Arguing Agile
We're arguing about agile so that you don't have to!
We seek to better prepare you to deal with real-life challenges by presenting both sides of the real arguments you will encounter in your professional career.
On this podcast, working professionals explore topics and learnings from their experiences and share the stories of Agilists at all stages of their careers. We seek to do so while maintaining an unbiased position from any financial interest.
Arguing Agile
AA217 - Extreme Ownership: Military Leadership Lessons for Professionals
Today, we're delivering a not-your-typical-leadership-book review: "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin!
Ed Martin joins hosts Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel for a chapter-by-chapter review of how military leadership principles directly translate to product management, agile coaching, and team development.
The core message?
True leadership isn't about barking orders - it's about taking complete ownership, empowering others, and leading with discipline and humility.
Some quotes from our discussion include:
• It's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate
• If you can run retrospectives people actually want to attend, you've got leadership skills
• Communication isn't just part of your job as a product manager - it IS your job
• There's no 100% right solution, but leaders must act decisively amid uncertainty
Listen to discover the striking parallels between leadership skill and "agile practices" such as decentralized command and the ability to prioritize and execute under pressure. Whether you're leading a development team or coaching organizational transformation, these principles apply.
#ExtremeOwnership #Leadership #ProductManagement
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Today on the podcast, extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Om is back. Ed is back. We're gonna dig into this book. We're gonna talk about application to our career fields and life in general. Sounds good. extreme ownership is it's not about barking orders, it's about taking ownership, empowering others. Simplifying plans and leading with discipline and humility that summarizes, what the premise of the book is about. And we're gonna deep dive on certain principles that are covered in the book, in their applications to business. I think , the agenda for this is going to be each chapter. There's 12 chapters in the book. Pretty quick read if, if you're interested I highly suggest it. The chapters are constructed in three parts a story from real world combat experience, right? From Jocko's background or Leif Babin's background and then principle, which kind of brings the idea together and clean, concise format. And then an application to business, which is basically like another story that reinforces the story and the principle they just told you from their consulting business. So he starts off, chapter one extreme Ownership, with a story this will be the only one that I actually go into the story section.'cause he, it's, it's relevant for what I'm about to talk about in the story section. And I'm on page 26 after an incident blue on blue incident, you can read the book, find out more. They're back talking about what happened. And you know, it's, they're expecting, someone's expecting to get blamed that kind of situation after a major mistake happens. And he has a quote that says, despite all the failures of individuals, units, and leaders, and despite the myriad mistakes that have been made, there was only one person to blame for everything that had gone wrong in the operation. Me, me. He said I had to take complete ownership of what went wrong. That's what a leader does, even if it means getting fired. If anyone was to be blamed and fired for what happened, let it be me. One of the interesting things about that after actions he did there was he started out with, whose fault is it? and so he was, he queried the team first and. And they all silent. But, but it was silence. And then there was that the one person who was always uncomfortable with silence spoke up first no, it wasn't you. they went around the room. Everyone all of a sudden owned up to a fault that was theirs before he said, no, it was me. he told everyone it wasn't their fault first he says, despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and ego, it was the right thing to do. The only thing to do, looking back, it's clear despite what happened, the full ownership I took of the situation actually increased the trust of my commanding officer. And master chief had in me. They knew it was a dynamic situation caused by a multitude of factors, but I own them all. The leader is ultimately responsible for everything. The leader must acknowledge mistakes admit failure, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win. Didn't mean to talk over you, but, one of the things he says in that same section, he talks about look at the organization's problems through the objective lens of reality. Remove emotion and , accept responsibility for the failures, attack weaknesses, and constantly work to build a better and more effective team. Good leaders do not take credit for the team successes and bestows the honor upon his subordinates and team members. So, but the idea there that for me is it's working through and trying to fight the weakness is always a challenge because when you start trying to call out the weaknesses in the normal business environment, a lot of team members aren't set up for that type of feedback. They're not ready to receive it. I mean, a lot of team members, but also in his, you know he says here, this is 31 you're reading from, right? Mm-hmm., That's a section I also had to outline as well, because I was at a networking event this week. And as I was , shooting my mouth off, I was giving unsolicited advice like I do, and I said if agile is waning, like the big a agile is waning in the field, all the people that have been enhancing their leadership skill over the past 10 years or whatever it's been, right? Everyone needs to like realize they need to transfer those skills somewhere else that appreciates them., If you can make it through a retro with a bunch of people and all the issues in the organization that have impacted the team are upstream and you as a scrum master or program manager or whatever your role is, regardless of agile role or not, you've learned now something that like most people don't get to, not only don't learn about conceptually, but now you've become the person that like, well, nothing's gonna change if I don't climb the ladder and knock on the door and be like, Hey, do you know when you said that one thing this is how it got perceived. Or when you speak up first in meetings nobody wants to talk that is what he's talking about here if we don't ask ourselves hard questions, like when number one, we're not gonna change, right? Number two, he's implying is you're not gonna succeed. Listen there are two or three things I pulled out of that particular chapter. He says, leaders own up to their own mistakes and failures. Two things happen when you do that it strengthens the trust that his team has in him. the other thing that happens implicitly is people learn from your behavior. They will start to own up to their mistakes, hopefully. Right. And that just makes the team better. So that's something that I think is important as well to point out. even when things are outside of the leader's control, the blue on blue incident wasn't in his control, but he took ownership of it. He said, this is my fault. in a way, he's really asking, how can I have done things differently? If leaders could do that in business, I think it would be a lot further along instead of just casting the blame which is what you see all the time so you'd talked about agile leaderships, right? Yeah. So I would, I would venture to say. If you're a scrum master or a coach and you run a retrospective that people actually want to come to, you got leadership skills. Right? Right. So if you're questioning whether you've got leadership skills or not , think about the events that you run and whether your team wants to be there or not, right. Or if you've made impact on the organization. I remember , I've been lucky enough to see a lot of different people do that job, and you really can draw a line of like, who is making an actual impact and who's just like cashing checks, there was a person who was high up in an organization and I'm like, you're, you made it to the top of the ladder. Why don't you start throwing your weighter on? I know you know how things are supposed to work, and now that you're at the top of the ladder, you're not using that authority to do anything. You're not improving any lives. you made it to the top and now you're just quietly collecting your check and defending your position. Like, what are you doing? they don't upset the apple cart, basically. If you read the book predictable Success, it falls off predictable, the predictable success into treadmill. And so you start falling off the backside if you're not careful. He certainly did. Do you have anything for against in honor of arguing Agile with my snazzy new patch? Ooh, I gotta go down to that section, I have three things. I think two are real. Possibly it can create realistic pressure. Leaders may take on too much because they're owning everything. Any problems that come up like, ah, it's my fault, right? I'm accountable. It could be overwhelming. That's what this point is making. Oh, I can see. But you also have to be sincere about that ownership. Yes, there are some, oh, it's my fault. ha ha and they're not really taking No, it's really my fault. Someone got hurt in this case, life's at risk in this case so even when we're at work, our job should be at risk I tell my team, I'm going to insulate you, not isolate you. If you do something galactically stupid, I can't help you. But if I can, I'm gonna do everything I can to stand in front of you so that you can learn and I can use my experience to help you grow and be better at what you do. The rebuttal to that, we'll talk about it later in this book. There's a whole chapter that deals with what you just said, they definitely talk about it in the dichotomy of leadership of mm-hmm. Leaders that are oh, no, they do talk about in this book, because they're talking about the, the, when they're in the training for close quarters, the CQB training In the house, they talk about, the leader up front, clearing doors and stuff like that. And it's like, you need to back up to have some kind of like objective view. So you do talk about a little bit in this book, in the next book, they go more into depth about well, yes, you do need to be like, involved in things, , not so much. Yeah. Like, there, there's a balance. They focus on the balance. Yes. They focus on the balance. Which does help with this question, but I already know we're, we're gonna talk about this later in the book. So I'm trying to remember the question you just said. Of the leader that takes everything on themselves and can't delegate, you know what I mean? That kind of person. Decentralized command we talk about it later in the book. So I'm gonna delay answering that one, but trust me, it will get answered. Alright. The only other against I think of is there's a risk of team members avoiding responsibility if the leader's always taking the blame. The same answer that I'm gonna use to answer the first one, I'm gonna use the answer the second one. There's a, there's a chapter here on the leader's job to set the standards and then enforce the standards so if you're enforcing standards they don't go into, this book about firing people. Like there's an example about a CTO that doesn't work out in this book, in the dichotomy of leadership, there's a whole chapter on when to fire somebody and how to go through it the advice this book will have is set a standard and then hold people to the standard, which doesn't necessarily mean at the first sign that they fail, wash 'em out. That's not what it means. we'll go into it when I have it highlighted in here. it's probably under the lead up and down the chain of command pro. Yeah, I think it is. Because it, it, it specifically talks about your person isn't exactly failing. You're just sending them back to do the job again until they get it right. You know what I mean? And like you, the, the idea that you give people chances and you're telling them that their work is not up to quality and you're sending them back to do the work again, so that, that's how they hold the standard I think I had something still for chapter one. I had a couple things. leadership attitude really matters. It goes back to the best performing SEAL team units leaders who accepted responsibility for everything. My support and leaders made bad calls. I must not have explained the overall intent well enough. How many times do team members feel like they're in trouble or we start yelling at 'em for whatever reason? they messed up, but ultimately we didn't give clear instructions and they did the best they could with what they knew, what they were trained to do. And this goes back to evolutions we talked about in SEAL teams, They trained together all the time in the business sense. how do we build that to where we're training, we do evolutions? What does an evolution look like in our workspace? And from an agile standpoint, every sprint is an evolution in a roundabout way but are we really approaching it? Like, we're learning, we're teaching, we're training, we're working together. If we change that mindset back to episode 100 mm-hmm. We change that mindset to where people could make that work out for 'em and recognize that it's an evolution and a training opportunity versus a sprint with events. Yeah or worse we just don't have sprints and don't train and claim to be Kanban. Some people out there. I'm feeling attacked right now there's