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Aidas Petryla
Aidas Petryla

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Extreme Ownership

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. I offered to take it over and improve it. I was told no.

Developers were constantly bombarded, context switching all day. I suggested acting as a buffer and improving prioritization. Again, no.

Then I pulled rough numbers from Jira.

For every ticket I closed, several more were coming in.

I remember thinking: this does not end in hard work. This ends in collapse.

That was the moment I escalated.

I built a presentation and showed the data to a larger IT group, including skip-level leadership.

Afterward, my department head asked me for the reference.

Nothing changed.

Later I raised concerns to a C-level leader directly, explaining that too much was breaking and the model was unsustainable.

His answer stayed with me.

He said, that’s what firefighters do — you take an axe and a helmet and go into the fire.

And I remember thinking:

No.

A firefighter also tries to stop the building from burning down again.

That was when my understanding of ownership deepened.

I had been taking ownership of my tasks, my systems, my standards.

Now I had to take ownership of my environment.

Because if initiative is suppressed from manager to leadership, and impact is structurally blocked, staying is not perseverance.

Sometimes staying is avoidance.

So I left.

And I never saw that as failure.

I saw it as refusing to outsource responsibility for my values.

And strangely, leaving also forced others to own what they had been ignoring.

Once people started leaving — including strong people the company valued — it became harder to dismiss the problems as individual complaints. Questions started being asked. Leadership started investigating. Another person was brought in. The management setup was reshuffled.

None of that happened because I “won” an argument. It happened because consequences became harder to ignore. In that sense, my leaving did force ownership back into the system.

That changed how I interview to this day.

I probe for red flags.
I challenge vague answers.
I test whether people want ownership, or merely obedience.

That lesson came from pain.
But it stayed.

Extreme ownership, for me, is not only taking responsibility for what is yours to fix.
Sometimes it is recognizing when the responsible act is changing the battlefield.

What ownership are you still avoiding taking?

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