Extreme Ownership | Book Review

Book by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

OVERVIEW

The entire premise of this book is incredibly simple and summed up nicely in this quote from the authors “Extreme Ownership - Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.”

This book teaches you that same lesson in a multitude of ways, supported with enthralling stories from their dusty Navy SEAL experiences in Iraq and reiterated again through real life commercial examples from the author’s consulting days throughout North America.

Not only does the book provide you indisputable reasoning about why leaders MUST own everything within their realms, it provides a toolbox of approaches that can easily be applied in a tangible and operational way to create immediate improvements.

The book is split into three parts: Winning the War Within, Laws Of Combat, and Sustaining Victory. Each part contains chapters focused on specific leadership tactics with titles like “Prioritise and Execute” and “Decentralised Command”. The authors also share parts of their own personal story and the book is interspersed with photos from Jacko and Leif’s time in Ramadi, Iraq.

I loved the straight-shooter style in which the book is written, words are not minced and the core point gets through - sometimes uncomfortably. You let the authors get away with this because they pull no punches on themselves either - they are raw and honest with their experiences, not just sharing their successes from the battlefields and boardrooms but also sharing times they and their teams learnt lessons the hard way.

“when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”

BIGGEST LEARNING/INSIGHT FOR ME

For me, the whole book was such a good reminder that accountability sits with us as leaders. The things that stay clearly in my mind are:

• Check the ego

• Manage the information up and down the chain of command

• There’s no bad teams, only bad leaders

FAVOURITE QUOTE

“Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own.”

THOUGHT PROVOKERS

Questions to self-reflect on

• When something goes wrong in your team, what is your first reaction? Do you take ownership?

• Do you own the responsibility to feed information up the chain to your own manager? Do they have all the information they need in order to empower you and your team?

• Are there silos in your business that appear to have a different goal to you? Do you ultimately all have the same goal e.g. to continue running a profitable business. Would it make a difference to your collaboration effectiveness if everyone agreed on the same overall mission?

FIND THE BOOK HERE: Amazon

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