Book Review: Extreme Ownership

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin served together in the Navy SEALs during the war in Iraq, and learned extremely valuable lessons on leadership while fighting for their country.

In their book, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, the duo share stories from their time on the battlefield, and detail how readers can apply strategies and solutions used in the war to their leadership roles in business, and their personal lives.

Transcript

Hey everybody. I am Kasey Jones of A Better Jones, and today I'm going to be reviewing the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

This book is absolutely incredible. I read it over a weekend and came into the office on Monday ready to change how I ran a bunch of things on my team and it has really, really impacted how I operate as a leader.

But also how I work with those above me so with clients, right, so it's all about how you own your results, how you own your process, and how you have extreme ownership over your role and your work and in a variety of ways. 

And Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, they are both ex-Navy SEALs that after leaving the Navy SEALs they went into kind of business leadership, consulting, and training. Jocko also has an incredible podcast that I highly recommend, it’s much more philosophical and sort of intellectual than you would expect and it's really really fascinating, but the structure of the book is really interesting because what they do is really tell a story from their experience as a Navy SEAL and the lessons learned from that. And then they talked about how they have applied that in the business world through some of their clients. 

The whole lesson is having ownership over yourself, your work, your process and your results, and what they talk about a lot is that this idea of kind of putting things off onto somebody else, of having excuses for why things didn't turn out the way that you wanted them to, or expected them to there's no real room for that, and one of the things that I think was the most powerful for me was really this idea around if you want somebody below you to do a job or to do the work and they come back and they didn't do it or they didn't do it correctly—that's on you.

That means that you didn't really train them on how to do it. You didn't make it clear what you were expecting and you didn't really lay it out there and there's something very powerful about that.

On the flip side, they also talked about owning things up the chain. So if you've got a boss or you've got management that they're not giving you what you need in order to be successful, what are you doing about it? Just sitting around and kind of complaining about it is not taking extreme ownership.

There's always things within your control that you can own and that you can leverage in order to have a greater impact and to do better work.

So the thing that I love about this is really it's about helping you recognize how much control you really do have and how much of an impact you really can have but it takes this mindset shift of being willing to look critically at your own performance and your own work and your own process, but then also recognizing when there's more that you can do and when you can have a

bigger impact in your role, even if you're at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder or a hierarchical structure of some sort.

So the book to me is I think it's something that anybody that wants to be a leader, anybody that wants to be better at their job, I think everybody should read it. It gives the very practical, actionable advice on how you can really think about your role and your work and your world while also feeling very inspiring and empowering.

It's one of those books that you know, I listened to the audiobook version of it. And I think I listened to it all. You know, it's like a 10-hour book and I listened to it all over the weekend. I absolutely could not turn it off and it made me so excited to go into work on Monday morning and implement some changes so that we could communicate better as a team and we could get more done and it really made me understand that as a leader I play a much larger role in the performance of my team and the process in which they get things done then I think I realized beforehand.

So again, I like highly highly recommend this book. There's a lot of lessons to be learned that these guys have really mastered while supporting the United States in their military roles.

They were Navy SEALs in Iraq, and I think Afghanistan as well, and they tell some really crazy stories, some scary things, but some really inspiring things about how you can harness your own grit and get really serious about owning every aspect of your work and taking real pride in a job well done.

So check it out. It's called Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, also check out the podcast, and they have a couple of follow-ups to this as well that I highly recommend and I'll talk about this. I'll do a review of those as well, but check it out and please share in the comments.

What did you think about this book? Did you like it? What did you learn? How are you applying some of these lessons? And we'd love to hear from all of you how you're making this work.

So thanks so much and happy reading.