It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy |  | Author: Michael Abrashoff
Publisher: Business Plus
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $3.79
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Seller: awesomebooksusa
Rating:  127 reviews
Sales Rank: 1634
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 212
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0446529117
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4092
EAN: 9780446529112
ASIN: 0446529117
Publication Date: May 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
GREAT CONDITION W/ AUTHOR AUTOGRAPH & "COMMAND A GREAT SHIP!" MESSAGE. WILL SHIP FAST!!
Amazon.com Review
Other than the sobering fact that real lives are regularly at stake, running a navy ship is a lot like running a business: leaders of both must get the most out of their crews to operate at peak efficiency and complete the tasks at hand. As commander of the highly acclaimed USS Benfold, Captain D. Michael Abrashoff irrefutably demonstrated how progressive management can succeed at sea; in It's Your Ship, he translates his methods into an approach that can also be applied by land-bound captains of commerce and industry. Describing "the ideas and techniques that I used to win my sailors' trust and, eventually, their enthusiastic commitment to our joint goal of making our ship the best in the fleet," Abrashoff cites embarrassing failures along with subsequent triumphs to illuminate the keys to his accomplished 20-month tenure aboard the guided missile destroyer. His suggestions: lead by example; listen aggressively; communicate purpose and meaning; create a climate of trust; look for results, not salutes; take calculated risks; go beyond standard procedure; build up your people; generate unity; and improve your people's quality of life. While hardly original on the surface, Abrashoff's course should provide practical direction and inspiration for any leader hoping for similarly positive results in similarly rigid organizations. --Howard Rothman
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 127
 Good Concepts - Easy to Translate to Non-Military November 24, 2009
T. Booth (Phoenix, Arizona. USA)
I purchased this book and handed it out to students in one of my leadership classes. It provides good insights, examples, and stories about how the Captain was able to gain the trust and respect of the men and women under his charge. Even though the book is about the Navy and there is an obvious hierarchy that must be followed, the lessons learned can easily be translated into non-military and non-government. This book is easy to read and provides excellent lessons in leadership.
 The solution to the Command and Control workplace November 22, 2009
B. Dean
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I like business books, but many of the professionals I work with aren't big readers. The text-of-the-day often comes across as too academic for their real world problems. The author of It's Your Ship doesn't suffer from that problem. In fact, after sharing this book with one of my I-don't-enjoy-business-books colleagues, he actually read it and told me to buy another copy for myself as he was keeping that one! "Bad News Doesn't Get Better With Age" is one of the practical quotes from the book I have heard that leader use regularly to teach others not to "shoot the messenger." The style of writing makes for very readable anecdotes. At first, the command-and-control environment of the Navy didn't seem to hold that much in common with our corporate culture.
However, after reading the book, the paradigm shift was complete:
a) I realized our culture was way more top-down command-and-control than I realized
b) Captain Abrashoff's success was, due to his learning, "I found that the more control I gave up, the more command I got."
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is the only other book I've read that is as approachable and useful as this one in the workplace. I recommend Emotional Intelligence 2.0 as well.
"It's Your Ship" is for everybody! November 9, 2009
bobcat7883 (Austin, TX)
This is one of the most inspirational books on management I have read. It was quick, easy and fun to read!
It has something for anyone in business, management, or in a position working together with people.
The subject of managing (commanding) a ship in the Navy was also very interesting. I highly recommend this book!
Excellent reading for any leader August 28, 2009
L. Scarber (Arizona)
I received the book as a gift and found it to be entertaining and insightful. Abrashoff took risks and thought outside the box--not to promote himself, but to create the best working environment for his subordinates. I bought additional copies for the people I directly supervise and have already received positive comments about how it is changing the way they do business.
Management development through powerful stories July 21, 2009
Tarcisio Cardieri (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Can anyone in search of a culture of peace learn anything useful from the success story of a war ship? How does the management of a ship endeavored to be the best in its category serve as a point of reference for public and private corporations, involved with the fulfilling of society needs? Hasn't one just had enough of the warfare marketing? Do we need war management as a new reference (or as a new fad)?
