Extreme Ownership
Chapter 7 – Prioritize and Execute
Prioritize and Execute addresses one of the biggest challenges leaders face today: everything feels urgent, and there never seems to be enough time to slow down and set priorities. With too many projects competing for attention, leaders often end up reacting instead of leading. Many of us are “decisively engaged.”
This chapter reinforces a timeless truth echoed by Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Prioritization requires intentional time and clarity. Leaders must step back, assess what matters most right now, and focus the team’s energy on the highest-impact tasks before moving on to the next.
Prioritize and Execute also ties closely to decentralized command. When leaders build capable teams, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and trust them to execute, they can delegate effectively. That delegation frees leaders to think strategically instead of being buried in tactical noise.
This is another area where AI can provide real leverage. Used correctly, AI can help leaders analyze projects, compare priorities, surface tradeoffs, and sharpen decision-making. I highly recommend the books The Ai Accelerator by Mike Koenigs and The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods. Both offer practical insight into using AI not as a shortcut, but as a strategic thinking partner.
The takeaway is clear: prioritization is not optional—it’s a leadership responsibility. Leaders who fail to prioritize create chaos. Leaders who slow down, think clearly, and execute decisively give their teams the clarity needed to win.
In this chapter, five excerpts really stood out to me.
- “…a leader must remain calm and make the best decisions possible.”
- “Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously. The team will likely fail at each of those tasks. Instead, leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute. When overwhelmed, fall back upon this principle: Prioritize and Execute.”
- “A particularly effective means to help Prioritize and Execute under pressure is to stay at least a step or two ahead of real-time problems. Through careful contingency planning, a leader can anticipate likely challenges that could arise during execution and map out an effective response to those challenges before they happen.”
- “If the team has been briefed and understands what actions to take through such likely contingencies, the team can then rapidly execute when those problems arise, even without specific direction from leaders. This is a critical characteristic of any high-performance, winning team in any business or industry.”
- To implement Prioritize and Execute in any business, team, or organization, a leader must:
- evaluate the highest priority problem.
- lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team.
- develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible.
- direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task.
- move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat.
- when priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain.
- don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.
Here are a few questions to help you dive deeper into this chapter:
- When everything feels urgent, do I create clarity by prioritizing—or do I transmit my own overwhelm to the team and call it “being busy”? (Distinguishes leadership from reaction.)
- What is the single highest-priority problem my team should be focused on right now, and have I communicated it simply enough that they could execute without further direction? (Tests whether priorities are real or assumed.)
- Where have I failed to plan for likely contingencies, forcing my team to improvise under pressure instead of executing with confidence? (Connects calm execution to preparation.)
- Have I built and trusted a team capable of decentralized execution—or am I still the bottleneck because I haven’t delegated authority along with responsibility? (Links Prioritize & Execute to leadership development.)
- If priorities are constantly shifting, is that because the environment truly changed—or because I didn’t take the time to think, analyze, and decide clearly at the leadership level? (Forces ownership of chaos.)
Go – Be the Hero of Your Story