Captain L. David Marquet (U.S. Navy, Retired) is a celebrated leadership visionary, bestselling author, and educator whose career-defining moment came during his command of the nuclear ballistic missile submarine USS Santa Fe (SSN‑763) from 1999 to 2001.
When reassigned to the Santa Fe—then one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet—he abandoned the standard “leader‑follower” model in favour of a radical “leader‑leader” philosophy: empowering crew members to take initiative, make decisions, and speak up. This bold shift transformed the morale and performance of the crew, propelling them from the bottom ranks to the top of the fleet in both retention and operational ratings—a turnaround so profound that after his departure, the submarine continued winning awards and produced an unusually high number of subsequent submarine captains.
Marquet is the bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around! (2013), named by Fortune as a must-read business book and by USA Today as one of the top business books of all time, and Leadership Is Language (2020), featured among Wall Street Journal’s top-ten business bestsellers. His upcoming book, Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions, is out now.
Since retiring, Marquet has become one of the world’s most sought-after keynote speakers on leadership transformation. His philosophy—summarised as “give control, create leaders”—is taught through his Intent-Based Leadership Institute, workshops, and global speaking engagements, including engagements with Fortune 500 companies and universities like Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. He has been named one of Inc. magazine’s top 100 leadership speakers and appeared on the American Management Association’s “Leaders to Watch” list. He is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Q: How does the psychological phenomenon of distancing relate to leadership?
[L. David Marquet]: I was a submarine commander, and I took over a submarine at the very last minute. I got reassigned to a different ship — one I wasn’t trained for. I’d spent a year preparing for a specific submarine, one of the newest in the Navy. But the captain unexpectedly quit a year early, and I was sent to take over. It was a different class of submarine, and I’d never served on it before. I knew the physics and the theory, but not the ship-specific systems.
So for me, it became a life-or-death mission to break out of the leadership mould I’d been so good at — which was, in my view, making the right decision and then getting the team to execute it. That was the classic two-step: be right, then get people to comply. Now, people will say, “No, I don’t coerce — I inspire, I motivate, I make them think it’s their idea.” But when you really analyse the language, it’s still rooted in an industrial-age mindset.
The industrial age was designed around one group of people making decisions, and a different group carrying them out. That mindset still lingers in our language — “leaders” and “followers,” “blue collar” and “management,” “union” and “executive.” It splits the world into thinkers and doers. That no longer works — and it didn’t work for me on the submarine.
So, we shifted our language. We got good at having the team come to me and tell me what they intended to do. And I would only step in to stop them. The rule was: unless I said otherwise, they were clear to proceed.
One time, an officer came to me with a plan to fix a torpedo tube. I thought it was a bad plan — it would have messed up other parts of the operation. I was tired that day and didn’t feel like arguing, so I said, “Here, sit in my chair while I grab a coffee. When I come back, tell me what you would do if you were me.” I came back 30 seconds later, and he laid out a totally different plan — and it was a good one.
Just that mental shift — from his role to mine, even if imaginary — changed everything. He hadn’t consulted anyone; he just saw it differently. So, I said, “Sounds good,” and he replied, “I intend to do this.” I said, “Go for it.” That’s when I realized: if I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.
Another example: I’d say, “Imagine you could talk to your future self — six months from now — and ask for advice. What would they tell you to do today?” Today’s mindset is usually “just get through the problem,” but your future self would say, “Solve the root cause — otherwise you’ll keep repeating this.” That small shift in thinking leads to much better action.
There are a lot of moments like that — when we step outside ourselves for just a second. As a submarine commander, I didn’t know anything about psychology. I was just lucky — asking questions, keeping the ones that worked, dropping the ones that didn’t. Over time, I categorized them: be someone else, be somewhere else, be sometime else. I mentally time-travelled — and asked others to do the same.
