The Jordan Harbinger Show - 231: Mike Abrashoff | It's Your Ship -- Here's How to Shape It

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

Mike Abrashoff (@itsyourship) is a former Naval Commander, leadership and teamwork expert, and author of the New York Times bestseller It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy. What We Discuss with Mike Abrashoff: Why leadership style matters and organizational culture is everything. How to know when it's appropriate to break the rules and favor innovation over tradition. When to challenge your superiors, and how to do so without endangering your career. How to earn the trust of your superiors so they come to rely on you and trust your judgment. What it takes to foster learning and innovation among the ranks of people conditioned to just follow orders. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/231 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Mind Pump is an online radio show/podcast dedicated to providing truthful fitness and health information. It is sometimes raw, sometimes shocking, and is always entertaining and helpful. Jack up your ears with some Mind Pump wisdom here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that we can use to impact our own lives and those around us. Today, Mike Abrashoff is at the center of one of the most remarkable modern day stories of organizational transformation. At age 36, he was selected to be the commander of USS Benfold and was the most of the most important. junior commanding officer in the Pacific Fleet. At the time, this was one of the worst performing ships in the entire Navy. Morale was low, turnover was high, and the previous commanding officer was literally booed off the ship after leaving command. And 12 months later, it was ranked

number one in performance, using the exact same crew. Today, we're talking about leadership. Not just about replacing command and control leadership with commitment and cohesion, but the principle that leadership style matters and culture is everything. thing. Mike teaches us how to break the rules and when. We'll also discuss how you can earn the trust of your superiors so they come to rely on you and trust your judgment. There's a strategy here that will really help you stay close to the crown and help you learn a ton in your organization or company, whether you have 30 years of experience or you're new on the job. We'll even discuss when to challenge your superiors and how to do so without endangering your career. Of course, we'll

toss a couple war stories in there for good measure. Had a lot of fun with this episode. and I think you'll enjoy it as well. It's not your typical business or leadership show. And I met Mike through my network as I meet a lot of these guests. And if you want to know how I create and reach out to people and manage hundreds slash thousands of connections every single year, check out our six-minute networking course. It's free. I just want you to try it out because I think you'll really have a game-changing experience with it,

both at work and in your personal life. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show here, they actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in some great company. All right. Here's Mike Abrashoff. So is commander the proper title of a commanding officer? Commanding officer. Sure. Of a guided missile destroyer. So can you tell us what this is and what it does, essentially?

It's an incredibly complex platform. Cost $2 billion to build. Wow. And I can track a bird and shoot it down at 50 miles. I carry as many Tomahawk cruise missiles as we can. I can shoot guns at other ships. I can shoot torpedoes at enemy submarines, and I can search the electromagnetic spectrum for enemy communications and radars. So it's a multi-purpose destroyer. Yeah. That's incredibly complex. That sounds really, fun's not the right word, but it does a lot of things instead of just having... So I love the job so much I would have done it for free. It was fun. And I think when people see the

you having fun and enjoying your work, then they will tend to enjoy their job as well. Yeah, that makes sense. And there's 310 people on this boat. So it's not because when I think Destroyer, all of my Navy knowledge essentially comes from the game battleship that I had when I was a kid. And Destroyer was the smallest one. So I thought, oh, it looks pretty small. So what's interesting is there's a cruiser next line up.

And it's the same platform except they carry 20 more missiles. Okay. Other than that, it's the exact same ship. Oh, okay. That's interesting. I remember the cruiser also being in the in the battleship game. Correct. It is sort of that.

My neighbor's wanting me to watch battleship for forever. And I do it as a matter of pride just to irk him to no end. I don't think that movie's going to live up to your expectations or anyone else's expectations for that matter. Sorry if you wrote the movie Battleship, whoever's listening. You mentioned in the book that we've lost our edge in terms of helping people grow. And I want to know what you mean by this because that's not just the military probably. Yeah. I've been speaking now for 19 years since I get out of the Navy.

And this last year has been my busiest year ever. And it's because companies for the first time are facing up to the fact that with a low unemployment rate, workers tend to leave more. And I spoke to a company yesterday. One of their plants had 100% annual turnover. Oh, that's horrible. Absolutely. And they think that it's because of low wages and they're in a poor town. Well, guess what, you know, people in the military today never started out life at the top rung of the economic ladder.

They're good people, but they never started out life at the top. And they use the military as a way to climb the ladder. And so, you know, we have a history of treating our people poorly. And I decided to treat our people like they were the best and put them in positions where they could learn and experience. And today they're enjoying a higher promotion rate than sailors off other ships. those who got out are excelling in the private sector. And so it's about taking an interest in them and taking an interest in their careers. And you know what?

