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

04 Mar 2024 #books

By the title, I guess you infer this isn’t a book about software engineering or programming. It’s about leadership. By any means, I’m advocating for war. But I think the military has to teach a lot about management and leadership. For years, they have been leading large organizations with complex tasks in changing environments. That sound a lot like software engineering, right?

Extreme Ownership is a book about the stories of two Navy SEALs officers and the lessons they learned while in service. In every chapter, they tell a story about their time in service, the leadership principle behind it, and its application to the corporate world. It’s an easy read. Probably, you could finish it in a weekend, too.

These are some of my takeaways.

Extreme Ownership & Leadership

Extreme Ownership is the principle that a leader “owns” or is responsible for everything that happens to the mission or his team. Even to take the blame when things go wrong. “The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.”

Leaders, who accept their responsibility when things go wrong, inspire respect and trust. They show and teach that attitude to the team.

A leader is responsible even for the underperformers. His job is to train and mentor them to level up their skills.

A leader should lead “up” too. He should speak up and ask questions when things could be better. He is also responsible for the communication with his own leaders.

A leader should create a simple plan and make sure everyone understands it clearly. A leader should first understand and believe in the mission. And when priorities change, he should communicate those changes and pass “situational awareness.”

A leader should put a system and mentor people so he can be the “tactical genius” looking at the bigger picture.

Voilà! Those are some of my takeaways. The book uses memorable stories to tell these principles. I like how the authors extrapolated the principles they learned while on duty to the corporate world. It turns out that the authors, as SEAL officers, had to deal with some of the same bureaucracy from the corporate world too. Even PowerPoint presentations! PowerPoint presentations! I didn’t see that coming.

As someone who influences decision-making inside teams, I enjoyed the book, and I will take lots of these ideas into my daily activities.

I’d like to close with this quote from the book: “there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”

After reading this book, I connected the dots with some of the lessons I learned after a failed project. I needed Extreme Onwership in that project. Too late.

If you want to read my takeaways from proramming books, read Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns and Hands-on Domain-Driven Design with .NET Core.

Happy reading!