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This book has 3 recommendations

Lynn Perkins (CEO/Urbansitter)

I gained so many tips about teaching leadership at all levels of an organization. It's a great book for when you're going through growth, and when you have young employees with a ton of potential but lacking in experience.

Simon Sinek (Best-selling Author)

So many leadership books are either theoretical (written by people who study it but don’t do it) or by people who look back and try to explain how they did it. Though both valuable, most leadership books are also very hard to implement as prescribed. That’s what makes Marquet’s book is so remarkable. A submarine commander, he used to obey traditional models of leadership … until they failed him. Unable to change any variables (people, technology or equipment), the only thing left for him to change in order to achieve success was how he acted as a leader. Based on real life events, Marquet presents his ideas in a superbly practical way — perfect for implementing.

Jason Fried (Co-Founder/Basecamp)

Turn the Ship Around is my favorite business book. A wonderful look at what leadership is really about. I recommend it highly.

Amazon description

Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results.

Marquet was a Naval Academy graduate and an experienced officer when selected for submarine command. Trained to give orders in the traditional model of “know all–tell all” leadership, he faced a new wrinkle when he was shifted to the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine. Facing the high-stress environment of a sub where there’s little margin for error, he was determined to reverse the trends he found on the Santa Fe: poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet.

Almost immediately, Marquet ran into trouble when he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why, the answer was: “Because you told me to.” Marquet realized that while he had been trained for a different submarine, his crew had been trained to do what they were told—a deadly combination.

That’s when Marquet flipped the leadership model on its head and pushed for leadership at every level. Turn the Ship Around! reveals how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control to his subordinates, and creating leaders.

Before long, each member of Marquet’s crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became completely engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day. The Santa Fe set records for performance, morale, and retention. And over the next decade, a highly disproportionate number of the officers of the Santa Fe were selected to become submarine commanders.

Whether you need a major change of course or just a tweak of the rudder, you can apply Marquet’s methods to turn your own ship around.

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See more books recommended by

Lynn Perkins, Simon Sinek, Jason Fried

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L. David Marquet

Sources

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