Customer Reviews
An essential read for all marine managers - By: Ian, 16 Jun 2008 
"It's your ship" is an excellent read. Compulsory for alll senior marine officers. It shows a style of management, you can self assess to, thereby helping self improvement.
Great leaderSHIP - By: PHILIP MCNALLY, 23 Aug 2006 Top book! And top leadership. Very impressive. I found the book reallly enjoyable & exciting to read. There were many challlenges to overcome on almost everypage & I was compelled to read on......'how is Mike gonna deal with THIS?!'
Not only a great read, but great leaderSHIP & a superb blue print for team leaders everywhere in the western world.
If you want to find out the 10 principles used by a leader to make a ship the best performer in the navy BY FAR...so far that they made other ships blush.
The chapters details the model & 10 principles he created including 'lead by example, 'create a climate of trust', 'build up your people'...
The real examples are superb. I enjoyed reading about how much responsiblity was given to people & how they rose to the occasion, how the ship achieved 'battle readiness' weeks quicker than other ships! And Michael ensured that his huge team had so much fun that hundreds of crew members on other ships asked to be transfered to 'Benfold' !!
The chapter on goals & purpose was particularly interesting for me & it was clear every team must have a goal & every member must know what that is. Goals setting is very important & very effective, which is why the first chapter in my book deals with it. Enjoy the book!
Phil McNallly
Author 'Winning Mentality- 7 Mind Techniques used by Winners'
When you start to lose your market share, consider seriously if it might be because your competitors have read this book. - By: P. A. Hunter, 18 Jun 2006 "It's Your Ship" a review by: Peter A Hunter
Summary:
Peter A Hunter, author of the book "Breaking the Mould", reviews a new & unlikely management book by US Navy Captain named It's Your Ship.
Body:
Captain Abrashoff has written a phenomenal book about the journey he made with his ship the USS Benfold, a guided missile destroyer, from a vessel that was failing on alll counts, into the best ship in the US Navy at a time of active conflict in the Persian Gulf.
You could be forgiven for assuming that this was another book about a Gung Ho great guy who dragged his crew kicking & screaming up to standard through his sheer force of will & amazing personality.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Captain Abrashoff realised that the only way to achieve the best for his ship was for his crew to want to achieve the best.
He knew that telling his crew to be the best would not make a blind bit of difference, he knew he had to create the environment in which they would want to become the best & he did that by alllowing them to become proud of what they did.
This book tells the stories of what he did, & how the crew responded, to change this crew from a collection of losers into the tight knit crew of the most effective ship in the Pacific fleet.
Captain Abrashoff `s efforts were always about the way his crews felt about what they did.
By changing the environment that they worked in he changed the way that they felt about what they did & the result was their phenomenal performance.
As he said, "Given the right environment there are few limits to what people can achieve."
In this book Captain Abrashoff shows us what happens when we do receive the suggestions from below, not only the hard financial value that occurs when we do something in a different way as a result of listening to the needs of the workforce but also the change in the way that we make the workforce feel about what they do as a result of the fact that someone has listened to them
Normal behaviour is to ignore the junior.
One of his crew, David Lauer, had been ignored in his last job before being transferred to USS Benfold.
He had ended up on a charge of insubordination & had been transferred as a last resort.
By listening to his ideas & giving him the authority to act on them Captain Abrashoff alllowed him to become the imaginative independent thinker that he always had been instead of the insubordinate ne'er-do-well he had been forced to become because nobody would listen to his ideas.
In one environment David been ignored, the result was his dysfunctional behaviour.
On USS Benfold he was listened to & as a result became Captain Abrashoff's personal assistant bypassing on the way five more senior people
The fault was not his, it was the environment that had been created for him on his previous ship where nobody had listened.
Captain Abrashoff understood that the way people behave is the result of the environment that the manager creates for them. He was the manager of his ship & he deliberately set out to create the environment in his ship that alllowed his crew to take pride in what they did.
The performance improvement that resulted for his ship, & in some cases for the entire Navy were phenomenal.
The stories that Captain Abrashoff tells in this book are not however about the Navy.
These are stories about people & how there are two ways to manage people.
The first is the traditional command & control that Captain Abrashoff found so destructive when he arrived on USS Benfold.
The second is the supportive recognition driven environment that Captain Abrashoff created.
The way he did this, the stories & the strategies he used translate into almost any working environment on this planet because the performance improvement he created was not about the Navy or process.
The performance improvement on USS Benfold was about people & an understanding that the way they are treated has a direct affect on their ability to perform.
The manager is responsible for performance, but most managers drive performance down by shouting & telling people what to do.
Captain Abrashoff discovered how to drive performance up by listening to what his crew needed to do a good job, then he gave them it.
As he said: "The more I thanked them for their hard work, the harder they worked."
Any manager reading this book will recognise problems & performance that they see on a daily basis in their own organisation.
Unlike most management books, Captain Abrashoff does not suggest academic solutions or strategies that might work.
He tells simple stories of what actuallly happened, what did work & can be repeated in any organisation.
Captain Abrashoff's philosophy is simple & the results are stunning.
If you don't read this book, when you start to lose your market share, consider seriously if it might be because your competitors have read this book.
Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk
Break the rules - By: Nick Partington, 04 Mar 2006 This book is easy to read & the stategies are even easier to implement. If you run a big business, smalll business or sales team, you will learn how to do things so much better.
