Leadership Strategy and Tactics by Jocko Willink | with guest Chris Morrow

0:01Welcome to Business Book Club, where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host Sam Brown and today we're talking about leadership strategy and tactics by Jocko Willink. If your startup feels like a daily fire drill, then this is the battlefield test of playbook you need to stop reacting, step back and get your team to actually want to follow you. The author Jocko Willink isn't an academic theorist. He's a retired Navy SEAL commander who led a highly decorated special operations unit. 15 years ago, after his military career ended, he founded Echelon Front.

0:39They specialize in training exec teams for business success. What Jocko does is take high stakes, life or death, combat situations and translates them into practical, no-nonsense tactics that you can use on the business battlefield every day. And joining me today is Chris Morrow. Chris is the founder and managing director of DigiTalent, a fast-growing AI and machine learning recruitment agency. Chris has navigated the absolute 24-7 chaos of scaling a global startup, and he uses Jocko's exact strategies to keep his distributed team aligned. In this episode, we unpack why stepping away from a crisis is often the best way to solve it, why taking the blame is your ultimate superpower as a founder, and we'll discuss the secret to building a high agency team.

1:29Chris, it's great to have you here. Why did you choose Leadership Strategy and Tactics as your most impactful book? What I love about Jocko's book is it gives you the sort of leadership strategy as the concept, but it also gives you the practical tactics of how to implement and what to do and what not to do in your business so that you can immediately implement some of the key concepts. As always, I ask you to bring and highlight your three most valuable lessons. Lesson number one, what did you choose? Detach and gain perspective. So one of the key concepts in the book is stepping back emotionally to see the full picture.

2:08Quite oftentimes when you are the leader of a team, you're so wrapped up in the day-to-day and in the weeds that it's quite difficult to actually see the wood for the trees. detaching to gain perspective is really about taking a step back when required to actually see the whole picture, not just the sort of small viewpoint that you have when you're actually in this sort of like narrow field of focus. It's more than just taking a step back emotionally. I think that's the kind of result of what he says is like taking a step back physically as well. I love his story near, I think the start of the book where he's talking around him and his unit had to take an oil rig and there's chaos all around And the thing that he did was literally take a step back and have a look around.

2:52And it was that sort of little elevated position which allowed him to see everything that was going around him. And then he could see the way out. For me, though, it's more physically being detached from the team, for example. So quite often in a business when you're sat with the team, you're in an open plan office, you are in the middle of the chaos. My business has always been a fully distributed business. So we've had staff all over the world and actually being physically detached from them has always helped me to actually gain that perspective. There's been quite a lot of instances where my business partner, Dylan, has been struggling with something on the ground in Australia with his team.

3:35And he sort of called me up and said, can I just run you past this scenario? I just want your viewpoint on it. because I'm physically not there with them and also not emotionally wrapped up in that situation. Whenever he's explained things to me about they've got this happening, I can pretty much immediately say, it's that, that's the issue. And he instantly will say, yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think having that physical detachment in terms of not sitting in amongst the chaos really helps. But if you are as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, physically sat with your team, taking that step back going for a walk removing yourself from the situation on a physical basis really helps you to gain that different perspective is this something that you have had to work at and practice have you noticed it in lots of areas of life and business obviously when you start a recruitment agency is notoriously hectic and especially in the first couple of years when you're bringing on your first members of staff you've got clients for us it was clients all over the world pretty much from day one there's a lot of things going on a lot of problems a lot of fires you have to fight on a daily basis especially when you have a team in australia you have a team in the uk and you've got clients in the us as well so it can be pretty much like a 24 hour job if you're not careful the first thing i would do in the morning the first couple of years if i checked slack I check my emails is there'd be like 15 problems that needed me jumping on them type thing whether it's clients or candidates that are going for jobs or we've got offers happening or people dropping out or whatever there's a million and one things that you need to attend to and I think being detached from it as the leader of the business allows me to keep a strategic view on whatever goal we're actually trying to hit without getting too much involved in the chaos of the actual day-to-day tactics and it also allows the team to take ownerships of a lot of the things that are on the ground certainly from my own side of things the ability to be able to detach physically and emotionally from whatever's going on has allowed me to remain focused on whatever the strategic mission the goal is of that particular moment in the business and that can very easily get sort of missed when you're so close to the issue that you get all wrapped up in it.

