Books: "The Dichotomy of Leadership" By Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

 

The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win

By Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 336 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, October 1st

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin served as U.S. Navy Seal Officers in the toughest urban combat mission in the history of the SEAL teams. Their task unit is to this day the most highly-decorated special operations unit from the war in Iraq. When they returned home, Willink and Babin founded Echelon Front, a leadership training and consulting group that teaches others to build and lead their own winning teams using lessons learned from the battlefield. They also are the authors of Extreme Ownership, which is a #1 New York Times bestseller. Willink has also authored numerous books, including Final Spin (click here for our review from November 2021), and he hosts the top-rated podcast titled Jocko Podcast.

In their insightful new book, The Dichotomy of Leadership, Willink and Babin confront the conventional wisdom that a leader must be willing to take charge and make hard, crucial decisions for the benefit of their team and the mission, while at the same time, being a leader also means being a good follower.

This is an updated, expanded version of Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, which was published in 2015, and it follows the same format, as it comes in three parts, four chapters in each part, with three sections per chapter. 

There is plenty of new material relating to the authors' leadership principles and teachings, starting with their combat and training experience with the SEAL Teams, and how those lessons applied to business. The dichotomies that are inherent in many of the concepts in the books, philosophy, and business foundation that they put into practice as the blueprint to Echelon Front.

Willink and Babin reveal how the use of opposite principles, where you can both lead and follow, focus and detach, and be aggressive and prudent, require skill, awareness, understanding, and dexterity.

In this excerpt, the authors write of their focus, "Leadership isn't black and white - it's gray. Recognizing that there exists an infinite number of dichotomies that must be balanced enables leaders to better find and maintain the equilibrium necessary to be successful - at work, at home, and in every aspect of their lives.

Dichotomy was written to address the most frequent and difficult leadership challenges we witnessed through our work with Echelon Front. Since Echelon Front was founded in 2012, we have worked with over sixteen hundred companies and organizations, from the biggest corporations in the world to small start-ups just beginning their journey. We have taught leadership in just about every business industry, both across the U.S. and internationally, as well as to organizations in the education and nonprofit sectors, military units, and first responders. We and our growing team of leadership instructors have interacted with thousands of leaders, both in person and virtually, at every level of leadership, from the c-suite to the front line. Struggling to find balance in these dichotomies is where we see the greatest challenge for leaders...

War is a nightmare. It is awful, indifferent, devastating, and evil.

War is hell.

But war is also an incredible teacher - a brutal instructor. We learned lessons in war, written in blood, about sorrow, loss, and pain. We also learned about the fragility of human life and the power of the human spirit.

Of course, we learned about strategy and tactics. We learned how to most effectively take the fight to our enemies. We learned how to analyze targets, gather and exploit information, find our enemy's weaknesses, and capitalize on them. We applied these lessons and made the enemy pay for their transgressions.

But of everything we learned, nothing is as universal and transferable as how we came to truly understand the power of leadership. We saw how successful leaders could create victory where victory seemed impossible. We also witnessed how poor leadership could bring defeat upon teams that seemed invincible.

We discovered firsthand that the principles of leadership are 'simple, but not easy.' There are strategies, techniques, and skills that take time and practice to utilize effectively. The foremost requirement for potent leadership is humility, so that leaders can fully understand and appreciate their own shortfalls. We learned much on the battlefield and have tried to pass those lessons on, but we are still humbled every day by our mistakes and all that we continue to learn.