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

by D. Michael Abrashoff

“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.