Life Lessons of the Navy SEALs

Unbreakable – A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life – Thom Shea (Little Brown)

As I delved into Unbreakable – A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life, by retired Navy SEAL Thom Shea I could quite shake the feeling of familiarity that the book brought to mind. There was just something about Shea offering up not only stories of his life in battle, but his desire to tell his story to his children why he chose the path he did and why he fought the battles he did to keep not only his children, but all of us safe.

And then it struck me, Shea had authored a Navy SEAL’s version of Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. While Pausch was dying from terminal cancer and wanted to leave behind life guidance for his kids, Shea was a warrior on the frontlines of war, facing not only enemies with total disregard for human life, but also the very real possibility that he might not return.

 

Shea not only takes us inside those frontline battles in a memoir, but he offers personal insights into his thought process and the things he did to protect the men in his command, but to offer advice to his children and us all how we could apply his training and actions to our life. The result is a very personal story and a great insight into the mind and actions of a warrior and what makes them tick.

The Making of a Navy SEAL - Brandon Webb (Griffin/St. Martin’s)

Retired Navy SEAL Brandon Webb has literally been the man who tells the story of the Navy SEALs. While many other former operators have taken up the pen, Webb has truly told the story of these special men from just about every possible angle; personal, historical, and clearly insider in action and in training some of the deadliest snipers in the history of warfare.

Now, he re-visits his personal story that he first told in The Red Circle, which was part autobiography and part story of his training of SEAL snipers; in The Making of a Navy SEAL, which he adapted for the young adult reader.

Webb writes with economy and delivers a sense of adventure that is sure to appeal to the young reader. His story of overcoming hardship and setting/achieving goals could easily inspire not only the next generation of warriors, but translates well to setting a path to a successful life, without coming off preachy or like a bad self-help book. If you have a young adult in need of direction in your life, I can’t think of a better Christmas gift.

Extreme Ownership – How the U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win – Jocko Willink and Leif Babin (St. Martin’s Press)

For me, the goal of any leadership book should be to impart not only practical, but also actionable information that I can put into play today. The question posed by Extreme Ownership – How the U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, a pair of former SEAL commanders is can the battle hardened leadership skills of been there done that warriors, translate to the to the work place?

Anyone who has ever tackled a leadership book (and I have shelves full) will know that it is easy for these books to stray off course and end up in the weeds of minutiae. Not the case here; Willink and Babin set the table for a series of leadership principles by relating a real life (at least their real life) battle field tale, the decision making process they went through in the moment and how you as a leader can apply that to your team/business.

The result is a very impactful approach to leadership and team building. The good news is you don’t have to go through the hell on earth of the Battle of Ramadi to apply these processes, Willink and Babin have done that for you; you gain from their experience, no body armor necessary.

 

Leadership from the Beginning

Your First Leadership Job – How Catalyst Leaders Bring out The Best in Others – Tracy M. Byham, PhD. and Richard S. Wellins, PhD. – (Wiley)

One of my all time favorite leadership quotes comes from Tom Peters – “Leaders don’t create followers they create more leaders.” I have found that to be the case when it comes for the best leaders I have worked for and I try to live that in my own leadership career, because let’s face it, leaders aren’t born, they are developed and nurtured.

That’s where Tracy Byham and Richard Wellins new book, Your First Leadership Job – How Catalyst Leaders Bring out The Best in Others comes in; just because you’ve managed to hang around long enough or been successful enough to be awarded a leadership role that you know everything you need to know to be a success. Think of Your First Leadership Job as a handy road map for effective leaders.

I love the fact that Byham and Wellins spend time focusing on what they call “interaction skills”. One of the obvious failings of bad leaders I have experienced firsthand is an inability to communicate clearly and effectively. If you can’t clearly define and communicate goals, strategies and engage your team, how can you ever hope to be an effective leader? This book provides out of the gate strong tools that you can easily put in play right from the first day you take the lead.

