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

by L. David Marquet

After those events were over, however, I asked the XO about the missed items, and he brought out the “tickler” (add ominous music here), a three-inch binder maintained by his yeomen that had all of the messages—such as this one—that we received. They were sorted by department and due date. He looked in the book and proudly reported that, sure enough, we were tracking this particular message and knew we hadn’t responded. So we had a system that was focused on understanding the status instead of actually getting the work done. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy to look at the binder, and in any event, it was stuck up in a locker in the XO’s stateroom. Like every other submarine we would have weekly “tickler” meetings where the department chiefs and department heads would sit in the wardroom for an hour or more going through the binder page by page. Of course, none of this activity actually resulted in getting any of the work done; it simply allowed us to catalogue what we were supposed to do and what we were delinquent on. It sucked up a lot of time, valuable supervisory time. This was how everyone did it, always had.