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

by D. Michael Abrashoff

On the way to Jeddah, Dr. Perry was multitasking again: He was in the cockpit with the pilots because he wanted to understand the avionics of the new C-17s. On the runway at Jeddah, he saw the other C-17 I had on standby there, and he looked at me and said, “Mike, there are only ten of these planes anywhere. What are the odds on another one being here?” I never told him I had set that up, with three more along the route. He didn’t have to know; it wasn’t something he needed to worry about. My job was to make sure the secretary’s mind was free to think about the big problems, and that he didn’t have to give a thought to how to get there or what was next on the schedule. I wanted to lift every other burden off his shoulders. I even called his wife for him from time to time to let her know what we were doing, because he didn’t have time to call her himself. My role was to create the conditions in which the policy makers could do their work. I wanted to be like a helmsman working so deftly, maneuvering the ship in difficult conditions, that the skipper never has to tell me which way to move the rudder or how far to move it.