What? Yet another book on leadership, filled with generic statements focused on WHAT (which is quite straightforward) instead of HOW (the hard part ...)? Not really, not this time. People who are treated as followers become passive. With scant decision-making ability, they have little motivation to contribute their ingenuity and energy. The Leader-Leader Model 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 of the St. John's College, Santa Fe Leaders and managers face an increasingly complex world, where precise execution, teamwork and enabling of talent are competitive advantages. David Marquet provides a blue print, 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 To be honest - I have never had a strong interest in military-oriented reading material, fiction or non-fiction. Aside from my interest in pre 20th century piracy on the high seas (more of social class/mobility angle here) - I haven't really read any books about life on boats or submarines. For people at all levels to make effective decisions, they must be fully aligned with the organization’s purpose, and thoroughly understand the organization’s goals and decision-making criteria. You can learn about the range of mechanisms to develop clarity, build trust, inspire people and develop clear guiding principles at all levels, in our Turn the Ship Around summary bundle. Conclusion GETTING STARTED Figure out the types of decisions that’d affect your organization’s ability to achieve excellence in those areas.The leader-leader structure is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership” Use "I intend to... " to turn passive followers into active leaders. Avoid disempowered phrases such as "Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . ." Enough context (justification) should be provided with this statement so that there would be no need for additional clarification and you can just approve the statement. EMBRACE THE INSPECTORS is a mechanism for CONTROL, organizational control." Use the opportunities provided by inspection to learn where improvements can be made.

That’s why “Turn the Ship Around” suggests that you think outside the box! Instead of a “leader-follower” approach, develop a “leader-leader” strategy. In short, train trailblazers – not devotees. From 1999-2001, Captain L. David Marquet served as Captain of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. At the beginning of his tenure, Santa Fe was one of the worst subs in the fleet. His book Turn the Ship Around! is the phenomenal story of how the ship turned from poor to excellent during his tenure and beyond through his leadership. If you haven’t read it, I hope this article inspires you to do so. I will summarize it and then briefly relate the book’s principles to Scrum. Leader-Follower vs. Leader-Leader Before long, each member of Marquet's crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command. Leaders at Level 1 may use language like, “This is what you need.” They will then proceed to provide step-by-step guidance on what to do. Team members on this same level, will normally say something along the lines of, “Tell me what I should be doing.”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 counter-culture, reengineering the very definition of leadership accepted by the U.S. Navy for as long as it has existed. He took huge risk 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 21stCentury 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 & CEO of Next Jump, Inc.) 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 everyday 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, which was in crisis when I arrived in 2010 and now is 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 at the GE Dallas Service Center and former crewmember, USS Santa Fe 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 of the St. John's College, Santa Fe) When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.” The rating is for the book, not the content. The ideas and concepts the book brings up are quite interesting and sound like they would be quite useful to many organisations. However, it's written in a simplistic structure that came off cheesy and often annoying. The writing, in general, was amateurish and the narrator for the audiobook (who happened to be the author as well) did a pretty horrible job. The feeling I got from the whole experience was that the author managed to get some success with a new leadership methodology and let that success get to his head.

That made the members of the USS Santa Fe crew much more motivated and trustworthy. They didn’t ask for permissions. But they didn’t shy away from taking the blame either. They felt both freer and more accountable. The traditional leader-follower model practiced in the U.S. Navy and most companies and organizations assumes there are two types of people: leaders who make decisions and followers who implement them. One of the 12 best business books of all time…. Timeless principles of empowering leadership.”– USA Today See how the discussion naturally flows from; Are we competent and safe, to are we doing the right thing?

Most people unconsciously divide the world into leaders vs followers, and make assumptions about what each group can/can’t do. Such assumptions influence our thoughts and actions to impact the performance of individual employees and the organization. Fake it til you make it" - or, as the author says "Acting your way to new thinking" as a mechanism for control. Even if you feel bad - smile - that will eventually make you feel better. Will this book shake your world? In my case, it didn't, but as it's a nice set of R-L cases, it's truly educative & I believe it has provided my some additional input to "digest" intellectually.

This is kind of an autobiography, but it's also an in-detail description of changing a ship's structure from 'one leader, many followers' (leader-follower) to 'one leader, many leaders' (leader-leader) - instead of having one guy saying what's to be done, you shift decision making power downwards so you get independent layers and groups. That's the basic gist, but there's much more here, how to get people to politically, emotionally, socially accept such changes, how Marquet himself struggled to implement these changes, what went well, what went wrong, really good thoughts on empowerment vs. emancipation within organisations, the strange benefits of deliberate action [1], and so on.

Our Critical Review

USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY." Note achievements and legacy - these are helpful for guiding the team. He increased clarity on his ship by coming up with guiding principles for the ship--things like courage, openness, etc. Nothing revolutionary--who hasn’t seen this in an organization? But to ensure that this list of principles did not just become a piece of paper on the wall, Marquet embedded the principles in the wording of the ship’s awards and evaluations. So, for example, when someone received an award, the reasoning behind it was given in the language of the ship’s principles: “Petty Officer M exhibited Courage and Openness when reporting…” (Marquet 182). This brought the principles to life. It embedded the language and thinking of the principles into the actions of the crew. One can raise some arguments that the environment was specific (military, elitist, non-typical supply:demand in "job market", etc.), but in fact author's ideas are applicable in different contexts, sometimes with re-adjustments (SKIN IN THE GAME!), but they remain quite valid.