Liliana A.'s Key Ideas from Extreme Ownership
by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

A true leader takes ownership of everything in his domain. This includes the outcome and everything that affects it. 

A true leader doesn’t find excuses or blame others. Instead, he puts his ego aside, takes full responsibility for the outcome and considers what he should do differently. When you demand extreme ownership of yourself and others, your example will inspire others to follow.

Leaders fundamentally decide their teams’ level of performance. 

• Effective leaders push the standards in a way that encourages and enables the team to extreme ownership. Great leadership can cause any team to thrive.
• Ineffective leaders don’t accept responsibility for mistakes. Instead, they make excuses and blame others for their failings. Their negative attitude is infectious. If substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable, poor performance becomes the new standard.

You must believe in the mission to convince and inspire others to follow. If leaders do not believe, they will not take risks needed to overcome unavoidable challenges.

Always remember that you are part of something greater than yourself and your own personal interests. A great leader should be able to detach from the immediate mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals.

Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. Our egos don’t like to accept blame.

Great leaders prioritise the broader mission over their personal ego. They’re willing to learn, accept good ideas from others, and own up to their mistakes.

Cover and Move is a common military tactic where one team covers while another moves, so they can jointly gain ground. 

Different teams should be able to work together towards a common goal and support one another. Each team member is critical to success. Some will contribute to the main effort and others to supporting roles.

Success is dependent on simple, clear, and concise plans and orders. However, when plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them.

If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple, and you have failed. Simple plans can be easily communicated, understood and adjusted.

It can feel overwhelming when faced with multiple time-sensitive, high-stake problems. However, if you try to do everything at once, you will fail.

Good leaders will stay calm, identify top priorities, and then address them one by one.

We are generally not capable of managing more than 6-10 people.

Ensure that leaders at all levels understand the overall mission and immediate goals. Every team leader should understand what the team must do and why. Junior leaders must know what is within their decision-making authority and pass critical information up the chain.

Leaders must identify clear directives for the team. A broad and ambiguous mission results in a lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep.

Every mission should have clarity, evaluation of options and risks, engagement of all levels, post-action debriefs, and systematization of the planning process.

Great leaders lead upward by offering information and updates to help their leaders understand their work.

They lead downward by helping junior leaders and frontline staff to see the bigger picture.

Leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear.

They must be prepared to make the best possible decisions based on available information.

Discipline is essential for freedom and results.

A good leader is confident but not cocky, courageous but not foolhardy;  competitive, yet a gracious loser, a leader and a follower, quiet but not silent, logical but not without emotions.