Powerful and practical advise from a former U..S Navy SEAL on how to be a great leader.
My Takeaways
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.
The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual.
If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.
Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage. But doing just that is an absolute necessity to learning, growing as a leader, and improving a team’s performance.
Navy Seal training example in BUDS: boat leader 2 had a realistic assessment, acknowledgment of failure, and ownership of the problem were key to developing a plan to improve performance and ultimately win. Most important of all, he believed winning was possible. In a boat crew where winning seemed so far beyond reach, the belief that the team actually could improve and win was essential.
Extreme Ownership is contagious and gets instilled in teams.
One of the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
Everyone must believe in the mission and it’s a leader’s job to explain why the mission exists and is important. In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission.
Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests. They must impart this understanding to their teams down to the tactical-level operators on the ground. Far more important than training or equipment, a resolute belief in the mission is critical for any team or organization to win and achieve big results.
It’s important to ask questions and understand the “Why” behind the mission or decision. This will help you convince others in the mission which will increase the likelihood of success.
Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.
Ego can prevent a leader from conducting an honest, realistic assessment of his or her own performance and the performance of the team.
The SEAL concept “Cover and Move” means teamwork. All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose. Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them.
A very interesting peak into the world of Google and how one of the world’s most successful companies operates.
My Takeaways
Google hires “smart creatives” that love to learn.
Product excellence is essential in today’s world because the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly.
The basis for continual product success is speed.
Google employees are encouraged to try new things and fail.
According to Google, the primary objective of any business must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of output.
Let data decide deductions, but don’t let it take over.
Google sets a collaborative company culture. Who do we want to be? What do we believe?
Decide your company culture before you get started.
Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions. Not for isolation and status.
Quality of the idea matters.
Flat organizations are better for communication.
Focus on great products.
Small teams using the “two pizza rule.”
Most of Google’s successful products have been based on strong technological insights. Google asks what are the technological insights upon which new features products and platforms will be built? Technological insight is something that either decreases the cost or increases the function and usability by a significant factor.
Another source of technology insights is to start with a solution with a narrow problem and look for ways to broaden its scope.
Build platforms that focus on growth.
Open platforms trades control for scale and innovation.
Don’t follow competition. If you follow competition, you will never deliver something that is truly innovative.
Strategy Session: Ask what will be true in 5 years and work backward. Carefully examine the things you can assert will change quickly. Especially areas of production where technology is exponentially driving down the cost curves or platforms that could emerge.
Identify the disrupters over a 5-year period.
Spend the vast majority thinking about product and platform.
Don’t use market research. Slides kill discussion.
Hiring is the single most important thing you can do.
Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly the wrong approach in the technology industry.
Every employee should recruit great people, so make it part of performance reviews and grading.
Google creates new positions within the company to keep employees happy. They also pay well for outstanding employees who contribute.
Google encourages job movement within the organization.
Google relies heavily on data to drive presentations and visions.
Google encourages dissent and different view points at meetings.
Google has a bias for action that incorporates patience, information and alternatives.
Every year, Google shares critical company info with all it’s employees at every level (slide presentations) that was presented to the board of directors
Every entry-level employee understands the details of each person’s job. Not a hands off approach.
Tell the truth.
Google does a postmortem after product releases to go over what went right and wrong. Opens up honest communication and then posts it on the company’s private intranet.
Press interviews are conversations not scripted answers.
For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
Think big and 10x your ideas.
Constantly ship and iterate your product.
Pour resources into the winning products, not the losers.
Extremely well written book that documents the history of pop music and how it has changed over time. The author dives into the science of how hit songs have been written and highlights who the key players are in the music industry to make it happen. I also enjoyed learning the history of famous pop artists like Rihanna, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.
My Takeaways
Sweden had a unique underground music scene where DJs would mix American songs with heavy rhythm with smooth European melodies.
Denniz Pop was a well known Swedish DJ who was instrumental in helping craft the modern day commercial radio pop songs because of his unique way he made melodies fit the beat as well as his style in altering the English language.
His first hit was with the band Ace of Base in the early 90’s.
