A Book Review: "Extreme Ownership - How U.S. Seals Lead and Win"

I’ll be honest, I don’t read many business or leadership books cover to cover. In fact, over my 40-year career, I can only recall finishing three: Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Jim Collins’ From Good to Great, and Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

That’s not to say I didn’t start and partially read many, it’s just I didn’t finish many. Some books started off great, then start to run thin after one or two chapters. And many fell into what I’d call the "armchair quarterback" variety. Only the three I mentioned above caught my interest at the start and then held it, chapter by chapter, to the very end.

And now there’s a fourth: “Extreme Ownership – How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win”, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

The book resonated with me, right from the start. True “life or death” lessons that were learned, refined, and then taught by leaders that faced situations and circumstances that most of us will never face, with consequences more potentially dire and costly than we will ever experience. When they talk and share, from those experiences, we would be wise to listen.

The first three books I mentioned all taught me lessons that I still remember and try to apply to this day. This book teaches, clarifies, or reinforces three things that were stated so impactfully, I know I will remember them a long time too.

The first lesson: It’s about the mission. You have to believe in it, and be surrounded by, and supported by, others that believe in it too. To believe in the mission means believing in the “why”. Without knowing about the “why”, and believing in the “why”, you can fall victim to what I refer to as “mission inversion”. Mission inversion is not a topic in the book, but it’s what happens when people on the team believe a secondary objective is more important the primary objective. Their belief is that if they achieve their particular objective (developing the perfect technology, for instance, or building the best management team), that by doing so, the company will achieve its primary mission as a natural consequence of them achieving their goal. The book clearly teaches it’s the mission, and accomplishing it, that needs to be the focus of the team or company, and success of the mission is the ultimate measurement of the leader. Being a nice guy, making everyone happy, or running great meetings – those things don’t make you a good leader if you don’t accomplish the mission.

The second lesson: Keep things simple. Prioritize and execute. Direct focus and attention on what needs to get accomplished, and why. Here again, the “why” is important to make clear, so that others can believe too. Although I have never faced the intense life-or-death pressure they have, I do know how trying to do too much creates noise and distraction that keep you or your team from doing what really needs to get done. One young leader I had the privilege of mentoring was given the opportunity to launch a spinoff venture from a solid, steadily growing multi-generational manufacturing company. The things that needed doing, and all the things he wanted to do, pulled him in every direction at the same time, leaving him exhausted at the week’s end without having gained any traction in any direction. I challenged him by asking, “if you could only get 3 things done this week, what would they be?”. He was trying to get 10 or more things done every day and his response was he couldn’t afford to only get three things done in a week. My counter to that was, “ok then, what 3 things can you not afford to not get done this week?”. Some weeks, he got his 3 things done by noon on Monday, and some weeks it took him until Thursday or Friday to get done, but every week, he always got the 3 most important things done.

The third lesson: Take responsibility. Own it. Most of life’s important lessons are learned the hard way – through failures. If you don’t own those failures and take responsibility for them, you don’t learn anything meaningful from them. If someone else didn’t do their part, why not? How does that tie back to you? If you’re not willing to make connections from mission failures back to yourself, you’re not ready to lead the next mission, or to lead people, or develop new leaders. I made many mistakes over my career, and failing to own them left me prone to repeating them. I had to learn some very big lessons more than once, and it was usually the result of not owning what was ultimately my responsibility as the leader.

The book contains many other lessons, powerfully explained and illustrated. The authors don’t explain away any of their failures, but instead they own them and share them, so we can learn from them too.

Most of us cannot honestly draw any parallels between fighting in a real war and building a business, but they can because they’ve done it. They fought, they led, they won.

And they’re still leading - by sharing what they learned so that others can lead better.