460: IT'S NOT THE OPPS!!! Destruction Comes From Within

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

If you want to accomplish anything on a large scale, you have to learn to lead a team. What makes leadership difficult, however, is the fact that every quality of a good leader becomes a hindrance when taken to the extreme: At a certain point, courage, discipline, and empathy all become deficiencies like recklessness, rigidness, and emotional paralysis. Thus, leadership requires a delicate balance of various dichotomies: You must be compassionate yet pragmatic, humble yet confident, bold yet cautious. The Dichotomy of Leadership teaches you to master such dichotomies.

As former Navy SEAL commanders and corporate leadership consultants, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin have extensive hands-on leadership experience. In this guide, we’ll explain where Willink and Babin’s expertise overlaps with the ideas of other popular writers on leadership, such as Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules) and Ray Dalio (Principles). We’ll also offer actionable ways to put the authors’ ideas into action, whether you’re leading a team of professionals or just looking to discipline yourself.

How do business leaders create engaged, motivated, and coordinated teams? In The Way of the Shepherd, Kevin Leman and William Pentak use a fictional story to show how, by adopting a shepherd’s mindset, managers can foster loyalty, trust, and high performance among their "flock" of employees.

Leman is a psychologist, educator, and radio and television personality. Pentak is a business consultant, columnist, former pastor, and speaker. These authors use a narrative format to make leadership concepts accessible and memorable for readers seeking to improve their management skills in various organizational settings. In this guide, readers will discover how to build trust, organize teams effectively, and lead with purpose, all while learning to embody the compassionate yet firm nature of a shepherd-leader. Through our commentary, we'll explore some of the research behind Leman and Pentak's strategies, while comparing their advice to other business leaders' ideas.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

Vulnerability is all too often engineered out of today’s work cultures, in a bid to make employees more efficient and less susceptible to emotions—but brave leaders who have the courage to allow vulnerability are essential to thriving work cultures. Dare to Lead breaks down the four courage-building skills that make up brave leadership, so that you can create an organization that takes risk, uncertainty, and failure in stride. You’ll learn how to lead your team in engaging with vulnerability, acting with integrity, having more productive and honest conversations, and moving on quickly from failure—skills that will allow your work culture to meet today’s ever-increasing innovative and creative demands.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable explores how teams fail to work cohesively together through a dynamic, five-part model of dysfunction. The five dysfunctions are 1) absence of trust, 2) fear of conflict, 3) lack of commitment, 4) avoidance of accountability, and 5) inattention to results. Through identifying these root causes of poor teamwork, teams can develop specific strategies for overcoming each of them. By doing this, they will become comfortable with one another, be willing to engage in constructive debate, achieve clarity and buy-in around team priorities, hold one another to high standards, and focus on team results instead of individual ambition.

Since the 2016 election, America has witnessed college campus protests against “controversial” or “dangerous” speakers. The Coddling of the American Mind explores this phenomenon, showing how a set of dangerous and false beliefs have taken root in the minds of today’s college students, convincing these young people that they are inherently fragile and must be protected from the allegedly harmful impacts of speech with which they disagree. This attitude threatens academic freedom, undermines democracy, and is ultimately harmful to the social and emotional development of today’s youth.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

In Discipline Equals Freedom, Jocko Willink argues that the key to mastering your mind, reaching your highest goals, and discovering your full potential is unwavering discipline. Willink is an author, speaker, and podcaster that shares his lessons and philosophy of discipline acquired from 20 years of service as a US Navy SEAL. Through his military and leadership experience, he’s learned that success depends on disciplined, daily decisions like waking up early and putting off your break until tomorrow.

We’ll examine Willink’s principles of discipline, comparing them to a variety of psychological and philosophical perspectives from books like The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. We’ll also explore what self-improvement experts say to support and challenge Willink’s advice and add effective ways to put his principles into practice.

If you want to be a good leader, you have to put your team before yourself. Jocko Willink explains exactly how to do this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. By learning to practice humility, build good relationships, and take responsibility for your team’s mistakes, you’ll elevate your team to success and empower them to become leaders themselves.

Willink is an author, speaker, and podcaster who served for 20 years as a US Navy SEAL. Through his military and leadership experience, he’s acquired a series of leadership principles and advice that he shares in this field manual. We’ll examine Willink’s leadership principles, comparing them to Principles: Life and Work, The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. We’ll also explore Willink’s advice through the lens of other leadership experts and psychologists to add nuances and actionable tips that will help you implement his ideas into your daily life.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

Every modern business is in the technology game in some way. In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones explain how technology and product development are the fundamental drivers of every successful business. Therefore, to thrive in the modern business world, companies must empower their product development teams to use technology to meet customer needs and drive business growth.

Cagan and Jones have a wealth of experience in product leadership, having worked at multiple high-profile technology businesses. In this guide, we’ll discuss the roles of product leaders and their technology teams, as well as how they measure their collective success. We’ll describe how to empower product teams to work with autonomy and enhance innovation. In addition, we’ll explain the authors’ key concepts, show how other writers expand on their ideas, and explore how some experts arrive at similar conclusions using slightly different approaches.