Professional Military Education

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"The most important six inches

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is between your ears."

Secretary of Defense James Mattis

leadership

Wake Up Early, Eat, Exercise: It’s The Power of Habit

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It’s 5 am and an alarm is buzzing in your ear. What do you do? Slap the snooze button? Or wake up ready to workout. Most people opt for the snooze button although they may want to run the track or hit the weight room. So why can’t the second choice be as easy as the first one? The answer might lie in something called a habit loop. It turns out there is a lot of science behind this early morning decision. The answer may not simply be because of tiredness. Power of Habit implies a much stronger force is at work.

Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business digs into the tricky science behind these habits. As a Marine, I find habits and the development of good, powerful habits to be interesting. The Marine Corps tries to instill habits of thought and habits of action into the young men and women who join its ranks. According to Duhigg, the Marine Corps is on to something significant. It turns out that habits do begin in the mind in the form of mental feedback loops. These loops are incredibly powerful.

Individual Habits

There is a cue. The cue triggers a routine. The routine is followed by a reward. With this feedback loop comes the formation of both good and bad habits. For example, a good habit might be an alarm goes off (the cue), the gym  clothes go on (the routine), then a person gets a good workout in (the reward). As Duhigg notes, the power of habit isn’t always the reward. Instead the power of habit can be the anticipation of the reward.

On the negative side, take a bad habit like smoking. Smokers have a difficult time quitting not because of the nicotine but often because of routines that have been built around the anticipation of nicotine. For example, consider a smoker who has a cigarette every morning at 9 a.m. after driving to work and finishing their morning coffee. It becomes extremely difficult for that smoker to quit unless they stop driving to work every morning at 9 a.m. and drinking their morning coffee. The reason is because the cues trigger the anticipation of the reward i.e. the morning cigarette.

As a Marine, I found this portion of the book valuable. It helped me to understand why certain habits that the Marine Corps standardizes are so powerful. Moreover, they have long lasting impacts on the individuals who join the organization often breeding life long skills of discipline and hard work.

The Power of Keystone Habits

Before reading the book, I expected to find more value in the section on individual habits. I was wrong. Part Two on organizations and the keystone habits chapter made the book worth the purchase. I learned a lot as a leader from this part. Duhigg did an excellent job explaining some fascinating business case studies.

In particular, the story of Paul O’Neill was outstanding. Paul O’Neill became CEO of Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) in the late 1980’s. When he got to the company, he decided to focus solely on workplace safety. At the time that he announced this initiative, Wall Street investors panicked. Duhigg says that they thought, “Who put this crazy hippie in charge?” But, what the shortsighted investors didn’t get was that Paul O’Neill was creating what Duhigg calls a “keystone habit.” As it turns out, focusing on the keystone habit of workplace safety was immensely profitable. In fact, by the time O’Neill left Alcoa, the companies stock value had gotten five times bigger and the company had achieved a valuation of $27 billion.

The keystone habit of workplace safety was the cue that caused multiple second and third order effects throughout Alcoa. Communication channels improved through timely and accurate reporting. Old equipment and manufacturing parts were replaced. Waste was cut in daily operations. As a result, profitability soared through improvements across the organization.

As leaders, we can look at our own organizations and find certain “keystone habits” to focus on. Perhaps in the military it is focusing on specific unit SOPs. Although what seems to be overlooked by Duhigg is the fact that O’Neill as a leader prioritized safety as a keystone habit. Alcoa had a safety program prior to O’Neill, but it wasn’t a priority. For leaders, we don’t always have to look at adding something new or reinventing the wheel in a dramatic way. Sometimes prioritizing the basics is what matters. In fact, the Marine Corps likes to call this “brilliance in the basics.” Being good at doing the little things right can itself be a keystone habit.

Power Habits from Starbucks

I found this chapter extremely valuable. According to Duhigg, Starbucks has created many powerful habits. In fact, Starbucks has created a system for its employees to deal with disgruntled and rude customers. One of the techniques is called: LATTE. Listen to what the person is saying. Acknowledge their concerns. Take action. Thank them. Explain what happened. Duhigg’s point is that Starbucks has sought to give their employees a habitual tactic to maintain a kind and positive customer service.

