This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Turn the Ship Around" by L. David Marquet. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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The leadership model most organizations still use was designed for a different era—one where work meant physical labor, not complex problem-solving. Retired US Navy Captain L. David Marquet explains why traditional leadership fails for modern knowledge work: It wastes human potential, creates organizational fragility, and can’t scale to meet today’s challenges.
Keep reading to explore the deeper forces that keep this broken system in place—and what it would take to move beyond it.
Originally Published: August 7, 2021
Last Updated: December 21, 2025
The Traditional Leadership Model Fails for Modern Work
In Turn the Ship Around!, Marquet explains that the traditional leadership model (“leader-follower”) was meant to coordinate physical labor. When the goal is to extract physical labor from people—to build roads, mine coal, or assemble products in a factory—it works for one person to decide what needs to be done and for everyone else to execute those orders. The leader needs to know what to build and how to organize the labor, and followers just need the discipline to follow instructions. But this model fails for knowledge work, where the goal is to coordinate intellectual efforts. In modern workplaces, most employees need to think analytically, make good decisions, and find creative solutions to the problems they encounter.
(Shortform note: Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge work” in Landmarks of Tomorrow to describe work using years of education and experience to analyze information, solve problems, and make decisions. But AI can now handle chunks of many of these tasks by drafting legal briefs, writing code, or analyzing data. This shifts where human value lies. Humans are much better than AI at contextual judgment, ethical reasoning that balances competing values, making creative connections, asking the right questions, and discerning when AI is right or wrong. We only develop these skills with practice, meaning leader-leader structures that give people real decision-making authority may become crucial for developing the skills that AI can’t replicate.)
Marquet explains that the traditional leader-follower leadership model undermines knowledge work in several ways. First, it wastes human potential. When people are treated as followers with minimal decision-making authority, they have little incentive to contribute their full intellect, energy, or passion. They don’t need to think critically about problems because someone else will tell them what to do. They don’t need to take ownership because they’re not responsible for outcomes, only for following orders.
| What Makes Work Meaningful—and What Gets in the Way? Marquet argues that many workplaces waste human potential. Research confirms that work is crucial to humans—it helps us learn, collaborate, and shape our environment—and that the meaningfulness of a job is more important to us than any other aspect, including pay or opportunities for promotion. Yet research also shows that specific structural conditions (like thin social safety nets, barriers to unionization, or policy choices that keep unemployment rates high) create insecurity that can make it harder for people to prioritize meaningful work. Experts find that when workers lack economic security, they become more focused on job security and income than on finding work that allows them to contribute their full potential. For example, in the US, where healthcare and retirement benefits are tied to employment, losing a job means losing not just income but also essential protections. Workers are more willing to tolerate work that wastes their potential when they feel they can’t afford to leave or to push back against management practices that destroy meaningfulness. In fact, researchers find that it’s very common for managers to undermine meaningful work in seven specific ways: disconnecting people from their values, failing to recognize hard work, assigning pointless tasks, treating people unfairly, overriding people’s judgment, isolating them from supportive relationships, and exposing them to unnecessary risk. Yet research on what motivates people shows that meaningful work and economic security don’t have to trade off against each other. What motivates people to work hard is having control over their work, feeling their contributions matter, and making enough money. Marquet’s “leader-leader” model shows a way for managers to create an environment where people can do meaningful work, but broader societal conditions may shape whether workers have enough security to demand this kind of treatment—and whether organizations face real pressure to provide it. |
Marquet says the “leader-follower” model also undermines the effectiveness of knowledge work by creating organizational fragility. He points out that, when success depends entirely on one leader’s ability, performance becomes inconsistent and vulnerable. A submarine with a strong commanding officer performs well, but the same submarine with a weak CO performs poorly. When that strong leader leaves, performance often collapses because followers have been trained to depend on the leader rather than to think for themselves. The organization has no resilience.
Finally, Marquet says the traditional leadership model doesn’t scale. One person can only make so many decisions, process so much information, and solve so many problems. As organizations grow more complex, the leader becomes a bottleneck. Important decisions get delayed. Information gets filtered and compressed as it travels up the chain of command, losing crucial nuance. Meanwhile, the people closest to the problems—who often have the best information—aren’t empowered to act on what they know.
| What Makes Groups Fragile? Marquet argues that the traditional leader-follower model makes organizations and their decision-making processes fragile because authority is concentrated at the top. But the deeper problem may be information silos: When knowledge is fragmented and hoarded rather than shared, people can’t develop the shared understanding necessary for effective decision-making. In The Silo Effect, Gillian Tett documents how major organizations, from tech giants to Wall Street banks, failed not because lower-level employees lacked authority, but because different departments stopped communicating. Similarly, a study of federal employees cited bureaucratic hurdles that keeps departments from sharing information as a major barrier to effective work. This problem extends beyond organizations. Thomas Friedman describes our current era as one where different groups operate from separate information ecosystems, consuming different media, trusting different experts, and using language differently. Some scholars say we’ve entered a “post-meaning” world, where language itself becomes detached from shared understanding, making it nearly impossible to debate policies or critique ideas because people can’t even agree on what words mean. Organizations and societies may need both the distributed authority Marquet advocates and systems to ensure that knowledge flows freely so people can make well-informed decisions based on a shared understanding of reality. |
The Traditional Model Persists Despite Its Flaws
If the traditional “leader-follower” model works so poorly for modern organizations, why does it remain the default? Marquet contends that the answer lies in perverse incentives at multiple levels. Leaders often like the model because it serves their egos and career advancement. In the Navy and many other organizations, leaders are rewarded for current performance. If a unit performs well under your command, you get promoted. When you leave and performance drops, people conclude you were indispensable. There’s little incentive to develop people or build systems that would thrive without you.