books being written right now claiming that the agile folks, they got nothing in here for you, nothing they're doing can help you just do product management. We'll all be cool together. Yep. Okay. I got a cross-functional team of one. I have a dysfunctional team of one. There you go. So moving on to chapter two. No bad teams, only Bad Leaders. It's sort of an adapted version of about face the Odyssey of an American Warrior where he says that there are no bad units, only bad officers. We're gonna skip a lot of the stories, but I think this story, and this one was the boat captain two boat, captain six or boat leader, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was, a phenomenal story, right? Can you swap out the leader and get what, what's the results gonna be? Yeah and so it's, I think it's important. So I, anyone's listening who has reads book, if you don't find the other, the other one's interesting, which, I mean, this is their life, so I read all the stories, but I think that this, from a bad leader standpoint is a, is a good example I've seen that happen on development teams. Swapping out the leader and immediate turnaround people ask me all the time Brian, how come you don't have these problems on your teams? I'm like, it's 'cause I've, I'm, I'm in the scene at all business kid. That's why like, there's very few of us in the workforce that are in the scene at all business and like, I don't get rattled when things don't come in on. people press me for deadlines. I ask them why, you know what I mean? They don't have good answers there's stress coming from people that are under stress themselves, reverting to bad behaviors. Sometimes you need to take those people off to the side it's just a little more awareness that you get with experience, right? I mean it's like when, when you, when you grind everyone that's older than 40 outta your company and you only wanna hire 25 year olds it's hard to have these skills in corporate America, but that's a whole different podcast. When there's some quotes for the principle here for no bad teams, only bad leaders. When leaders who epitomize extreme ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, this is 54. They must recognize that when it comes to standards as a leader, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. This is one of the first things Ed ever said when I met him was this quote right here. It's not what you preach. It's what you tolerate. Culture is the behaviors you allow and accept. So when people talk about culture, it's a lagging indicator. It's the stories that they tell about you, your team, and your company.. And so whatever you allow and accept, that's your culture. He says, leaders must enforce standards, consequences for failing, need not be immediately severe, but leaders must ensure that tasks are repeated until the higher expected standard is achieved. Leaders must push the standards in a way that encourages and enables the team to utilize extreme ownership. And that's the answer that I was looking for to your question that you had just asked, there's a way to do it where , we're not being severe or harsh where we actually like, I mean, doing this, depending on who's doing this, like if you have a scrum master or you have a designated, team lead or even I as a product manager, during the reviews, I'll say I'm not happy with this work and we're gonna take it in the next sprint and do it again, and we're gonna fix it in these ways. Or the customer will say, I'm not happy with this work, and we'll talk about how to fix it. That's not bad on anyone. We'll just take it in and we'll fix it. if there's bad to be had, all those fingers are gonna point back at me for not clarifying upfront. Before I started to work with the dev team, we didn't do enough wire frames or understand the problem well enough. Business is not common to any one developer on my team It may be on you to own that the intent wasn't expressed clearly. I also understand that organizations suffer from many dysfunctions and many organizations don't work the way that my organization works, I remember I worked at a place where the lead developer would come and scream at individual developers on a team for this kind of stuff. Like, oh, you should have known whatever. And I'm like, you're not helping anybody here. they're just shutting down while they're getting yelled at and there's no learning happening and they still have to do the work again. So let's just cut to doing the work if there's a pattern or whatever, that's a different thing to deal with and we should deal with it. So up in the first paragraph he talks about needing a forcing function to get different members working together. And so by swapping the leaders. That was that forcing function so thinking about your teams, what can you change? What is that forcing function to help. Every team must have junior leaders ready to step up and temporarily take the lead roles and responsibilities for their immediate bosses to carry on the team's mission and get the job done if needed. The quote that I was taught in my first leadership role as an IT leader was do the bottom half of your boss's job., If you're a junior leader figure out how to a, become expert at your job, figure out how to do the bottom half of your boss's job. That way when you get your boss's job, the bottom half isn't dragging you down. Mm-hmm. And there was a, a podcast manager tools that talked about the juggling koan and talking about juggling balls I used the. Crystal ball, rubber ball analogy, If I give you a rubber ball, you can drop it, it'll pounce. If I give you a crystal ball, you drop it, it shatters. I can't glue that back together and so the juggling koon is as you get promoted, as, as when you go on vacation and you delegate your work to a team member who doesn't know how to do it, that ball you just handed them is three x what they're used to handling. Yeah, yeah and so they can't keep up with the load if you haven't trained them. There's another book that basically says the leaders who set themselves up where when they leave the company just dies, or the division or department or whatever dies. That wasn't in Carol Dweck's book. Is it, is it in Carol? Yeah. Like, it's because Iacocca specifically specifically called out. That's not, that's, that doesn't show how great of a oh, you were the glue that held everybody together. That just shows that you didn't train a replacement. And you didn't delegate well, and you didn't play well with the the other children, but Jim Collins great by choice was also the comparison to leader themselves on the company.'cause Good To Great was about the companies. Great By Choice was about the leaders. The last quote in this section that I have is leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve. And build that mindset into the team . they must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team's performance. And again, I read this thinking about my statement about the Agile folks, and I'm like, oh boy, look, here's something you're already ready to do that most people especially in smaller companies, like you never know with the I like working with smaller companies, but you never know when you're gonna get in a small company and like have like a executive or a co or somebody who's like ego is made outta glass or something. You never know. they do something successful, they need to evolve a little bit as a person to get to the next level of success. And it's awkward being there and being like, you need to elevate your level of leadership. Was it you and I that were talking about your level of leadership brings, that's the top, that's like the glass ceiling of your talent. Mm-hmm that was John Maxwell's LA of the lid lA of the lid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. LA of the lid. Your, leadership ability and aptitude, right? Yeah. It was in that period of my career , when I was on contract. Oh boy. I saw this all the time. for those that aren't familiar with Law of the Lid is you have a XY axis and you work on your ability to go from a level seven to a level eight skilled person. But if you work on your leadership going from a seven and then multiplying your leadership, moving your leadership up to a two, you go from a seven to a 14, right? So you don't, you're not really working on your abilities, you're working on your leadership and you become a force multiplier at that point and focus more on that. what are your soft skills that help you build relationships and grow people, make them better, which ultimately will make you better learn how to get people what they want so you can get what you want. These skills that we speak about aren't necessarily taught in school one of the things that they say in the book is you get these through training. and I personally feel like leadership training leaves a lot to be desired in business. Oh boy. Wow. so we may have a different section where this is more relevant, but since we're talking about bad leaders they never got the training. training is gone by the wayside. you show up to work now and it's OJT if you're lucky, there's a computer-based training course to teach you what they expect you to know. you're lucky if they teach you about the history of the company, You're supposed to know all this stuff coming in. They're not taking any effort into making you a better leader anymore. If you wanna learn it, learn it on your own time, sadly, there's no ROI in that. Yeah, exactly. Is that the, is that the, out like train yourself or like train pretty much. I mean, you really have no choice, right? What choice do you have? I've said this on the podcast several times, but I'm a huge fan of the Journeyman model. Yeah, definitely. the journeyman model. That would be great. the evidence is that companies are not hiring new folks anyway. Like the new, new hiring in tech it's, I think it's tech. I should go find the diagram now. I'm talking about it like down 24% this year. You and I were talking, before the show a lot of AI is starting to do junior programmer work. How do we get junior programmers five years from now, how does a person come in as a mid if they were never a junior? I think the counter argument to that, and I I don't buy into it, is they're not needed right. Because AI is doing it all. So to your point about mid-levels, they won't be needed because AI will do it all . Well, someone's eventually gotta check the work. Right? For sure. The only vibe so far. my experience has been companies just want no part of, they just wanna completely wash their hands of like, I'm out, find somebody else in the market. There's not that many people in the market. So at some point we have to take some responsibility . Careful. There's a lot of people in the market right now. I know. We can't all opt out of taxes., We can't all opt out of taxes., We're not all billionaires., We can't all opt out, one person can opt outta taxes. It doesn't really hurt everyone that much, , everyone can't opt outta taxes, come on. But corporate America, somehow, like we're all opting out of training and helping our employees grow. We're all opting out of it all at the same time. That's the majority of places, just like we're opting out of it. And these are the same people that are saying we can't recruit enough talent. Nobody wants to work. Uh, that's, that's, uh, that's a no. That's, That's valid., Nobody wants to work. Sorry. You're taking the other side now. I am taking the other side. Nobody wants to work. So there are no bad teams'cause nobody's working. Is that what you just said? Oh my God. Too good. I mean, it all, This just proves the header of the chapter is like this. They're all bad leaders. If you're not investing in the future at all, like that's your plan, not investing in the future at all. That's a terrible plan. My experience has been , it's hard to get companies to lift a finger to help anyone this message has been brought to you by private equity. Sorry, I can't save money by cut training. That's right. That's, there's no ROI in training . no one will be here tomorrow. If you train 'em, they'll leave and if you don't train 'em, they'll stay. You can't prove there's a future. Why train them? They should be doing real work. Exactly. Hands on keyboards. Yeah, that's it. Hands on keyboards. So although like that was, that was an interesting diatribe that I was on to, to me, just that's what I'm saying. part of that goes into what they talk about in chapter three, which is the chapter about believe Before, when you talk about the , swapping of the boat captains Right. Was they had to believe that that leader, when he went to the, to the vote that was not winning. He believed that winning was possible the fact that he believed it, he was able to help them believe it and then they had a single specific first goal of winning that race. Not all future races so you have to make sure you believe what you want, what you believe in. Mm-hmm. That they believe in you , and then set a singularly focused goal and accomplish it together. You make a good point, which is like , you're a leader. They've got to put in some work to convince themselves that winning is possible. And I do this, this is gonna be the podcast about one individual, there are some individuals that I've seen that just don't believe winning's possible. Like that person I talked about earlier that got themselves to the top of the ladder, they just don't think winning's possible. So they're just gonna sit why use their new position to rattle the cages? All these people that have been keeping the whole organization locked up the whole time they've been there why bother doing that? They don't think that winning is possible. and you or I would probably look at that and be like, well, that is a quote leader that they need to be gone. They seem burnt out. They need to take some time and really think about what they're doing with their life. So if you as a leader