It's Your Ship
The story of Captain D. Michael Abrashoff and his command of USS Benfold has become legendary inside and outside the Navy. Now Abrashoff offers this fascinating tale of top-down change for anyone trying to navigate today's uncertain business seas. When Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, a ship armed with every cutting-edge system available, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and take responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy-Benfold was a key player in our Persian Gulf fleet-Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including: See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value. Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew would eventually call him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often.
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64% recommend36% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It’s Your Ship by Abrashoff is really good too.
- Obviously books:
[!] 1) The 360° Leader, John C. Maxwell
2) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink
3) The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha & Chris Yeh
[!] 4) It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, Michael Abrashoff
5) Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, Frederic Laloux
6) Immature People with Power How to Handle Them, Larry Mullins
7) Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Eric Berne
In no particular order. That kind of list could be endless, but 1-7 I consider the most important ones (you can throw away (5) if you aren't interested in how to simplify corp structures) regarding shaping anyone into a reasonable leader. It's all about: attitude, values, understanding oneself and other people.
The only reason I'm putting all of this here is because it's a good investment. I hope you will read those, because I don't recommend stuff I know nothing about to random people ;) This world desperately needs better managers, not another infantile prick who thinks he gets it (I'm not pointing that to @OP directly, it's a more general problem). Again, I can only hope that the 10 minutes I've spent here are going to blossom in the future as at least one good guy who knows what he is doing because he thinks about what he's going to do beforehand. If that's not going to happen that's going to be on you (and I will find you and then we're going to have an unpleasant conversation). Meanwhile, I highly recommend the mentioned books and reading in general. This is how you can easily distinguish yourself from a herd of management sheeple who consider reading to be harmful for their egos ;) Howk!
A general tip: I've written "books, obviously", because management is on of those disciplines where there ARE good books, as well as good trainings available. The books route is far less expensive, it's as good as let's say expensive couching, and there's some space between the lines in books in general one can utilize for thinking for oneself!
All of the above comes form my own experience.
- Reading this article I was reminded of the book It's Your Ship, the motto used by one navy captain to empower the crew to turn around a poorly performing ship. Then I see that part of the inspiration for this post was... a book about a different navy ship.
I often think back to It's Your Ship, I'd highly recommend it.
- "It's Your Ship"[1] is more directly applicable. That's by a captain who turned around a troubled US Navy surface warship.
I'm amazed that serving naval officers flunked a quiz on the Rules of the Road, and even more amazed that the XO of the ship refused to take such a quiz. That's so basic. It's the driver's handbook for ships. See rules 11-19, which are about How Not To Run Into Other Ships. These are simple right of way rules. There's a one-page summary in "Power Boating for Dummies."[3] That anyone on the bridge of a US Navy vessel would not know these is terrifying. That the Navy brass tried to cover that up is worse.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Its-Your-Ship-Management-Techniques-e...
[2] https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/pdf/navRules/navrules.pdf
[3] https://www.dummies.com/sports/following-right-of-way-boatin...
- -Godel, Escher, Bach / There was an article on here a short while back writing about how they didn't like the book. I figured if the book was important enough that it was noteworthy when someone wrote that they DIDN'T like it, I should check it out.
-Salt, fat, acid heat / A no-nonsense approach to cooking that's made me feel a lot more confident in the kitchen
-It's your ship / Required reading for a PM class
- iyn,
Author here. Thanks! That's a great suggestion. As you can tell, right now the site and the mailing list is the most minimal of an implementation. We want to build a network, connect and mentor one another through the simplest and easiest mechanism possible - email. Once we have a medium-sized community with dozens of experts, we plan to add community managed content. Perhaps through a wiki?
I'll share the books and articles that have positively affected my career. These aren't tried and true and maybe dozens of people would disagree about their value but here they are, for what they are worth:
Management:
Engineering:- High output management (Grove, 1995) - Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem) - It’s your Ship (Abrashoff) - The score takes care of itself (Walsh) - The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Horowitz) - Where good ideas come from (Johnson) - Extreme Ownership (Navy Seals) — (Willink) - Work Rules — (Bock) - 5 Dysfunctions of a team — (Lencioni) - Give and Take (Grant) - This is what impactful Engineering leadership looks like - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-what-impactful-engineering-leadership-looks-like/ - Notes on startup engineering management for young bloods - http://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html?m=1- Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Duval, Matyas, Glover, 2007) - Continuous Delivery: Release Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment Automation (Humble, Farley, 2010) - Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) (Beck, Andres) - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Refactoring Databases - Evolutionary Database Design (Ambler, Sadalage, 2006)
