Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

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Copyright © Louis David Marquet, 2012

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Purchase only authorized editions.

Originally published in the United States of America by Greenleaf Book Group Press

ISBN 978-1-101-62369-5

The views presented are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the United States Department of Defense or of the United States Navy or its components.

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PRAISE FOR

Turn the Ship Around!

I don’t know of a finer model of this kind of empowering leadership than Captain Marquet. And in the pages that follow you will find a model for your pathway.

—Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

To say I’m a fan of David Marquet would be an understatement. I’m a fully fledged groupie. He is the kind of leader who comes around only once a generation. He is the kind of leader who doesn’t just know how to lead, he knows how to build leaders. His ideas and lessons are invaluable to anyone who wants to build an organization that will outlive them.

—Simon Sinek, optimist and author of Start with Why

How do we release the intellect and initiative of each member of the organization toward a common purpose? Here’s the answer: with fascinating storytelling and a deep understanding of what motivates and inspires. David Marquet provides leaders in the military, business, and education a powerful vehicle that will delight, provoke, and encourage them to act.

—Michael P. Peters, president, St. John’s College, Santa Fe

"I owe a lot to Captain David Marquet, not only for turning the Santa Fe around during some REALLY bad times, but I learned many lessons on leadership from him that have been invaluable in my post-Navy life. I preach the three legs (control, competence, clarity) of Leader-Leader every day to empower my people and move the decisions to where the information lives. I used these principles to turn around the GE Dallas generator repair department that was in crisis when I arrived in 2010 and is now the best generator repair department in the GE network. Now I am tasked with turning around the Dallas steam turbine repair department."

—Adam McAnally, steam turbine cell leader, GE Dallas Service Center, and former crew member, USS Santa Fe

This terrific read actually provides new and valuable insights into how to lead. And nothing important gets done without leadership. Captain Marquet takes you through his life of learning how to lead and presents you with a winning formula: Not leader-follower, but leader-leader. It’s about leading by getting others to take responsibility—and like it. It works for business, politics, and life.

—Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations, member of many business boards, and former columnist for The New York Times

"It’s The Hunt for Red October meets Harvard Business School. Turn the Ship Around! is the consummate book on leadership for the Information Age—where unleashing knowledge-workers’ intellectual capital is pivotal in optimizing organizational performance, from maximizing market share and minimizing customer churn to improving margins. Captain Marquet’s thesis is a complete paradigm shift in leadership philosophy. This new approach to leadership is applicable in all industries and across all corporate functions. If you’re an organizational behavior or leadership expert or enthusiast, this book can have a substantial impact on you and your organization’s ability to meet its goals."

—Joe DeBono, founder and president, MBA Corps, and Merrill Lynch wealth manager

"David Marquet’s message in Turn the Ship Around! inspires the empowerment of engaged people and leadership at all levels. He encourages leaders to release energy, intellect, and passion in everyone around them. Turn the Ship Around! challenges the paradigm of the hierarchical organization by revealing the process to tear down pyramids, create a flat organization, and develop leaders, not followers."

—Dale R. Wilson, Sr., business management professional and editor/blogger at Command Performance Leadership

"This is the story of Captain David Marquet’s unprecedented experiment in the most rigid of environments—on the Santa Fe, a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine. He had the courage to operate counterculture, reengineering the very definition of leadership accepted by the U.S. Navy for as long as it has existed. He took huge risks to do this. The outcome was revolutionary—within a few short months, the crew of the Santa Fe went from worst to first. In today’s information age, human capital is our most precious resource. It is the twenty-first-century weapon of choice. Captain David Marquet’s experiment in leadership has far greater application to the entire business world. This is thought leadership."

—Charlie Kim, founder and CEO, Next Jump, Inc.

Leaders and managers face an increasingly complex world where precise execution, teamwork, and enabling of talent are competitive advantages. David Marquet provides a blueprint, along with real-life examples and implementation mechanisms. Anyone who is charged with leading and making a difference needs to read this.

—John Cooper, president and CEO, Invesco Distributors

David Marquet’s book discusses the ‘successful motivation’ that provided his people with the energy to overcome difficult obstacles. The values that he imbued in his folks provided a burst of energy that positively energized them by satisfying their needs for achievement—providing appropriate recognition, providing a sense of belonging, developing self-esteem, permitting a feeling of control, and permitting an ability to live up to appropriate standards. This type of leadership energizes the workforce and allows senior management to paint the future and light a path that takes the entire team to it. This is a must-read for all who desire good moral influence on the workforce!

—Vice Admiral Al Konetzni (USN, ret.), former Pacific Fleet submarine commander

"The legacy of a commanding officer, or the leader of any organization, is how well the organization performs after he/she departs and the subsequent motivation, success, and institutional contribution of those next-generation leaders who are trained and developed. Read Turn the Ship Around! and you will learn how to build enduring high performers who can’t wait to get to work."