Lead Inside the Box - How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results – Victor Prince and Mike Figliuolo – (Career Press)

I have started to compile a list of my least favorite, most over used business words and phrases; you know the ones that if you here them used in a meeting or on a conference call you cringe inwardly. At some point I will turn them into an article, but for now let tell/warn you that one of the phrases near the top of the list encourages you to “think outside the box”. While that now hackneyed phrase supposedly extols the virtues of breaking down barriers, getting creative and finding new ideas or solutions, it overlooks the all too real circumstances when you’re stuck with what’s in the box.

Imagine you are a leader, you need to improve your team’s results and help them to be more effective and you don’t have the luxury of making an upgrade by swapping out for better players, what do you do? Lead Inside the Box - How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results – Victor Prince and Mike Figliuolo can help you break out of an institutional, one size fits all approach to performance improvement.

 

All too often business likes to fall back on plug and play, best practices that may not be practical given that no two individuals on your team are alike. Prince and Figiuolo developed a Leadership Matrix that will help you help you team to be more impactful and effective by identifying the right approach for each individual without it becoming an overwhelming process. Keep in mind that sometimes, the box isn’t so bad, it’s the approach that’s the problem.

H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle – Brad Lomenick – (Nelson Books)

In a rut. Burned out. Hit the wall. Just plain stuck. There are probably a whole armload of words and phrases that you can throw at that feeling of uncertainty about what’s next. You may be ridiculously successful or you may be struggling mightily, but at some point I think that every leader reaches that point where they don’t quite know what direction to take.

For some it might be an outright career change and for others it might be something a little different. For Brad Lomenick the founder, architect, and president of Catalyst, one of the most widely recognized and successful leadership forums in the world, the answer to the “what’s next” question came in the form of a sabbatical. You may be asking yourself; what, the hard charging leader of a wildly successful organization who has personally trained thousands of next generation leaders simply walked away from that organization to take a break? That’s exactly what Lomenick did.

And we get to benefit from his self-confessed crisis in leadership as he took what is a very personal journey to re-focus and recharge that resulted in the book; H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle. Along the way on his literal and figurative journey, Lomenick reached out to his personal network of business and thought leaders the likes of Jim Collins (Good to Great) John C. Maxwell and Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) to tap into their insights on leadership and to stoke his passion for leadership.

Lomenick describes leadership as habitual; defining 20 habits that he finds essential to effective leadership. There is nothing here that can’t be integrated simply and easily into your everyday life and approach to leadership. Lomenick taps into a who’s who of leadership thought as he works his way through the book. While it may not be practical for many leaders to simply take a sabbatical, Lomenick serves up actionable steps that we can all put into play based on his journey through this process.

What It Takes to Win

Think to Win – Unleashing the Power of Strategic Thinking – Paul Butler, John Manfredi and Peter Klein (McGraw Hill)

Ah…you can smell it in the air…or maybe not, but I can certainly feel it my bones; it the time of year that that I love and hate. It’s strategic planning time! Every year around this time the conference calls ratchet up and the new slide deck and white paper outlines get their final touch ups and the schedule of planning sessions gets laid out. Then with the blast of the starting gun we are off to the races spending countless hours researching, meeting, thinking, spitballing on the white board dozens of ideas and just when you think things will get completely out of hand, you manage to loop a lasso around then whole mess and pull together your strategic plan for next year.

In my day job as the director of business development for a health care organization, I relish the opportunity to take the keys and drive the bus when it comes to strategic planning; leading the various teams developing our road map for the next twelve months is something I love to do…I could however do without out the blinding spread sheets and 16 hour days. Every year I try to bring something new to the table to keep things interesting and to see if we can deliver a more focused, achievable plan.