I particularly like the six-month shift for operational decisions. But for life choices, look at Jeff Bezos. When deciding to start Amazon, he projected himself into the far future. He asked: “When I’m 80, what will I regret more — starting the company and failing, or never starting it at all?” From that future perspective, you reframe the choice through the lens of regret management.
That’s when you realize: “I should’ve moved to France earlier,” or “Why didn’t I stay in touch with that friend?” or “Why was I so hung up on being mad at my mom?” When you’re in the present, looking forward, your brain sees change as scary. But from the far side, looking back, the fear fades. I hate calling these tricks or hacks — they’re just incredibly powerful. And in the book, we share stories of people making better decisions instantly just by shifting perspective — with no new information at all.
Q: What are the consequences of being immersed in ourselves?
[L. David Marquet]: Our default state for experiencing the world is what psychologists call an immersed state. I teamed up with an industrial-organizational psychologist, Dr. Mike Gillespie, who’s a professor here at the local university — the University of South Florida. It’s a big university, and this idea has some solid science behind it.
The basic point is: we experience the world from our perspective. Someone spilled coffee on me, someone cut me off in traffic, they’re talking bad about me, I feel bad. It’s all “me, me, me.” I had eggs for breakfast. That’s our normal experience.
And that’s generally fine — but in moments of stress or decision-making, this self-focused lens becomes a problem. See, your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you’re the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, “Well, that must have been the right decision.” It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right. It magnifies those things, makes them stand out. Meanwhile, anything that might suggest you were wrong? Your brain starts playing tricks.
First, it denies them: “Nah, that’s not really what happened.” You can see this kind of reasoning in court cases sometimes. For example, the defendants in the January 6th riots first said, “There wasn’t any violence.” Then prosecutors showed video footage — so that didn’t hold up. Next, they’d attack the source: “Well, maybe it happened, but he had it coming.” And finally, there’s the fallback: “I’m a good person. I helped the Boy Scouts. So even if it happened, I can’t be bad.” Our brains feed us all these kinds of storylines — and the result is, we don’t actually see reality clearly.
There was an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about posture — maintaining good posture. And as a guy who’s getting older, that hits home. The author made the point: you often don’t realize how bad your posture is. Ballerinas do — because they’re constantly looking in mirrors. But you? You need a mirror. You need someone external — a friend who can look at you and say, “Hey, that’s a knucklehead move. Why are you doing that?” They can see it clearly. You can’t.
And we all know this, right? That an external perspective is usually more accurate. So here’s the magic — the superpower: even imagining yourself as someone else — your replacement, your friend — can be incredibly powerful. Just that mental shift changes everything.
[Vikas: I guess this has practical applications for- say- investment too?]
[L. David Marquet]: Well, the first problem is that you’re at your worst when the markets are at their most volatile. Studies show there’s almost always a gap between what the average investor earns and what the actual investment earns — even in something broad like an S&P 500 fund. It’s called the investor gap. Why does it happen? Because investors tend to panic at the wrong times.
Certain things push us into what’s called an immersed state. And when you’re in that state, it’s really hard to recognize it — let alone break out of it. If someone cuts you off in traffic and you get irritated, you’re immersed. You’re in the moment: “They cut me off,” and it feels personal. It’s very difficult to step back in that moment.
But knowing which situations tend to immerse you? That’s easier. And volatile markets — like the ones we’ve had recently — are one of those situations where we’re especially prone to getting immersed.
There’s some interesting research related to this. A writer for The Wall Street Journal regularly asks readers to predict the stock market’s performance for the year. A couple of years ago, the average prediction was a 6% gain. Then, three-quarters of the way through the year — when the market was down — he asked those same readers to recall what they’d predicted. On average, they reported they had expected a 1% loss.
So two things happened. First, they didn’t remember their original prediction — even though they could have written it down. And second, what they did remember was much closer to the actual outcome.
So not only are we bad investors — we think we’re good investors. And that’s the real problem.
Q: How do you encourage your team to create psychological distance?
[L. David Marquet]: So: be someone else, be somewhere else, be sometime else.