6:00It's finding that balance, isn't it, between working in and working on the business. As the owner of the company, you are able to solve the problem better than anybody else. But if you're the one solving all the problems, then the company as a whole isn't moving forward. It's not going in the right direction. It's not growing. I think that's something that Jocko articulates very well in this book and some of his other books that I've read as well. The way he describes it is when everyone's looking down and in, you need at least one person looking up and out. That's a really important thing because if you think about an analogy of like you fly in a plane or you're sailing a boat or you're driving a car, you need someone looking at where you're going.

6:43And when everyone's looking down and in, then it's not good for the overall success and the mission that you're trying to achieve as a business and as a team. Let's move on to lesson number two. Leadership is ownership. The concept is that leaders own everything in their world. Success and failure, so there's no excuses. What Jocko sort of gives us an analogy in the book is that there's no bad teams, only bad leaders. It's very easy to, you know, as leaders and as individuals to blame other things when things go wrong. It's easy to blame market conditions or clients or staff or employees when things go wrong.

7:24But extreme ownership really means asking first and foremost, what could I have done differently when things do go wrong? As an example, when things have gone wrong in my own business, it's having that mindset of essentially accountability and trust. So whenever my businesses faced issues. We've been around for almost eight years now. What's happened is I've tried to take full ownership of those issues and not try to cast blame on others. What really happens when you do that, even if what's happened isn't necessarily your fault, if you hold your hands up and say, this is my responsibility, this is what I'm going to do to fix it.

8:08A, it requires There's a lot of humility as a leader, which I personally think is the number one characteristic of any leader that they should have. But what it does is it creates this culture within the team of when things go wrong, people hold their hands up and they take ownership of the problem and then they present a solution to go ahead and fix it. And that's such a powerful thing within any team or any business. And if you think about the other side of the coin to that, when you have a blame culture, when a leader is in charge and when something goes wrong, they want a scapegoat. They want to say it's this person's fault.

8:42They point fingers. It makes people defensive. And that also spreads through the team. It also means that people blame other people when things go wrong or they make excuses. Oh, this client did this or the market conditions are no good for that. And it's really like the antithesis of what Jocko's talking about here in terms of extreme ownership. You don't have to be a leader to adopt this as well, but you will soon become a leader if you do was my kind of takeaway from it. If you have this humility, it means that people want to fix it. You end up not looking for the problems and pointing fingers.

9:15You just have a solution focused attitude. I've worked in teams where there's been finger pointing and I've worked in teams where there's a solution focused attitude and the latter is just so much more fun to be in. Everyone works as a team. Everyone is happy when other people do well, which is not the case in the finger pointing sort of rooms. So let's dig in about how we can adopt this as a bit more of a mindset and how we as leaders maybe teach other leaders or other people in our companies to have the same kind of attitude as well. Why is it so important to take ownership of the things that people might say you couldn't control?

9:53Ownership's contagious, as simple as that. When things go wrong as a leader, if you can ask yourself before diving into blaming people and making excuses, what could I have done differently here? 99 times out of 100 you will realize that there were things that you could have done differently and that they might have affected the outcome and it might not be directly related to the individual or people on your team who were involved in that last moment when things went wrong but from practical experience and these sorts of things even asking yourself the question is a superb way to actually train this mindset into yourself and when you do and you vocalize it it spreads across your team like wildfire because what you'll end up hearing then from your team when things go wrong before you even get involved in it you'll hear them say this is my fault it's my responsibility this is where it went wrong and these are the steps i'm to take to fix it.

