I’ve been reading “Extreme Ownership”, and I want to reflect on some ideas through my own experience. Starting with the first principle itself. Extreme Ownership. Years before I had the term, I think I had already wrestled with it. I joined a company and by day three I was dealing with production incidents with almost no onboarding. Firefighting was normal. But what struck me was not the fire itself. It was that people kept fixing consequences while causes were left standing. So I started treating my role differently. Not as “close the ticket in front of you,” but as: where are the bottlenecks, why does this keep breaking, what could be improved so the same incidents stop repeating? That led me into uncomfortable places. There was a password management solution defended because it was “free,” while its maintenance risk was quietly pushed into operational work. I argued that economics made no sense. There was critical automation written in ways I believed were deeply unmaintainable, yet heavily relied upon.…