Extreme Ownership

December, 2025

Initially I was skeptical about this book, but then I decided to give it a try. I must admit this is a good book. It contains more war stories than I like, but authors separated principles into a different section in each chapter. This specially good book, if someone transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to manager in a company.

Table of Contents

Extreme Ownership

  • In any organization, all responsibility of success and failure falls with in the leader. The leader must own everything in their organization, there is no one else to blame. Acknowledge mistakes, admit failures, take ownership of them and make a plan to win
  • When individual in a team doesn’t perform up to a standard, leader must train and mentor the under performer. But if the individual continue to fail to meet the standard, leader must stay loyal to the mission and the team and take step to replace the under performer
  • We all make mistakes and fail at times. Important thing is to own it when mistakes happen and continue to improve. We have to leave the personal agenda and ego aside and stay loyal to the mission
  • How to get our team to execute effectively to accomplish the mission
  • Make sure extreme ownership is followed through the most junior manager in the chain

No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

  • Carrying weak performers in the team is not loyalty. That is a misguided loyalty. It hinders the mission. It is our responsibility to highlight weak performers.
  • We don’t want to work along side weak performers, and we don’t have right to make others work with the weak performers.
  • Leaders must accept the responsibility, own problems that cause bad performance and develop plans to improve the performance
  • A team only can deliver exceptional performance, only if leader ensured team work toward a focus goal, enforce high standard of performance and working continuously to improve
  • When setting expectations, no matter what is written if we tolerated substandard performance and no one held accountable, poor performance become the new standard
  • Victimization
    • Leader accept the poor performance of the team because they inherited the team, That stops them looking into where they can improve
  • Tortured Genius
    • A leader who doesn’t own their mistakes and blame everyone else for their problems

Believe

  • As a leader make sure understand the why behind the decisions your managers make, if you don’t understand ask questions from the chain of command to make sure you understand why and believe in the new mission
  • You have to believe in the mission to convince your team on the mission. If you don’t believe, you can’t convince your team
  • During the course of the mission you will have to continue to remind your team about the why ? So that it is on top of their mind.
  • When you have extreme ownership, you won’t let leader to carry the burden of explanation of the why, if you don’t understand the why you have the responsibility to make things clear for yourself. After all things can slip from leaders.
  • Often, my subordinate leadership would pick up the slack for me. And they wouldn’t hold it against me, nor did I think they were infringing on my ‘leadership turf.’ On the contrary, I would thank them for covering for me. Leadership isn’t one person leading a team.

Check the Ego

  • Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best.
  • Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.
  • When someone in your team make a mistake, as the leader it will become your failure. When addressing the issue, it is critical that you admit that you messed up
  • “This isn’t his fault, it’s yours. You are in charge, so the fact that he didn’t follow procedure is your fault."

Cover and Move

  • Cover and move is about teamwork, how to best utilize resources in the greater team to accomplish the mission
  • Break down silos and work together to accomplish the mission. Understand who depend on who
  • If the overall team fails, everyone fails. There is no winning as individuals
  • All teams and individuals must find a way to communicate, work together and mutually support team.
  • When there are multiple teams involved, it is important to engage with them, communicate with them and explained to them what you need from them and why you need. Make sure you are there to help them succeed.

Simple

  • Keep plans and communications simple, make sure everyone in the team understands the mission
  • Also, give opportunity for the team members to ask questions and get clarity about the objectives and the mission
  • When plan is simple and everyone has a baseline understanding of it, they can easily make modifications when things go wrong.

Prioritize & Execute

  • When there are multiple competing priorities involved, don’t let them overwhelm you
  • Stay focus and relax, figure out the priority of the competing tasks
  • Pick the highest priority task and work on it. Once that task is done, move on to the next task
  • Also, keep an eye out for the new priorities that could develop as you are executing.
  • This is very similar to OODA cycle where, Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Orient phase is the the prioritize

Decentralized Command

  • A leader can support only five to six member teams, they will have to depend on junior leaders to execute the plan
  • All team leaders and members need to understand the objective and the standard operating procedure. Standard operating procedure, governs your boundaries of decision making and when you need to get approval from your manager
  • The instructions to your teams should be simple and direct. Team’s should have opportunity to clarify their tasks and why they are doing it

Plan

  • The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission.
  • Leaders must delegate the planning to key subordinate leaders. Trust them to make right decisions but provide the oversight and assistance where needed
  • When senior leaders supervises the entire planning process, they must be careful to not to get bogged down in the details. Having control of the overall higher level plan, they can help identifying the holes in the derived plans.
  • The planning process & briefing must be a forum that encourages discussion and questions even from the most junior members
  • Not all risks can be mitigates. In that case leaders must be aware of the risks they are accepting and find ways to control them
  • Always, have a review after a mission to figure out what went right, what went wrong, where we can improve.
    • After action review

Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

  • The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission.
  • Leaders must delegate the planning to key subordinate leaders. Trust them to make right decisions but provide the oversight and assistance where needed
  • When senior leaders supervises the entire planning process, they must be careful to not to get bogged down in the details. Having control of the overall higher level plan, they can help identifying the holes in the derived plans.
  • The planning process & briefing must be a forum that encourages discussion and questions even from the most junior members
  • Not all risks can be mitigates. In that case leaders must be aware of the risks they are accepting and find ways to control them
  • Always, have a review after a mission to figure out what went right, what went wrong, where we can improve.
    • After action review

Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

  • Make sure that they understand how their work fit into the larger strategic goals of the organization. It may seem that they are doing only small part, but they need to understand why they are doing it
  • It won’t come naturally nor they have the information, as a senior leader it is your responsibility to relay that information down the chain so that the team can see why they are doing what they are doing
  • Also, as the senior leader it is important to know what your teams are doing. Not in every detail but you should have a knowledge on what each team is doing
  • If you are getting questions and requests for information from your managers, that means you haven’t done a good job of relaying information up the chain.
  • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do
  • If someone isn’t doing what you want them to do, ask yourself first how to enable them better so that they can what you want them to do

Decisiveness amid Uncertainty

  • There is no 100 percent right solution. The picture is never complete. Leaders must be comfortable with this and be able to make decisions promptly, then be ready to adjust those decisions quickly based on evolving situations and new information.
  • Outcomes are never certain and success is never guaranteed. Only thing we can control is the process. Follow the right process and let the outcome play itself

Discipline equals freedom

  • The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test.
  • If I wanted extra time to work on my gear, clean my weapons, study tactics or new technology, I needed to make that time. The only way you could make time, was to get up early. That took discipline.
  • Nothing is easy. The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.
  • The more disciplined standard operating procedures (SOPs) a team employs, the more freedom they have to practice Decentralized Command (chapter 8)
  • So the balance between discipline and freedom must be found and carefully maintained.
  • Leaders who lose their temper also lose respect.