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

I was on a visit to a client company’s field leadership team, the
frontline troops that executed the company’s mission. This was where
the rubber met the road: all the corporate capital initiatives, strategic
planning sessions, and allocated resources were geared to support this
team here on the ground. How the frontline troops executed the mission
would ultimately mean success or failure for the entire company.
The field manager’s team was geographically separated from their
corporate headquarters located hundreds of miles away. He was clearly
frustrated. The field manager had a job to do, and he was angry at the
questions and scrutiny from afar. For every task his team undertook he
was required to submit substantial paperwork. In his mind, it made for a
lot more work than necessary and detracted from his team’s focus and
ability to execute.
I listened and allowed him to vent for several minutes.
“I’ve been in your shoes,” I said. “I used to get frustrated as hell at
my chain of command when we were in Iraq. They would scrutinize our
plans, ask questions that seemed stupid, and load on a massive
paperwork requirement that I had to submit both prior to and after every
operation.”
“You had to deal with that as a Navy SEAL at war?” asked the field
manager, surprised. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“I absolutely did,” I said. “Before every combat mission, we had to
get approval up the chain of command at least two levels from a faraway
boss who didn’t fully understand what we were up against. That required
me putting the intricate details of the operation in a multitude of
PowerPoint slides and then an additional Word document of several
typed pages, just to get approval. Once approved and we launched, then I
had to generate even more paperwork when we got back: a multislide