don't have self conviction that winning is possible, how on earth will you convince others and bring them along?? They're gonna see through it and you're not gonna get the end result. you want the win, right? You have to truly believe that it's possible. Otherwise, step away and let someone else pick up the. I feel like my life has prepared me to be the superhero juggernaut, every time I see a wall, I just wanna run through it. That's what I like about Agile, is I can go round my impediments. So do you enjoy hitting your head against walls? Ed, that's what you said. I do it frequently. With a forehead like this, it comes in handy. Chapter three believe in order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Far more important than training our equipment, a resolute belief in the mission is critical for any team or organization to win and achieve big results. There's a good part in this section. There's a quite enlightening part where he talks about the leader here's a quote. If the leader doesn't understand why they need to stop and hammer their head against the wall until they get the why from whoever they need to get the why from, every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals. When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question why. Take a step back, deconstruct the situation, analyze the strategic picture, and come up with a conclusion. If they cannot determine a satisfactory answer themselves, they must ask questions up the chain of command until they understand why. It is likewise incumbent on senior leaders to take the time to explain and answer the questions of their junior leaders, because the frontline troops will never have as clear of an understanding of the strategic picture as senior leaders. And this is what I preach in my role as product manager all the time . We did the podcast about product management. Communication is your only job. This is what I mean., It's not just communication., Like sending slack messages, it's not the mechanics of communication. This is what I mean. you're spending the majority of your time.'cause this is so hard to do, you might sit up in front of the whole company and tell them all the same information and they all hear it differently. now you've got a big problem. You have a bigger problem than if you sat in front of the company and didn't tell 'em anything at all. At least they'd have no ideas in their head. Now they've got a ton of ideas in their head, so you need to stay on it until they all have the same picture. Exactly a couple pages earlier, he talks about running to the sound is much easier when a seal is surrounded by other seals, the bond of the brotherhood is our strongest weapon, right? I mean, imagine gonna work every day and the bond of your brotherhood is your strongest weapon, all the things that make us work together. Running towards the sound, knowing that the people you're with on a daily basis, , they got your back in military, got your six. You, you need that. You've gotta have someone you can trust on a daily basis. It's interesting because in business, in a team, you have people that are solo operators quite often. And those people don't have that level of trust from the rest of the team, right? People know that that person's gonna do things their way. And eventually what happens is they burn out or they let go because they make mistakes because they're not trusting other team members. It's all about me, not we. And we've seen this, each of us have seen this, right? So believe here is. If they're a team leader or a leader Yeah. They need to believe in what the mission is and then be able to explain that to the others in a way that the others perceive that these people aren't just saying it it's it's their true inner belief. Yeah and that winning is not only possible, it is now probable. Right there's quite a few senior devs out there that finish the sprint. So for, you got a Tuesday into the sprint, they spend Saturday and Sunday finishing everything. They didn't finish, they rewrite the architecture. Oh, I thought, I thought I'd do a full rewrite on this thing. Everything breaks., Well, I spent all weekend doing, you should think I'm great for that. I'm the hero. Right, right. I'm the brilliant jerk. I made it happen. Yeah, absolutely. Chances are that they don't really understand the why. Right, right and so again, we go back to that same point we haven't done last time they probably haven't been trained in leadership as such. Mm-hmm. I, I got, I got one for you. Occasionally I'll tap the wealth of knowledge that is Mr. Om Patel. On page 78, he has a quote he says, in business, just as in the military. No senior executive team would knowingly choose a course of action or issue, an order that would purposefully result in failure., At the highest levels, they're not purposefully trying to run us into the ground. I mean, again, private equity aside, well aside from them. Yeah, yeah. When you sell all the real estate that all your restaurants are built on that's not a good long-term move. Aside from private equity I'm having fun today. The question I wanna ask you. you get an order it's not clear. You get your marching orders. They're not clear, and it's like a software development team, right? Sure. You have to question it until you really understand why. Right. But sometimes there is no strategy at the corporate level. They're all trying to make the latest sale. there is no cohesive strategy. I agree with that. a true leader might then say, why not this, why that if you're in a safe environment where questioning is welcome. Leadership, especially if there's no clear strategy, should welcome that approach. What about this alternative?, What if we didn't do what you're saying we should do? What's the impact on us?, We should ask that I tend to make up the why if I don't understand it. I try to make my best sense of it. And this is what I think do that though. And that's what I think the why is I, this is why I think it's important. And what do you think? And if I'll ask 'em, what do you think? If they don't have a better answer, let's do that one. All right. Sounds good , I would say the further along people get in their careers and with leadership skill, they get better at managing up? Is that the term for this? Clearly there is no strategy. Like clearly the senior executives in this story are monkeys pushing a button and hoping for success. And you need to lead them to a strategy. And that's acceptable. not the monkey part, but leading your leaders to success. That's what I mean when I say question them, right? Why this, why not that? And try and get to a point where. There's at least some level of consensus on a direction. I had experiences where sometimes when you're in the business world, the why might get you fired so it depends on the relationship you have, but you figure it out. You were told what was requested, and if it's plausible and ultimately not going to destroy a company, it's probably in a good interest to go ahead and do it. Yeah. I mean, this is the point in the park archive where we offer that sage advice. You know, keep your resume, keep that resume updated. Exactly. Oh, I was gonna say, don't be a whistleblower at Boeing. No monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast. That's right. All is getting cut out. Bananas or monkeys. Were harmed. But believing in figuring out is important. Right? Yeah. Taking the time to go. Look, I may not have received the strategy. one of my favorite questions is, what's the problem you have? what problem are we trying to solve? Yeah there are a lot of times I ask, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? Is my way of politely asking why so that I understand the problem. If I understand the problem, it's easier for me to buy in, understand what we're doing, and figure out if I'm gonna get halfway there with my solution or not. But if I'm just told to march and go north, I don't know why I'm going north. How far north am I going? Do I need more clothes or not? That applies to your team as well, right? Right. So are you as a leader, if you're just simply giving them orders as opposed to explaining to them the purpose. I mean, most of the team members will just follow you. Yeah but even as an owner, right? So not everybody thinks of themselves as a leader, but everyone should be an owner. Yes. Yes. Agreed. so you're one, so you're 81, so you're on 81. You're in the story about the CEO that they're going to, and she implemented a new sales plan or something like that. Right. And no one understood it? Nobody. And they were afraid to ask . Okay. They were afraid to ask. I didn't get it. So in her mind she was fairly laid back. She thought she was open to questions, she thought she was approachable. She has an open door policy home, open door policy, open door policy, come on in. Just not right now, but in the book, you have boss tattooed on your forehead. When you're in a position of people leader, your team always sees it. you feel you're something Your team will tell you with their behavior what you are if they're not coming to you, not asking questions, they're afraid to address you, then that's on you figure that out she called a meeting. Based on the feedback she received she gave them the opportunity to ask. when they didn't ask, she knew they wanted to know through the other workshop. she offered it and said, does that make sense? Is that clear? do you agree with the decision? We want low performers to not be bonused and self-select out. Yeah and so once they understood the why, yes, it was punitive, but for good reason because the low performers were not bringing in the revenue they needed to bring in on the belief side of it depending on what position you are in, you may be. Creating an avoidance unintentionally. it's similar to one of the against that I have here.. Some leaders may fake belief to stay aligned. Which can seem inauthentic. That was my story. That person , through being on the right teams and saying the right things somehow made it to the top. He made it to the top by saying the right things and basically fake it till you make it. And then he made it and kept faking it, that's a big problem that does happen in corporate America. Yeah, it does. It it sure does was the inversive imposter syndrome when you faked it, made it, but don't know you have imposter syndrome? Oh yeah. what's the inversive Imposter syndrome. I think it's still imposter syndrome. I think that when you what's go there's a meme I, I'll make a meme for this. Don't worry about it. Alright. Another, another against is this requires full transparency from upper leadership which may not exist. So this talks to the people and the politics that exist they're not always. Upfront and open with you about what's really happening. And the last one is, blind belief can lead to lack of critical thinking or challenging bad strategies. I, so what was the second one I wanted? Second one was, requires full transparency from upper leadership the full transparency one. I would say if you're working for a bunch of people that are always trying to hide stuff , your day is numbered anyway at that kind of place. I don't know that I, , I'm finding it difficult to take that one as seriously as I probably should. it just doesn't sound like a good place to work . I've pretty much only worked on teams where transparency was a principle that wasn't negotiable for the last, eight years, seven years, something like that. So I have a difficult time going backwards and I can tell the people that are trying to hide stuff, it's hard, right? It's hard and it stands out and they don't realize it really does. People who have been in transparent organizations the answers that are incomplete, the answers that lack detail, the answers that are vague you know, what happens in obscurity stays in obscurity , and it stands out. And when we've experienced the types of environments we have. It's hard for them to understand when we are trying to be trans, we're the odd one out. It is a really weird Dynamic also., Without transparency, you're not making real progress. You're making these like faux commitments and stuff like that , I don't think that's true at all, because if leaders are willing to stay on the senior leaders until they get answers, you know what I mean? If we really are in a culture where I can ask, 'cause I'm not clear, and you're gonna stay on until you've made it clear. and help me to understand then number three is like right out, so number three is talking about blind belief, right? Yeah. So without questioning, you just simply take the word. Yeah., That's not what the book is calling out. The book is calling out like, you believe in it because you understand the why behind it, right? So you should be questioning is what this is saying. You should be questioning and if you have people that just are saying, well, I'm not explaining this this conversation's over and walking away or whatever, believe me, trust me, this is the case, or take that offline. I'm just telling you this is what we're gonna do. Take that offline and I'll yell at you in private or something. Like, that's disingenuous. And you're obviously not practicing extreme ownership with that kind of stuff. You're trying to deflect. So you can get outta having a hard conversation. That's not what leaders do. Yeah, absolutely. So in this section, this is where part of the training, the Iraqi military, right? So if we don't train them, when do we get to go home is kind of the summary of that. So if they can't defend their own country, who's going to defend it? To ensure everyone clearly understood the strategic importance of why we were directed to do this I made it perfectly clear. Juliet Funt talks about white space and having time to think. She has a great book, A Minute to Think We're losing the time to think as well , he was able to work it out himself If we don't find the time