Extreme Ownership

Willink and Babin commanded Navy SEAL Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, the most decorated unit of the war, and later founded a consultancy to bring its lessons to companies. Each chapter opens with a combat scene, follows with a lesson and closes with its application to a business. The scene that gives the book its name is a friendly-fire episode in which an Iraqi soldier died and a SEAL was wounded; when command asked who was responsible, Willink, who could have spread the blame across half a dozen other people's mistakes, stood in front of everyone and said: the fault is mine. That act didn't cost him his post; it gave him the authority to redesign the entire process.

The author's line: "The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame."

The lessons on responsibility are the most uncomfortable. Take extreme ownership: of your decisions, of your team's, and of your boss's when you fail to convince him. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders; they prove it with the story of the boat crews in basic training, where they swapped the leader of the best boat with the leader of the worst, and in one race the losing boat went on to win with the same people. Believe in the mission: if you can't explain the why of an order to your team, first convince yourself or argue it upward, but never pass on an order you don't believe in. And check your ego: ego is what keeps you from accepting criticism, asking for help and admitting your plan failed.

To run a team there are four laws of combat:

• Cover and move: teams within a company must support each other, not compete; the enemy is outside.
• Simplify: a plan your people can't repeat in two sentences will fail when something goes wrong.
• Prioritize and execute: when everything collapses at once, pick the most urgent problem, solve it, and only then move to the next; panic comes from trying to solve everything simultaneously.
• Decentralized command: no leader handles more than six to ten direct reports well; leaders at every level must understand the commander's intent well enough to decide on their own.

To sustain it, three more lessons:

• Plan with your team, not for your team, and always do the after-action review of what went wrong.
• Lead down and up the chain: if the person above you isn't giving you what you need, it's not their fault, it's that you haven't managed to communicate it.
• Decide under uncertainty: you will never have all the information, and waiting to have it is also a decision, almost always the worst one.

And the one that sums up the book: discipline equals freedom. Fixed habits, the time you get up, the planning process, order in the team, are what free you to improvise when it really matters.

The concept to master is the dichotomy of leadership, which they develop at the end and in a later book: every principle has an extreme that turns it into a flaw. Be aggressive but not reckless; disciplined but not rigid; give autonomy but don't lose control; be responsible for everything but delegate. Leading is knowing how to balance.

A simple place to begin: take the biggest problem you have today and rewrite it starting with "I have not...": not "the sales team doesn't close" but "I have not defined a sales process that closes." In the next team meeting, ask each leader to explain the company's number one priority in two sentences; if they don't match, your plan isn't simple. And when the next crisis arrives, write the problems in a list, order them, and attack only the first one.

As a founder it will help you align your whole team and the people you report to, and in your family and personal life it will help you raise responsible people.