[fourseventy]

Good Night Moon - 187 times

The Cat In The Hat - 200 times

The Very Hungry Caterpillar - 85 times

But seriously, im on my third re-read of Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, In my opinion its the best book about leadership ever written.

[AnimalMuppet]

The secret of writing childrens' books is to write something that an adult can read 200 times without going insane. You've got to put in something that the adults will smile at.

For slightly older children, try "The Bravest Ever Bear".

[RhysU]

Boom, boom, boom, etc from The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear.

[Infernal]

Hah, I hadn’t even thought about children’s books! When my son was 1-2 years old I had probably 3-4 books like this completely memorized for bedtime. He did too, as occasionally if I would change a phrase for effect “they went to” to “they all went to”, he would often correct me.

[phaus]

Extreme ownership is a great book with lots of sound advice. However, I don't find the approach flawless at all.

These guys had the benefit of being leaders in an organization that is set up to rapidly show you the door if you under-perform. Furthermore, everyone that's on a SEAL team desperately wants to be there. To some extent, extreme ownership falls apart in a regular, non-combat focused military unit and also in many civilian organizations.

If you're a Soldier, the military's authority is an illusion. Don't assume that my next statement means that punishment is my first tool for attempting to remedy under-performance, but at some point with some people it becomes necessary. In those extreme cases, even that's not effective because of the way the military operates. Half of the punishments for being lazy/ineffective at your job only work if you voluntarily participate in being a part of the military. Examples: exercise as punishment only works when people choose to exercise. Putting people on punitive details like picking cigarettes up and raking lines in sand for 12 hours a day only work if the people voluntarily do the work. Some people don't show up at all and some only show up to laugh in your face and tell you to go fuck yourself in front of your superiors.

Even the punishments that don't require participation still do require voluntary participation in a way. In the military if you give someone nonjudicial punishment, typically they lose half of their pay for a month or so, and in extreme cases they'll get permanently demoted in addition to that. So you take their money away. However, for the kind of people that aren't doing their job and don't intend to, that doesn't really matter much. You are giving them 3 meals a day and a place to stay. You don't have the power to take that away from them without kicking them out of the military, which in a regular unit often takes well over a year and always requires leadership support, which may not exist given the fact that most units are operating with less people than they need.

It may be hard to see where I'm going, but my point is this. There are people in the military that don't intend to do their jobs. All of us have run into the same type of people in a civilian workplace. You can't inspire them because they don't want to be inspired. You can't lead them to do what they are supposed to do because not doing it is the only control they feel they have over their lives. The only viable option for some people is to remove them or ignore them and spend your precious time on the people that are getting the mission accomplished. In many cases, the latter is your only option.

I'm no Jocko Willink or Leif Babin in terms of being a Soldier or a leader. However, I spent almost 2 decades in the military and helped numerous Soldiers go from under-performing to be very successful. I learned that in some cases, usually when someone regrets joining the military, that you just have to move on. Sometimes, in spite of what extreme ownership claims, things really aren't your fault. As a leader, most things are your fault though, so I do agree with the overall message even if extreme ownership isn't a magic bullet.

Similar people exist in a civilian context.

Hopefully people won't read the above and assume that I avoid responsibility for my mistakes. On the contrary, I was known in the military and in my civilian job as a person that was honest and forthcoming almost to a fault.

[alexpotato]

Disclaimer: I have no military experience.

Your points on the lessons he mention are very valid. The particular part of the book that matched your description of "this might not work for non SEALs" was when Jocko described how he took full responsibility for a near friendly fire incident. He goes on to say that he earned a lot of respect for being the type of leader that would take accountability. He points out, IIRC, that this respect was gained from both the enlisted men and the officers.

I remember reading that passage and thinking "I've been in plenty of orgs where if someone did that, sure, the 'enlisted' aka line employees might respect that but the 'officers' aka middle managers would immediately think: 'Ah ha! Here is some noble minded fool we can dump our problems on!' "

I'm exaggerating somewhat but only to reinforce the point that I think the book is excellent and agree with you that the lessons taught don't ALWAYS apply.

[hackermailman]

The most frustrating thing about reading that book is when you encounter management that break all the advice in there, like manufacturing nonstop excuses whenever you bring a work problem to them 'well nobody told me about it...everybody had consensus this was what we were going to do so collectively we all share blame'. After reading you can no longer tolerate this leadership style whereas before I just accepted their answers assuming that's how it worked.

[GioM]

I started that book, got about 60% of the way through, and had to put it down. It seemed like Jocko was re-teaching the same lesson over and over again from slightly different angles.

Maybe I missed something big, but that's just the way it felt to me.

[deathgrips]

I think you're missing a lot. It might seem repetitive because in almost all the stories Jocko is practicing almost all the principles at the same time, but in different chapters he definitely teaches different lessons.

[thejackgoode]

I found “Dichotomy of leadership” by them released in 2018 even better put together and formulated, I guess all these podcast skills came to play. Looking forward to second read.

[chrismatheson]

HAHA yes!

add Gruffalo, Room on the broom and Snail and the wale for me

[mrfusion]

Very clever. What about “ Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?”

Do you try to find the mouse on every page in goodnight moon?

[mathattack]

Yes! And the Rainbow Magic series - 200 books that are the equivalent of reading 1 book 200 times.