Be someone else. The story we tell here is about Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, who founded Intel. They became rich and famous making memory chips, and Intel was doing very well. But as we now know, Intel became a microprocessor company. In the early 80s, memory chips had become commoditised, and they faced a big decision: stick with memory, or bet the entire company on this new, unproven product — microprocessors.
Andy Grove talks about this in his book. He says they were stuck on the decision for a year. Their identities were wrapped up in memory chips — they were memory chips. They were successful because of memory chips. Giving that up was like saying, “My baby is ugly.” Their brains just couldn’t let go.
Then one day, in a meeting, Andy Grove says, “What if we got fired, and they brought in new people? What if we were our replacements — what would they do?” And instantly, Gordon Moore says, “They’d shift to microprocessors.” No new information. But suddenly, the clouds lift. When you become someone else — someone without baggage — the answer gets clearer.
Be somewhere else. Imagine yourself on the balcony. This is what negotiators do — some of this comes from Bill Ury, who wrote Getting to Yes. He says that when you’re in a tough negotiation, don’t stay immersed at the table. Mentally move to the balcony and look down on yourself. That distance gives perspective.
Be sometime else. This is about shifting time. Think of a team launching a product — something happening every day around the world. You wrap up a phase and ask, “How did we do?” That’s the perfect moment for defensiveness. People feel exposed. “We did our best!” So you pre-empt: “I know everyone did their best, but let’s talk about what we could do better.” Still, people get defensive, and you don’t get the insight you need.
Instead, say: “Imagine we’re advising a team in Singapore who’s about to do something similar. What would we want them to know from our experience?” Now it’s not about us. We’re helping someone else. That distance — even just imagining a team somewhere else — creates clarity.
Here’s some research that’ll blow your mind. People were given a complex matrix for buying a car. First, they were told, “You’re buying the car in your hometown.” They struggled to pick the best one. Then they were told, “Imagine you’re buying a car in Portland,” which was across the country. Suddenly, they were better at it — just by imagining the decision was happening far away.
Why? Because distance helps you see the big picture. Your brain shifts into wide-angle mode. If you’re standing next to a tree, you see the bark, the beetle, the veins in the leaves. But when you step back, all you see is: “It’s a tree. It’s an oak.” That visual distance — whether spatial or temporal — helps you see what really matters.
So when you want to ask, What really matters to me?, imagine it’s far away. Imagine you are far away from it.
Q: Does the concept of distancing then also mean you think differently about leadership over time?
[L. David Marquet]: First off, this kind of forward thinking — asking “What will I think about this in a week? In six months?” — immediately puts you into a learner’s mindset, a growth mindset. Because if all you care about is right now, you’ll just optimise for the moment. Like, I want to drive the submarine into port on the straightest line possible, so I’m going to use my best officer every time we come in.
You’re frequently evaluated when pulling into port. So if all I care about is today’s evaluation, I’ll just keep using the same best guy, over and over. But eventually, he’s going to leave — and then I’m stuck. Whereas if you ask, “What will I wish I’d done six months from now?” you’ll rotate among your officers. You might take a small hit in the short term, but you’re building long-term strength — now everyone learns how to drive the ship.
I always think of it as two vectors. There’s the production vector — build the cars, ship the code, whatever it is. Then there’s the learning vector. Most businesses focus way too much on production. How can you tell? Look at their quarterly reports, their earnings statements. Look at what the CEO writes in the annual letter: “Here’s what we did. Here’s what we accomplished. Here’s how many units we produced.”
It’s rare to find a CEO who says, “And here’s what we learned. And here’s what we still need to learn.” When they talk about next year or next quarter, it’s always: “We’re going to do this, deliver that, sell this.” It’s all do, do, do. Rarely do you hear: “And we’re going to learn more about this.”
So one of the things I did was ask my officers to write their next year’s evaluation. I’d say, “Here’s your evaluation for this year — don’t worry about it, I just got here. Now I want you to write next year’s evaluation. Take a week, come back when it’s ready.” Usually, it took them a day.