The book briefly highlights the history of male harmony music and gives background as to how boy bands were crafted in the late 80s and early 90s – specifically talking about how Lou Pearlman formed the Backstreet Boys to appeal to the masses.
A musical act is a small entrepreneurial business. Making a hit requires a lot of different services that not all bands can provide for themselves.
There have only been a few hit song factories in the modern music era because of changing tastes as well as changing dynamics between the artists writers and producers.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the radio industry leading to mass consolidation of radio stations with radio programming driven by market research, rather than curated playlists by local DJs and tastemakers.
The Pop Cycle: Pure pop music gathers the largest audience, but then music tastes change to extremes, and then switch back to pop music.
The Swedish pop writers made a mass exodus to Los Angeles, CA
Greg Zapokean created a ratings product called “Hit Predictor” that many record labels and radio stations used to test if a song was a hit. They would remix a song to its essence and then test it with new listeners.
“Hit Song Science”, a term trademarked by music entrepreneur Mike McCready, was a computer-based method of hit prediction that purported to analyze the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns in a new song, and compare them to those of past hits.
Manufactured music that is designed to be authentic is called K-pop and popular in Korea.
The songwriters who produced ‘Umbrella’ for Rihanna have a background in wiring music jingles – which helped them crank out songs for many other famous artists.
Radio and the record industry have a complimentary yet adversarial relationship.
By the mid 2000s, the “track and hook” method of writing songs was the most popular.
The track and hook method lends itself to a more manufactured music way of writing the music by mass producing songs in batches and gathering the best melodies. It allows for more specialization, which makes it more of an assembly line process. Similar to how a TV show is written.
The hooks in a piece of music are farmed out to individuals.
Music production comes first, then the “topliner” lyrics over the music track.
“Topliners” are the melodic writers in a track and hook songwriting process and rarely cross over into headliners.
On average, people listen to a song for 7 seconds before they change the radio. So the songs today are written with hooks in each section.
Because ticket revenue is the main source of income from artists, recording has to adopt to their schedule in the middle of tours.
Artists don’t write their own songs, by and large. This makes it easier for labels to control them in the production of their hits. The writers, for their part, already share songwriting credit with a half dozen or so other writers, because of the way song production has been “industrialized” since the early 1990s.
A songwriter’s music revenue is now being threatened by services like Spotify, because the music labels are keeping more of the money for themselves.
When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” The songs in heavy rotation are “executing our volition after the fact.” The imagined participation encouraged by familiar music is experienced by many people as highly pleasurable, since it mimics a kind of social communion.
Fascinating book about how Steve Job’s was obsessed with applying simplicity into all products Apple created.
My Takeaways
Steve Jobs preferred straight talk and to cut to the chase.
Small groups of smart people.
Think small.
Be brutally honest as it is the simplest form of getting things done.
It’s hard to instill simplicity within organizations.
Complexity is the easy way out.
Apple puts creativity and the best idea before process.
The more layered the process, the more watered down the final product becomes.
Those who believe in simplicity, believe that good ideas need to be protected from those who would damage them. The best way to do this is to minimize the process from which these ideas must travel.
People will always respond better to a single idea expressed clearly, and tune out when complexity speaks.
Apple makes a more meaningful connection with customers by highlighting the benefits in a human-centric way, not highlighting the technical specs like its competitors.
Unlike many CEOs of big companies, Steve jobs was involved in every aspect of marketing and branding at Apple.
Steve was very clear in his marketing – focusing on a single point and/or value rather than multiple points.
Apple conveyed human emotion and iconic imagery in its ad, not the product.
Steve jobs used every weapon he had to get his ideas through.
Apple keeps product names simple for the sake of brand building.
Apple keeps the “Mac” name in all its product names because consistency is simple for people to remember.
Apple would prove that the most powerful form of simplicity is that which directly connects to our humanity.
Apple constantly challenged the status quo.
Apple’s products had to improve customer lives by an order of magnitude over what was already available or invent a new category altogether.
Steve Jobs evaluated advice in context, oftentimes ignoring it in favor of his own beliefs and intuition.
