In partnership with
Welcome back to House of Leadership. We explore what it really takes to grow and lead successfully in a fast-paced, high-performance environment.
We publish every Thursday and Sunday.
Thursdays are deep and tactical, practical frameworks, real examples, and leadership tools you can use immediately. Sundays are calm and reflective, with one book, one visual, and one question to sharpen how you think. Thursday builds your capability; Sunday builds your perspective.
Looking to start a newsletter? Use Beehiiv (it’s what we use)
What did we learn this week?
Introducing the first AI-native CRM
Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.
With AI at the core, Attio lets you:
Prospect and route leads with research agents
Get real-time insights during customer calls
Build powerful automations for your complex workflows
Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.
📘 One Book: Extreme Ownership
Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
The big idea
Great leaders don’t choose between accountability and empathy. They take responsibility for everything, so their teams don’t have to carry confusion, chaos, or blame.
Willink and Babin call this Extreme Ownership.
At its core, it’s the belief that:
There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
Most leadership breakdowns happen when responsibility is diluted:
Ownership without clarity → heroic, but exhausting
Clarity without ownership → well-intentioned, but hollow
Neither → blame, politics, and drift
Extreme Ownership lives in the only place that scales: the leader owns the outcome, the process, and the environment the team operates in.
Not control. Not micromanagement. Ownership.
The key takeaway
The fastest way to improve performance is not better talent. It’s clearer ownership.
When leaders fully own results:
Problems surface earlier
Excuses disappear
Teams move faster with less friction
High performers don’t want cover. They want leaders who will say:
“If this failed, it’s on me — now let’s fix it.”
The strongest teams are built on one quiet truth: psychological safety increases when accountability is visible.
Why you should pick this up
If you lead teams in fast-moving, high-pressure environments, Tech, Product, Support, Finance, this book will help you:
Remove blame from your culture without removing standards
Turn missed targets into learning, not finger-pointing
Build trust by owning mistakes early and publicly
Create teams that solve problems instead of escalating them
It gives you a practical leadership lens you can apply in:
Post-incident reviews
Exec escalations
Missed deadlines and delivery slippage
Cross-functional conflict
“This isn’t my job” moments
You don’t need to work harder. You need to own wider.
🗞️ Things worth checking out
Your annual review, created with Shane Parrish
Behind every successful year is honest reflection. This workbook, written by Shane Parrish and reMarkable, helps you find clarity so patterns become visible.
Traditional annual reviews add goals, tasks, and pressure. This is different. It helps you strip everything back to see what to change in your the ahead.
Ready to identify what matters?
🧠 One visual to sit with
Imagine two circles.
The first is labelled: “What I Control.”
The second is labelled: “What I Own.”
Average leaders live in the first circle. Great leaders deliberately expand the second.
Extreme Ownership means your responsibility doesn’t stop at:
Your role
Your function
Your team
It extends to outcomes.
❓ One Question
Where are you waiting for someone else to fix a problem that ultimately lands with you?
What would change this week if you stopped managing around it, and fully owned it?