—Admiral Thomas B. Fargo (USN, ret.), former commander, U.S. Pacific Command, chairman, Huntington Ingalls Industries

"Captain Marquet’s compelling leadership journey inspires each of us to imagine a world where every human being is intellectually engaged and fully committed to solving our toughest challenges. If it can be done on a nuclear submarine, it can be done everywhere. Turn the Ship Around! delivers a brilliant message."

—Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

What I learned from and with David Marquet is that developing a bottom-up, Leader-Leader culture produces highly empowered people and highly effective teams. It worked on a nuclear submarine and it worked in the mountains of Afghanistan. That said, cultivating a Leader-Leader culture is much easier said than done because you must overturn almost everything people grow up thinking and learning about leadership.

—Captain (Sel) Dave Adams, USN, former Weapons Officer, USS Santa Fe, Khost Province PRT commander, commanding officer, USS Santa Fe

David Marquet was handpicked to turn around a struggling submarine crew. With leadership and character he not only turned a ship around, but mentored and grew an unprecedented number of future commanding officers and senior sailors who continue to create additional leaders wherever they serve. His methods and lessons apply to every leadership challenge in military, business, or academia.

—Rear Admiral Mark Kenny (USN, ret.), CEO, KENNCOR

Dedicated to the crew of the USS Santa Fe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for the Book

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Stephen R. Covey

Introduction

Cast of Characters

PART I

STARTING OVER

1 | Pain

2 | Business as Usual

3 | Change of Course

4 | Frustration

5 | Call to Action

6 | Whatever They Tell Me to Do!

7 | I Relieve You!

PART II

CONTROL

8 | Change, in a Word

9 | "Welcome Aboard Santa Fe!"

10 | Under Way on Nuclear Power

11 | I Intend To . . .

12 | Up Scope!

13 | Who’s Responsible?

14 | A New Ship

15 | We Have a Problem

PART III

COMPETENCE

16 | Mistakes Just Happen!

17 | We Learn

18 | Under Way for San Diego

19 | All Present and Accounted For

20 | Final Preparations

PART IV

CLARITY

21 | Under Way for Deployment

22 | A Remembrance of War

23 | Leadership at Every Level

24 | A Dangerous Passage

25 | Looking Ahead

26 | Combat Effectiveness

27 | Homecoming

28 | A New Method of Resupplying

29 | Ripples

Afterword: Where Are They Now?

Glossary: Technical Terms, Slang, and Military Jargon

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to acknowledge the crew of the USS Santa Fe who served with me from 1999 through 2001. They set aside their notions of what should be and engaged with me on a courageous journey. Whatever success I had was theirs.

Recognition goes to my publisher, Clint Greenleaf, who showed confidence in my project after a chance meeting in New York.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover deserves credit for establishing the naval nuclear propulsion program. He interviewed me in 1981, selected me for the program, and gave me the opportunity to command a nuclear-powered submarine.

I’d like to acknowledge the inspirational leaders I’ve served with in the Navy including Marc Pelaez, Steve Howard, Mark Kenny, and Al Konetzni.

Great thanks go to my readers Dan Gillcrist, Jack Harrison, Lauren Kohl, and Rob Tullman, who immeasurably improved the document.

Special thanks go to Arthur Jacobson. His support sustained me during times when the project was in jeopardy of failing.

Stephen Covey rode Santa Fe in 2000 and played an enormously important role. Not only did his words in 7 Habits show a path I hadn’t seen, but his enthusiasm and faith in the project helped me maintain my resolve.

Simon Sinek played a key role as inspiration, mentor, critic, and coach. He has helped me find my Why. Thank you, Simon.

I would like to particularly acknowledge my wife, Jane, who gave me the courage to follow my own path and endured while I struggled to tell the story.

FOREWORD

I had the opportunity to ride the USS Santa Fe during Captain Marquet’s command tour and observed firsthand the impact of his leadership approach. It had a profound impact on what I thought possible in terms of empowered and engaged workplaces.

I had been training U.S. Navy officers in leadership during the dot-com era when I started hearing about something really special happening on a submarine in Hawaii. When an opportunity arose to ride the Santa Fe, I jumped at it. I embarked on Captain Marquet’s submarine to see what the buzz was about. Never before had I observed such empowerment. We stood on the bridge of this multibillion-dollar nuclear submarine in the crystal clear waters off Lahaina, Maui, moving silently along the surface of the water. Shortly after getting under way, a young officer approached the captain and said, Sir, I intend to take this ship down four hundred feet. Captain Marquet asked about the sonar contacts and bottom depth and then instructed this young man to give us another few minutes on the bridge before carrying out his intention.

Throughout the day, people approached the captain intending to do this or to do that. The captain would sometimes ask a question or two, and then say, Very well. He reserved only the tip-of-the-iceberg-type decisions for his own confirmation. The great mass of the iceberg—the other 95 percent of the decisions—were being made without any involvement or confirmation by the captain whatsoever. Wherever I went on the submarine—the control room, the torpedo room, even the galley where they were preparing lunch—I witnessed a dispersed intensity of operations I hadn’t expected. The crew was amazingly involved and there was a constant low-level chatter of sharing information.

