How to Create Leaders

Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet is a leadership memoir that tells of the author’s experience as the commander of a submarine in the United States Navy. He tells of his process moving from a leader-follower model of leadership to one of leader-leader – a process which builds mindful leaders rather than thoughtless followers.

I learned of this book as I read Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. In that book Sinek tells of Marquet’s year-long preparation to command a well-run submarine. At the last minute he learned that he would instead be taking command of an underperforming submarine of an entirely different class. Lacking the time to study this new sub type and her crew, he racked his brain to figure out how he could successfully command this new vessel. He decided to give as few orders and possible, to empower his knowledgeable and capable crew

The example that Sinek gave is what led me to read this book. Traditionally in the US Navy, one asks the commander for permission – “Request permission to submerge the ship!” Marquet changed this from a request to a statement of intent – “I intend to submerge the ship!” – thus giving agency to his crew. And the book details how he worked with the leaders on his ship to develop a process for turning a crew with one leader and 134 followers who mindlessly take direction into one with 135 leaders actively thinking about what they can proactively do to achieve the ship’s mission.

To dig further into the ideas of intent-based leadership, Marquet published another book in 2020 titled Leadership is Language. He also has a website with a video of him giving a talk on the ideas in Turn the Ship Around!

For anyone searching for how to move from simply managing what happens to being a leader and developing leaders, you can’t go wrong reading Turn the Ship Around!

Living Your Best Life

I thoroughly enjoyed The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and its quirky premise of the titular library in the space between life and death. The author uses it to explore the nature of regrets in life. Not how to avoid them or even overcome them. Rather it is about living from your own unique experience. In other words, “Stop looking at your life from the outside and start living it!”

Communicating with Numbers

I recently finished a new book about how to communicate with numbers–Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. It is both a workbook and a reference tool. The author’s goal is to help overcome the fact that humans are not biologically built to easily manage numbers over five. Yet today we regularly need to communicate through numbers. What to do?

The authors provide excellent guidance and examples for how to effectively communicate what numbers have to say so that audiences will understand the message the numbers have to deliver. I highly recommend it to all managers and leaders.

Not Your Average Love Story

cover of the book "This is How You Lose the Time War"

I almost stopped reading This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. I am very glad that I didn’t. I found it a little hard to get into. The language is what I would call “flowery” and poetic. And since the story is largely told through letters, learning about the world takes some investment. But the investment is worth it.

The love story is deep and complex while somehow being somewhat traditional despite it being between enemies. I am not a big fan of sappy romantic nonsense (that’s my description for absurd, unrealistic romantic ideas that pass for relationship stories). Some parts of this story gave me that feeling, but for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on I kept reading and lost that feeling.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It isn’t for everyone, but if you are willing to explore an unusual story unusually told, this might be for you.

Proper Business Leadership

I recently finished reading Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. This book provides the best perspective for how to lead business in a capitalist world. And the author demonstrates that not only is this the right way to do business, but it also the most successful. He uses the experiences of leadership and how it is taught in the US military as well as good and bad examples of leadership in business. And he grounds all of this, surprisingly, in biology.

Throughout the book the author continues to refer back to the foundation of biology and four hormones that he presents in chapter six. He splits these into two groups: selfish chemicals without which he argues we would die (endorphins and dopamine) and social chemicals without which we would be cold-blooded (serotonin and oxytocin). Endorphins make us feel good and give us what is known as the runner’s high. Dopamine gives us an incentive for progress. Both of these are focused on individual biological survival. He calls serotonin the leadership chemical which helps us to survive collectively as a social species. And oxcytocin is the love chemical that drives engagement with others.

All this together is presented in a very engaging and informative format that really resonated with my own experience as a US Army officer and business manager. It was enlightening to have the science and examples from others that confirm that.

A Disappointing Issue

A human looking figure is surrounded by playing card sized objects in the air

I was disappointed by the January/February 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine compared to my experience with the other issues I have read since subscribing in May of last year. None of the fiction in this issue really connected for me. I felt like too much was left unclear on the background of the stories. The topics were very interesting, but the execution left me feeling like the stories could have been improved.

The one piece that really grabbed me was “Gone with the Clones: How Confederate Soft Power Twisted the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy” (article available online starting Feb. 1). Briefly, the argument is that while the original Star Wars trilogy was based on WWII with the clear enemy being the Nazis and fascism, the prequels were based on the US Civil War, the meaning of which is much more messy due to the myth of the “Lost Cause”. The best part was the author’s amazing summary of how organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy muddied the cause for the Confederacy from preserving slavery to a number of nebulous higher level ideas like states’ rights (states’ rights to do what?). Buying this issue is worth it just for this essay.