Now they’re the ones framing their goals. They’re defining success — in their own words. A year later, we’d look back and say, “Here’s your evaluation.” And they owned it. It came from them.
These are the kinds of things you have to do. And I think you really have to pay attention to language — because the kind of industrial-era English we’re programmed to use is built around Group A trying to get Group B to do something. It’s all about production — and not enough about improving how we think.
Q: How do you maintain your mental fitness and resilience?
[L. David Marquet]: I think I’m lazy. I call myself long-term lazy — and this learning dimension is part of that. I remember coming up through the ranks, and you get inspected a lot. There are formal inspections, but you’re constantly being judged: How are you doing? That kind of thing.
And if you’re completely wrapped up in the production mindset, then every day feels like a test. It’s mentally exhausting. That classic leadership model — make the right decisions, then get your team to carry them out — I think it takes a huge toll. Not just on the leader, but on the team too. Because the team starts to feel like, “We’re not being valued as human beings — we’re just cogs in a machine.” And that’s painful.
But when you shift the focus to: What are we going to learn from this?, and approach it with this kind of child-like curiosity, it’s a totally different energy. Don’t get me wrong — you can absolutely die on a submarine if you don’t do the right things. It’s not hard to screw up badly. But I remember the moment I finally got it.
I was a captain, and we had this big inspection coming up. It was going to be a major evaluation — not just of a department, but of me too. Because I was trying out this new structure, this intent-based leadership model. There was a lot riding on it.
I remember standing in the control room the night before, driving toward port to pick up the inspection team. My heart rate was low. My breathing was calm. I felt this sense of peace. Part of it was confidence in my team. But part of it was this genuine curiosity: Hey, what are we going to learn?
During inspections, you get to do all kinds of stuff you don’t normally do — launch torpedoes, shoot missiles, run the reactor at the edge of its limits. It’s like: How cool is this? We’re going to learn so much. And you don’t need to know the answer. That’s key.
I think leaders often get hung up when someone comes to them with an idea that sounds… off. Our instinct is to fix it. “Let me make your bad idea better.” But I don’t think that’s the right move. We do it by asking these annoying questions like, “Well, have you thought about the customer?” — and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I totally forgot about the customer — thank you!”
But what you really want is to help them get into the right mindset — so they can come up with the answer themselves. And that starts with assuming you don’t know the right answer either. Assume nothing.
Instead, ask: Why are they so immersed? Why are they stuck in this one view of the world? Why are they approaching the problem this way? It’s not because they’re bad people — it’s because they’re human. That’s how our brains work.
So, ask: “If you could talk to your kids right now, what would they want you to do?” Or: “If your replacement showed up and you were suddenly promoted and out of here — what would you really hope that person would do?”
The goal is to get them out of themselves. Out of their own heads. And when they do that, they usually come up with something better.
You’re the boss — you’re the goalie. When the decision comes toward you, like a ball coming down the field, you want the team farthest up field to reverse it — to take action and make the call. That’s great. But you may still have to stop the ball. Just remember: there’s no one behind you.
Q: How do you approach postmortems on challenges?
[L. David Marquet]: There’s a reversal happening in psychology. We used to rely on the idea of “talking through your problems,” but it turns out that might not actually be good for you. Because when you’re doing it, you’re often just rehashing — reliving negative experiences. And depending on how you talk about them, you can end up reinforcing and hardening the neural wiring around those negative events.
If you look at the testimony of people who’ve experienced serious trauma — like sexual assault or violent attacks — there’s a pattern we often notice. As they recount what happened, they sometimes shift into third person. They’ll say, “I went into the park, it was dark… and then I saw myself lying on the ground.” They begin to describe the experience as if it happened to someone else.
That shift into third person is the brain protecting itself from overwhelming trauma. And we know it’s generally easier to talk about someone else going through something painful than to talk about ourselves going through it.
