It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

by D. Michael Abrashoff

“It’s your ship. You’re responsible for it. Make a decision and see what happens.”

BEING THE BEST CARRIES RESPONSIBILITY.

“Absolutely.” “I’m coming over to observe you next time.” “Aye-aye, sir. Please do.” I could afford to be serene, even smug. Thanks to a junior petty officer, Fire Controlman Derrick Thomas, Benfold had found a shortcut. The boarding paperwork, required by the United Nations, was excruciatingly time-consuming and tedious, consisting of more than a hundred questions. Worse, half of them had to be answered in radio conversations with the shipmasters, most of whom spoke very poor English. Compiling the entire written report could take days. After watching our officers suffer through this process in an earlier boarding, Petty Officer Thomas spoke up: “Why not create a database and speed this up? A lot of ships make this trip every week.” I was on the bridge at the time. My officers looked at him and looked away. I would not have traded any of my officers for any others in the Navy. They were sharp. They were energetic. They knew their stuff. But as I said before, they were trained not to listen to the crew. Thomas was so junior they barely even acknowledged his existence. So I asked him to elaborate. “We have got electronic access to all these reports for the last year on every ship that’s come in and gone out,” he said. “Of the hundred items on the list of questions, fifty or sixty are routine information that never changes from trip to trip.

People ask how I got along with the other commanding officers. I have to be honest: less well than I should have. If one ship in a ten-ship group is doing conspicuously well, it’s hard to imagine the other nine feeling good about it. Yet I never stopped to consider those feelings, which, of course, included my own competitiveness. That was a mistake on my part. I certainly made life uncomfortable for the nine other commanding officers in my battle group. Their sailors would complain that Benfold was doing this or that, so why couldn’t they? I was proud of our accomplishments, and to me it was logical for the other ships to simply adopt what we were doing. After all, top performance was what everyone was supposedly trying to achieve. That was one area where I failed to put myself in other people’s shoes and see things their way. You might say I was arrogantly naive. In hindsight, I could have been much more supportive of my colleagues—for example, by telling them in advance what we were doing, so they could join us voluntarily rather than having to be ordered to join us later. Being compared unfavorably to Benfold—time after time—must have caused the wrong kind of competition. In my eyes, I was merely competing with myself to have the best ship possible. I never cared what the competition was doing. But in retrospect, it’s obvious that they cared what we were doing, and they didn’t like it one bit. I wish I had seen that at the time. If you decide to go the Benfold route in...

Optimism rules. And the corollary: Opportunities never cease.