Narrator: Aboard a nuclear submarine, the captain gives an order: "Ahead two-thirds." The helmsman, responsible for executing the command, does nothing. The captain repeats the order, his voice sharper this time. Still, nothing. The helmsman finally turns and says the order is impossible; the ship’s engine doesn't have an "ahead two-thirds" setting. In that tense, embarrassing moment, Captain L. David Marquet had a stunning realization. He had given an order based on his training for a different class of submarine, and his crew was so conditioned to follow that they almost let him drive them into a mistake. What if the order hadn't been impossible, but just wrong? This single incident became the catalyst for one of the most radical leadership transformations in the U.S. Navy.

This journey from a flawed command-and-control mindset to a revolutionary new model of empowerment is chronicled in Marquet's book, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules. It tells the story of how the USS Santa Fe, once the worst-performing submarine in the fleet, became a model of excellence by dismantling the traditional leader-follower hierarchy and proving that true leadership means creating more leaders, not more followers.

Narrator: The fundamental flaw of traditional leadership, Marquet argues, is that it’s built for an industrial age of physical labor, not an information age of cognitive work. The model assumes that authority should reside at the top, and information should be passed up the chain for a decision. This creates bottlenecks, disengages the workforce, and leads to poor decisions. Marquet’s solution was radical: don’t move information to authority; move authority to the information.

When he took command of the Santa Fe, he found a crew that was disempowered and passive. The chiefs, the experienced senior enlisted leaders, felt their authority had been stripped away by layers of bureaucracy. A prime example was the process for approving a sailor's leave request, which required a stack of signatures from officers. Marquet asked the chiefs what one change would make the biggest difference. Their answer was simple: let them be in charge of their own people’s leave.

Marquet agreed. With a one-word change to the ship's regulations, the final approval authority for enlisted leave was given to the Chief of the Boat. This seemingly small administrative change was seismic. Suddenly, the chiefs were truly in charge. They were now responsible for managing their sailors' schedules, training, and readiness. They couldn't blame officers for delays or problems. Control was given to the people with the most information about the crew, and with it came accountability. This was the first step in deconstructing the leader-follower machine and building a leader-leader culture where everyone was expected to take ownership.

Narrator: Changing an ingrained culture is notoriously difficult. Most leaders try to do it through speeches and mission statements, hoping to change how people think. Marquet discovered it was far more effective to change how people act. Instead of trying to inspire new thinking, he implemented mechanisms that forced new behaviors, believing the thinking would follow.

One of the first mechanisms was the "three-name rule." Morale on the Santa Fe was low, and the crew often appeared defeated and unengaged. To change this, Marquet ordered that whenever a crew member greeted a visitor, they had to use the visitor's name, their own name, and the ship's name. This small, deliberate action forced them to make eye contact, speak with confidence, and take pride in their vessel. It was a physical rehearsal for a new mindset.

An even more powerful mechanism was a linguistic one. After the embarrassing "ahead two-thirds" incident, Marquet vowed to never give another order. Instead, he coached his officers to use the phrase "I intend to..." This simple change shifted the psychological dynamic completely. Instead of passively waiting for a command, an officer had to think through a situation, devise a course of action, and announce it. It forced proactive problem-solving and placed ownership squarely on the person doing the work. Marquet’s role shifted from giving orders to confirming intentions, turning passive followers into active leaders, one sentence at a time.

Narrator: Giving away control without ensuring the team is competent is a recipe for chaos. Marquet understood that for his leader-leader model to work, he had to aggressively build the technical and decision-making skills of his crew at every level. Empowerment and competence had to rise together.

Early in his command, Marquet tasked his team with positioning the submarine for a training exercise. He gave them the solution—the exact location to be at a specific time—but didn't explain the strategic reasoning behind it. The next morning, he discovered the submarine was miles off course and pointing in the wrong direction. The watch team, focused only on the immediate task of avoiding navigational hazards, had completely missed the tactical objective.

Later, during a simulated attack, the radio operator requested permission to raise an antenna, an action that would have revealed their position to the enemy. Marquet’s old instinct was to shout "No!" and provide the solution. Instead, he resisted. He simply said, "We have to find another solution," and let the team work it out. After a brief, tense discussion, they realized they could wait until after the "attack" to raise the antenna. By refusing to provide the answer, Marquet forced his crew to develop their own problem-solving muscles. He coupled this with mechanisms like "take deliberate action"—a required pause to vocalize an intended action before touching any equipment—to build a culture where competence and careful thought were prerequisites for any action.

Narrator: Once a team is empowered and competent, one final ingredient is needed: clarity of purpose. If everyone is going to make their own decisions, they must be guided by a deep, shared understanding of the organization's goals. For Marquet, this meant shifting the Santa Fe's focus from simply avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

This was vividly illustrated during a fire drill. When the alarm sounded, the crew members closest to the fire hose ran right past it, scattering to their assigned duty stations as dictated by procedure. They were perfectly compliant with the rulebook but were failing at the actual goal: putting out the fire. Marquet changed the drill. The new goal wasn't to follow a checklist; it was to get water on the fire as fast as possible. This clarity of purpose empowered the crew to use their own ingenuity, and their response times improved dramatically.

The ultimate proof of this new culture came during a high-stakes pickup of a SEAL team. When the submarine unexpectedly entered shallow water, Marquet, believing they were pointed toward land, ordered the ship to back away. But a junior quartermaster named Sled Dog, the same sailor who had once gone AWOL out of frustration, paused and said, "No, Captain, you're wrong." He calmly explained that the ship was already pointed to sea, as the team had planned. In that moment, the system had worked perfectly. A culture of competence and clarity had empowered the most junior sailor to question the captain, prevent a critical error, and ensure the mission's success.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Turn the Ship Around! is that leadership is not a function of personality or position, but a deliberate act of creating an environment for greatness. It is the art of building a resilient system that doesn't depend on a single, heroic leader. Instead, it unleashes the passion, intelligence, and creativity of every single person in the organization.

Marquet’s story provides a powerful and practical blueprint for any leader who feels trapped by the limitations of a top-down structure. Its most challenging idea is also its most liberating: that true power comes not from holding on to control, but from having the courage to give it away. The question it leaves us with is not whether this model can work, but whether we, as leaders, are brave enough to try it.