Before reading this book, I didn’t expect to learn self-discipline techniques from Starbucks baristas. But, Duhigg brought me there. In the military, we focus on things called immediate action drills. There is a natural crossover between business practices and the military procedures in this case. Starbucks employees have their own immediate action drills. They train to use these drills when dealing with the challenge of unruly patrons. This becomes habit with time and ensures that the employee can fulfill the Starbucks mission of quality customer service. In the same way, Marine units train to use immediate action drills so that certain actions become a matter of habit. For example, taking contact from the enemy or reacting to sniper fire. Each action from the enemy triggers a trained response from the unit. This powerful habit allows the unit to regain initiative and accomplish its mission.

Power of Habits in Societies and Groups

The final section of Duhigg’s book focuses on societal habits. In one chapter, he tells the story of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. He also intertwines the experience of Rick Warren, who built a megachurch known as Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. Duhigg focuses specifically on the social habits that allowed Civil Rights marchers to successfully boycott the Montgomery buses and eventually set the conditions for civil rights legislation. In the case of Saddleback, a socialization process developed around small groups in church members homes. This helped Saddleback grow from one man and his family into a congregation of over 20,000 people.

The key takeaway from this section was the importance of peer pressure in creating powerful habits. Network effects can bring about sweeping social change. In thinking about the Marine Corps, I reflected on the recruiting process. Often we see Marines that are second or third generation Marines. They are not the first in their families to join. Also, a lot of Marines have siblings that joined too. Families create a natural social pressure for an individual to join. However, for a recruiter to get individuals to join with no prior connection to the Marine Corps, focusing on trying to get a group of friends committed seems to be the best method. The peer pressure from one or more members of a social group creates a powerful incentive for commitment.

Duhigg’s writing style is entertaining and informative. There is a lot of good cocktail party conversation in it. Specifically, the chapter on retail giant Target predicting when a woman is pregnant was very interesting. If someone is looking for a book to better understand personal habits, then the Power of Habit is a solid read. I also highly recommend it to military and business leaders because of the organizational habits part. In particular, the keystone habits chapter stands out as a must-read in what is, overall, a very enjoyable book.

 

Extreme Ownership: The Perfect Mindset for Successful Leadership

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How do Navy Seals lead and win? Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explain in their book, Extreme Ownership. The authors are former Navy SEALS and combat veterans. After multiple deployments to dangerous places like Ramadi, Iraq, they have valuable leadership principles to share. In Extreme Ownership they bridge lessons from the battlefield with challenges in the business world. The result is a leadership book accessible to both military and civilian leaders.

Broken into three parts and twelve chapters, each chapter focuses on a core leadership principle. For example, Jocko’s first lesson about a friendly fire incident in Ramadi leads to a principle of accepting personal responsibility. In fact, this is the central lesson of the book. Leadership is about assuming personal responsibility for everything that takes place in an organization. Jocko hammers this point repeatedly. Taking ownership for problems is a leadership imperative. Furthermore, leaders should be quick to credit their subordinates for success.

Extreme Ownership Part I: Winning the War Within

Reading this part of the book, I was reminded of the line from the New Testament, “First remove the beam from your own eye and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). Too often in a bureaucratic organization like the military, it becomes easy to shift blame. With a chain of command, one can get mad at a subordinate for failure. Is this good leadership? Extreme Ownership argues no. Extreme Ownership says that the leader sets the subordinate up for success or failure. This is a radical lesson on servant leadership. It underpins and reflects the mantra of “no bad teams only bad leaders.”

In order to “win the war within”, a leader needs to look inward and figure out what he or she should do to make the organization successful. For example, this may take the form of belief. When tasked with a seemingly insane mission- taking poorly trained Iraqi troops on missions- Jocko writes about taking ownership of it and trying to believe in the mission. He does this by putting himself in the shoes of his higher commanders. He looks several levels above his narrow field of view.

