MBA1268 Must Read: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

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Jocko Willink served as a Navy SEALS officer during the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq, leading what would become the most highly decorated special operations unit in the Iraq War. They now run a leadership consulting firm that teaches business leaders how to build their own high performance teams. Full transparency here. I've heard a lot about this book, but I've been putting it aside for some time purely because I'm not a big army guy. I'm not a big military guy. It's not something that really attracts me immediately. I have a lot of respect for those who serve. You know, I spoke at the US Military twice, but war and battle just not something I'm really interested in. But there are a lot of leadership lessons you can learn in an extreme environment like that, where things are literally life and death, not only for you and your team, but for the millions of people that you're defending, the people that you're fighting for. And in this book, Jocko really focuses on how to become a better leader in business. He applies a lot of the military leadership tactics into the business world. And some of the things I want to share with you today from the book are some strategies like how to accept blame when things go wrong and how teams in a corporation or a business should collaborate rather than compete. And when to really abort the mission. Abort your mission in business. I got those insights and more waiting in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So let's jump into today's must read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. One of the biggest insights in this book is, is about taking responsibility for everyone's failures on the team. Now, this doesn't mean that people are not responsible or accountable for their actions or their outcomes. In your business, people are accountable, but you need to take some of the failures on yourself as well. You can't just take all the glory. So when you have a bad month in business, a topic that we're gonna be talking about later on this week, you as a leader have to take some responsibility. You have to say, hey, this failure we just went through. A lot of this is on me. You know, I need to lead, I need to give you direction. I need to keep you up to date on how things are going during the month. Jocko relates a story when he was in Iraq where a operation went totally wrong. And he went to his commanding officer, his superiors, and just owned up to it and owned that failure. And it saved him his job because his superiors knew what a lot of business leaders don't know, which is that every leader makes mistakes, but only the good ones take responsibility for them. And that's why he was allowed to keep his command. His superiors were like, hey, things are going to go wrong. But you taking responsibility, taking ownership means you're taking pride in your work and you won't make that mistake again. He also relates this to even criticism. If things are not good and you're being, you know, given constructive criticism about how you can improve your business or how you can improve your team, you should take notes, detailed notes. Things are not going right. Don't get defensive. This is really important. I'm speaking to myself first and then to everybody else. Try Your best just to listen, take detailed notes so you can improve. Take ownership of the good and the bad. He says when you fail to take responsibility, it causes some really bad vibes on the team. For instance, Jaco tells a story about when he met a poor SEAL leader in the Navy SEALs, and he used to blame everybody but himself. And that bad attitude passed on to his subordinates who did the same. Again, you're leading. You're showing them you're leading by example. The result is that the team is becoming ineffective and incapable of carrying out the plans because they're not taking responsibility. And when you don't take responsibility, you don't really take action. You're like, hey, this is not my fault. This is not my responsibility. Whatever happens, happens. And a team like that just makes excuses and passes the buck to. Instead of just adjusting and just owning up to it and say, hey, we have a problem here, let's solve it. And that's not gonna come from nowhere. You gotta build that culture as a leader and say, hey, I screwed up, or we have a failure here. I'm taking ownership. Let's try to be part of the solution. Let's solve this. And this is one of the biggest and best takeaways I got from the book. Another brilliant takeaway from this book is understanding that if you wanna successfully execute your mission in business, if you want to be successful in business, if you want to successfully achieve that mission, the team has to understand its importance. This is all about the why, right? They have to know why this is important. Why do they need to work so hard? Why is this so critical? You can't leave them in the dark. You have to actually be honest with them. Hey, we need to achieve this deadline. We need to roll out this new feature. We need to have this great product because our competitors are on our heels or our customers need it, or it's going to take us to this level and this is what we can do with the business. We all can benefit when people are not aware of what's going on. If they don't understand why it's so important. They don't really have a drive, they don't have a purpose. And your job as a leader is to give them that. And you don't have to do this every single day, but it has to be done regularly. I would say, minimum, once a month. You need to remind them of this. People can go to work anywhere. They can work for any business. If you don't want people shopping around or looking around at different jobs, they gotta Have a purpose. They gotta feel like they're part of a reason that's greater themselves. And I'm going to give you an example. And it doesn't have to be this big glorious mission, but it has to have some meaning. With our company, Webinar Ninja, our software company. Yes. We create a software that allows you to create webinars easily and run your webinars. And our clients are business owners. And, you know, it's a great piece of software. And our development team, our customer support team, they all know this is what we're trying to do. But what they really understand is that what we're trying to really do here, our mission here is to empower people to. To build businesses, to stay in business, to grow their business so they can live the lives that they like, so they can hire people and give them a chance in life, give them an opportunity in their career. Our software empowers them to do that because it helps them get more sales. We understand how hard it is to build a business. We know how hard it is to stay in business. So if we can help them with a great piece