The main argument in Extreme Ownership is hard to disagree with. If you’re responsible for a team and your first explanation for every failure is that everybody beneath you screwed up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough at your own part in it. That doesn’t mean every failure belongs to the leader. That’s where I…
I’ve never believed being chief means I owe an officer blind loyalty. If one of mine is wrong, I have to deal with it. That may mean coaching, discipline, termination, or standing in front of the public and saying we got something wrong. What I won’t do is decide he’s wrong because defending him became…
It’s pretty easy to judge the boss when you’re not the boss. I’ve done plenty of it. I’ve looked at decisions made above me and thought they were slow, unnecessary, poorly timed, or just wrong. Sometimes I was probably right. Becoming the person in the chair didn’t suddenly convince me that bosses know better than…
In a previous life, I delegated a lot more than I do now. I had to. I was responsible for more than 2,300 employees who depended, in one way or another, on the decisions I made, and there was no realistic way I could personally handle everything that came with that. On a normal day,…