for ourselves to walk these things back and think critically. You talked about critical thinking earlier. To do that, critical think as to the strategic importance and what could come out of it. We are losing that opportunity as well, and that hurts our ability to be a believer. Ask questions until you understand why, so you can believe in what you are doing is page 85 and you ready to move on? Sure you know, what makes all of this more, much more difficult and of sabotages, all of the practices we're discussing is ego. Ego, which we've talked about on the podcast before. And it arrears its ugly head and it does. So in this book check The Ego is a chapter. He says, ego clouds and disrupts everything. The planning process, the ability to take good advice, the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone's self of self-preservation. Often the most difficult ego to deal with is your own. Many of the disruptive issues that arise within any team can be attributed directly to a problem with ego. Ego can prevent a leader from conducting an honest, realistic assessment of his or her own performance and the performance of the team. I keep hammering that whole agile is just leadership by another name thing today, because everything I just read is apply that to agile teams, apply that to software development teams throughout my career. And oh boy, every, every time that we can't pull planning together we don't have a productive session out of planning. And any kind of cross team event where you're trying to do something with another team or when you're trying to figure out a better way forward through failure or retrospective and you, you just can't look and make an honest assessment all it's ego, all up and down. Absolutely. I think everybody could do well just looking in the mirror first and say, do you really have an ego? Right. Answer that honestly for yourself, first of all,'cause ego clouds judgment causes confusion, right? And in the case of the book, it can not only cause conflict, cost lives. And this is the chapter where the other unit came in and didn't listen. the new unit made it clear that they had little interest in learning from the seal platoon commander and his men. this specific late leader came in and said, you can't tell me nothing. You know what? I've been in three, I've been in three other businesses, I know how to run this. Mm-hmm. This is no business. It's just a transferable skill. You know, your, your workers are no different than all my other workers. from a business standpoint, you see it all the time where leaders are coming in and team members are coming in right past developers. they're not taking the advice. I'll just open up this library and change this line right here. Hey, who broke the build? I remember being on a program where a leader wasn't making results. They'd recycle 'em. Get a leader from another program, put'em in and say, oh no. They get all excited roll out everyone on the program. last minute. Everyone's gotta be there in person meeting. Introduce a new person on the program. They're great. They came over from this other place. They're gonna supercharge our program. That person would stay there maybe six months, eight months, maybe 12 at the most. Then they get washed out. Same song and dance again. New leader because there are no bad teams. Only bad leaders because what they. Fail to realize is all your successes with one team, every team is unique and requires a different style. these people were very inflexible, They did not have the ability to analyze a new group and set up. So it all comes back to leadership, which in this case came back to ego. And in this part of the chapter, not to ruin, not to give a spoiler, but you know, the, the result was give them what they need and try to help where you can. But it sounds like they made their own bed, right? So how many times would you try to help someone? Eventually you just go, you're on your own, man. Figure it out. Sorry. It hurt, but it's gonna hurt. At the end of the day, a good leader really needs to swallow their pride and prioritize the team above that. Prioritize the mission above your personal pride. That's really what the chapter is trying to convey here. I'm super interested if you actually have an against, I can't believe there'd be an against an ego. is it gonna be something like that? You've gotta have some level of ego. Some level of ego is healthy. Too much humility may undermine authority or decisiveness. Too much humility, comes across as weakness. That's consensus gathering. I don't know that humility. And consensus gathering are the same thing. Humility you can still play down and still have an ego. Humility is, but people don't believe you after a while trying to make, undermines authority and, and decisiveness i'm, I'm sort of with you on that. I've seen people fail because they're trying to make everybody happy., It's not quite that point, I think is trying to say, well, like the way, the way it's coming across to me, that point is you are doing a big song in nasa. Try to, try to make sure that your ego's not getting away and you're going too far it's o over it's, it's over emphasizing that. Which I would counter by saying you balance it , know that. Like that's the next book. Know that you're the gorilla in the room and you need to balance it. That's what we're saying, ed. It's intervention. Thank you. I need that. Be nice. Be nice, ed.. Be nice, but balance that. Not too nice. In some cultures assertiveness, linked to ego is rewarded. There are cultures where it's rewarded. Otherwise, you're seen as a weak leader. One of the things that I don't know if, if we're gonna get, I forget if we get to it in here or not, but the idea of dis discipline versus motivation, right? He goes into some, one of his stories somewhere that I've seen is he talks about having to get in that cold water at buds, No one wants to get in the cold water at Buds. That's not motivation. Mm-hmm. That's discipline. When he gets up at four 30 in the morning, that's not motivation, that's discipline. I get up at five 30 most mornings, and that's craziness. I hate it. but how many times has someone said, oh, you're just not motivated. I'm just not disciplined I can't hear motivation anymore. you can't motivate people. They need the discipline. I agree with that. Like, doing the podcast broke the word motivation for me.'Cause now , when someone says motivation, I'm like, what are you trying to sell me? Whatcha you trying to sell me especially with Deming, where motivation is intrinsic. You motivate yourself, right? I mean, it says, and and Deming didn't even invent that. He got that from other sources as well, which is, and, and and the GTO book about the education system is like purely the stick and the carrot are both two sides of the same coin. That device should not be used in schools, but somehow the entire school system is built around it. Like this, this subject goes deep. That was amazing book. Mm-hmm. This subject goes deep. I don't remember. I got all motivation from there, but Yes. Well, thanks for coming to this tangent. So, I think one of the things that as we get into cover and move on page one 19 is what it actually is, right? Cover and move is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Mm-hmm. Departments and groups within a team must break down silos, depend on each other, and understand who depends on them. If they forsake the principle and operate independently or work against each other, the results can be catastrophic to the overall teams performance. This is often when smaller teams within the team get so focused on their immediate tasks. They forget about what others are doing or how they depend on other teams. They may start to compete. It falls on leaders that continually keep perspective on the strategic mission and remind the team that they're part of a greater team. The strategic mission is paramount. I wrote down two points here. One is development and testing, having silos within the team, so developers don't throw something over the wall at testers until day eight of the spring. Oh, that's a good one. You you mean the double diamond when the design team? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, ed's making me go check episode numbers. Hang on, hang on. Oh yeah, we did that one. the other one I wrote down was sales and marketing shouldn't blame each other. For missed targets. They should meet regularly to align on messaging goals and feedback. help desk and the network team That's another one, right? Network's down. Help desk. I'm not helping you figure it out. Network's down. What do you want me to do? It used to be, in the old days, it was hardware versus software. It was arguing Agile 2 0 2. Dual track development. Yep. AKA . Dual track. Dual track Should have been DUE I screwed up that. I screwed the title up no dual track mean you're fighting each other. That's what I mean el is your fighting. Fighting. That's what I mean yeah, yeah, yeah. I meant to put the joke in there.. I must have been tired and I put the real thing in there , it should have been dual trick. Yeah. so on 1 24 I have the enemy is the other competing companies. that was one of the takeaways I had for Cover and Move. And it's always about the bigger strategic mission. And you need to be able to engage with folks and build a relationship with them. So working in your own silo and you're, I got mine. You get yours, right? That's right we can't do that. We've got to work together. It's, we're in the same company, it's the same dollars . So I guess the product management equivalent of Cover and Move is this is the reason that you have one-on-ones and you establish, personal relationships with people that you may have to influence later or you may need their buy-in later. Like this, it's all part of Cover and Move. Sometimes I have to build a relationship with someone I don't get along with in the book, I think he has that is the story I think in this section. Mm-hmm. About having to go out and like, make a relationship with the plant manager. those relationships don't grow on trees. So you have to make them. sometimes when you're talking about work you have to set aside talking about work to talk about something else to even have any kind of connection.'cause again, you're, it's, it's the, we talked about on a podcast before how someone has to be open to coaching first. To be someone has to be coachable and open to coaching. you have to open them up you can't just offer unsolicited coaching advice. Right, right. You do it all the time. Absolutely true. Well, don't do that it might not be welcome. Kinda goes into feedback too, right? So I was always trying to, Hey, can I give you some feedback? And if the person's not ready to receive it, don't give it to 'em but after the third time, you're like. I'm giving you some feedback because I offered it. You didn't take it. Now I gotta tell you. be blunt, be upfront, say what it is and let 'em know. But then also be open to what they're gonna come back with as well. If you give someone feedback when they're not ready for it, you need to be ready for the blowback and don't judge 'em for the blowback. So but building those relationships are important. Making sure that you have the, the communication, but those situations allow you to hear them understand the concerns and share together. Sometimes you gotta rumble if you wanna quote Brene Brown, we talked about some of this in our one-on-one podcast, People like to work with Good people. if you are just one of those people who just rubs people the wrong way. Building rapport is very, very important. That was arguing Agile two 15. Why one-on-ones still matter and why you should have them despite what Jensen says. That's right. Despite cool leather jacket, man. we are jumping to simple., That's the header of this chapter. Simple . simple is the next chapter we're talking about. He says, combat, like anything in life has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong and they inevitably do complexity compounds, issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Simple, clear and concise. Yeah. So plans and orders need to be simple, clear and concise. How many times you read that here's a 15 page document on what we're gonna do, or even better, how many teams you been on where they have a story that's like a wall of text, you know what I mean? Epics hiding your stories and a link to an external document.. So clarity improves execution and avoids confusion under pressure. Those are absolutely priceless things. if you have lack of clarity, even if it's diluted clarity, you're gonna have obfuscation and the opportunity to make mistakes, which obviously in the book, it's in the military context, but in business too, plans and communication really need to be simple enough to be understood by people. Right. and we are hitting on a topic that I think we should have a separate podcast about and go much deeper just on this topic, the simplicity one we talked about, arguing Agile two 11 communication is products only job or is it in all caps?'cause I was sassy that day. I was arguing Agile two 11. Part of communication is simplicity with this chapter.'Cause he says you must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team. Understands. he really, that's not derogatory. He means the most junior member of the team, let's put it that way. It is critical as well that the operating relationship facilitate the ability of the frontline troops to ask questions when they do not understand the mission or key tasks to be performed., And that right there is a big problem in corporate America, which we already talked about on the podcast I have an open door policy, don't how dare you come in. Yeah. if you've ever asked three different people in your company about the company mission and got different responses, people don't understand the mission, right? Oh yeah . That's a great point. We