of software that enables them, that empowers them to do that, that's so powerful and it's really impactful. And you're building more than just a software. You're building a tool to allow people to live a great life. And that is my responsibility as a leader, to remind the team of that on a regular basis why we're doing this. Another insight from this book talks about dealing with your competitors, the people in your marketplace, other business owners, people that are in your network, treat them as allies, not as competition. This is something that I just recently kind of came around to. You know, the people that are your competitors, they're not necessarily people that are gonna take custom away from you. They can help you out. I remember I met by chance at a hotel, another business owner, and he owned a few McDonald's. He's a franchisee. And I asked him, hey, what do you think about all these other gourmet burger joints that are opening up everywhere? Why are you worried about that competition? He said, no, we're all in the burger business. The more burgers people eat, the better. For me, I'm just one of the people that are there. So we're all promoting burgers. So in your case, they're all promoting whatever your product is. Secondly, your competitor one day might buy you out. So it's good to be respectful and cordial. It's okay. Or vice versa. You can buy them out And Jocko mentions this in the book about, you know, even though we're at battle, at war, there's some level of respect on the battlefield. Another great insight is about remaining effective under pressure by setting clear priorities and acting upon them. Having priorities to refer back to are really good. What's most important? What is the mission here? What we're trying to accomplish? What are things we don't want to sacrifice? You should know this about your business because, hey, there are going to be times where you have high pressure. You're going to make a decision and you got to refer to these priorities, to these guiding north stars. So for example, if one of the biggest priorities in your company is delivering high quality of customer service, when you make a decision, you're going to ask your question. Will customer service suffer when I make this decision? Is this investing in this priority or is it hurting this priority? When things get heated, you can always rely on your priorities and they don't have to be, you know, a lot of things. It could be three or four things. These are your values as a company and they should be the cornerstone, the thing that guides your decisions.

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One more takeaway I want to share with you from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. He explains that when you're planning for success, if you want to plan for success, you have to comprehensively identify and mitigate risks ahead of time. When you're a commander in the military and you're about to go into a mission, they have to risk assess. They have to say, hey, what are all the things that can go wrong? Why is this just so they can worry? No, it's so they can plan for what to do in every scenario. If we go down this route, what are the risks? If we go down that route, what are the risks? Same thing with you and your business strategy. By doing this, you can find out what is the best course of action to limit risk as much as possible. What can go wrong? What can go right? What is there to gain? What is there to lose? When you're starting out in business, a lot of people give you the advice, Just start acting. Start implementing. Act fast. Make decisions quickly. Once you get the ball rolling and your business is up and running, that advice is not so great. You need to take the time to have a strategy to think about. Hey, hey, when I go on to market my business, when I go on to hire somebody, when I go on to launch a new product or a service or change my prices, how do I do this properly so I don't cause damage to my current customers, so I don't have a marketing disaster, so I don't waste money and time? When you're starting out, there's very little to lose. But once you have a business established, there's lots to lose. Here. You need to make sure you mitigate risk. What Jocko says is that you should always take the time to generate a detailed plan that identifies and quantifies as well as mitigates all known potential risks. Making such a comprehensive contingency plan helps reduce risk because every person in the operation, everybody on the team, knows exactly what they're doing and where things can go off the rails. And if it does go off the rails, what is the plan? This creates a sense of calm in your team. And hey, we got a backup plan. We know what to do if something go wrong. And if they don't go wrong, great. But if they do, we don't freak out. We expected this. We planned for this. So if you're building a business, if you're gonna launch a new product, ask yourself, what if it doesn't go well? What if it doesn't go according to plan? What if it's not a success? What are you gonna do? How are you going to course correct? How are you gonna change things? What's your contingency plan? I love this advice. I love it because it forces you to ask tough questions and plan accordingly. And a lot of times the answers you're looking for are in the questions you ask yourself. And these questions will come up if you're mitigating risk, if you're having a contingency plan at the risks that are ahead of you. Or there you have it, guys. I recommend you pick up this book even if you're not a military guy or gal. There's a lot of great leadership lessons in here. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. It's a bestseller and he's got a very popular podcast as well off the success of his book. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe. So you don't miss an episode by hitting subscribe, you get the episode right on your device as soon as it publishes. We're on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, Himalaya. We're on all the apps. Hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Every time I interact with anybody who has experience in the military, whether I'm speaking at a U.S. army base or I'm meeting a friend that has military experience or reading a book like this, there's a lot to gain. You can put your political views aside for a moment and think about what are some of the things that this person has learned in this experience. One of them is discipline, hard work, leadership, respect, and command. All that kind of stuff is really ingrained in their training and and you can learn a lot from that person. So don't let your opinions or personal feelings about certain things hold you back from learning something new. You don't have to agree with everything in order to learn something. Thank you so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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