Effective leadership is the most important key to success, and to say that “Extreme Ownership” will empower you as a leader is an understatement. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin use their experiences as former U.S. Navy SEALs to provide a backdrop for their views on leadership. Their stories drop you right in the middle of the action, both on the battlefield and within the confines of corporate America, in order to teach you invaluable leadership lessons. The book is divided into three main points and designed to make it as easy as possible for you to apply extreme ownership in your own life.

Winning the War Within
Leaders are responsible for everything and everyone within their role. Willink and Babin make the bold assertion that there are no bad teams, just bad leaders. They use examples from the battlefield and the boardroom to show that all failures can be traced back to poor leadership.

Laws of Combat
Simplify, prioritize and execute, and decentralize command. Applied to an office setting, these combat strategies show how simplifying plans and organizing priorities will improve your operational efficiency. While there is a need for clearly designated leaders, junior leaders must be empowered to make their own decisions –– and their own mistakes.

Sustaining Victory
To drive their point home, Willink and Babin provide a plan for how to implement and sustain the concepts of extreme ownership. They highlight the importance of decisiveness and show you how to create planning checklists that enable your team to operate like one fluid unit.

“Extreme Ownership” differs from other leadership books by emphasizing that there can be no leadership where there is no team. Its main points revolve around the importance of teams, not just individuals. Leaders who embody extreme ownership don’t just take the blame for mistakes –– they own them.