In this case, the Navy Seals of Task Unit Bruiser did not want to conduct operations with Iraqi soldiers. Who could blame them? The Iraqis were poorly trained, ill-equipped, and lacked motivation. But, Jocko communicated to his team that if they took Iraqi soldiers with them, they would be authorized more missions. Furthermore, if they were able to train the Iraqis to defend their own country, the Navy SEALS would be able to set successful conditions for U.S. troops to leave the country for good. This simple logic was enough to get his team to believe, which they did.

Extreme Ownership Part II: The Laws of Combat

Laws of combat include decentralized command, prioritization and execution, and simplicity. With the example of simplicity, this lesson was magnified through the lens of a unit’s first patrol in Ramadi. In this case, the patrol unit leader, a young Lieutenant, had trained Iraqi soldiers for a patrol into enemy territory. After reviewing the Lieutenant’s plan, Jocko convinced the officer that the plan was too complex and underestimated the dangers on the battlefield. Reluctantly, the patrol leader took Jocko’s advice. The patrol took contact after 12 minutes outside friendly lines and sustained multiple casualties. Consequently, the patrol leader learned a hard lesson about simplicity. Jocko points out that the situation could have been much worse if not catastrophic had the Lieutenant gone with the original plan. Thus, the old adage- a plan breaks down on first contact- means that plans need to be simple to mitigate the inevitable chaos and confusion. The other saying, “the enemy gets a vote” means that leaders can’t anticipate everything that will happen when they step outside the wire.

In the business world, complexity can create chaos too. For example, Jocko uses the example of a company with a confusing employee bonus plan. The intricacies of the system made sense to management. But, to the employees? Head scratching all around. But, how are problems like these mitigated? Understanding that “people take the path of least resistance” is important. People need to have simplicity embedded into the way they work. With simple plans, employees can be flexible when faced with challenges in dynamic workplace environments. Flexibility in operations will ultimately drive productivity. Employees will have clear expectations and a baseline upon which to effectively operate.

Extreme Ownership Part III: Sustaining Victory

In the final part, Jocko and Leif include some harrowing examples of close calls in Ramadi, Iraq. Specifically in the chapter on “uncertainty”, Leif relates a story of working with Chris Kyle, the famed Navy SEAL sniper and author of American Sniper. Leif tells of how Chris decided not to take a sniper shot until he got positive identification (P.I.D.) on a possible target. Leif was put in a position in which another unit of Army soldiers was pressuring him to take out the possible enemy sniper. Ultimately, Leif decided not to let Chris take the shot. The decision proved prescient when the potential target turned out to be an American soldier.

Leif explains how this incident “scared the hell out of him.” If Leif had ordered the shot, it would have meant the end of his career. The lesson is clear. Leaders need to be decisive even in the midst of uncertainty. Logic must trump emotion. In this case, the emotion was tied to soldiers, who had been taking fire from enemy snipers. Leif had to resist the emotion of a unit that desperately wanted to kill the enemy. The military tries to empower its leaders to employ logic through training, doctrine, standard operating procedures (SOPs) as well as simple, executable plans.

In business, chaos abounds too. Perhaps no better example of this exists than in the stock market. No one can predict the direction of stocks on a given day. One must have a disciplined and well-thought out investment strategy. This strategy can be simple too. For example, an investor can buy index funds and hold them long-term. With this type of strategy, investors can maintain confidence in the face of market uncertainty.

Learning from Others

Extreme Ownership is an extremely valuable book for leaders at all levels. I wish I had read this book a long time ago. It quickly became a call to action for me in my current leadership role. I found myself taking the leadership lessons and immediately figuring out ways to apply them.

Finally, Extreme Ownership is a great book to read with a team or organization. The book provides a strong platform for productive conversations. Team members and leaders will benefit from each principle as they are simple, timeless, and supported through tough experience. As leaders, we are called to learn from what others have gone through. With Extreme Ownership, Jocko and Leif are exceptional teachers.