10:54It's so powerful and liberating to see that ownership spread. And it all really starts with you as a leader to sort of set the example on that. This isn't even something that's just applicable to business. When you do this at home with your partner, it's like some sort of Jedi mind trick. So I would highly recommend for anyone who can actually get to grips with this concept it really really works and it's so simple when you boil it down and you think about it but there's just so many companies and businesses that i've worked for in the past and teams that i've been a part of who just don't do that they have that culture of when things go wrong they want to blame suing accounts it's really toxic it relates to a great deal of unhappiness one side of its ownership and taking charge of problems and looking at yourself which requires a hell of a lot like I said of humility some people just aren't humble enough to do that for whatever reason the other side of it is just basically making excuses it's a mindset thing of looking at yourself first of all and when you do that you vocalize it across your team that's what they end up starting to do as well and it is an absolute game changer for any team in any business one thing that sprung to mind for me when I was reading the book was that if you're in one of these cultures that you spoke about being in a second ago, where there is a bit of blame kind of culture and you start taking ownership of things, do you think that practicing extreme ownership here, could it end up with you just being taken advantage of?

12:27Or do you think this is such a powerful thing that it would just spread? And could you just be contagious and change a bit of a company culture? It's a great question. I genuinely believe that this would spread amongst your peers, certainly. I don't think it would necessarily change your leader if they lacked the humility to be able to think of it in terms of taking ownership of problems. But I do think that amongst your peers and subordinates, as Jocko always talks in military speak, he talks about subordinates a lot in his book, amongst your peers and subordinates, it would definitely have a massive effect on those individuals.

13:04And I think that overall as a cultural shift can only be a positive thing. So I don't think it would be cancelled out necessarily if you were already in a culture, which is more of a sort of blame culture. I think you would stick out like a sore thumb in such a positive way by adopting that in that type of environment. I think it would only be a good thing. And I think if you're the leader of a team, let's say you take ownership of a problem that's happened, let's say sales down by 10 % or you missed your quota, ultimately at least the leader, that's your responsibility in the team. When you take ownership of it, it forces people to also detach from their own mental approach to that.

13:44And what they do is they detach and look at it and say, well, he's taking ownership of that. But actually I contributed to that. And this is where I've sort of like fallen down on that because there might be one person who's overachieved in their target in the team, but then there's a couple of people who have missed their targets. So it forces everyone in the team to also look at themselves and detach and take ownership of their part of that plan as well. So it's almost impossible when someone is doing that to not look at yourself as well. Basically, when you own problems, your team will too.

14:19What's one thing that you think someone listening can do tomorrow to take ownership, to adopt this statute of extreme ownership and that leadership is ownership? One of the things you can do is, whether you're the leader of the team or you're part of a team and you have a leader, I don't think it really matters. I think everyone can take ownership. The next time something goes wrong, try holding your hands up. If you were involved in it, say that it's your responsibility. And if it's something that's really bad, for example, say sorry. That word is really, really powerful and it shows a humongous amount of humility.

14:56And then tell either your peers or your boss or the people that you're leading what you're going to do to fix it. and go from there those are the things that i think that people can do straight away and when you do that a couple of times watch what happens you'll see people actually step in and say actually it's not your fault this is my fault this is actually my responsibility i messed up here and then you see the effects it's like a ripple effect you know where people actually approach that mindset a little bit differently because they're actually analyzing themselves and the role that they had to play and whatever problem is actually taking place let's move on to lesson number three then build relationships before you need them the key concept here is that leadership isn't really about barking orders it's building trust so that people want to follow you when it comes time to make tough calls people will actually follow you willingly people don't follow leaders that they don't trust.

15:59And I just think that is such amazing advice. When you're running a business, you have to build genuine relationships with each member of staff. You have to know what the motivations are. You're kind of trying to reverse engineer what they're looking for in their own career. And you have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, I think, to have that trust. Business in general is all built on trust. That's your employees, that's with your clients, that's with your peers and your partners. So it's such a big thing to actually invest in that trust as early as possible before you need to cash it in.

16:40I wrote down a quote about this bit as well. Trust is the most important element of leadership. Without trust, there is no team, only people working for themselves. One of the things that he speaks about doing is doing the dirty jobs so that your team don't feel alone when you've been elevated into a different position, showing that you don't think that you're above them. Was this in the book when he talks about taking out the brass? That's the one. So the concept there is when you're in the military, obviously in the Navy SEALs or if you're in the army or whatever, you go in the firing range and there's lots of bullet casings everywhere.

