510: The Ego Trap In Leadership. The Need To Lead Pt.2. With Dave Berke.

What if leadership could be measured by what happens when you’re not there?

That question hums through Dave Burke’s need to lead, and it landed on me like a punch and a promise. Burke—Top Gun instructor, frontline ground commander and later F‑22 and F‑35 pilot—uses his own missteps and hard-won humility to reframe leadership as something you carry, not perform. I found myself unsettled, impressed, and oddly relieved by how honest the book gets.

Ownership: the heavy, practical muscle of leadership

The most wrenching section recounts the death of Marine Chris Leon. Burke admits he didn’t fully own the failure at the time; reading Extreme Ownership years later forced a reckoning. That admission is blunt and human—no tidy resolutions, just a leader wrestling with avoidance, blame, and the corrective power of true ownership.

What struck me was the distinction between guilt and responsibility. Burke doesn’t say he could’ve guaranteed a different outcome. He says he failed to look for fixes he could control, and that omission mattered. That clarity makes ownership feel less like ceremony and more like daily, uncomfortable work.

Preemptive ownership

Burke coins a practical variant of the concept: preemptive ownership. Don’t only accept blame after failure—anticipate it, design changes, and force the organization to adapt. It’s a small linguistic shift with big tactical consequences. That idea alone will alter how teams set standards and run after risks.

Listen more than you speak

The book’s quieter sections stopped me. Burke’s return home from Ramadi is candid about short fuses, bad dreams and the damage done by speaking first. He learned to listen—to his wife, to his team, and to himself. The prescription is simple: stop talking, ask, then listen. The result felt immediate in his life and marriage. I felt my own impatience get called out by proxy.

Humility when skills become liabilities

Two scenes cement this lesson: a meltdown during F‑22 tactics training and a string of zero‑visibility carrier landings. In the sim Burke realizes years of experience are suddenly counterproductive—his habits are liabilities. That moment of humiliation becomes useful because he lets go, learns again from younger instructors, and then leads those who are still struggling.

There is a cultural note here: true leaders swallow pride and learn from people younger, less experienced, or outside their tribe. Burke’s military stories make this point visceral.

Team-first, down to the smallest role

The carrier landing chapter is almost cinematic: faith-based approaches, HUD cues, paddle calls, and a landing so blind it feels like miracle and machine. Burke’s takeaway is not a pilot’s brag. It’s gratitude for the plane captain, the LSO, the maintenance crew—every person who made that landing possible. Leadership, he suggests, is ensuring credit and systems exist for those people.

Decentralized command as insurance

When Burke’s family crisis pulls him away from the nascent F‑35 program, the squadron keeps moving. That’s not luck. It’s the result of disciplined decentralization—training people to decide and own work when the leader is absent. That’s what “leadership outlasts the leader” looks like in practice.

What to do next—small, urgent moves

• Take ownership: Identify one preventable risk in your area and assign ownership today.
• Listen: Try a 48-hour experiment—ask more, speak less, then record what you learn.
• Preemptive ownership: Draft one procedural change that could stop a common failure before it occurs.

These are not feel-good platitudes. Burke gives immediate action drills and scripts. They are practical and repeatable.

Final thought

Reading need to lead felt like shadowing a leader through the worst days and the quiet wins. I left with a clearer, smaller job description for leadership: own what you can, listen to what you resist, and build a team that functions without you. That last sentence lingered. It should linger for anyone who leads, loves, or plans to be missed.