The Navy SEAL Art of War, by Rob Roy

After 22 years as a Navy SEAL, author Rob Roy formed a company that provides training in leadership skills to corporate executives and young professionals. The training is based on the methods that the Navy uses to train new SEALs. Mr. Roy tells us in the introduction to The Navy SEAL Art of War that he has long been a fan of Sun Tzu's Art of War, and has subsequently decided to share his philosophy on leadership in a similar manner. In 57 short chapters, Mr. Roy conveys what he thinks makes a good leader. While this is an easy book to read, and I don't have any quibbles about the leadership traits that Mr. Roy espouses (e.g., work as a team, be humble, communicate clearly, and so on), the book has three main weaknesses.

The first is that Mr. Roy describes many of the traits and abilities of a Navy SEAL, but doesn't make the connection to the corporate or work world. For example, in the chapter "Festina Lente: Make Haste Slowly" he describes a war simulation exercise in which he participated and had the most kills of any of the players. He claims "While SEALs are usually faster, smarter, and more adaptable than their adversaries, we're also more elegant in how we operate. That elegance translates into lethal accuracy when it matters most." (p. 29). He goes on to describe a quarterback who maintains calm under pressure, and another simulation in which he "killed" 30 targets in 34 seconds. He wraps up by telling the reader that leaders need to remain calm under pressure and "carry yourself with elegance." (p. 31). While his anecdotes are interesting, his lesson appears to be "SEALs remain calm and elegant under pressure, and you should too." I'm not sure how helpful that will be to most readers.

Another weakness of The Navy SEAL Art of War is that most women will not see themselves reflected in its page. Many of the anecdotes that Mr. Roy uses to illustrate his principles involve war operations. Most of the non-war-related anecdotes come from Mr. Roy's company SOT-G (Special Operations Training Group) and its special training programs. He described one 10-day program in which the participants had to swim 2 miles, do a number of exercises in small groups such as squats while holding large logs, and participate in simulation war exercises. I have no doubt that this kind of training and exercise can be life-changing for the men who participate, but when I look at the photos on his website, out of dozens of pictures of groups of men exercising together I only saw one woman among them. Throughout his book Mr. Roy consistently referred to leaders as men; I only saw the pronoun "she" used once. In addition to the complete disregard of women as leaders, Mr. Roy's program would leave out anyone with a disability or any kind of weakness. In the end, while I appreciate that physical adversity can be character-building, I don't think it's a critical requirement to build and lead teams in the workplace.

Finally, while I acknowledge that Mr. Roy modelled The Navy SEAL Art of War after Sun Tzu's Art of War, and he specifically mentioned that he admired Sun Tzu's pithiness, I think he may have taken the brevity too far. I don't have an issue with short chapters in general (with 57 chapters in 199 pages, they're all pretty short), I do think he could have put a little effort into some of the chapters which are basically just a short list of bullet points. There are eight such chapters. For example, "Performance Expectations" (p. 167) consists of this list:

• Give at least 100 percent, 100 percent of the time.
• If your leaders are failing the team, remove them quickly and replace them with someone who can get the job done.
• Get it right every single time ... there is no tolerance for error.
• In the SEALs, if someone screws up in our line of work, people may die.

This is the kind of list that you can find anywhere, with the exception of the last point, which is pointless in this context. How does that statement help someone learning how to be a better leader in the work world? One of these chapters "Commit to Commitment" consists of only three sentences: "There's nothing that frustrates me more than someone who fails to give 100 percent effort, 100 percent of the time. If you're going to show up, show up. If you're not going to show up, don't show up." (p. 153). Aside from the fact that this statement is repeated 14 pages later, I don't think it's worthy of its own chapter in a book on leadership. Since many of these bullet-point chapters appear in the last quarter of the book, I wonder if Mr. Roy was simply running out of steam.

Overall, I would describe The Navy SEAL Art of War as leadership-lite: an example of empty-calorie management literature that can be popular with readers. It reminds me a lot of Take Command: Lessons in Leadership by Jake Wood, a management book based on Mr. Wood's experience as a Marine sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan, reviewed on this blog here.

Rob Roy, with Chris Lawson. The Navy SEAL Art of War: Leadership Lessons from the World's Most Elite Fighting Force. New York: Crown Business, 2015. 203 pages. ISBN 9780804137751.