This year that something new comes in the form of Think to Win – Unleashing the Power of Strategic Thinking by Paul Butler, John Manfredi and Peter Klein. It didn’t take me long to have an A HA! moment when I delved into the book. The trio spell out the five principles that drive the Think To Win (TTW) approach:

1.   Challenge assumptions

2.   Scope the issue

3.   Rely on facts and data

4.   Focus on the vital few

5.   Connect the dots

It was challenge the assumptions that strikes the first chord for me. After a quick but thorough wipe down, I took to the white board and started to scratch out a list of all of the assumptions that people had about our organization. It didn’t take long before the light bulb went off and I knew that we had to start the planning process, not by leaving those assumptions that had driven our planning for so long in place; you know the perpetual problems and issues that had held us back from achieving our goals, but by challenging the assumptions and looking for strategies to tackle them.

A HA! This was a good starting point and something I could work with. And that is what makes Think to Win great; it offers up a guide for those with a bias for action to move from the thinking stage to the execute stage with greater agility.

The series of case studies in the book give it a real world finishing touch; an exclamation point that takes things from theory to practice. TTW offers up the useful tools to institute and effect a culture change that will have every member of your team working like a strategic thinker and may even offer up a solution for avoiding the dreaded “that’s how we’ve always done things” mindset.

 

 

Get On The Bus

Move Your Bus: An Extraordinary New Approach to Accelerating Success in Work and Life – Ron Clark – (Touchstone)

For whatever reason, a Bus is a popular metaphor of authors of business and leadership books. Bestselling business author Jim Collins most famously utilized the bus in his book Good To Great when he wrote about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the right people in the right seats on the bus as a way for businesses to make the often difficult transition for being good to being great.

Now educator and leadership trainer Ron Clark is trying his hand at moving from training educators to taking his unique leadership principles to the business world in the form of Move Your Bus: An Extraordinary New Approach to Accelerating Success in Work and Life.

Clark breaks his bus passengers down into four categories:

·         Runners – those workers who consistently go above and beyond for the good of the organization

·         Joggers – workers who do their jobs without pushing themselves

·         Walkers – the workers who are just getting pulled along

·         Riders -  those who actually hinder success and in the process drag the team down

The trick is for the bus driver; you, the leader to recognize those qualities in your workers and then integrate the strategies to bring out the best in your team. The goal isn’t to have a bus full of runners who often can’t balance work and life, but to balance the team and if necessary kick those who aren’t pulling their weight out at the next stop.

Groundbreaking? Probably not, but Clark’s track record of success combined with workable strategies you can implement quickly and mostly painlessly make this one worth the price of admission. It’s accessible and easy to develop a plan of approach based on the tool Clark presents.

 

McChrystal - The Rules…Have Changed

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World – General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell – (Portfolio Books)

History tells us of the mighty Soviet military invading Afghanistan; they are met by a rugged terrain on the order of the surface of the Moon and a collection of grizzled fighters that are relentless in their efforts to hold off and defeat the invading horde. With the help of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. military aide funneled through the CIA and the Soviets stubbornness or inability to adapt to a different fighting paradigm, the seemingly rag tag Mujahedeen tribes send them packing.

Flash forward to the War on Terror and the U.S. Military launching a traditional military campaign of “shock and awe” based on expending massive amounts of military ordinance in an effort to overwhelm the enemy. It doesn’t take the leadership on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq to figure out, that there has been a shift in strategy and they need to respond accordingly with a new set of rules for engaging the enemy.

One of those leaders that came to the battlefield realization was General Stanley McChrystal. Now retired from the military and engaged in the battle ground of business, McChrystal and his co-authors, a pair of fellow special forces combatants and a student from the General’s leadership class at Yale, set out to see how the lessons learned in that battlefield shift could be applied in the business world. The result is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.

McChrystal and company make the case that even with the seeming fire hose of data and information available to leadership types; leaders can’t be “all knowing and all seeing”. It is that loosening of the stranglehold grip on control that will speed the transition from “puppet master” to the “crafter of culture”.

