The most successful men and women in the civilian world practice extreme ownership.  The principles of extreme ownership are simple but not easy. Taking ownership of mistakes and failures is hard, but it is key to learning, developing solutions and ultimate success.

Taking ownership to achieve success

Discipline is the pathway to freedom.

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.

Extreme Ownership

Leaders fundamentally decide their teams’ level of performance.  <ul><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul>

No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

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.

Believe in the Mission

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.

Check the Ego

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.

Cover and Move

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.

Keep Things Simple

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.

Prioritize and execute

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.

Decentralized command

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.

Sound planning

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.

Leading up and down the chain of command

Leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear. They must be prepared to make the best possible decisions based on available information.

Decisiveness amid uncertainty

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.

Discipline equals freedom

Extreme Ownership includes practical leadership advice from two Navy SEALs on staying strong, disciplined, and level-headed in high-stake situations.

An updated edition of the blockbuster bestselling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two U.S. Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life. Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership—at every level—is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails. Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields. Now, detailing the mind-set and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult missions in combat, Extreme Ownership shows how to apply them to any team, family or organization. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, explaining what they are, why they are important, and how to implement them in any leadership environment. A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.

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Extreme Ownership

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Bite-sized knowledge
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