In 1999, David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine ranked last in the US Navy's Pacific Fleet for retention and performance. Eighteen months later, it was ranked first. Not because he issued better orders. Because he stopped issuing orders altogether.
Turn the Ship Around! is one of the most radical leadership books ever written - not because it is idealistic, but because it is documented, specific, and achieved in one of the most high-stakes, high-discipline environments imaginable. If intent-based leadership works on a nuclear submarine, it works in your organisation.
The book's central challenge is simple and devastating: most leaders think they lead people. They don't. They lead followers - people trained, rewarded, and conditioned to wait for direction. And an organisation built on followers is fragile, slow, and exhausting for everyone involved.
The leader-follower model is the default operating system of most organisations. Someone at the top decides. Everyone else executes. It works - up to a point. But it has a ceiling, and most organisations hit it somewhere around the point where complexity exceeds any single leader's ability to see clearly, decide quickly, and communicate effectively.
In that environment - which describes virtually every modern technology organisation - the answer is not better leaders. The answer is more leaders. Marquet's leader-leader model is not a soft, feel-good alternative to command-and-control. It is a harder, more demanding, more resilient form of leadership that produces organisations capable of acting with intelligence and initiative at every level.
The people who most need to read this book are the ones most resistant to it: the leaders who believe their job is to have the answers.
The conventional response to organisational underperformance is more control: tighter approval processes, more oversight, more frequent status reporting, more detailed planning. Marquet observed the opposite dynamic on the Santa Fe. The more control he exercised, the more dependent his crew became. The more dependent they became, the more control he needed to maintain performance. It was a trap, and the only way out was to break the loop.
The insight that changed his approach: control doesn't produce competence - it suppresses it. When people know their job is to execute orders, they stop exercising judgement. When they stop exercising judgement, they genuinely become less capable of making decisions. The leader-follower model doesn't just reflect dependence - it manufactures it.
The most famous intervention in the book is elegantly simple. Marquet asked his crew to replace "Request permission to..." with "I intend to..." followed by their reasoning.
The shift is profound. "Request permission to submerge" puts the cognitive load on the captain. "I intend to submerge at 1400, sir, because we've completed our surface checks and weather conditions are deteriorating" puts it on the crew member - and forces them to think through the decision, not just ask to be given one.
What Marquet discovered is that language shapes cognition. The language of permission-seeking trains people to be passive. The language of intent trains people to think like leaders. Over time, the crew members who spent months saying "I intend to..." began to think and act with genuine initiative - not because Marquet asked them to be different, but because he changed the daily practice that formed their thinking.
The leader-leader model is not an excuse to step back and let people figure it out. It has two essential foundations:
Competence: People need the technical knowledge, skills, and domain understanding to make good decisions in their area. Distributing control without investing in competence produces chaos. Marquet invested intensively in developing his crew's expertise - not so they could answer his questions, but so they could answer their own.
Clarity: People need to understand the mission, the values, and the intent at every level. When a crew member makes a decision in a novel situation, they are drawing on their understanding of what the organisation is trying to achieve. If that understanding is vague, their decisions will be inconsistent. Marquet made clarity of purpose a relentless priority - every decision was anchored to the mission of the boat.
Control without competence and clarity is recklessness. Control with competence and clarity is resilience.
One of the most affecting observations in the book: the crew of the Santa Fe were not exceptional people. They had been rated poorly not because they lacked capability, but because they had never been asked to use it. When Marquet changed the environment - when he made it safe to take initiative, when he gave them authority commensurate with their responsibility, when he treated them as leaders - the capability that had always been there became visible.
This is a question worth sitting with: how much of your team's capacity are you actively suppressing through the model you've built?
Marquet distinguishes between leaders who optimise for immediate results and leaders who build organisations that thrive after they leave. The leader-follower model produces short-term dependence on strong individuals. The leader-leader model produces long-term organisational capability.
The measure of a great leader, Marquet argues, is not what they achieve while they are in the role. It is what the organisation continues to achieve after they've gone. The USS Santa Fe consistently outperformed for years after Marquet left command - because the culture he built didn't depend on him.
How many decisions in your organisation require your personal approval? Each one is a symptom. Is it a symptom of necessary oversight, or trained dependence?
When someone on your team brings you a problem, what do you do? Do you solve it, or do you ask "what do you think we should do?" The answer tells you more about your leadership style than any assessment.
"I intend to..." requires the speaker to have thought through the decision. What would happen in your team if everyone was expected to do that before escalating? What would you have to stop doing to make that possible?
Your best engineers are probably already making decisions - just without visibility, authority, or accountability. Are you capturing that intelligence or suppressing it?
What would your team's performance look like if you were unavailable for a month? Is that a comfortable thought, or an uncomfortable one? Either way, it's useful information.
Try the language shift. In your next team interaction where someone asks for permission, ask them to reframe: "Tell me what you intend to do, and why." Notice what changes in the quality of thinking that follows.
Audit your approval processes. List every decision that requires your sign-off. For each one, ask: why does this need me? Could this be handled by the person closest to the work? What would need to be true for that to happen safely?
Have a direct conversation about intent. Share with your team the organisation's three most important goals for the next six months. Not the OKRs from the planning document - what actually matters, in plain language. Then ask whether people feel empowered to make decisions in service of those goals.
Identify your highest-potential person who is currently in execution mode. Give them a real decision - not a recommendation request, a real one - and back them fully. Watch what happens.
Ask yourself honestly: are you building an organisation that needs you, or one that's better because of you? Then build toward the latter.
"The problem with telling people what to do is that it doesn't tap into their ability to notice and think. It just taps into their ability to execute."
- David Marquet