Take Command, by Jake Wood

Jake Wood. Take Command: Lessons in Leadership: How to Be a First Responder in Business. New York: Crown Business, 2014. 242 pages. ISBN 9780804138383.

Author Jake Wood has turned his experience as a Marine sniper in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into a management book that tells readers how to apply military leadership principles to their work in business. After he left military service, Mr. Wood and fellow veteran William McNulty formed a non-profit organization, Team Rubicon, which provides emergency relief to regions hit by natural disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricane Sandy. Their experiences building and running Team Rubicon as well as Mr. Wood's experience as a sniper inform his perspective on leadership.

Take Command is organized into eight "lessons" in four sections: Prepare, Analyze, Decide, and Act. Each chapter, or lesson, introduces a principle and provides examples from either Mr. Wood's military experience or Team Rubicon to illustrate it. The lessons themselves aren't original: build a high-impact team, maintain transparency, demand accountability, prioritize goals, gather information, understand and accept your risks, don't wait until you have 100% of the information you need (i.e., you can move forward with 80%), overcome set-backs. Mr. Wood concludes with advice to be relentless in executing your plans.

I can't quibble with the principles outlined here; in fact, I found Mr. Wood's discussion of the 80% solution particularly compelling. His military experience certainly informed his work at Team Rubicon, which deploys veterans and medical personnel into potentially dangerous situations to provide emergency relief and medical aid. However, I don't think Take Command connects these experiences closely enough to most business environments. The promise of this book is that we can apply the principles learned in the military to real life business challenges, but because Mr. Wood's experience is primarily in the military and now with Team Rubicon, he has a hard time making those connections to business.

Because the leadership principles are not original and not tied very closely to actual business examples, I can't believe that this book would be a significant help to anyone hoping to learn leadership skills. Nevertheless, Mr. Wood's anecdotes about his military experience and Team Rubicon activities are interesting. I would have preferred a book strictly about Team Rubicon's challenges and achievements while providing emergency relief.