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3/14/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.  No other element can do so much for a person if they are willing to study them and make capital out of them.” – Date Carnegie

3/15/2023 – Morning Caffeine “…Energy multiplies when you set a desired goal and resolve to work toward that goal.” – David Joseph Schwartz

3/16/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Do more than you have to do, more than you share, and do it as well as you can.” – Ralph Charell

3/17/2023 – Morning Caffeine “It is no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary. – Winston Churchill

3/20/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The future belongs to those that believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

3/21/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Man’s minds stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

3/22/2023 – Morning Caffeine Develop the flexibility to adjust and adapt yourself to the changing patterns of life.

3/23/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Hit the ball over the fence and you can take your time going around the bases.” – John Raper

3/24/2023 – Morning Caffeine “First we will be best, and then we will be first.” – Grant Tinker

3/27/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Have your processes become the master rather than the servant? How can you ensure adherence to the  procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind? Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions? Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives?” – David Marquet

3/28/2023 – Morning Caffeine “If you fail, it’s because you took a chance; if you succeed, it’s because you grasped an opportunity.”

3/29/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life, I find.” – John F. Kennedy

3/30/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The only sin is mediocrity.” – Marth Graham

3/31/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The essence of leadership is vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” – Father Theodore Hesburgh

4/3/2023 – Morning Caffeine “One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something.” – David Marquet

4/4/2023 – Morning Caffeine “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” – Vencent Van Gogh

4/5/2023 – Morning Caffeine “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Chinese Proverb

4/6/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Always keep the heart young and expectations high and never let your dreams die.”

4/7/2023 – Morning Caffeine “No man is a leader until his appointment is ratified in the minds and hearts of his men.” – Anonymous, The Infantry Journal, 1964

4/10/2023 – Morning Caffeine “If you want people to think, give them intent, not instructions.” – Don Marquis

4/11/2023 – Morning Caffeine “A person who walks in another’s track leaves no footprints.”

4/12/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo

4/13/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Follow the crowd and you will never be followed by a crowd.”

4/14/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Lead, follow, or get out of the way – Lee Iacocca

4/17/2023 – Morning Caffeine “People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead.” – David Marquet

4/18/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The greater thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are going.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

4/19/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Follow the crowd and you will never be followed by a crowd.”

4/20/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Don’t wait for your ship to come in; swim out to it.”

Friday 4/21/2023 – Morning Caffeine “”You’ve got to have integrity to be an effective leader. That’s what it all stems from.” – Don Sula

4/24/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The leader-leader structure is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership” – David Marquet

4/25/2023 – Morning Caffeine “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” – Georgia O’keffe

4/26/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.” – Henry Ford

4/27/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Develop the curiosity to experiment…to test and try new ways of living and thinking.”

Friday 4/28/2023 – Morning Caffeine 

5/1/2023 – Morning Caffeine “You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.” – David Marquet

5/2/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Never bend your head, always hold it high.  Look the world straight in the face. – Helen Keller

5/3/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that yo, too, are great. – Mark Twain

5/4/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Press on. Nothing can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent. – Calvin Coolidge

5/5/2023 Morning Caffeine “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” – William Shakespeare

5/8/2023 Morning Caffeine “Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional. Once a ship has achieved success merely in the form of preventing major errors and is operating in a competent way, mission accomplished, there is no need to strive further.” – David Marquet

5/9/2023 – Morning Caffeine “We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.” – Goethe

5/10/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” – John Wooden

5/11/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.” – William Shakespeare

5/12/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.” – William M. Winans

5/15/2023 – Morning Caffeine “If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions.” – David Marquet

5/16/2023 Morning Caffeine “Doing Nothing is doing something. “It is what it is” is the result of  doing nothing.” – Jeff Price

5/17/2023  Morning Caffeine “Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simple have their ideas closer together.” – George C. Lichtenberg

5/18/2023 Morning Caffeine “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

5/19/2023 Morning Caffeine “I will not send troops to danger which I will not myself encounter.” – The Duke of Marlborough

5/22/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative.” – David Marquet

5/23/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Don’s let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was” – Richard L. Evans

5/25/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Create mental pictures of your goals, then work to make those pictures become realities.”

5/26/2023 – Morning Caffeine – “Been here. Done that. Now you go there and to that!” – Richard Marcinko

5/29/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The leader-leader model not only achieves great improvements in effectiveness and morale but also makes the organization stronger. Most critically, these improvements are enduring, decoupled from the leader’s personality and presence. Leader-leader structures are significantly more resilient, and they do not rely on the designated leader always being right. Further, leader-leader structures spawn additional leaders throughout the organization naturally. It can’t be stopped.” – David Marquet

5/30/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The crime is not to avoid failure. The crime is not to give triumph a chance.” – Huw Wheldon

6/1/2023 –  Morning Caffeine “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein

6/2/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Example is Leadership” – Albert Schweitzer

6/5/2023 -Morning Caffeine “The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control. Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.” – David Marquet

6/6/2023 – Morning Caffeine “The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten.” – Andre Malraux

6/7/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

6/8/2023 – Morning Caffeine “A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.” – Alexandre Dumas