talked earlier about well maybe there is no strategy. What's gonna happen is all the strong leaders in the company are gonna go back up, clarify the strategy as they understand it, and then bring it back to their team. And now let's say you have five leaders. Now you're gonna have five strategies. And because the leaders have the budget or the team now you're gonna have five different people advancing five different strategies in five different directions. And now you have company of smart, like smart people that are motivated and all that kinda stuff that are just like, and then the company fails 'cause they're muddling through basically. There's a book by Karen Martin called Clarity First. In the first two chapters, she pulls out some really cool nuggets on talking about execution because of clarity. It's failing and the leader's not knowing or they're oblivious recommend looking into Karen Martin's clarity first if someone is trying to work on simplicity and clarity in their messaging. simple plans are Easy to explain. They're teachable and adaptable. It's easier to change a plan that's simple than a plan that's complex. in the application of business section, he talks about that very challenging and difficult bonus plan. the physical weight of objects that were rejected impacted your bonus. And that's part of the factoring. The example he gave I assume it is real. And yeah, that would not be a fatal faults. That was one of the, one of the examples of hold faults and fatal faults impact your bonus. So if you're gonna do a bonus plan for your team, make sure it's clear, make sure they understand it, make sure you can calculate it with ease otherwise if your plan requires motivation, focus to keeping the team engaged you're not gonna get it if it's complicated agreed.. It was around 100. It was strategy what? That's one of my favorite episodes. What company's doing set of strategy? Oh man.. That was a good one. That's not what I'm looking for. It was arguing Agile 1 0 3 challenges to building a product roadmap and arguing Agile 1 0 4, creating a mission, vision, and strategy. Those two, back to back talk about creating a mission, vision strategy. we had simple advice in those podcasts, which was just write it down somewhere. Like write down your mission vision and strategy somewhere. most people don't even have that written down and the mission's written down on some plaque that nobody ever looks at, it's usually in reception. But your strategy, like what is your strategy to do that? Write it down and make it visible so everyone can act around the same ones. Alright, so we're saying keep things simple, but oversimplification may ignore some important nuances or risks. Such as nuances that might get glossed over because you're oversimplifying things, it's contextual. Pick an area and it's contextual to the business. Maybe you're saying, well, we need growth in Latin America by x percent by a certain timeframe, right? But the nuance might be, there's aku going on in one of the nations, so you're not gonna get anything from there. So oversimplifying to that level might run that risk. You might wanna look at that and say, in this case, we don't focus over there, we focus in the rest of the countries in Latin America. Okay, I'm gonna start from an agile standpoint. isn't that part of why we make size things smaller is to make it more simple? If we make something so small that it's vague, don't we have the other items that help us understand the problem? I read that one as making it so simple that it's not functional anymore and therefore not cross-functionally usable. You could leave out scope, for example. I can see that from an agile item that's so, so finely sliced that an important piece of scope is missing. We got to the simplest form by ignoring the risk and challenges inherent to the problem. Right? So don't ignore the Yeah. Whereas I just kind of go, I think that's kind of built into simplicity it of a, of a mission. And there's an organization that wanted corporate signatures at the bottom of every email. For example, there's lots of ways you can solve that problem. You, you can, a take the, the GM approach, right? So GMN clothing said went from a 10 page dress policy to the words dress appropriately, , in 2018, it went from 10 pages to dress appropriately. You're an adult. I'm not gonna tell you how to dress but you should know what appropriately means. So you could , put the signature in this format in the bottom email, or tie it to active directory and you can do have a DP. Make sure you got the same job title and phone number and all right. So you can take a simple approach. You can take a complicated approach to the problem, but ultimately the CEO said, I want a standardized signature. It's up to the implementers to figure out the how , as long as you know what the, what is you're focused on the how yeah. And the inherent risk and challenges as to why you chose what you chose. So anyway, all that to say is, I think . It should be built in if it's so simple, you lost the nuance to it. I I really feel like you really didn't know what you're doing to begin with. Yeah. Possibly. You, you I do you mean the, the way I'm interpreting what you're saying, ed, is if it's so simple that you've stripped out the context, you've basically stripped out the reason why. And my brain is focused. I'm thinking of when you ask why my brain is now on overdrive thinking of all the worst teams in the world. I'm like the worst teams in the world where the ones who were like, we can keep breaking this work down until it's so simple. Like a one arm monkey can do it. And then we'll send the simplified tasks offshore to have people do it overnight. when we get in, the adults can look at the code and it'll be done for us. So you're gonna hand over this work to people who have no contacts about how it plugs into anything. And they don't talk to customers and can't question the work and you think this is gonna work out. Like they, they thought because it was so simple it was a formula for success. And I'll leave it up to you to dream about how that worked out. It was bad. Very bad a few books written about it another one is not all teams respond well to minimalist communication. Some just need that extra attention. Now you're in a disc profile. I never lobbied for minimalist communication. In fact earlier in the book I implied that some people you just need to sit down with and stay on until they get it and that is certainly not minimalist communication. That's maxim maximal communication, simplifying the messaging, I guess. To a certain degree for teams that you believe can consume that. Right? But then for other teams, you might wanna spend a little more time and deep dive a little. I use email communication as a guide. If someone starts off with a salutation, I'll respond with a salutation. If someone writes three paragraphs, I'll try to write more than a paragraph but if someone's, no salutation in one sentence, they're getting one sentence back because I'm trying to model how they write. Yeah. I wanna write back to 'em the same way. And so to your point, if someone spends three or four paragraphs, they're not gonna like my one sentence response. Sure, sure. So if anyone's looking for a tactical tool for this one arguing Agile 2 0 1, mastering Stakeholder Communication and Management we have the two by two grid, the power influence grid to break up your stakeholders, figure out who you need to spend more time with, that kind of stuff. Because the next evolution of the questions gonna be like, well, I'm gonna let one person, or one group, monopolize my time. And I would say, well, if they're the CEO and they don't understand and you're trying to make them understand you are gonna let them monopolize your time. It's important for you to bring them in line and bring them up to speed. Now if it's just a random customer or a peer on another team maybe there's a limit to that. But you need to. Take the context of where that person sits, what their role is, that kind of stuff. Agile 2 0 1 has a helpful little exercise. Is it okay, just say RACI matrix here so if you have a, if, if the person is, I mean, you can say anything you want. So if the person's responsible or accountable for the problem, you probably wanna spend more time with 'em. But if they're just informed you don't need to spend as much time with 'em. You informed 'em, you told 'em, but if someone's accountable and responsible, you probably wanna spend more time with 'em. Yeah, yeah. The last against I have is well, sometimes complex problems require complex solutions. So you can't oversimplify solutions all the time. Sure., The implementation of that complex solution is gonna be a series of simplified steps.. Which might be done in parallel, might be done in serial, depending on their teams and manpower the process when it comes to me is still the same. I think we're halfway through the book. the next section is prioritize and execute. Thanks for listening to this, everyone. Remember to like and subscribe. Here we are, in case this is a new episode. It's getting late. Extreme ownership. This is part two, or as we say, part the, that's right. Oh, is that the way we say it? Yeah. Oh, it's French. Okay. Oh, well, I think we are French now, or it's Louisiana. do people in France listen to our podcast? I don't think they do. On the battlefield. Countless problems compound in a snowball effect. Every challenge complex in its own right, each demanding attention. But a leader must remain calm and make the best decision possible. to do this, seal combat leaders utilize, prioritize, and execute. We verbalize this principle with its direction, relax, look around, make a call. Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously. A particularly effective means to help prioritize and execute under pressure stay at least one step or two ahead of real time problems. And they say to do this by careful contingency planning is that a design sprint? no this is, this section. I'll tell you, I had a few hangups when I was reading this section of how people actually implement this. And no, it's not a design. I mean the, the, the real problems of this one is like, well, when the CEO or VP or whatever is not available, nobody can make a decision like that. That's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about. And he gets into it on page 1 64 with decisively engaged is a term that's used to describe when a unit is locked in a tough combat situation and they cannot maneuver or extricate themselves. As a team or business unit leader, you're so focused on what you're dealing with right now. You're reactive and you're not able to see the forest for the trees. You're not able to see the battlefield in a bigger sense. You're not able to be strategic because you're too busy fighting fires and that comes back to team size. That comes back to team training, team capabilities that you have. What have you done to build your team to handle playing at that level? When I say playing at that level do you have a high school football team, a college football team, or an NFL team that you're working with? people who are good at high school are good in NFL. They had to develop into that. You don't just thrust them into it. But every now and then there's a change. Something happened. There's a new player on the field that brings NFL tactics to a high school JV team. they completely get blown up because of it. And this is normal you know, world software development, like everything's a priority. the same story that you're referencing on 1 64 where he is you know, he's going to the CE and the CEO says like, oh yeah, we're spread pretty thin. I mean, he just ask him like, I understand you spread pretty thin, out of everything that's going on mm-hmm. Do you clearly know what the highest priority is? And the CEO says, yeah, of course. This thing, whatever the thing is, right? It's always a thing and then he says. Do you think your team would be clear about that, that that's the highest priority, and then everything starts breaking down, Because sometimes the highest priority is the complex problem. Not all the small solutions that make the complex problem. Solvable, right? And so everything's a priority at that point, even though to some leaders' mind it was just one thing. It's just one thing but there's 15 things that make that one thing possible. Just get this sale. Yeah, but getting the sale is like, you already know. They have this bug and they won't budge if they don't have this bug fixed. And then they want these features. they want to be clear that we're gonna work on these features, but these features are actually this here's this architectural thing that's limiting us, and we could work for a whole year and, in that kind of thing where there's like a, a whole storm of things happening, right? Yeah. And you're like, I don't care about any of that, Brian, just gimme that signature on the sale. you could even Break down the big problem to be like, well, what little thing would move us ahead and go from A to B2C? there is a path, the old project management called that the critical path of like, if we line out the critical path and we start showing progress maybe that's what we need and plan for the risk up front. It reminds me of an anecdote where a few years ago I was working for a company with international clients and our software had issues and some of these customers were very vocal about these issues, when it came time to renew their annual maintenance contracts, they said, unless these bugs are fixed and these three or four key features we're not gonna renew. Right. But those three or four features varied almost per customer so what does the company work on now? Now we have a list of a hundred features. at the annual user conference, we got the users together. And said, look, you guys figure out what your top 10 list is. We're not gonna be in the room.
