Extreme Ownership?
In Extreme Ownership, a few utter maniacs give visceral advice gleaned from vicious firefights in a scorching desert to… middle managers in corporate America. In this essay, I’m going to argue that Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s book would be more interesting if they instead explained what middle managers should not learn from Navy SEALs. What was so extreme about their situation, and what extreme advice only applies in that situation? More generally, I think that advice from extraordinary people is more interesting when it is more particular.
The key message of Extreme Ownership is that:
The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything. That is Extreme Ownership, the fundamental core of what constitutes an effective leader in the SEAL Teams or in any leadership endeavour.
The direct responsibility of a leader included getting people to listen, support, and execute plans... As the commander, everything that happened on the battlefield was my responsibility. Everything. If a supporting unit didn't do what it needed to do, then I hadn't given clear instructions. If one of my machine gunners engaged targets outside his field of fire, then I had not ensured he understood where his field of fire was. If the enemy surprised us and hit us where we hadn't expected, then I hadn't thought through all the possibilities. No matter what, I could never blame other people when a mission went wrong.
There are no negative repercussions to Extreme Ownership. There are only two kinds of leaders: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders that lead successful, high performance teams exhibit Extreme Ownership. Anything else is simply ineffective. Anything else is bad leadership.
Personally, I like this advice, and I find it helpful. It’s closely aligned with Andy Grove’s theory of High Output Management: the output of a manager is the output of their team, and so a manager must take extreme ownership over their team. The High Output Manager is, as Willink puts it in Extreme Ownership, “truly and ultimately responsible for everything.”
And yet when Jocko Willink and Leif Babin claim that their advice is universal - that Extreme Ownership is the right approach for any good leader in any leadership endeavour - I think they take it too far. Even if most leaders should take more ownership and put more pressure on themselves, there are leaders who put too much pressure on themselves, to the point that it’s self-destructive. Those people need to loosen up, relax, stop being so hard on themselves.
One of these people is Goethe’s Werther; shortly before he blows his brains out, Werther writes:
Oh, if only I could follow some mood and blame the weather, or a third person, or failure in some enterprise; then the intolerable burden of my discontent would trouble me half as much. Woe! I feel all too clearly that the blame lies solely with me.
Sure, Werther was not a leader, and would not have been a good one; but there exist leaders who share his depressive tendencies, and “extreme ownership” would be the wrong advice for them. SEALs are a unique breed of man; Willink’s advice helps men like them edge rightwards into the tail of their distribution; but other people sit in other distributions.
Scott Alexander makes the same point in All Debates are Bravery Debates:
Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish. Post more or less offensive atheist memes. Be more or less willing to blame and criticize yourself. There are some people who need to hear each side of the issue. Some people really need to hear the advice ‘It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!’ Other people really need to hear the advice ‘You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.’
I think this is the correct way to interpret gurus like Stef Sword-Richardson, creator of the brand FUCK BEING HUMBLE; her advice seems obvious and quite possibly counterproductive to people like me; and yet, of course, there exist many people for whom “FUCK BEING HUMBLE” is exactly what they need to hear. Not me!
There are many books like Extreme Ownership; take Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling, which teaches leaders high on amphetamines to blitz in destructive but perhaps unsustainable ways, or Heinz Guderian’s Achtung - Panzer!, which also teaches leaders high on amphetamines to blitz in destructive but perhaps unsustainable ways. If you take the advice in these books without considering what made their situation unique, you will run into difficulties.
My point is that most advice is only situationally correct - it’s the right advice for specific people facing specific challenges. For instance, most businesses should try to be profitable; following Hoffman’s advice is a recipe for disaster, but considering his assumptions provides valuable perspective into your own situation.
I got the same feeling reading How Big Things Get Done. Bent Flyvbjerg has spent his career to studying multi-billion dollar megaprojects; How Big Things Get Done is advice for megaproject planners. Flyvbjerg draws interesting conclusions from the examples of the Guggenheim in Bilbao and Heathrow T5 (good), and Californian high-speed rail and the Sydney Opera House (bad). I think the book falls down, though, when it attempts to extrapolate those lessons back down to the scale of a homeowner renovating their kitchen.
Flyvbjerg’s argument is that homeowners should plan more before committing to a project; but when he scales down his advice, it becomes quotidian, which rather defeats the purpose of the book. Flyvbjerg is at his best when he’s talking specifics: for example, he explains why solar power, wind power, thermal fossil fuels, electricity transmission, and roads are easier to build than other categories of megaproject (hint: they’re modular not monolithic). I want the counterintuitive advice that only makes sense in the context of a megaproject, the wisdom that I can’t draw from my own experience.
There’s a self-sabotaging lack of modesty common to both Flyvbjerg and Willink’s books. The authors extrapolate down from the most extreme situations possible to dispense universal wisdom. It’s immodest to assume that their situation generalises; it’s self-sabotaging because their advice is interesting because it’s specific. Willink’s insistence that Extreme Ownership is right for everyone devalues his unique experience.
These books are valuable because they show us how different things could be; observing the SEALs is like observing some Amazonian tribe that has a number system that goes “one, two, many”. Question received wisdom! Down with the categorical imperative! There are many local maxima; as you scale yours, the perspiring effort of the blitzscalers and blitzkriegers provides a quantum of perspective. The takeaway isn’t “here’s how the SEALs do it; I should do that too”; it’s “here’s an unusual solution to an unusual problem”. If you read Extreme Ownership and only come away thinking “I should take more ownership sometimes”, or read How Big Things Get Done and think “I should plan more”, you’ve missed the point.