But we can use that insight even at a much smaller, everyday level. It doesn’t have to be something as extreme as assault. It could be something like: “Hey, how did the project go? What went wrong?” Questions like that — or even, “Can I give you some feedback?” — can easily trigger people into a defensive state.
So here’s a simple tool: when you journal, try writing about yourself in the third person from time to time. Especially if you’re working through a tough decision or reflecting on an uncomfortable moment — like a phone call that didn’t go well.
Instead of writing, “I had a call with so-and-so and it upset me,” try: “David had a phone call with so-and-so. They were upset. David didn’t feel great afterward and now needs to figure out how to move forward.”
That little shift in perspective can make it easier to reflect clearly, with less emotional intensity — and often leads to better insight.
Q: What have you learned about the importance of creating a mission?
[L David Marquet]: I think this is really important. The first question is: What’s the mechanism by which a mission-driven organisation can be more adaptive and resilient than a non-mission-driven one? Is it just that people try harder? No, I don’t think that’s it.
I think the real reason is that when people understand the mission, you can distribute decision-making to them. You get a network of decision-makers instead of a single point of decision. And that’s huge—because this network of decision-makers can sense shifts in the environment—like this new thing called AI, or whatever it happens to be—and they can start adapting in real-time. That kind of responsive, resilient behaviour just isn’t possible when all decisions are funnelled through one person at the top.
So what you get is distributed decision-making, plus organisational unity and alignment. That combination is incredibly powerful.
Now, the biggest problem is that when people try to articulate their mission, they bury it in corporate blah blah blah. These statements are often written by lawyers or PR people and end up meaning nothing. They’re too broad, too abstract, too carefully worded. What you need is to be honest—say what the mission is really about.
When I took over the submarine, the Cold War was over. Submarines are amazing weapons in large-scale military conflict—but we weren’t doing that anymore. We were following drug smugglers in the Caribbean with a $2 billion submarine. It was hard to find meaning in that.
So we started talking. And it wasn’t exactly cool at the time, but I’d ask: Why are we here? And the answer we kept coming back to was: To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath. And it really matters—because it’s the Constitution, the ideas codified in that document. Not the president, not a party—the ideas.
I’d ask my sailors: “Why do you support and defend the Constitution?” Because they’d recite that line during reenlistments, but if you asked them what the Constitution actually says, they’d go, “Hmm, I don’t know.” So we started digging into it. It was nerdy, maybe uncool—but it became our North Star.
Then one day a guy says, “I’m cleaning the bilge. Why? Because it makes the submarine quieter. Why? So we don’t get detected. Why? So we can deliver combat effectiveness. Why? So any potential adversary—like the Chinese—know they’re going to get their butts kicked if they try something.” That’s how it all connects. But you’ve got to be really honest to get there.
Too many companies just BS their way through mission statements. Remember Volkswagen? During Dieselgate, their slogan was something about clean engines. Total hypocrisy. You’ve got to flush all that crap away. Be radically honest. And when you are, the right people will find you—and they’ll want to be part of it.
Q: What do you hope your legacy will be?
[L. David Marquet]: I think I just want to make work less crappy for human beings. I want people to go to work and actually say what they really think. That kind of honesty allows for real expression—not this idea that we’ve got 100 geniuses at the top who are going to solve all the problems for us. Because that’s not how it works.
What we really need is the most underutilised resource on the planet: what’s right here—in the brain. Maybe not yours or mine! But we all show up to work using just a fraction of our minds. And it’s not our fault—the language of work is structured to keep it that way.
The truth is, people love solving problems. They love working through challenges. What they don’t love is being treated like a cog in a machine. If we change the way work works, people will be healthier. There’ll be fewer divorces. Fewer bullies at school—because parents won’t come home angry from jobs that drain them.
And we’ll solve big problems. We’ll build amazing things. So yeah—I’m excited about the future. I want to stick around as long as I can.