Followers often find the model comfortable, even if it’s unfulfilling. Marquet notes that being a follower means you don’t have to take risks, think through complex problems, or accept accountability when things go wrong. (You can always fall back on “I was just following orders.”) Over time, people who’ve spent years as followers develop learned helplessness—a sense that they’re at the mercy of outside factors and not in control of their work. When someone finally does try to give them more responsibility, they may resist because they’ve lost confidence in their ability to make good decisions.
(Shortform note: Research challenges Marquet’s claim that followers grow comfortable with the “leader-follower” model because they get used to not taking risks. Neuroscientists have found that passivity isn’t something people learn to prefer—it’s just the brain’s default response to prolonged stress. But taking active control does have to be learned. When we experience stress, the brain automatically triggers passivity unless the prefrontal cortex intervenes, which only happens when the brain detects that control is possible. With repeated experiences of successfully taking control, the brain develops “learned controllability”—it rewires the default response and becomes primed to meet stress with problem-solving rather than passivity.)
Organizations also reinforce the traditional model through their structures and incentives. The Navy, for instance, emphasizes the total accountability of the commanding officer. This makes sense for maintaining clear responsibility, but it creates pressure for the CO to control everything. (If anything goes wrong, it’s the CO’s fault regardless of who made the decision.) Marquet notes that many civilian organizations operate similarly, holding managers accountable for their team’s results without giving them any incentive to develop their people’s decision-making capabilities. The emphasis is on short-term performance, not long-term leadership development.
| How Leadership Accountability Varies Across Cultures The accountability structure Marquet describes reflects specific organizational and cultural assumptions. In individualistic cultures like the US, leaders receive disproportionate credit when their teams succeed (reinforcing the idea that strong leaders drive performance), but often aren’t held as accountable for failures. In collectivist cultures, like those of many Asian, African, and South American countries, accountability patterns differ. Leaders typically share credit for success with their teams but are held personally responsible for failures. For example, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, TEPCO’s leader took personal responsibility and resigned, even though the earthquake and tsunami that caused it were beyond anyone’s control. In contrast, after BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—which a US court ruled resulted from “gross negligence”—the CEO eventually resigned but never accepted personal responsibility. But the difference in accountability doesn’t necessarily make collectivist cultures more compatible with Marquet’s leader-leader model. Many collectivist cultures emphasize hierarchy and respect for authority, which suggests they often maintain hierarchical decision-making structures similar to the leader-follower model. The implications for implementing Marquet’s approach may vary by context. In organizations with a very individualistic culture, the challenge may be counteracting incentives that reward individual achievement and discourage leadership development. In collectivist organizations with strong hierarchies, the challenge may be different: overcoming cultural norms around hierarchical deference and obedience to authority, even while leveraging existing cultural emphasis on group harmony and collective responsibility. |
Empowerment Programs Don’t Fix the Problem
Many organizations recognize that workers are disengaged and try to address the problem through empowerment programs. Leaders give speeches about “taking ownership” and “being proactive.” But Marquet argues these efforts fail because they try to layer empowerment onto a leader-follower structure without changing the structure. He learned this firsthand on the USS Will Rogers, where he served as an engineer before taking command of the Santa Fe. The CO of the Will Rogers ran a strict top-down operation, but Marquet tried giving his crew more autonomy by explaining objectives and letting them figure out how to achieve them.
The change backfired. The crew missed deadlines, fell behind, and made dangerous mistakes, in one instance improperly installing critical bolts to save time. The problem wasn’t a lack of ability or bad intentions, but that the sub’s entire culture—all the systems and procedures, and everyone’s training—still reinforced “leader-follower” thinking. When he tried giving people authority to make decisions, they didn’t know how to use it well because everything else in the organization told them their job was to follow orders. Marquet explains that you can’t empower people within a system designed to keep them powerless.
| The Leadership Challenges of a Nuclear Submarine The workplace Marquet was trying to change was that of a ballistic nuclear submarine, which is powered by an onboard nuclear reactor to generate electricity and propulsion. The ballistic missile submarine fleet was built during the Cold War as part of America’s nuclear deterrence strategy. The conditions on board such submarines created an extremely high-stakes workplace—the crew was submerged for months alongside both nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor, and mistakes could kill the entire crew and trigger environmental or geopolitical catastrophe. To deal with these risks, the Navy designed an intensely centralized system. Every detail of reactor operation was controlled through standard procedures, and shore-based authorities maintained oversight at all times. When the Navy started using nuclear subs, one admiral, Hyman Rickover, selected every officer in the program and insisted on absolute procedural compliance. This worked: His fleet operated 152 reactors over 30 years without a single radioactive emission. This context helps explain why Marquet’s efforts on the Will Rogers failed. The crew had been trained to follow procedures without deviation because in their environment, deviation from procedure could be catastrophic. Research on submarine crews suggests that extended isolation in confined, artificial environments also degrades people’s psychological functioning, which makes adaptation to new expectations even more difficult. The entire nuclear submarine culture, built over decades to ensure safety, actively discouraged the independent thinking that good decision-making requires. |
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Here's what you'll find in our full Turn the Ship Around summary :
- How a captain turned the U.S. Navy’s worst-performing nuclear submarine crew into one of the best
- The principles for developing leaders at all levels to create a passionate, high-performing workforce
- Why the "leader-leader" model works better than the "leader-follower" model
