Extreme Ownership is a fascinating book written by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. It describes the leadership lessons that they learned through their time as commanders in the Navy SEALs, lessons which they now teach through their company called Echelon Front. The book packs a lot of stuff into a relatively small number of pages so I’ll hit on a few things that stuck out to me the most.
The book’s primary focus is on the importance of taking responsibility for your decisions, oversights, and failures. Jocko illustrates this point through a story involving unintentional friendly fire in his platoon. As he says both in the book and in this TED Talk, he took total responsibility for that event and refused to blame anyone above or below him in the chain of command. This surprised everyone and earned him respect both from his commanding officers and those he was tasked with leading. Taking ownership of the consequences of your decisions is really the foundation of leadership as far as Jocko and Leif are concerned and everything else originates from that starting point.
Part of the book discusses trying to understand understand a leader’s intentions by looking at the situation from their perspective. With any given assignment, a good leader is doing their best to develop and execute a plan that will bring about positive results. If they don’t make their intentions clear, then asking them for clarification or at the very least putting yourself in their position can give important insight into the bigger picture. This made me think of Start With Why, which is still one of my favorite books and would be a great one to read alongside Extreme Ownership as both contain valuable wisdom about leadership, including the importance of good communication.
I’m glad Jocko and Leif teach leadership lessons to people in business management positions. The conversation transcripts they included in Extreme Ownership reveal that the people they coach, rather than being driven by malice, more often suffer instead from poor communication, making things overly complex, working on too many things at once, or trying to micromanage their employees. Once Jocko and Leif introduce them to a better way to do things and give examples from their experience as evidence of its validity, the managers understand what they need to do and adopt this new strategy without hesitation. This gives me hope that relationships between employees and managers, as well as people in general, can be improved through striving to understand one another by having open conversations.
I enjoyed reading Extreme Ownership and I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in leadership, communication, and strategy to check it out. It’s difficult to read at times because of the war elements but I still got a lot of good stuff out of it. Plus I find it valuable to challenge myself by reading things that I disagree with, either entirely or in large part, since I can still learn from just about anything if I’m willing to consider other points of view. I’ll probably reread parts of the book periodically and I can imagine rereading the whole thing again at some point. Check it out if this sounds interesting to you and let me know what you think of it if you do.