Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win

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3 Sentence Summary

Two former Navy SEALs teamed up to bring us the most badass book on leadership ever written. In Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin take turns describing their experience fighting in the Battle of Ramadi, Iraq, and then conclude each chapter with a leadership principle and business application. Equal parts war memoir and leadership manual, these guys will get you to stop making excuses, take ownership of your life, and put you on the path to experience freedom through discipline.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Extreme ownership means taking responsibility for everything in your world. The buck stops with you – always.
2. Check your ego and lead with humility.
3. Make simple plans and communicate them clearly.
4. Get comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
5. Lead and support your superiors.

Extreme Ownership Summary

Introduction

• Without a team, there can be no leadership.
• The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails.
• The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.
• These leadership principles are simple, but not easy.

Principle #1: Extreme Ownership

• The leader must own everything in his or her world.
• It’s the leader’s fault when subordinates aren’t doing what they should.
• Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept. It requires extraordinary humility and courage.
• Extreme ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans.
• Effective leaders do not take credit for his or her team’s successes but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members.
• It is the direct responsibility of a leader to get people to listen, support, and execute plans.
• You can’t make people do things. You have to lead them.
• Extreme ownership is asking yourself, “How can I best get my team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?”
• Every mistake, every failure or shortfall – own it.
• Pointing fingers and blaming others is easy and contagious.
• You create the culture. What you do as the leader will be emulated by your subordinates.
• If something isn’t going your way, start with what you are going to do differently.

Principle #2: No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

• It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.
• If substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable, poor performance becomes the new standard.
• Leaders must push the standards in a way that encourages and enables the team to utilize extreme ownership.
• Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mindset into the team.
• High standards start with the individual and then spreads outward to each member of the team.
• Leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.
• A negative attitude is infectious.
• An attitude of victimization prevents you from looking inwardly at where you have the ability to improve.
• The “Tortured Genius” is someone who accepts zero responsibility for mistakes, makes excuses, and blames everyone else for their failings.
• There are only two types of leaders: effective and ineffective.

Principle #3: Believe

• You must be a true believer in the mission in order to convince and inspire others to follow.
• If a leaders does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win.
• Always operate with the understanding that you are part of something greater than yourself and your own personal interests.
• A resolute belief in the mission is critical for any team or organization to win and achieve big results.
• Every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals.
• If frontline leaders and troops understand why, they can move forward, fully believing in what they’re doing.
• Goals must always be in alignment.
• Start with why.
• It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand.

Principle #4: Check the Ego

• Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism.
• When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues.
• Extreme ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility.
• Ego can prevent a leader from conducting an honest, realistic assessment of his or her own performance and the performance of the team.
• Our ego doesn’t like to accept blame.

Principle #5: Cover and Move

• Cover and move = teamwork
• Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them.
• Each member of the team is critical to success, though the main effort and supporting efforts must be clearly identified.
• Identify supporting player in other departments and make them a part of your team.

Principle #6: Simple

• Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success.
• When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them.
• When things go wrong (as they inevitably will), complexity compounds issues.
• Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.
• If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed.
• You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.
• Teams can’t intelligently adapt to changing circumstances without a baseline understanding of the original plan.

Principle #7: Prioritize and Execute

• Relax. Look around. Make a call.
• If you try to do everything at once, you will fail.
• Leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute one at a time.
• You will be more effective under pressure if you plan for contingencies.
• Map out your response to anticipated challenges before they happen.
• It is particular important for leaders at the top of the organization to step back and maintain the strategic picture.
• It’s important to communicate up and down the chain of command when priorities change.
• Teams must be careful to avoid target fixation on a single issue.
• Maintain the ability to rapidly adapt to a constantly changing environment.

Principle #8: Decentralized Command

• We are generally not capable of managing more than 6-10 people.
• Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish the mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible.
• Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it.
• Junior leaders must know what is within their decision-making authority. They must also pass critical information up the chain so senior leadership can make informed strategic decisions.
• Be proactive rather than reactive.
• Junior leaders must have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions.
• Leaders must be free to move to where they are needed most, which changes throughout the course of an operation.
• Leaders exist at all levels.

Principle #9: Plan

• Leaders must identify clear directives for the team.
• A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep.
• Every mission must clearly state the purpose and the expected outcome.
• Delegate the planning process down the chain as much as possible to key subordinate leaders.
• Giving the frontline troops ownership of even a small piece of the plan gives them buy-in.
• Once the detailed plan has been developed, it must be communicated to the entire team in a simple, clear, and concise format.
• The briefing should encourage discussion, questions, and clarification.
• The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it?
• The plan must mitigate identified risks where possible.
• Don’t get caught up worrying about risks that cannot be mitigated. Focus on those that you have some control over.
• The best teams make time to analyze and debrief after execution.
• Address what went right, what went wrong, and how you can adapt your tactics to make your team even more effective in the future.
• Your planning process should be standardized. It needs to be repeatable and guide users with a checklist.

A Leader’s Checklist for Planning

1. Analyze the mission.
   • Understand the higher headquarters’ mission (what), purpose (why), and desired outcome (how).
   • Identify your own purpose and expected outcome.
2. Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available.
3. Decentralize the planning process.
   • Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible course of action.
4. Determine a specific course of action.
   • Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action.
   • Focus efforts on the best course of action.
5. Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action.
6. Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation.
7. Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible.
8. Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders.
   • Stand back and be the tactical genius.
9. Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation.
10. Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets.
    • Emphasize the why.
    • Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand.
11. Conduct post-operational debrief after execution.
    • Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.

Principle #10: Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

Leading Down

• Senior leaders need to explain to junior leaders and troops executing the mission how their role contributes to big picture success.
• Frontline workers need to be able to connect the dots between what they do every day and how that impacts the company’s strategic goals.
• Doing this requires regular face-to-face conversations with directs and observing the frontline workers in action.

Leading Up

• Examine what you can do to better convey critical information up the chain of command.
• Subordinate leaders cannot use authority. Instead they must use influence, experience, knowledge, communication, and maintain the highest professionalism.
• You must accept that your boss must allocate limited assets and make decisions with the bigger picture in mind. You may not be the priority right now.
• One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss.
• Talk positively about those in authority above you. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels.
• You may not always agree with the decision. But at the end of the day, once a decision has been made, you must execute the plan as if it were your own.

Key Factors for Leading Up and Down

1. Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike.
2. If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this.
3. Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

Principle #11: Decisiveness Amid Uncertainty

• Leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear.
• You must make the best decision that you can based on the immediate information available.
• There is no 100% right solution. The picture is never complete.
• Intelligence gathering and research are important, but they must be employed with realistic expectations and must not impede sift decision making that is often the difference between victory and defeat.
• Leaders must be prepared to make an educated guess based on previous experience, knowledge of how the enemy operates, likely outcomes, and whatever intelligence is available in the immediate moment.

Principle #12: Discipline Equals Freedom

A good leader must be:

• Confident but not cocky;
• Courageous but not foolhardy;
• competitive but a gracious loser;
• attentive to details but not obsessed by them;
• strong but have endurance;
• a leader and follower;
• humble not passive;
• aggressive not overbearing;
• quiet not silent;
• calm but not robotic;
• logical but not devoid of emotions;
• close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge.

A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

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• Lead up the chain by supporting your boss