We'll come back at 2:00 PM and you'll tell us what are your top 10. What we'll commit to is we'll work on the first five of those 10, but we won't guarantee that we'll do all of them. they could be complex we don't know. They got some lukewarm reception. But they did in the end, decide on their top 10 as a entire user base. As an entire user that's awesome and so we focused on that the next quarter. That gave us a clear direction as a company. These are the top five that we said we would work on, and if there's time, we'll tackle six through 10. Otherwise, those top five have to be air type button down. We're gonna deliver on those. In addition to the bug fixes, which were relatively simple, these are features that we had to build from the ground up to satisfy these customers. Yeah, I think that's an example of how you could do this, right? You could stay calm under pressure and make sure that you're focused on the top priority item. Get that done and then move on to the next one. It's interesting because what you just outlined is almost exactly the list that he outlines at the end of the bottom of 1 62 on a, the table of 1 63 says in order to implement, prioritize, and execute in a business. A team or organization, a leader must, evaluate the highest priority problem. Lay out in simple, clear and concise terms, the highest priority effort for your team. Develop and determine a solution. Seek input from key leaders from the team wherever possible. Direct the execution of that solution. Focusing all effort and resources towards this priority task. When I go to events as a product manager, around the community , it's a lot of project management, masquerading as product management. When I hear about that, I used to engage and now I lean back and hope the conversation moves on because I don't have these problems this is the way that I work. What is the top priority? I have one epic that's in the doing column and nothing else goes into doing until that one Epic is done. And then we move the epic over and then we move another Epic in. And sometimes you take the Epic and you move it back to the previous column 'cause you got more work to do. Priority shifted. You had a conversation with leadership. You both agreed that like, we'll, we'll button up where we're at and then we'll save this to come back to it later, or whatever. Or we're button up where we're at and we'll never come back to this later. In that case, I moved to done. Right, right., That's the way I work. I go from the highest priority to the highest priority with my small team maybe if I was managing five teams, I'd have a different way of working. I have very few people and I really can only go from the most important thing to the next important thing that has impacted the business. What I see is his list here on 1 62, 1 63 is basically the way that you work when you're in this super stress mode and everyone's yelling at each other. Not doing that, and just jumping from topic to topic, working on one thing to another leads you to this situation where, and you see this in teams where they start things but they don't quite finish. They start something else. Well, we got 20 things in progress. Yeah. We got 20 epics in progress. Exactly. They're all inching forward one inch per year. Sorry, I completely agree. I've lived that for, I don't know how long it's, it had to stop himself from being like, yeah, this is a stop. I'm gonna start crying. I'm gonna start flinching here in a moment. I got some ticks from some of those organizations. but yeah, definitely when people talk about technical debt, a lot of it's unfinished work. It's, oh, we got halfway there and we moved on. We got halfway there and moved on, or, we did something really complicated and couldn't figure it out. So we left it as far as we could get what's your plan to finish that? Why are we still living with it? It's all unfinished work. Any against on this one? Some team members may struggle with shifting priorities some people like to be focused on things and not be told, Hey listen, that's no longer this, this new thing is now the top priority everybody's focused on that. A lot of people will have problems with this if you're not clearly delineating why? If work isn't broken down to a simple enough state, This can cause a lot of problems. Make a movie reference the accountant, right? I gotta finish., You don't let somebody finish, obviously in his case, had a situation, but some people you gotta let 'em finish. Right. And if they don't, they're still carrying that with them. Every other project you're working with yeah. I mean that can happen too is like you start creating the shadow backlog. since you can't say no or since team members, there's a lot that could, this is a whole nother topic. Oh yeah, indeed. You know but yeah, I mean, that's a good pushback because I have that as the next against as well, the shallow backlog. Right. So important, but non-urgent tasks could find their way on another parallel list. now what's priority? Because people will get deflected on those two lists and when you have more than one list, do you know what the priority list is? Oh boy. We're gonna have a podcast on prioritize and execute, like arguing agile with pushback and everything, and a fully constructed agenda because yeah. Those, that's gonna, that'll happen. Again, leadership is the way outta that I think it's in decentralized command. When you come up with a strategy, a goal, right. When he starts talking about commander's intent, is in that section you need to get everyone together and brief it out until people understand it. encourage people to ask questions facilitate the asking of questions, not just like, oh, nobody, any questions. I must have been really great. I've heard that question. it was the same point that David Marquette makes in his book, right? Mm-hmm. Ship around. Same point i, the last one I have is when prioritization is always clear it can lead to analysis paralysis. Ruthless prioritization is the key here without any kind of ambiguity. If priorities aren't clear, you make the priorities based on your experience and execute on that until someone tells you that's wrong I manage up though. Yeah. I manage up though, and I'm like, this is our strategy right now. And they say. That sounds good. But back to David Marquette's book you, I intend to do this, and you give them a chance to say, no, that's not a good idea, but lack of prioritization. You make the prioritization until someone advises you that maybe this should change a little. Yeah. Give them the first right of refusal. Mm-hmm. Sure. Basically and seek confirmation. That's just, day-to-day stakeholder management. Well, yeah. And we covered that, but not everyone does that. Okay. Our experiences, our environments have allowed us to operate that way, but there are people who have lived in command and control most of their career, and if you don't tell them what the next thing is, they have no idea what to do next. You're right about that. I mean, there are teams that the developers just work on whatever they want. If you're not, Hey, You didn't assign me the next work item, I guess I'm not gonna work today. typically the developers will say something like, well, I thought I could knock this out in the sprint. So I'm working on that. I've seen that where developers will pick something 'cause they think it's easy to achieve. Decentralized command. That's an interesting one. Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to 10 people. We're starting off. With declarations right now, ed, and I want to get your hot take on that one. I'm real interested in your take on human beings generally not capable of managing more than six to 10 people. Yes, I agree. We're making statements today, six to 10. I agree. If you go back to the, agile team, right? Seven plus or minus two, that's close to six to 10. So it, oh, I didn't even think about that actually. That, yeah. Interesting. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they took that number out of the scrum guy, didn't they? And they didn't put it back in the 55. No. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, I guess I'm showing my age of that one. Yeah, that's been out for a while. How dare you, ed, I wonder if they put it back in the expansion. I skimmed it so I don't remember. The stuff that they could have put in there is stuff like this. I'd rather see this, Like, Hey, you guys are having a lot of problem with organizational design. Let me help you. Like, oh I think you proved they didn't cover organizational design, right? if you start thinking about it, six to 10 people, you start one-on-ones. One-on-ones are important, right? So you have eight, eight people half hour, right? Four hours are spent one-on-one. So it is still, you can run as if you start growing those, those, those team sizes up. You have to, do your one-on-ones, you're doing your professional development, you're trying to deliver and have the meetings and stuff. You're not going to be able to effectively manage and lead teams longer than that. Larger than that if, if they're your directs. Yeah and so you get into Scrum at scale, right? So I've ran a project that was 104 people, 10 teams we had levels of Scrum associated with it. There's no way I could run 104 people by myself, And be effective at it. You have to have the layers to help you get there and execute. You can't build the relationships as well as you'd like to if you have too many people the span of control is just too great when you're talking about direct relationships. Yeah. So empower junior people and keep them engaged, but also give them the autonomy to make their own decisions, right? I think I've said empowerment is not my favorite word because when you empower something, you can take it away. But if you can engage them, they control their own destiny. So I prefer to figure out engagement opportunities and techniques versus just, I empowered you to do it. I don't know how to do it. Yeah so there's a, there's a couple quotes in this section. I'm gonna, I'm gonna zip through real quick. Teams must be broken down to manageable elements of four to five operators with a clearly designated leader. Every tactical level team leader must understand not just what to do, but why they're doing it, can we pause on that real quick though?'cause it's always misattributed, right? The idea that the military has hierarchical control And flight squad groups, right? Yeah they, they, you have a hierarchical control. Well, they get stereotyped as like the boilerplate for command and control. When that is not exactly like a hierarchical command and control, like at scale, that works. And then people look at it and be like, see they work. But if you've been in the military that's not really how things work, right? Like, yes, there is rank and that is a hierarchy. However, it is difficult to explain. you don't just order somebody who's not even in your work center or chain of command to do something and like, and that's what I wanted to, it kind of just doesn't happen when, when we said a leader of four, I just, I wanna stop and say, but just back to leader doesn't mean barking orders. Organizational design doesn't mean I'm telling you what to do all the time when we're talking about extreme ownership, we are a cohesive, well trained, executing group of people who work in precision. we do evolutions together, we do training together. We work out together. One phrase they were talking about war fighting in the dark. We knew each other's silhouette, I have so many remote people, I don't know their silhouette. You're lucky to see them on camera. You're lucky to see 'em on camera. Those are some of the things I struggle with in our business role today. And what's necessary to work and live in extreme ownership comes down to, their silhouette and so we talk about decentralized command, and you're talking about building the trust, how can you trust and lead when you don't know each other's silhouette? Someone once told me if your team can't do a good impression of you, you don't spend enough time with 'em. For sure. To, to your point about building trust with people you don't know that well, you don't know if they're able to be leaders even at that junior level. Right. So they may not be ready for autonomy. It's one of the against I have is maybe they're not ready for it they lack confidence, they lack training, whatever it might be. So you have to identify that, redress those things, and then you could say, okay, are you ready for this? Right. Otherwise they're gonna fail. And then if they fail, you failed if they're not meeting the standard for leadership, you stay on them until they improve. If they don't improve, then you move them somewhere else or you change teams to somewhere where they can have a little more supervision or more help, more coaching perhaps. Yeah, more coaching the other against I wrote down is risk of miscommunication or too many cooks in leadership role. Decentralized command. You have lots and lots of people that are taking charge under your guard, but that might lead to chaos and confusion because they themselves don't know what the other are doing that falls on you again, right. To be clear about this And explaining the why and the mission so that they get it. Yeah. But there is that risk is what I'm saying here that is a risk that we have too many cooks. The risk is what we keep hinting at Ed, where we say we all go back up to that leader who like, clearly they see us all coming to them. They should just write a mission statement or a strategy and get get all of us together in a room and write a strategy and they just don't do it. Mm-hmm. But again, like if you're gonna say, well, we don't wanna have a bunch of leaders'cause things get chaotic, they're doing their own thing. But that was never your problem in the first place. Your problem was you have a leader in the organization that's not doing their job aligned. They're malaligned to the mission a lot of times that lack of clarity, that lack of simplicity creates mal-alignment. And , in order for decentralized command to work. The assumption is you have alignment on the mission. You have alignment on behavior, you have alignment on culture, right? Behaviors that are allowed and accepted. that's just assumed, but it's hard to get it agreed. Lemme give you a few more