6/9/2023 – Morning Caffeine “Whatever does not break my back makes me stronger” – Friedrich Nietzsche

6/12/2023 – Morning Caffeine “When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.” – David Marquet

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Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “As you work with individuals in your organization to develop their vision for the future, it is crucial that you establish specific, measurable goals. These goals will help the individuals realize their ambitions. In addition, you as a mentor have to establish that you are sincerely interested in the problems of the person you are mentoring. By taking action to support the individual, you will prove that you are indeed working in their best interest and always keeping the end in mind.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a manager, what does this say about that person’s leadership?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Why do we need empowerment? Do you need someone else to empower you? How reliant is your organization on the decision making of one person, or a small group of people? What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use? When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind? What assumptions are embedded in those images? How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader? To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “leadership is the enabling art.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to “give control, create leaders.” I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Don’t Empower, Emancipate” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “control without competence is chaos.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation? How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “But leadership is about making the lives of others easier, not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “disempowered phrases” that passive followers use: Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . . Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . .” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The goal of a leader is to give no orders. Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you have the fortitude to go against the grain? There are significant benefits to thinking differently about leadership.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Many empowerment programs fail because they are just that, “programs” or “initiatives” rather than the central principle—the genetic code, if you will—behind how the organization does business. You can’t “direct” empowerment programs. Directed empowerment programs are flawed because they are predicated on this assumption: I have the authority and ability to empower you (and you don’t). Fundamentally, that’s disempowering.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “When thinking about the principles and their utility, I used this question: If I were a crew member and faced with deciding between two different courses of action, would these principles provide me with the right criteria against which to select the appropriate course of action? The guiding principles needed to do just that: provide guidance on decisions.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you play “bring me a rock” in your organization, where vague understanding of the goal results in wasted time?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Managers say these things to assuage their conscience. When things go wrong, they can blame others for not speaking up. But leaders make the lives of others easier, not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Frequently, I wouldn’t just say, “Very well.” There would be too many unanswered questions about the safety and appropriateness of the proposed event, so I found myself asking a bunch of questions. One day I caught myself, and instead of asking the questions I had in mind, I asked the OOD what he thought I was thinking about his “I intend to submerge.” “Well, Captain, I think you are wondering if it’s safe and appropriate to submerge.” “Correct. So why don’t you just tell me why you think it is safe and appropriate to submerge. All I’ll need to say is ‘Very well.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Rather than telling everyone what we needed to do, I would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, I told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “THINK OUT LOUD is a mechanism for CONTROL because when I heard what my watch officers were thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and let them execute their plans.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “We realized that resilience and effectiveness sometimes meant questioning orders.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was a lesson that would serve me well.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I was disturbed by the close coupling of the technical competence of the leader with the performance of the organization.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience. It’s my hope that this organization of the mechanisms in this book will help you put these ideas into action as you adopt the leader-leader philosophy.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “as authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for technical competence.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “If all you need your people to do is follow orders, it isn’t important that they understand what you are trying to accomplish.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “We let our administrative processes get in the way of prompt recognition. Many times we would submit awards three months prior to the departure of a sailor, only to find ourselves calling during the last week to track down the award before his departure. When I say immediate recognition, I mean immediate. Not thirty days. Not thirty minutes. Immediate.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them? How will you communicate your principles to others? Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards? Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria? Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people? Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The practice outweighs the rhetoric. In” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers? How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviors you want? Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “It might seem like a little thing, but on board a nuclear submarine, little things like lack of punctuality are indicative of much, much bigger problems.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Back in Pearl Harbor, we visited the USS Bowfin submarine museum and called it officer training. I was worried that the crew would think some of these things tacky, but that wasn’t the case. It helped provide organizational clarity into what we were about—the why for our service. USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you aware that you turned in a blank sheet?” “Yes sir, I am.” “Well, don’t you think that you as the commander have an obligation to create a vision for your command?” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, I feel that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The guiding principles needed to do just that: provide guidance on decisions.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “having the courage to change, and tolerating failures.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Continuous improvement is how we get better. We continually seek ways to learn from processes and improve them and ourselves. The chain of command has the obligation to develop and institute mechanisms (such as conducting debriefs) to achieve continuous improvement.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment We encourage those below us to take action and support them if they make mistakes.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I have seen this, for instance, in an organization that talked about safety first but whose real interests were in profits and accepting degradations in safety if they seemed “reasonable.” After all, the safest thing to do is to shut down and send everyone home. But not acknowledging that they would be balancing safety with profits resulted in miscommunication, lack of credibility (because everyone knew the truth), and unaligned decisions. USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. All business concerning a leaking valve or failed circuit card had to occur outside these meetings. During the first set of discussions, we adapted a useful technique for long-term focus and planning. I asked each of them to write their end-of-tour awards. Since these supervisors are assigned to the submarine for three years, this particular exercise made them look that far into the future.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “There were plenty of signs that my view was distorted—had I been willing to see them. People would hesitantly offer a good idea every now and then. Occasionally, they would take smart, decisive action without my direction. Once in a while, I would make a mistake, directing my team in a way that wasn’t optimal or was just plain wrong. In these scenarios, my subordinates would comply with bad orders, despite all my lectures to speak up if they ever saw a problem. Afterward, when things went off the rails, they would shrug and say they were just doing what they’d been told. In response, I would double down on giving clear, concise, and correct orders.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about. This is called clarity,” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “in a leader-follower structure, the performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader. As a result, there is a natural tendency to develop personality-driven leadership.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals? Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “THE END IN MIND is an important mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “we hadn’t been keeping track of the appropriate data, and we’d have to start doing so.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The key is that as the importance of doing things right increases, so does the need to act deliberately.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Through trial and error, the team arrived at a body of practices and principles that were dramatically more effective than those within the leader-follower model. It was only toward the end that we understood we had replaced the leader-follower model with the leader-leader model.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you react when an employee admits to doing something on autopilot, without deliberately thinking about the action or its consequences? Do you think that by implementing a system of taking deliberate action you can eliminate errors in your company, or within certain departments in your company? Will employees in your workplace revert to acting hastily and automatically in a real-life situation? How effectively do you learn from mistakes?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “By explaining the process to the team and giving them the tools to improve their performance, you empowered them to determine their own success.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do we create resilient organizations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system? Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct? Do you want obedience or effectiveness? Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “What would you and your team like to accomplish? How can you as a leader help your people accomplish it? Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both professional and personal goals? Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences of their own behavior?”- David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.”- David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language? How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings? How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes? Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance? To what degree does trust factor in the above?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization? What is the cost of being open about problems in your organization and what are the benefits? How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter? How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors? How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organization?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “With physics, you don’t have problems; you only have the consequences of your actions. They become problems when we decide that what happened wasn’t what we wanted to happen.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The next time you have a problem at your company, think about this: Is this simply a problem in execution, or was there a decision in the past, perhaps the distant past, that set us down the path where this operational problem was more likely to happen? Is the problem rooted in faulty bluework in the past?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are your people trying to achieve excellence or just to avoid making mistakes? Has your organization become action-averse because taking action sometimes results in errors? Have you let error-reduction programs sap the lifeblood out of initiative and risk taking? Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success? Are you able to identify the symptoms of avoiding errors in your workplace? When you ask people what their jobs are, do they answer in terms of reducing errors?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you ready to take the first steps toward leader-leader? Are you ready to take the first steps toward an empowered and engaged workforce? Are you ready to embrace the changes that will unleash the intellectual and creative power of the people you work with? Do you have the stamina for long-term thinking?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Instead of looking at a task as just a chore, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the associated piece of equipment, the procedure, or if nothing else, about how to delegate or accomplish tasks.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “As leaders, the way to get out of the cajole, manipulate, plead, and hope for certain behaviors game is to focus on immediate, positive, and certain psychological rewards after we observe the behaviors that are useful and effective in the business.”- David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Process thinking asks questions like: “What are we missing?” “How might this go wrong?” “If we do this and it ends up going south, what would be the most likely culprit?”- David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Are people eager to go to training?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Instead, we were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived. We called this “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “In brainstorming, I would like as many different ideas as possible. In decision-making, I would like a wide range of options. In determining the truth, I would like to hear different perspectives.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you limiting your leadership to empowerment? What programs have you instituted to supplement control with competence and clarity? Have you divested yourself of the attitude that you, as a corporate leader, will empower your staff?” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “What do we do on a day-to-day basis? We learn.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.” – David Marquet

