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

subsidiary company, owned by their parent corporation, on which his
team depended to transport their product. “They can’t get their jobs
completed on schedule. And that prevents us from doing our jobs.”
Clearly, there were major issues between his field leaders—the frontline
troops of his team—and those of the subsidiary company.
Jocko and I stood before the class of a dozen midlevel managers
seated at tables forming a U-shape in a conference room of the
company’s corporate headquarters. In the second session of a twelve-
month leadership-training program, our presentation and discussion
centered on the Laws of Combat. We solicited from each of the class
participants specific leadership challenges that they currently faced.
Jocko and I set about to help them solve these challenges through the
application of the SEAL combat leadership principles they had just
learned.
The production manager explained that his team struggled to
minimize downtime in their production—the times when they had to
cease making product. These disruptions occurred for a variety of
reasons, but they stopped product from moving to market, and every
hour and day of downtime cost the company huge revenues and
substantially impacted the bottom line. With his crew just getting up and
running, there had been a steep learning curve. The production
manager’s team maintained an average downtime that was much worse
than the industry standard. Such a glaring discrepancy was a major
detriment to the company’s profits. As a result, the production manager
was under scrutiny and intense pressure to reduce downtime. The
subsidiary company on which his production team depended became the
major scapegoat to blame.
“We spend a lot of our time waiting on them [the subsidiary