David Marquet had been picked to command one submarine, the USS Olympia. Then the captain of another one quit, and the Navy sent Marquet instead. The USS Santa Fe was, by his own account, the worst-performing submarine in the fleet. It was also a type he knew little about.
Early in his command he ran a drill. The crew simulated a reactor shutdown, and the boat crept along on its backup electric motor. Marquet didn’t want the crew to think their new captain was easy, so he ordered more speed: “Ahead two-thirds.”
His most senior, most experienced officer of the deck repeated the order. Nothing happened. Then the helmsman spoke up: “Captain, there is no ahead two-thirds on the EPM!” The backup motor had no such setting.
Marquet asked the officer if he had known. “Yes, Captain, I did.”
“Well, why did you order it?”
“Because you told me to.”
The answer wasn’t insolent. It was the truth about how the boat worked. Orders came down from the top, and the people below passed them on. That works as long as the person at the top is right. Marquet was new, on an unfamiliar submarine, and he had just been wrong in front of everyone. “What happens when the leader is wrong in a top-down culture?” he wrote. “Everyone goes over the cliff.”
He vowed never to give another order. Officers would come to him not with requests for permission but with “I intend to…” He would give them intent, the goal, and let them work out the how.
He commanded the Santa Fe until 2001. According to Marquet, the share of sailors who stayed on went from one in ten to 100%. Ten men from his crew later became submarine captains themselves.
All of it started with an order that could not be carried out, and an officer who knew it and passed it on.