I can’t say I actually saw the captain give an order.

I asked David how he achieved this turnabout. He said he wanted to empower his people as far as he possibly could within the Navy’s confines, and maybe a little bit more. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye when he told me that. He felt if he required them to own the problem and the solution to it, they would begin to view themselves as a vitally important link in the chain of command. He created a culture where those sailors had a real sense of adding value. But that answer only makes clear his objective, not what it actually takes—from the top man in the organization and everyone else—to accomplish this.

How do you create such an organization? What does it take?

The answer is in this book.

What I Love About This Book

First of all, this is a great story, one of self-discovery, tension, and the lonely self-doubts of the leader who sets off on an unknown path. We know now that Captain Marquet’s experiment on the Santa Fe was wildly successful, but at the time, neither he nor the courageous crew who embraced this new way of running an organization knew if it would work.

Second, the book provides the specific mechanisms they used on the Santa Fe to achieve the transformation. We learn what they did, how the crew reacted—good or bad—and how the mechanisms matured with time. The good news is that these mechanisms are about how we interact as people, and are universally applicable. You can apply them in your organization—business, school, government, and family.

Third, the book presents a comprehensive paradigm shift for how we think about leadership. Captain Marquet has coined the phrase leader-leader to differentiate it from the leader-follower approach that traditional leadership models have espoused. I think that laying out this distinction in such opposing terms is a good idea. Having personally witnessed how the Santa Fe operated, I can attest that this new way is not a nuanced modification of how we are doing business now; it is fundamentally different, and that is where its power lies.

Why You Want to Read This Book

No matter where you are in your company’s organization chart, you’ll want to read this book. People at the top will learn how they can release the passion, intellect, and energy of those below them. They may be unwittingly behaving and taking actions that work against those goals.

People on the front lines will also find ways to embrace decision making and make it easier for bosses to let go of control.

We are in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in human history, where the primary work of mankind is moving from the Industrial Age of control to the Knowledge Worker Age of release. As Albert Einstein said, The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. They certainly won’t be solved by one person; even, and especially, the one at the top.

Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential. You may be able to buy a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only. The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed volunteers.

My definition of leadership is this: Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves. I don’t know of a finer model of this kind of empowering leadership than Captain Marquet’s. And in the pages that follow, you will find a model for your pathway.

Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position. I wish you well on your voyage!

—STEPHEN R. COVEY, SPRING 2012

INTRODUCTION

People are frustrated.

Most of us are ready to give it our all when we start a job. We are usually full of ideas for ways to do things better. We eagerly offer our whole intellectual capacity only to be told that it’s not our job, that it’s been tried before, or that we shouldn’t rock the boat. Initiative is viewed with skepticism. Our suggestions are ignored. We are told to follow instructions. Our work is reduced to following a set of prescriptions. Our creativity and innovations go unappreciated. Eventually, we stop trying and just toe the line. With resignation, we get by. Too often that’s where the story of our work life ends.

Even the most promising employees can go through this downward evolutionary spiral. Take Ian, for example, who should have been viewed as a model employee by the multibillion-dollar communications company that hired him. Instead, his first corporate employment experience was so disheartening he swore never to return. He’s now an entrepreneur. When I asked Ian what went wrong, he told me: I could complete my day’s work in two hours. I asked for more, and I was met with ‘in time, young man.’ I had no decision-making power. And this from a company that has a reputation for thoughtful leadership and innovative products!

Ian quit and found a more satisfying way to spend his time. You know, sure, maybe over time things would have improved, but who wants to gamble their career—no, their life energy—on the hope of a sea change at an established, ‘successful’ company. I went on to pursue my dreams, and I’ve done so.

If you have felt the urge to follow Ian’s example, you are not alone. Worker satisfaction in America is at an all-time low.¹ Worker engagement and commitment to their employers is also at a low.² As of November 2011, unemployment had been at 9 percent for thirty-one months. You’d think that everybody who had a job would be happy just to have one, but that is not the case.

This deliberate disengagement is costing billions in lost productivity. Disengaged, dissatisfied, uncommitted employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of their colleagues. Gallup estimates that within the U.S. workforce, this cost is more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone.³ As large as the cost is in lost productivity, my sense is that it is dwarfed by the costs of lost joy and happiness.

Bosses are frustrated as well.

If you are a boss, you have likely been stymied by the lack of passion and ownership you see among your workforce. You probably have tried to encourage them to make decisions only to have many seem more comfortable simply doing what they are told. Empowerment programs start well but don’t sustain themselves. New workers come into the organization straight from school expecting to be given prescriptions for how to do their work.

This situation exists in even the best companies. For example, Dr. Scott Mesh is CEO of Los Niños, a company dedicated to assisting with the educational development of special needs children. Los Niños has been a Best Company to Work for in New York award winner in multiple recent years. I met some of Scott’s employees and recognized that he’d assembled a pretty elite team.

Still, Scott has his frustrations.