17:12And normally when a leader is a bit full of themselves, they'll come and survey everything and then they'll sort of spend a minute there and then walk out and then that'll be it. what Jocko used to do and what really good leaders, in his opinion, used to do. They used to sweep up all of the shell casings, which was really kind of, in theory, beneath them in terms of their rank and superiority. But he would do that and other good leaders would do that to build trust amongst the men, to basically say, hey, yes, I am more senior than you guys and I'm a higher rank and all the rest of it, but I'll do the dirty jobs and I'll do everything that you guys will do as well, which, you know, if you were one of those people could only have a positive effect on you.

17:57That would only leave a positive impression on you, I think. So that's a really powerful analogy is that, again, it goes back to humility. I think nothing is beneath you as a leader. You are willing to do everything that the team's willing to do and there's nothing that you're asking them to do that you wouldn't do yourself. And that's where I think the trust element comes in and that's what builds the relationship. Another part that I wrote down here was that communication creates trust. So constantly thinking about how you're able to communicate to people better and stop people making up their own narratives and just being forward and clear with how you communicate with people.

18:31How have you taken this idea of communication creates trust? Does anything spring to mind for what you've been able to implement in your work? A million things, to be honest. So I've always try to have really strong relationships with my employees and my peers, even as a leader, the relationships are your insurance policy. So the communication side of things, the way that I've always tried to do it is to be very clear and open and honest and transparent in the way that I communicate with people. So I'll try and set clear directions, clear goals, also try and set clear boundaries of like how they can operate within those sort of parameters as well and also communicate what the intent we're trying to achieve i think when people know exactly where they stand they know that they have ownership of their own area they can make their own decisions and that's the way that i've always tried to bestow ownership onto other people is to give them that freedom to make decisions and allow them to communicate back to me when things are going well or when things are not going well.

19:39That's kind of how I've approached it from a communications perspective. It's always been really open, allowed people to voice their opinions on things and also to allow people to speak up when they think that something has been missed. That's a really important key aspect of this, to be honest, is that if you're the leader, it's not about you coming up with all the ideas and pushing them down to the team because soon you'll be surrounded by people who've just got nothing to say. What you want is to essentially explain to the team what you want to happen and then for them to come up with a plan.

20:14Or if you do come up with the plan and they see holes in it, having the confidence in the relationship with them that they can actually say, hey, I think there's maybe a better way to go about this and it's this. And again, that goes back to you being humble enough in your communication from the outset as a leader to be able to adopt that sort of culture, but also for them to have a certain amount of ownership in the plan to be able to feel like this is a worthwhile thing to voice. So I think a lot of these things are obviously heavily reliant on each other and they feed into each other and really are complementary as well.

20:50I've heard this concept in a few different books now. Turn the ship around. It's written by another military guy. It's about turning around the quality of the worst performing submarine in the whole US fleet. The concept is that what you want to be doing is pushing the decision making to the person who's got the most visibility over what the actual problem is itself. Looking at the high level picture of the whole business, if you're trying to make the decisions on which creative you should use for a meta ad, you shouldn't be making those decisions. You don't know best. Somebody else needs to be making the decision so that the person closest to the issue needs to be making it.

21:21Exactly. So there's the concept that Jocko talks about and the name that he gives to that is decentralized command. When you think about that, it's really the difference between the tactics that we saw in the First World War and the tactics we saw in the Second World War. First World War was all about command and control. And it was about people sat in a bunker in London making decisions about what happens in the battlefield in the Somme. And obviously the horrific consequences that happened with millions of men losing their lives as a result of that. And then you look at the sort of approach that we had in the Second World War, the overall goal was to defeat Hitler.

22:00But the strategy is really left up to the men who were on the ground and they were given the command to be able to figure stuff out as they see fit as boots on the ground because they're in the best position to make those decisions and go from there. So that's really the way that I think about that, having read some of these books from people like Jocko. And it's such an important thing. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs sometimes automatically think that they have to be involved in absolutely every decision. And they have to be the one to call the shots. It needs to be their plan and all the rest of it.

22:36Whereas what you realize when you're a little bit more seasoned as an entrepreneur is that if someone has skin in the game in terms of the plan, if they have ownership and they've actually contributed and they think that the majority of this plan is their idea, they will literally run through walls to make sure it happens. That's such a powerful thing when you actually allow people to make those plans themselves because they're making it with the most up-to-date information, the client relationships in mind that they're dealing with, the restrictions they have in terms of budget and resources.