McChrystal’s thoughts on the value of a leaders words vs. their actions brought to mind one of the best leaders I ever worked for who impressed upon me the first week he was in the job of CEO that he didn’t “know everything about what you do…that’s why I pay you to do the job and make the decisions.” He went on to say “I want to move the decision making out of here (as he hooked a thumb toward his office) and over to you.” That was a major shift in thinking from his micromanaging predecessor and it took all of 10 seconds for me to embrace the change and take charge of my role within the organization.

One of the major steps that worked for McChrystal in battle and will transition well to business is “normalizing sharing”. Again it raises the importance of a leaders talk vs. their action; talk of transparency is meaningless without the sharing of detailed information. Technology offered the military a wide range of tools to implement the sharing strategy and the same holds true for business. This information sharing will help leaders avoid a top down management style, defeat business silos and bring people into the process.

Team of Teams is densely layered with real world examples of how the principles can be applied and will have you scrapping the standard org chart because the old rules have changed.

Business Focused…hold the B.S.

The Real Life MBA – Jack Welch and Suzy Welch – (Harper Business)

Quick…Over the past couple of decades who has been the most respected CEO business leader when it comes to offering advice and insight? While some may point to members of the high profile members of the big bucks fast, hoodie generation CEOs. In reality, when it comes to business leadership and leadership development the go to person, respected for not only his personal business success, but also his ability to adapt to the times and deliver fresh insights and ideas is former GE CEO, Jack Welch.

Welch is literally the guy who wrote the book of business leadership. Winning was an international best seller that became the within reach guide for a generation of new and experienced leaders. Welch and his wife, co-author and co-conspirator Suzy, have gone on the road to work directly with and guide businesses and executives at all levels, in a wide variety of industries, through the practices that the book spelled out.

 

Now the dynamic duo are back The Real Life MBA which walks readers through the whole spectrum of business topics. The book distills the basics of business in a manner that you can put to work today across your business or organization. Does it replace pursuing and MBA? No but it does offer a 30,000 foot overview of useful knowledge gleaned over decades of hands on experience.

The practical advice falls into three basic categories; career management, operations and organizational management, and leadership and building teams. If your career path is in one of these areas, the other to section will prove useful in building your knowledge in other company sectors. The Real Life MBA is a wonderful building block for those seeking next level advice.

How to Standout in the Fire Hose of Information

Captivology – The Science of Capturing People’s Attention – Ben Parr (Harper One Books)

Think about those events, news stories, products, celebrities and phenomenon that we latch onto and just can’t get enough of. What is it that captures our attention and no matter how hard we try we can’t seem to get enough or shake free from their grip.

Marketers, producers, both established and wannabe stars and professorial types have all wondered, researched, explored and delved into the mysterious world of trying to figure out exactly what it is, what the magic quicksilver is that can grab us by the throats and not let go. With the fire hose of options we are confronted with on a daily basis, what is it that makes some things standout?

 

Enter writer, investor, and tech maven Ben Parr and science to explain it all. In Parr’s new book, Captivology – The Science of Capturing People’s Attention, he utilizes a pile of research to delve into the three types of attention; immediate, short and long and what it takes to not only elicit a response, but to engage the participant and then transition into building long term value, that sticky magic that has folks hanging around.

Along the way Parr identifies seven triggers, or tools that are part of the equation. Those triggers are:

·         Automaticity - or using sensory cues

·         Framing - adapting to someone’s view

·         Disruption - which challenges people’s expectations

·         Reward - the motivating of people either intrinsically or extrinsically

·         Reputation - which draws on experts to build a level of trust

·         Mystery - creating suspense to create intrigue

·         Acknowledgment - fostering a deep connection as people tend to pay attention to those who provide them with validation

Is this a business strategy book that will offer up actionable steps? No, not really; but what it lacks in strategy and tactics it does provide a level of deeper understanding of how the variety of tools that are available to businesses and individuals can put into play to capture audience and retain market share.