Friday – Morning Caffeine  –

Monday – Morning Caffeine “The Power of Words The key to your team becoming more proactive rests in the language subordinates and superiors use. Here is a short list of “disempowered phrases” that passive followers use: Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . . Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . .”

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance?” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “We found that when people know they will be asked questions they study their responsibilities ahead of time. This increases the intellectual involvement of the crew significantly. People are thinking about what they will be required to do and independently study for it.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “An effective survey question to ask your employees is how many minutes a week they spend learning on their own, not mandated, not directed. Typically it’s a small number. An organizational measure of improving health would be to increase that number. If you want engaged teams, don’t brief, certify!” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants? How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation? When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tune out the procedures? What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them? Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfill?” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “He reserved only the tip-of-the-iceberg-type decisions for his own confirmation. The great mass of the iceberg—the other 95 percent of the decisions—were being made without any involvement or confirmation by the captain whatsoever.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Operating this way—conforming to hierarchical roles, maintaining emotional distance from others, avoiding vulnerability at all costs—is lonely and unfulfilling.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “He felt if he required them to own the problem and the solution to it, they would begin to view themselves as a vitally important link in the chain of command. He created a culture where those sailors had a real sense of adding value.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “As the level of control is divested, it becomes more and more important that the team be aligned with the goal of the organization.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “We are in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in human history, where the primary work of mankind is moving from the Industrial Age of “control” to the Knowledge Worker Age of “release.”  Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential. – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Disengaged, dissatisfied, uncommitted employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of their colleagues.” – David Marquet

Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is the art, science, or gift by which a person is enabled and privileged to direct the thoughts, plans, and actions of others in such a manner as to obtain and command their obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation.” – David Marquet