Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

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.