23:10They are definitely the best people to make those calls. But again, it goes back to humility. If you're the type of leader that's not humble enough to allow someone else to make that call, it's never going to happen. I think the analogy between the First World War and the Second World War is such a powerful one because the command and control side of things is that it slows everything down. And that happens in business as well. And we've all experienced that probably in some degrees. When you have to wait for somebody else, some other higher up to make a decision, it slows everything down. You're not fast.

23:41You're not nimble. you're not maneuverable that's where the sort of red tape and the bureaucracy comes in in business a lot of the time when someone's making the decisions on the front lines and they are going with what they see in front of them it's fast and your clients can feel that as well it's palpable when you're dealing with those two different types of approaches you can really tell the difference i think from the customer's perspective especially and also the people who work in the business too Just before we kind of wrap up and finish off, I just wanted to give you a bit of a chance to give an elevator pitch.

24:14Tell us about what you're doing in recruitment at the moment. I run a business called DigiTalent. We are a small but global recruitment agency that specializes in AI and machine learning, hires and roles. We help companies in the UK, US, and also in Australia and a couple in Europe as well to build AI teams. We deal across contract and permanent and executive search and selection as well. So we sort of deal across the whole spectrum of hiring and that very fast paced, bleeding edge side of technology that we find ourselves in at the moment. One thing that we've recently been helping companies with is their journey to actually figuring out how to do AI, as they always ask me.

25:00So we've sort of set up a consulting service in partnership with a company called Lumo, which is all around AI readiness advisory. So we're really helping companies to figure out how to implement AI across the businesses before they're even ready to hire. Lumo are a business that we know from UK AI, which is the UK trade body for the AI industry in the United Kingdom. them. So we met those guys at a round table at the House of Lords and we partnered up and now we advise, consult with companies to actually help them on the journey with AI. All right, let's bring this all together. Here are the three most actionable takeaways from Chris's playbook on leadership strategy and tactics by Jocko Willink.

25:45Number one, step back to see the battlefield. When the chaos hits, whether a massive deal falls through or a client blows up, your instinct as a founder is generally to dive headfirst into the weeds to fix it. Don't. Next time, try this tactic from the book instead. Take a step back, detach yourself physically and emotionally. By stepping back, you elevate your perspective. It's like seeing the whole chessboard, not just a corner of it. This helps you see the most logical way out. It's a brilliant real-world application of Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow. What you're doing is actively moving your brain out of that reactive, panic-driven system one so you can make a calculated strategic decision.

26:28Number two, default to extreme ownership. The core of Jocko's philosophy is simple. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. If an employee misses a target or makes a catastrophic error, it's not on them, it's on you. Either you didn't train them properly, you weren't clear enough with expectations, or you didn't prepare enough for an unexpected event. By putting your hands up and asking, what could I have done differently here? You completely kill any toxic finger-pointing culture that destroys startups. It forces your entire team to start looking in the mirror and owning their solutions. And as a bonus, you might actually learn a couple of lessons about how to deal with and avoid the same mistake happening in the future, even if it didn't feel like your fault.

27:09And number three, build trust before you need it. What Jocko's point here is that you can't lead by barking orders. You have to build a genuine in relationship with your team when things are calm so that when the pressure is on, they naturally trust your decision. This leads to what he calls decentralized command, where your team can understand the ultimate goal so well that they can execute it without you holding their hand. If you love this concept, I'd really recommend that you read Turn the Ship Around next. It's a book with some frankly great stories, but the really important bit is that there's some really valuable lessons in there to help you build a leader-leader culture at your company.

27:46If you want to master these tactics and bulletproof your own leadership style, grab a copy of the book using the link in the show notes. And hey, if you even got one useful insight from today's episode, do me a massive favor and click the follow button on your podcast player right now. If you've been following for a while, why not send this to a friend? These things take two seconds to do and it's the absolute best way to help me grow the show so that I can keep bringing you top tier founders. Thank you so much for listening to Business Book club you and our one book smarter and one step closer to building the business that you want to build so go make it happen and I will see you on the next one