[bitexploder]

Sure, that quote with no context is reduced to meaningless platitude. The context is that no matter what a leader, the person responsible for making decisions and owning them owns it all and never puts blame on a subordinate for failure. If something goes wrong, the buck stops with the leader. When a team can rely on it's leadership to take responsibility for failure and to share the success broadly and generously amazing things can happen. It really is not so different in philosophy from Adam Grant and his whole take on givers and takers. Takers are basically selfish and focus on themselves. Givers give freely to others and seem much more likely to be good leaders willing to take responsibility and negative consequences onto themselves to spare their team, but also to understand a failure and improve. It also allows teams to share success and is in my book a "proven" leadership style that yields results in the real world.

Edit: Also -- it is a fair practice to be skeptical of any group that gets beatified in the media and by military PR wonks. But I have read his book and listened to his words and directly applied his general principles to my day to day life and it has helped me personally. It did not change my political views or dislike of military culture one bit.

[thinkfurther]

You cannot "take" responsibility. You can face the responsibility you have, or don't. You cannot shed one iota of it, or take one additional iota. And "subordinates" or also responsible for the orders they follow. Their leader cannot absolve them.

[bitexploder]

This seems like digging at meaningless pedantry now. We are arguing over phrasing and not intent. In almost any corporate or military environment it is extremely common for leaders to blame some external circumstance for the failure of a given project or mission, instead of looking at themselves as the root cause of failure. I think it is "understood" that this is the common definition of "taking" responsibility vs. displacing it to some external entity (a subordinate). This is not about absolution for mistakes but how a leader is the ultimate responsible party for leadership decisions that put subordinates and projects into a box that can define the ultimate success or failure of goals.