🤫 Whisper #16: Extreme ownership or bust
Be an extreme owner, or give up your seat at the leadership table.
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Whisper #16
Are you an extreme owner?
This post is for people who consider themselves leaders, whether formal or informal.
This can be in an externally designated capacity—as a manager or a tech lead or a director/VP/CxO. It can also be in a self-appointed capacity, i.e., as the leader of an ERG or championing a special project or stepping up to lead a complex feature your team is building.
The framework for this week’s Whisper comes from a phenomenal book on leadership from the lens of two Navy Seals who learned to lead at the deep end of high-stakes situations: during the war in Afghanistan. The book is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s hard to be motivated in tech these days. With layoff after layoff, cost-cutting, downsizing, nuking product areas, FOMO over AI, and the mind-boggling divestiture of R&D and innovation, it’s not easy to be “100% in” right now.
But I think that’s exactly why reading this might be what you need to read today.
It’s not peacetime in tech right now. It’s wartime. The guard is changing. The rules of the game are evolving.
Workplace dynamics are shifting. Most of us know we’re socially healthier when we regularly go into the office, but we hate pants with buttons and long commutes, so RTO is still up in the air. With Boomers retiring, Millennials are now the elders of the workforce. Gen Z isn’t sure if they even want in on this rat race. Who will take the lead?Who will follow?
Big tech is down-trending. Many of the companies that have dominated career ambitions appear to be on a downward trajectory, at least culturally, from Twitter to Uber to Google. Oldies are looking like goodies (Microsoft, Nvidia), but the real excitement is with emerging early-stage AI companies. We’re all excited to participate in this next wave of tech because late-stage capitalism and public markets aren’t great for the employee experience.
AI is eating everything. Tech has graduated from helping people access basic information (Google search) and doing simple human-in-the-loop tasks (“Alexa, play music”) to becoming a productive early career employee (see: Ema).
Hard times call for wartime leadership and extreme ownership. This is not a post about embracing your feelings. I think we all see enough of those posts, thanks to the rise of therapy platforms and the de-stigmatization of mental health (which I fully support). This post is about showing up even when it’s not easy.
Ok, that’s the context. Let’s dive into the whisper of the week: Extreme Ownership.
The concept of extreme ownership posits that leaders must be all in (or all out).
On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.
It’s a fitting philosophy for hard times when you must summon inner strength and resolve to push through (like right now in tech).
In wartime, leaders with extreme ownership need to:
train and mentor underperformers
put the team & mission above any individual
replace people who can’t cut it (this includes ourselves, if we just aren’t all in, we need to step back and let someone with the energy and buy-in take the lead).
You must be willing to cull the herd, including yourself, to strengthen the likelihood of an ideal outcome. That’s extreme ownership.