We wrote this book because we're passionate about leadership and we've seen what works and what doesn't work, we learned some hard lessons, we realize we trained
leaders in the seal teams to help the future generations of leaders as they
came up through the ranks and prepare them for their combat experiences we saw
those guys go out with the same leadership principles we taught them and do some
extraordinary stuff. As we as we helped leaders of the business world,
we saw leaders do some amazing things and these same principles allowed them to succeed
and really dominate on the battlefields. People sarted pressuring us and asking
us, "Hey, can you can you capture these lessons learned, something that we can
actually reference when you're not here to give us a brief" and that's really
why we wrote this book, to help leaders everywhere.
People will say,
"Obviously it's different, what you did in combat and what we're doing
in the business world." While clearly there are differences, there's a lot more
similarities than there are differences. In a leadership position, you've got
the task of leading to a diverse group of people to achieve some kind of a goal,
some kind of a mission, and you want to do in the most effective and
most efficient way. I think what's different about this book from
other leadership books that I've seen out there number one is just practical experience.
This is theory learned in a classroom. This is experience-based
school of hard knocks where we learn this about what works and what doesn't.
The principles that are in this book are the principles that allowed us to be
successful in an extremely challenging environment and therefore we've seen
that these principles are effective in any environment.
There's nothing more humbling than though combat experiences where you don't bring
all your guys home from combat or where the enemy does some things that you hadn't expected and
gets the best of you on a particular day. Those things are incredibly
humbling. You've gotta stay humle, you've gotta learn those lessons, go
back to drawing board and figure out how you can do things better. I think that's
really what this book is about is teaching in a spirit of humility,
for leaders to use extreme ownership, look in the mirror and realize there's
nobody to blame. They've gotta own everything in their world and take
charge of everything that affects their mission. This book isn't all about, "hey we
did awesome and look at all the great stuff we did." There's a lot of stuff in
this book that was actually hard to write about because you're writing about
some mistakes that we made as leaders, some mistakes that are are
subordinate made that we were responsible for and when you see that, when you've done
that, and experienced that, it really gives you the inspiration to help
other people that are facing those same kind of tough, challenging decisions
from leadership perspective. It's definitely tough to write about.
When I was reading through the edits, you know you're going
through it saying, "Wow, that was a hard time in my life and here it is, poured out into the
world." That's a challenge.
Interestingly, in the Seals, there was no real doctrine about leadership, so we kind of learned on
the job. Over a twenty-year career, I was trying to figure out what
worked and what didn't and it's great now to have taken those lessons that we
learned over our careers and through intense combat to say, "Hey, this
distilled group of laws and distilled group of principles are what helped us
and I can give it to you in a very concise way." You dropped to twenty years in
the Seal teams. You can you can pick up this book, you can read it, and you can
see not only how they apply to us in combat but also how they applied with
other businesses and again in a wide variety of industries. And I'll tell you,
it's a manual about leadership but there's not step-by-step directions
because leadership is not that cookie-cutter and if it was that easy, there will be books about
leadership. There be one book and it would have ten steps and this how
you become a great leader. Leadership is a lot more nuanced than that. You've got human
elements, you've got market factors, you've got what the enemy's gonna do, you've got all these
different things that affect leadership.
It's not a simple "one plus one equals two."There's a lot more algebra and there's a lot more
dynamics, geometry, personalities and human interaction that comes into it and
that's what makes leadership challenging.
The principles outlined in the book are not ultra complex. They're
fairly simple and straightforward and yet it's amazing that even as a
Seal leader, I wasn't taught these principles in a concise manner. I kinda
had to figure them out and take bits and pieces throughout a twenty-year career to
figure it out. Now we've kind of captured them and distilled them down into
some pretty straight forward
concepts that if you understand you can apply them in any situation.