quotes here before we move off of this chapter. Junior leaders must fully understand what is within their decision making authority, the left and right limits of their responsibility. Additionally, they must communicate with senior leaders to recommend decisions outside of their authority and pass critical information up the chain so senior leadership can make informed strategic decisions. Junior leaders must be proactive rather than reactive. He says, junior leaders must be proactive rather than reactive. Which is funny because my reading this section is saying senior leaders need to be proactive because a lot of senior leaders purely operate in a reactive space. organizationally speaking, like as a product manager running a line of business. That is very bad. I need to free up the senior leaders from having to deal with the day-to-day stuff so they can truly be doing strategic next three year type of moving the business along. And that was a comment. So that was a comment I made of doing your bottom, bottom half of your boss's job so you're ready for promotion when the time came. So if you're, if you're training do the bottom half of the job, you know how to do the bottom half of the job, that frees up your leader to focus on the bigger rocks that need to move and the day to day can just happen. But I do wanna go back on one thing of, about the something you said in there, but reporting, I have a bias that it's not done until it's reported done. I don't know how many times something was delegated to be done, but I'm still responsible for communicating to someone else that it was done. Mm-hmm. But a junior leader or team member, they went out, they did the work, and they moved on to something else, but they never communicated. Done. And I'm still left wondering is it done? When's it done? it sure has taken you longer than I expected. I don't wanna micromanage and ask you if it's done. But if I keep asking you when it's done, you're like, why are you micromanaging me? Well, you're not telling me it's not done until it's communicated. that's stakeholder management we referenced before. I'm gonna keep harping on it'cause a lot of people, they get buried into work and they're trying to just finish things as fast as possible, right? Mm-hmm. And then one of the things that slips is communication, because some people don't see it as essential as actually completing work, but again, we're also the people that did the communication is your only job like the business isn't asking you the product manager or you, the leader to get out there and knock out every widget yourself or be on the line. Or like in his like scenario where they're going through CQB training sometimes you need to step back and fit in your stuff to the larger ecosystems. And a big part of that is just communicating. So I would say it sounds like you have somebody that's too close to the work if they're not stopping and communicating as they achieve things. But I guess that's kind of in, I'm trying to make it informative for anyone doing the work. If you're doing the work for someone else. Or someone came to you to ask you to do something, you owe them a response when you're done. Maybe that should be part of your definition of done once it's, the work is done, you're not done.'cause the communication part's not done but the developer says, I know I updated the Jira ticket. it's not communicating go look at the ticket system. I updated it there. I was trying to move off. But also the juicier version of this is in Agile. we have a bunch of opportunities whatever framework you're using, most people use some kind of framework. You have opportunities built into the framework To show your progress, communicate your status. That some large objective has been achieved and now we're off to the next thing and here's what we're planning to do next. How it affects you. Get some feedback. Tell you what we're doing next. there is an event for that. no matter what you're doing. Right. Well, from a sprint standpoint, a developer gets a story done, didn't update Jira ticket or didn't let you know it was done. They sit around for two weeks. You think they're still working on a three point story that should have taken four days, two days, but it should have been done sooner than two weeks. But it was never communicated, done. They never grabbed more work. They never. So they're just moving along. Hey yeah. It's good. Should be part of your team working agreement. This is what you do as a team. We did a podcast about it we talked about a Kanban board we talked about manage the work, don't manage the people. Mm-hmm. That was one of the things., if you're tracking the work, moving along and you're going down the board, walking the board by looking at the cards in movement. You should be getting updates as soon as things move or don't move, yep. And there are ways that you can build a system that takes care of this as well. where I was going was you've got time windows built into your delivery. Like if two weeks is too long, then that's a different story. We should make it less than two weeks. I think two weeks is too long for the way that I work way too long. But you're also working from a mature team. as far as updates and things like that dashboards I have friend too, right? I wrote down the exact same sentence that you said earlier. Is a four for decentralized command. Is it free Senior leaders? To focus on strategy, not micromanagement. Yeah, that's what I wrote down some people are not good at strategy. They like micromanagement. That's true. They do. That's the pocket. They don't know what to do with their lives when they they, at the end of the Shawshank Redemption, when they get let outta prison, they just don't know what to do. They need to get back in prison. Thanks for coming to the livestream. All right, well, We're nine. Again, that's a whole nother podcast, that's a good one. A plan's a four letter word. Did you know that planning begins with mission analysis? Leaders must identify clear directives for the team, a broad and ambiguous mission. Results in lack of focus, ineffective execution and mission creep. The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result or end state of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission. While a simple statement, the commander's intent is actually the most important part of the brief. Yes. I kind of skipped around there, but yes. And you get what I'm saying? Yep. So outcomes are output, right? That's right. the end result, the desired end state. What is that? It's not, I did a bunch of stuff. I achieved that thing, we got that done Commander's intent mentioned earlier was that's the what intent doesn't tell you the how. That's up to the team to figure out and execute and make it happen. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So that's again, David Mark, right? Mm-hmm. Yep. He has a whole list in here. I'm not gonna read the entire list, but I'm gonna read enough where I think it sounds like what anyone on an agile team does on a regular basis. Leader's checklist for planning should include the following analyze the mission, understand high level headquarter mission, commander's intent end state, which is the goal, you have your broad strategy broken out into goals. You're taking those goals, you're bringing them in. Identify personnel, assets, resources, time available, decentralize the planning process. Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible course of action., You're taking a big block of work with an intent behind it. You're taking a what with a why behind it. And you're decentralizing it into a process. Yep. And you're breaking it all out and you're come up with a plan together. Empower key leaders to develop a plan for the selected course of action, plan for contingencies, mitigate risks, delegate portions of the plan to brief to junior leaders and so on and so forth. So like this, that sounds like safe PI planning. At what point does your RTE come in and say, sorry, we're cutting this time block in half. We're really busy. Oh man. I mean, at a high level in the spirit does sound like big room planning, like Yeah, I can get down with that. I dunno about safe. Can you imagine looking all the battle plans with red yarn? No, not at all. When we said, I started visualizing red yarn everywhere. Oh my goodness. It's not like it's done in one session either. This could go on 'cause Ideally you want to get everybody the democratization of it was what struck me when I read through all those steps of like, oh, you're getting everyone involved. Whereas it contrasts of how software development was done when I started my career, which is like a project manager will go off with whoever's funding the project in a room and write out everything everyone will do, come out with a timeline and then come out to the team and be like, this is your stuff. You're doing it now. Pretty much. If you're lucky, you got a document. Here's the Gantt chart I created. Says this is gonna take three months. You'll have this done by Q2. Here's your work breakdown. And don't question it. You don't get to be part of it, which is the polar opposite of what was just described And then people have the audacity to say that the military's command and control read team of teams if you wanna talk about that as well. Great book. Leading up and down the chain, we hinted at this section early in this podcast about leading up and down the chain. Any good leader is immersed in the planning and execution of tasks, projects, operations, to move the team towards their strategic goals. Some leaders possess insight into the bigger picture and why specific tasks need to be accomplished. This information does not automatically translate to subordinate leaders and the frontline troops. It's paramount that senior leaders explain to their junior leaders and troops executing the mission how their role contributes to the big picture success. This is not intuitive. Never as obvious to the rank and file employees as leaders might assume. Yeah, agree a hundred percent. So in the corporate world, you do see that right? People at the team level don't really understand the strategy. If you really don't understand it and you're just focusing on the what you told me to do this, I'm gonna do it. Why? Why are we doing this as a company? Why is it important? Why now? If they're not understood, I don't think the teams can come up with the best potential solution for that. They're gonna just be focused on a narrow view of the what and I've seen that a lot. I've seen that a lot where product managers come in and say, this is what we need to work on. It's like, why, who does it impact That stuff is missing. An interesting one he has here, which I'm gonna take as advice directed at me. It says, if your team isn't doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself. Rather than blame them for not seeing their strategic picture, you must figure out a way to better communicate it to them in terms of their simple, clear and concise so they understand this is what leading down the chain of command is all about. Yes, I agree with what was read, but when some people say, I need to make you understand, oh boy, I need to make them understand. Oh boy. Right? I go to the, I go to the quote man convinced against his will is of the opinion still. You may think you're making me understand, but my opinion's still the same. There's a fine line between spending the time to share and teach and empathize with my problem and your need versus I'm gonna make you understand, I told you there's that happy medium in the delivery to understand, you've made me understand 15 things you want me to do, but going back to prioritization and the other chapters, you didn't prioritize 'em. I understand them all. I know they all need to be done. Arguing Agile right here is sometimes you sit me down to help me understand. And I do understand. I just think the decision being made is a stupid decision and wow. And we should test some things against the market before going with one's solution. So like I'm, I'm big on that inside. I mean, if I'm, if I'm a pain inside my businesses that I'm a part of as a product manager, I'm a pain because when, when I hear people's opinions I can pretty easily delineate opinions from facts by the amount of research done the data you're bringing, the number of customers you talk to, who they are and what role they're in. Like if you're talking to a bunch of customer service reps, maybe the way that customer service reps look at the problem is not the same as the way that actual customers look at the problem. Or maybe it's not the same as the way somebody else looks at the problem. I sometimes understand, but I don't agree. This is the Amazon thing that I, when we did the working backwards I did not like that part of the book, which is the disagree and commit part. It's like, 'cause disagree and commit. I often see used as a weapon of like, I'm not gonna explain it. This is the way it is. This conversation's over, we're gonna take this offline. You're just gonna do it that, that's the way I normally see the, like what I'm talking about is like, oh, that's another good book. there are some sections, the working backwards yeah. It's a good book. If you can take all the Amazon corporate propaganda out of the book no, you can't take it out. I love Amazon. It's in there. I'm laughing with you. if you can peel the corporate propaganda the same thing when I read you ever read Lean In? You can take the Facebook propaganda out of the book. There won't be much left if you're not gonna question things that you don't agree with or understand, you're gonna end up with a company that basically lives by build it and they'll come and they don't come because nothing was grounded in fact. The decisions that were made weren't data driven, they weren't made with adequate research. Said, if that's the case, yeah. You absolutely well within your rights to say, look, I need to see evidence. Otherwise we're heading toward a brick wall, we're wasting money but if conversations prove that you're not listening to me when I'm asking questions and you're not understanding the intent of my question and you're just continuing to try to make me understand your position, we're in an impasse. Yeah. And so there comes a point in time that I just go, eh, you're not