KI Book Club

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This book details the characteristics that authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin believe are essential to strong leadership. As retired Navy SEALs, they now use their military experiences to inform leaders in the business realm. In their view, the crucial component to success is Extreme Ownership – taking extraordinary responsibility for all that occurs, beyond what is normally required. This entails accountability, courage, and confidence; it means assuming liability for the outcome of your team’s missions and refusing to find excuses for failure. By taking Extreme Ownership, you can reach your potential as a leader.

“Discipline is freedom.”

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Dietary recommendations are the result of measuring possible dietary effects on health, although it is extremely difficult to link diet to future disease. Despite this, Americans dutifully follow recommended diets. This book makes the scientific case for a diet with ample amounts of fat, including meat, eggs, butter and other animal foods high in saturated fat.

“The USDA’s popular food pyramid further cemented the government’s position on the low-fat diet. Big meat lobbyists lost out to lean meat lobbyists, and the food pyramid was incorrectly touted as a ‘returning to nature’ concept. The belief that our ancestors lived mainly on fruits, vegetables, and grains was widely perpetuated despite historical evidence to the contrary.”

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When we think of health, dieting and exercise are the first things that come to mind. So it may come as a surprise to learn that chronic over-breathing is actually the biggest obstacle to optimal health. Another surprise is that blood oxygen level does not determine how much oxygen is delivered to muscles and organs – it’s the amount of carbon dioxide. Red blood cells (RBCs) are normally 95-99% saturated with oxygen – enough for strenuous activity – but according to the Bohr Effect, CO2 is necessary to release and metabolize oxygen. How you breathe determines the level of CO2 in your blood; frequent heavy breaths raise CO2 levels above optimal levels and increase your need for oxygen.

“In terms of importance for survival, breathing is the top of the list, followed by water, with food in last place. Health professionals, athletes, and nonathletes alike pay far more attention to their food than their breathing, but what happens if we switch this focus around?”

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When you’re a leader, some challenges like low staff can be solved with the stroke of a pen. Yet others, like improving performance and response time, require a behavioral change, something far more difficult. Behavioral strategies require clear goals, commitment, and accountability, but often these factors get lost to the daily whirlwind. Enter The 4 Disciplines of Execution:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important

2. Act on Lead Measures not Lag Measures

3. Keep A Compelling Scoreboard

4. Create A Cadence of Accountability

While not always easy to maintain, remaining committed to these 4 disciplines for extended periods of time can lead to drastic improvements in your life.

“Great teams invest their best efforts in those few activities that have the most impact on WIGs: the lead measures. This insight is so crucial & distinctive, yet so little understood, that we call it the secret of excellent execution.”

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Note: This is Part 2 of The Craft of Power. Click here to view Part 1.

People and money themselves are not very helpful to gain power, it’s where you direct them that gives you power. While Part 1 described the theory of power, techniques like usurping national cultures, and uprooting disguised opportunists and entrenched bureaucrats, Part 2 contains specific methods for vectoring resources towards a win. It describes how to properly leverage institutions, corporate communication channels, and negotiations to grow one’s power. Finally, it discusses end-game considerations such as morals, stopping early, and how to prepare for the next competition.

“As far as duty to power is concerned, the following seems to express the practicing consensus among persons of power: It is one’s duty to reach ever for greater power but never once for more than can be gotten away with.”