Turn the Ship Around: A Tribute to a Culture-Building Classic

By Joe Newsum

Some books argue for empowerment. Turn the Ship Around proved it, on a nuclear submarine. Published in 2012 by L. David Marquet, it tells the true story of the USS Santa Fe, the worst-performing submarine in its fleet, and how Marquet turned it into the best, not by being a better captain who gave better orders, but by giving up control on purpose. And the way he did it is almost too perfect: he changed the words his crew used at the moment they acted. Read it.

Here is the premise, in four words: leader-follower becomes leader-leader. The Navy Marquet inherited ran on one leader and a crew of followers, decisions made at the top and carried out below, which meant the ship was only ever as capable as its captain. Marquet’s bet was that everyone could be a leader, and that you could deliberately turn followers into leaders, so that a submarine with one person making the calls became a submarine with a hundred and thirty-five. That shift, from followers into leaders, is the whole book.

That tiny swap, from asking permission to stating intention, is the whole reason I wanted to write about this book. I spend my days helping leaders build culture, and I have come to believe culture is built exactly like that, not from values on a wall but from shared commitments: simple language a team holds in common and acts on, again and again, until it becomes who they are. That is what I call Culture by Commitment, and it is the lens this tribute looks through. Seen that way, Marquet did not just inspire his crew. He handed them new language and let it rewire how they thought and acted, which is exactly why the culture held after he was gone. It is also worth knowing how to hold it, because giving control is the easiest idea in this book to get wrong.

Why It Works: Language Drives Behavior

Here is the deeper reason this book lands, beyond the gripping submarine story. It works because of how culture actually gets built, through a simple chain. Language shapes thinking, and thinking shapes behavior. And behavior, repeated across a team day after day, becomes culture.

Most leaders try to create ownership at the wrong end of that chain. They give a rousing speech about empowerment, or they put “accountability” on a values poster, and the crew keeps waiting to be told what to do. But values are an output of culture, not an input to it, and a speech wears off by the next watch. The leverage is at the front of the chain, in the actual words people use the moment they decide to act.

That is exactly what Marquet changed. He did not lecture his crew about initiative, he replaced the language of permission with the language of intention. “I intend to” is not a slogan to admire, it is a cue engineered to fire the instant a person is about to act, forcing them to think the decision all the way through and own it. Marquet himself described it as a minor trick of language that profoundly shifted ownership. The book is a master class in building culture through commitments, even though it never uses that phrase.

The System of Commitments, and Why Shared Language Is So Powerful

Here is what makes these phrases powerful, and it is not that they are clever. It is that they are shared. A good idea about empowerment in one leader’s head changes one leader. The same idea turned into language the whole crew holds changes the crew, because shared language does three things no private insight can. It lets people coordinate without re-negotiating the basics, because everyone already knows what “I intend to” signals. It lets people hold each other to a standard, because a shared phrase is one anyone can point to. And it compresses culture into something teachable, so a new crew member learns how we operate here in a sentence instead of a year.

So what did Marquet actually hand his crew? The model is leader-leader instead of leader-follower, you give control rather than take it, and it stands on two pillars, competence and clarity, because hand people control without the skill or the purpose to use it well and you get chaos. Inside that model are the commitments a crew makes to each other.

Notice the move. Marquet’s real gift was not a grand philosophy of empowerment, plenty of leaders give that speech. It was the language, the exact words he put in his crew’s mouths at the moment they acted. He even said the way they ran the ship was the leadership development program. That is the leap from a good idea to a living culture: language a whole team holds in common and uses on itself, at the moment it is needed. The speech inspires. The words change behavior.

Why Culture Is the Cumulative Effect

Notice what those commitments have in common. None is a value statement. Each is a cue or a habit that fires at a specific moment and shapes one behavior. On its own, any single one changes a single decision. That is not culture yet.

Culture is what happens when you repeat them. Take “I intend to,” the phrase that turns a request into a decision. Said once, it is a nice moment of initiative. But a whole crew that says it every day for a year becomes a crew that simply thinks like leaders, that works the problem and owns the call without being asked. The commitment is the input. The culture of ownership is the cumulative effect.

Think about your own team. How often do they ask permission when they could have stated an intention, and what would change if the words flipped?

This is the part most people miss, about this book and about culture in general. A culture of ownership is not declared in a kickoff. It is accumulated. It is the residue of the same commitments lived over and over until thinking like a leader is simply how people operate here. Change the commitments and you change the culture, one fired cue at a time, compounding.

And here is the bigger idea, the one that makes this book matter beyond the submarine. When Marquet left, the Santa Fe stayed at the top and kept producing leaders. The culture did not depend on him, because it lived in the crew’s language, not his personality. That is the difference between a heroic leader, whose magic leaves when they do, and a culture built on shared commitments, which outlasts anyone. Marquet built his for one thing, command on a submarine. Picture the same engine on every activity a team does, the meetings, the feedback, the decisions, the handoffs. That compounding, across a whole organization, is the whole of Culture by Commitment, and Turn the Ship Around is one of the cleanest proofs that the engine works.

The Heart of It: Giving Control Is the Harder Work

This is the most powerful idea in the book and the most misread. People hear “give control” and picture a hands-off leader stepping back and trusting everyone to figure it out. That is not empowerment, it is abdication, and it usually ends badly. What Marquet actually did was far more active. He poured energy into building his crew’s competence and into making the ship’s purpose crystal clear, precisely so that giving control would be safe rather than reckless. The leader who gives control well does more work, not less, it is just different work: developing people and clarifying purpose instead of making every decision.

That is also the real inversion at the heart of the book, the one its subtitle names outright: turning followers into leaders. The job of a leader is not to be the person who makes the decisions, it is to build an organization full of people who can. A ship of followers can only ever be as good as its captain. A ship of leaders is as good as everyone on it. Get that right, and you do not just get better results, you get a culture that keeps producing leaders long after you have gone.

Watch Out for These Things

A clean idea like “give control” is strong medicine, and strong medicine has side effects. The most common one: a manager reads the book, announces “you are all empowered now, make your own calls,” and walks away, no training, no shared sense of the goal. The team flounders, makes decisions that pull in different directions, and quietly starts wishing for the old orders back. That is not the leader-leader model, that is abdication wearing its clothes. Four cautions, so you get the benefit without the damage.

Hold it right and it is simple: give people real control, build the competence and clarity that make it safe, trade asking permission for stating intention, and measure yourself by how many leaders you create, not how many decisions you make.

From a Great Book to a Culture You Can Build

So if you came here for Turn the Ship Around, here is what to do with it. The mechanism that makes the book work is not unique to submarines or to empowerment. It is how every part of a culture gets built.

Read the book, take the spirit of it, and then do the part the book leaves to you: turn its language into a handful of commitments your team actually shares and lives. And if the idea grabs you, that culture is the cumulative effect of the right commitments lived day after day, that is the whole premise of Culture by Commitment. Start with the core commitments a team shares, and the activity commitments that make them real, one activity at a time, until the cumulative effect is a culture you chose on purpose.