listening. Alright. I'm gonna accept everything you say because it's not worth the energy trying to discuss it. For job safety and security. I'll shut up in color. That's what Colonel Burline told me in 1996, Ed Martin shut up in color. I got it. Yes, ma'am. I got a quote for you. Hang on. Because she didn't like what I was telling her in an advisory council meeting. While pushing to make your superior understand what you need, you must also realize that your boss must allocate limited assets and make decisions with the bigger picture in mind. You and your team may not represent the priority effort at that particular time, or perhaps senior leadership has chosen a different direction. Have the humility to understand and accept this. One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss. Yikes that's the counterpoint to what I just said. Which is I recognize that you're working with limited resources and saying the priority other places, and I recognize that you've made a decision and that we've actually talked about in depth and you understand my point of view. And I think you still made a stupid decision and I guess I'm just gonna shut up. That's the time when you send that sentiment out in an email. So you've got it in writing and when it does blow up, you could step back and say things could have been different. And also there's no value in that. And also there's no, there's no value keep your resume up, but there's no value in rubbing somebody's nose in the fact that it failed saying, I told you so is never a winning strategy. If there's anything to be gained by at least documenting your disagreement in an email, not to rub their nose in it, but at least you won't get fired for their failure.'cause you say, listen, I don't know, you still might actually. So yeah. Okay. We'll go back to that. Keep your resume updated. I was gonna say stick with that one. I was gonna say, can we all just look cringe at each other and then move on? like we came to some kind of like, like we came to some kind of Wait, wait, yeah. Yes. Home. I agree. That's gonna be the thumbnail for this podcast right there. Oh man. Leading up and down a chain. The funny part about that too is if success is at the other end, I don't have a problem losing, I do have a problem when you're gonna ignore evidence, or I'm the only one bringing evidence,, which I've gotten much better about this over my career, I will bring evidence and then somebody usually leadership will say well this is the intuition versus evidence battle. I'm a smart executive and we built this city on rock and roll or whatever, and we're gonna go with my hunch. As you know gamble's often the house wins in the end. I live, I have a lot of axioms in my head. phrases I use based on the experience I've had or what I've heard other people. And so for the case winning isn't everything but wanting to win is, I don't play a game. Unless I want to win. I don't start out with the idea that it doesn't matter ask my kids. I didn't let them win. They learned to win. They learned to want to win. And there was always a struggle. I taught them strategy, here's the strategy you should use. Battleship got really good when I taught 'em a battleship strategy. Cards get really good when you teach 'em card strategy. Mm-hmm. So it, there, there's teachable moments there all the time, but I never, I never start out with the idea I might lose. And that also goes back to earlier chapters. Mm-hmm. I believe I can win. If I don't believe I can win, I question why am I actually doing it? Playing one-on-one with Shaq is probably not a good idea for me you don't think? I don't think, I don't know. I think you can do, maybe now, maybe now I might be maybe now I've seen him run but , his knees aren't what they used to be, at the same time, certain things you look at, you just kinda go, yeah, that's probably not a good idea, I don't play to lose, I don't want to lose at anything. I'm not as hyper competitive as I used to be but I used to extreme, everything was about winning to, to a fault. So anyway, I did to that point of just take the L now I'll take the L with the lesson that came with it because I was trying to win. But I'm gonna give it a good, valid effort. I'm gonna encourage my team to join me in that good, valid effort. We're gonna fight to stay on the cliff. There is a case where I often take the L and that's when I'm on a cruise boat, I just go sit at the casino table. I just take 40 bucks with me. I know I'm gonna lose it all, but , I'm gonna have half a dozen drinks the house is meant to win. i've spent 40 bucks on drinks is how I justify it and I go back empty handed, of course. But when you're sitting there, you don't sit down in the first pet and go $40 on nine. Oh, never. No because you're playing to stay. Oh, I'm playing. You're not playing to lose. Not till I get four drinks in me and then $40 on nine and then it's like, okay,$40 on zero, double zero. Yep. So anyway, in that example, you're still playing to stay. Absolutely. You're not playing to lose stay as long as I need to stay. Nobody plays to lose just take the L take the L thank you for indulging me I listen podcast on losing coming ups coming up soon. Teach me how I need some help. What a great topic because again, look, somebody told me in a 1 0 1, they're like, I'm amazed how often like you just admit that going down a road was not a good strategy and then just pivot and like, you don't really get upset or bent outta shape or whatever. I was like, yeah, because if you ever work for someone in professional product management and they get bent outta shape when things don't go their way. You got a bad product manager the whole point of the job is like the, the entrepreneur in residence, the, the business leader in residence with, with, with guard rails under a program or a budget , the good people should be testing a million ideas and only implementing the little sliver that they know are gonna be successful, making the right bets you don't do that without making a bunch of tests so yeah. It's a lot more rare, rarer, rare, rarer, more rarer, more, more rarer. It's a lot more rare than anyone would expect. The longer I stay in the career, the more I realize that. Let's go on just for the purpose of time, the next chapter is Decisiveness Amid Uncertainty. That's actually the name of the chapter. Decisiveness Amid Uncertainty. Leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear. The result that results in inaction. It's critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty to make the best decisions they can on only the immediate information available. This realization is one of the biggest lessons learned for our generation of combat leaders, both seal teams and throughout the US military branches. There is no 100% right solution. The picture is never complete. Outcomes are never certain. Success is never guaranteed. Even so, business leaders must be comfortable in chaos and act decisively amid such uncertainty. Did you see the movie warfare? No. 2025 movie warfare. It was, shot in real time, and I believe it was a two and a half hour remembrance of these soldiers who were in a very tough situation. And they had to deal with what came at them and how they could get out, and the casualties that came with it and the situation that went along. And it is intense. And so when we talk about the indecisiveness, the chaos they did a great job, I think. And there's a lot of great movies out there that capture wartime scenarios, but I think warfare did a great job of. Making the viewer tired when they left because there was so much chaos. There was so much noise, there was so much going on. What would you do if you were in that situation? Would you be someone who fell apart? Would you be someone who was able to recover and all the stupid stuff that you saw dude, stop doing that. You're sitting there watching, stop doing that. Someone tell him this and, you know guy injured. He's getting kicked all the time. Stop kicking him. So anyway, the point being, there are times that you go to stuff like that and watch that chaos and ask yourself, what would you do? What would you do if you found yourself in that situation? I think that's one place where people who fancy themselves as leaders, how do you fancy yourself in chaos? How are you managing through it? I go back to that training topic we raised earlier, right? You don't get training to be a leader. Mm-hmm. You are not gonna be able to think straight in the fog of war. And that you often see that, you often see leaders are just vacillating between one decision and another. And that's because they're just simply listening to one person or another. As opposed to stepping back going, what's really important here? Right. The company's losing money. do we now stabilize income revenue streams and then worry about. cutting cost or where do we focus, right? And true leaders know how to do that. And that knowing is not innate. It's learned over time with experience and training. But back to them knowing it, how do they help their teams know it? That's a million dollar question, right? training's a great start. I'm just trying to think of the corporate America equivalent And boy, there is none. I hope you get trained on your own time. Here's your cybersecurity training for the year. That's all we're giving you. Make sure you sign off at the n we're trained. Here's your, don't click on bad URLs training the result of which only gets you in more trouble when you accidentally click the phishing email. Phishing that's always fun. That's not training, that's not training. And I always appreciate the chat channels that say, Hey, there's a phishing email today. Make sure you don't click on it. hover on the email and you go, I ain't touching that. It smells as soon as it comes in too. When you're at this point with the book, the book kind of dwindles down. I mean, the next, the next chapter is discipline equals freedom. The only note I have in discipline equals freedom is a leader must lead, but also be ready to follow. Followership is a whole topic in itself we covered it a little bit in managing up, or we wouldn't call, it wasn't called managing up up search air University followership. 10 Good Rules of Followership. It's a, it was an article written in 2000 or 2001. Rule number eight is tell your boss because someone else may not. They may not know what's going on. Go down. That one right there, that's not the same one. But that's the first rule. So that was republished in 2008, but don't blame your boss for an unpopular decision. Your job is to support and not undermine fight with your boss if necessary, but do it in private use initiative. Accept responsibility when offered. Tell the truth. Don't quibble. Do your homework, give your boss all the necessary information, but rule number eight, keep your boss informed what's going on in the unit they may not know, someone else may not be telling him, obviously it's not making you a narc, but dude, sometimes, sometimes they're just not aware. And so, anyways, that's a great article. If you wanna know what, what followership is about air Force teaches followership too. And it's an important thing discipline versus motivation. just making sure that you do the things you don't wanna do. You gotta do it anyway. If you don't wanna get up, but if you need to do it, go do it. I'm saving that shortcut so I can try to remember to add it to the show notes. That looked like it was dated 2008. But the Post I'm thinking of goes back to 2000., It's the two column that, it was that one site that didn't look legit, but it was that two column view is the, is the original article. Well, if you can, if you can find it later, shoot it. I'll edit it. I'm sure I got it in my folders at home. This is extreme ownership. Well, there it is right there. I wanted to do this book for a long time, like at least a hundred plus episode before episode a hundred. I wanted to do this book. Yeah. It was much longer than I expected but it was good'cause I didn't wanna shortcut anything in this book. It's dense idea wise it's not necessarily the, the biggest book ever, but it's dense idea wise and the follow up book will be another podcast, hopefully as a follow up podcast. The dichotomy of leadership. Yeah I read that whole one. And there's a few scenarios that are kind of reused from this book and that book. The scenarios are very similar. Like the CQB one is very similar. But it's more about the balance of these things. It's like, oh, you wanna stay on top of your folks until they understand how to do it, but you don't want to be micromanaging,, that kind of stuff. if you're not a reader definitely go out there and get an audio version of it. Listen to it listen to its entirety, read its entirety. The stories that are told there are real real experiences that military does go through. I was lucky in my service to be a Desert Storm veteran who had end zone seats. I was support for the support. The Iraq war was completely different than what some of us have experienced and I really feel bad for the families who have lost service members veterans truly need support. They truly need awareness of what they went through. Because only 7% of our population are military veterans. And that's a very small number of people who can actually relate to other veterans. What's the population of, of veterans? I think you're gonna find it's down from like 13% in the eighties. Yeah. So 6.1 in whatever, seven so that's a very small number. who have lived and understand the lifestyle of service. Mm-hmm. And so if you run across 'em you know, they may have seen stuff and done stuff that you haven't and they deserve a little bit of respect and a little bit of grace if they looked, act and talk differently than you do. I just wanna put a little veterans clip part in there. Appreciate the opportunity. 22 veterans commit suicide every day due to mal adjustment or challenges they're dealing with. So there's plenty of organizations out there like Mission 22 that are worth checking into and helping provide services to 'em. Not trying to be a downer, but just trying to provide some veterans awareness With that extreme ownership. Let us know what you think about this book once you read it or the podcast in the comments below. Let us know what other topics you'd like us to tackle. Also don't forget, like and subscribe.