Summary
Marquet, a U.S. Navy submarine captain, took command of USS Santa Fe in 1999 — at the time the worst-performing submarine in the Pacific Fleet. He had been trained for a different ship, knew almost nothing about Santa Fe's specific systems, and inherited a crew shaped by years of top-down command. Within a year, Santa Fe was rated the best-performing submarine in the fleet, with the highest retention rate in the Navy. Marquet credits a single inflection: he stopped giving orders. After accidentally giving an impossible command early in his tenure and watching the helmsman attempt to obey it anyway, he resolved to replace the leader-follower model with what he calls leader-leader. The book is the story of how that worked, hierarchy by hierarchy, on a 130-man nuclear submarine where mistakes can kill people.
