12 Books - Author Led Business Book Group discussion

This is our official discussion for June 2014, David Marquet's "Turn the Ship Around"

Well there be a chat for this group?

Hey Rachael, its been a busy month and I've not been active here. I finished the book. I love the simplicity of the story of the Santa Fe as it relates to understanding the leader/leader model.

I'm looking forward to our live call with David on Friday.

Here is the registration link for the Friday call:

http://www.12booksgroup.com/turn-the-...

It has been a busy month. I am still reading the book. I'm finding it another memoir style book, like the last one. In fact, I think I remember Mr Spaulding mentioning this book. I like the concept of pushing decision making down to the lowest level it can be. I have seen this idea in other leadership books, back at least 15 years. It seems so easy, until you start to look at human behavior in groups, egos, history. The structure of Army units (I'm an Army brat and veteran, so I'm a little comfortable with this published structure) claims to push actual work decisions to the squad level, mostly because that is where the work is done. But you constantly run into people who demand that they get a say in what you do and when you do it because of their rank. More than once I remember an E6 countermanding the orders my E5 had given me. Just annoying since I worked in a Stateside office, but it could have been a problem if I had been elsewhere.
I would like to see more of this leader/leader in the work world. I would really like to see it in customer service, where the person I talk to first could solve my usually simple problem. But, it hasn't shown up there. I still have to talk to at least three levels of people to get somebody who can actually help. All the first person I talk to seems to be able to do is give me information and more phone numbers.
As I said, I'm still reading this book. Maybe the way to spread this idea is still to come.

This is not a new concept. I've seen in fail in the most spectacular ways in the Corporate world because guidelines were not clearly laid out for who is responsible for what and who is untimately accountable. In my experience, management pushes the responsibility and accountability for the decisions down to the lowest levels when things don't turn out and take all the glory and bonuses for themselves when it does. And then there's the bun fight amongst the empire builders and those that consider themselves 'management material' trying to get noticed at your expense. Nice idea, but personally I prefer clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities which rarely happened in the places I worked.

I liked this book a lot; was sad that I had to miss the live call due to travel.

I liked that it was all based on a real and personal example, and especially appreciated that Marquet didn't hesitate to say what he did wrong--and how he learned from it--along with what he did right. (I find that many leadership books based on personal experience take the line of "here is everything I did, and everything I did was great." This one was refreshingly humble.)

Melinda, I was interested to see your comment about management pushing responsibility down to the lowest level when things don't work out and taking all the glory when they do. I'm reading this book: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Workby Matthew Crawford, and he makes that same point; he calls it "pushing accountability down and pulling credit up." He says this is a trend in organizations today, and I must say I agree. Depressing but true.

I thought, however, that Marquet was talking about something different. He seemed to be set on distributing both accountability and credit more evenly throughout the organization, at all levels. This came out in the "Sled Dog goes AWOL" anecdote: Marquet could have sent an underling to go find him, but he went himself and personally talked with Sled Dog. And he could have thrown the book at Sled Dog, but instead he put most of the blame on the Chiefs, who had been hogging all the good shifts and leaving their subordinates sick with exhaustion. I think it's a good example of demanding leadership at all levels -- including himself.

I hear what Marquet is saying, Jocelyn, however I don't think most people are capable of managing in the style he is outlining.

I was a temp / contractor for 25 years and on average I moved to a new client every 3-4 months, the longest I worked anywhere during this time was 8 months, and out of all those positions I only had 1 boss who I would say embodied Marquet's principles and he was such a pleasure to work with but in the end he was the one who got burnt from on high.

However as advice to small business owners, if they can pull it off it is excellent way of getting the best out of people. For the boss I had who embodied these principles, I would have done anything he asked me to do to get the work out the door because he believed in me and put a structure in place where I could grow and learn from my mistakes in an unthreatening environment. And because he never asked for anything unreasonable I did whatever I could to make sure the products we delivered were the very best I could do regardless of how long it took.