These could be some of the questions that can come to the minds of people who may take a first glance at this book. Others may feel enlightened by it as proof that management should be inspired by military precepts. After all, aren't the structures of many modern organizations inspired by the art of war? Don't terms like headquarters, strategy, tactics, line of command, and so many others come directly from the military jargon? Some people may even twist their noses and refuse to open the book. They may argue that management has to do with cooperation and not with some wining and others losing. The sources of inspiration should involve other fields of human action, and include nature. Depending on what each one is looking for or believe is going to find, they may all be right in their views. Or they may be wrong. So, how do we get from here?
An interesting starting point could be the one that considers this book as being about people, about ordinary human beings. Human beings who have stories to tell, life stories that may involve suffering, limitations, stumbling blocks, frustrations or even deceptions. But their stories can also be about demonstrations of courage, stimulating challenges, companionship, unconditional support, self-realization, accomplishments and joy. They may be stories that reveal the character of the ones who lived or told them. It is also a book about the potentials that each person carries within himself or herself and given the appropriate conditions, they may flourish in extraordinary ways. It is also about how an inspiring leadership can contribute to the unfolding of those potentials. Besides, it's a book about what motivates people to take action. Not the most elementary, superficial and illusory kind of motivations, but the deep ones which give a real sense of an important contribution to the world.
As it follows, it would be convenient to look at this book as extremely rich in resourceful lessons about competences that transform a "commander in chief" in a genuine leader, capable of mobilizing the best energies of people with whom he works. These are subtle competences, such as knowing how to listen with refinement, how to practice unconditional and positive appreciation/acceptance of others, how to raise the levels of self-esteem through the proposition of "impossible equations" (those which we want but don't know to get to them) geared to the overcoming of limitations; and how to use very well elaborated strategies to face with success any orthodoxies ("It has always been done that way, it created success in the past, therefore no questions about it.")
Leaders need to face some very powerful challenges to develop those competences. The first challenge to be faced is to question their own mental models, the "formatting" of their thinking that many times functions as a filter that percolates only that which is in conformity with what is already known and conveniently accepted to be true. Then, they need to create an environment of unequivocal trust in which everybody in a group can freely express not only ideas, but also anxieties and weaknesses. A kind of environment that would allow everybody to admit and accept (including the leader) to be vulnerable. And finally, the challenge of establishing a clear and very well articulated purpose, so that it can be fully understood by everyone in the group. It is also necessary to take into account that the realization of this purpose will need to be supported by a solid base of principles that are the expression of nonnegotiable and inalienable values. In this case, the challenge to the leader is to create consensus around the principles that will be taken into account.
Another fundamental point in the appreciation of this book is to deepen the level of abstractions that one can make. A first level abstraction would invite the reader to look for situations similar to the ones described in the book, so that by using analogies he or she can envision news possibilities of action. A second level abstraction refers to the identification of mental models and assumptions that hide behind the modus operandi of a situation and, in so doing, see if such assumptions are present in similar situations, so that one can learn how to act on them. A third level abstraction could look at fundamental principles that led to the decisions adopted in the described situations. On this level, it is possible to find more intense and productive analogies, because the principles may be expressions of universal values. For example, on chapter four which is about Communicating Purpose and Meaning, the author narrates the episode of a radio operator who, by means of his own initiative, discovered how to solve a critical communication problem during the crisis with Iraq, in 1997, which could account for very serious problems. The radio operator worked so hard that he ended up discovering how to solve the serious faults in the system that created great congestions and he even expanded its capacity. He did so because he was extremely competent, he was working in an environment that valued initiative and he had a clear purpose of his work. A first level abstraction could be the manager's need to know very well the members of his or her team and give them autonomy to bring forth their potential. On a second level, a possible abstraction could be the assumption that the manager not only gives the material conditions for his team to do the job but also to know the reason why they do what they do. On a third level, it could be that the value of human life is above all else and for that reason no effort will be too exigent or too exaggerated when the preservation of life is at stake. As leaders, how can each manager perceive his or her performance in relation to these abstractions?
Stories can be read and understood as metaphors, or as a description of something by means of something else that is similar to it. This is a book of stories. Therefore, a book of metaphors. In that sense, it doesn't really matter if the stage for the line of action is on a war ship. This is just the packaging, a kind of container as in "King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table" or "The Fox and the Grapes" which are also metaphorical stories. And just because they are open, their metaphors can have different meanings for different people at different times. So, what you are going to find within this book will be that which you believe you are going to find. What are you choosing to look for?
Showing reviews 1-5 of 127
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