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

by Jocko Willink

These leaders cast no blame. They made no excuses. Instead of complaining about challenges or setbacks, they developed solutions and solved problems. They leveraged assets, relationships, and resources to get the job done. Their own egos took a back seat to the mission and their troops. These leaders truly led.

Once people stop making excuses, stop blaming others, and take ownership of everything in their lives, they are compelled to take action to solve their problems.

leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and the principles of good leadership do not change regardless of the mission, the environment, or the personalities of those involved. Leading is leading.

there can be no leadership where there is no team.

Cover and Move, Simple, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralized Command.

Prioritize: Of all the pressing tasks at hand, if I didn’t first handle the armed enemy fighters bearing down on us within the next few seconds nothing else would matter.

Execute: Without hesitation, I engaged the enemy fighters moving toward us with my Colt M4 rifle, hammering the first insurgent in line carrying the RPG with three to four rounds to the chest, dead center.

with proper understanding and application of the Laws of Combat, we had not only survived a difficult and dangerous situation but dominated.

The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.

Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.

the leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.

If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.

the direct responsibility of a leader included getting people to listen, support, and execute plans.

Take personal responsibility for the failures. You will come out the other side stronger than ever before,”

there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance.

Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance—or doesn’t.

My boat crew at times had struggled to perform, until I figured out that I had to put myself in the most difficult position at the front of the boat and lead. That required driving the boat crew members hard, harder than they thought they could go.

Leaders must accept total responsibility, own problems that inhibit performance, and develop solutions to those problems.

A team could only deliver exceptional performance if a leader ensured the team worked together toward a focused goal and enforced high standards of performance, working to continuously improve.

When leaders who epitomize Extreme Ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, they must recognize that when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team.

His realistic assessment, acknowledgment of failure, and ownership of the problem were key to developing a plan to improve performance and ultimately win. Most important of all, he believed winning was possible.

“Extreme Ownership—good leadership—is contagious,

Each member demanded the highest performance from the others. Repetitive exceptional performance became a habit. Each individual knew what they needed to do to win and did it. They no longer needed explicit direction from a leader.

leadership is the most important thing on any battlefield; it is the single greatest factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.

In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission.

It is critical that those senior leaders impart a general understanding of that strategic knowledge—the why—to their troops.

The leader must explain not just what to do, but why. It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand.

If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made.

Discipline created vigilance and operational readiness, which translated to high performance and success on the battlefield.

The most important tactical advantage we had was working together as a team, always supporting each other.

“The enemy is out there,” I said, pointing out the window to the world beyond. “The enemy is all the other competing companies in your industry that are vying for your customers. The enemy is not in here, inside the walls of this corporation.

Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster.

Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.

all animals, including humans, need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately.

“Our standard operating procedures were always kept as simple as possible. Our communication plans were simple. The way we talked on the radio was as simple and direct as possible.

Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously.

I trusted them to lead. My ego took no offense to my subordinate leaders on the frontlines calling the shots. In fact, I was proud to follow their lead and support them.

Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators, with a clearly designated leader.

Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it.

“Proper Decentralized Command requires simple, clear, concise orders that can be understood easily by everyone in the chain of command.

Trust is not blindly given. It must be built over time. Situations will sometimes require that the boss walk away from a problem and let junior leaders solve it, even if the boss knows he might solve it more efficiently.

Open conversations build trust. Overcoming stress and challenging environments builds trust. Working through emergencies and seeing how people react builds trust.

Establishing an effective and repeatable planning process is critical to the success of any team.”

And it is paramount that senior leaders explain to their junior leaders and troops executing the mission how their role contributes to big picture success.

Leaders must routinely communicate with their team members to help them understand their role in the overall mission.

As a leader employing Extreme Ownership, if your team isn’t doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself. Rather than blame them for not seeing the strategic picture, you must figure out a way to better communicate it to them in terms that are simple, clear, and concise, so that they understand.

“Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well,”