They'll be loyal to you. They'll remember you. Yeah. I can appreciate that. Some of the stats from the book, and the book title is it's your ship, yeah? Correct. So I want to make sure we get that correct. And moving to that in the show notes, of course, and I put the image in there, the one that you,

the slide you sent us earlier. It's a great book because it includes a lot of, I think, when you wrote this book stuff probably nobody had heard before about leadership. Now some of your ideas are making their way into these edgy Silicon Valley leadership books. But even now, when I was reading this, I go, this guy did this, but in the military? I mean, and we'll get into how that affected other ships in the meantime because I think there's no way you didn't face a ton of pushback. But 40% of people don't complete their enlistment contract. That's military turnover. And 40% is a the right word, I guess. That's really bad. Well, and when you consider nobody ever took the cost

of all the commercials, the be all you can be commercials, and then getting them through eight weeks of boot camp and what that cost. And so I did the math. And for at the time, 20 years ago, it was like $45,000 just to get one person through boot camp. Whoa. And then we're losing them before their contract is up. And nobody's being held accountable for that. And now it's even worse because the military is not meeting their recruiting goals. So now you're getting a $30,000 bonus just to sign up on top of the $50,000 or $60,000 now to get you through your first eight weeks. That's an incredible investment that nobody was ever being held accountable for. And so, of course, if you get through boot camp and then you go through a little bit of your job training and then you go, you know what,

I don't like this. You're talking with that bonus, possibly six figures and then it just 40% of these people are unplugging and then leaving. Exactly. That's, that's, That's a huge cost to the taxpayer. It sure is. And it's a cost of business as well. Sure. You know, what they invest in people and train them, and then the lost productivity until they find somebody to replace them.

And now businesses are waking up to the fact that labor isn't free anymore. Yeah. Yeah, of course. You know when you go work for a company that they often won't even pay, let's say, the recruiter or your signing bonus until you've been there for eight, 12 months, because they've seen this movie before. Absolutely. the the idea that people then counter recruit against the military was interesting i hadn't thought about

that but yeah if somebody leaves early and it's one of the 40 percent that leave early and then you are my older brother and you say oh how was it i'm my friend's thinking about joining and i go it sucks man everybody there's such a jerk and the food stinks they don't sign up so you've got you got all these expensive be all you can be commercials on tv but then you've got all your friends saying screw it man it's a trap don't do it that's going to be a more powerful weapon well and it's a the same for businesses in the local community. You know, when, especially with the way things go viral today, that if a disgruntled employee takes a video of something that's not appealing and it gets out there, they're out there counter recruiting against you. So, you know, if they do

leave, I always wanted them to leave on good terms so that, you know, you came, you did your job, and we're going to celebrate the fact that you're choosing not to continue with us instead of kicking them in the behind and walk out the door. Yeah, I can, I can imagine that that. But there's always something, even if somebody hates working for you and hates every element of the job, and you mentioned some examples of this in the book, you can still make them feel like at least they counted in the moment, and they'll have a, even if it's a 10% shred of fondness for the experience. Or it to feel like they made a difference in that they contributed to the overall mission. Yeah. I tried to connect every sailor's job to the completion of the overall mission, even if they were running the sewage system on the ship. I wanted them to feel important and that we couldn't operate without them.

Well, I think somebody's running the sewage system on the ship. That guy is important. One guy, and I went to see him every day to thank him because he had a crappy job down in the bows of the ship. And I went down ladders, hand over fist, four decks down into the bows of the ship to say, Sean, you're doing a great job. I appreciate your hard work. Yeah, and he probably said, can I get a window?

Can I get a fan down here? Oh, man. That's got to be one of the worst. jobs, because I would imagine anything that gets clogged is kind of his purview. It is. Oh, your ship improves so much that other commanders were then sending people to your ship to learn how you turn things around. Because your ship originally, when you started, this was not an all-star.

We weren't the worst ship in the Pacific Fleet, but we were near the bottom. And so, and we had one of the highest turnover rates. We had one of the highest accident rates of any ship in the Navy. And the sailors were just disengaged. They were bitter. They were just waiting for their contract to be up. Oh, man. And so this is what I inherited.

And a lot of what I try to do is to get people to understand, you know, don't be a victim. And I didn't feel like a victim. And it was focused on the things I can influence and treating our people well in setting high expectations for them were things that I could do. And they responded. Tell us what it was like when you first took command because the story of you first taking command of this ship. When I read this, I thought, okay, I would be. intimidated because it was just sort of like general applause when the when the commanding officer no it wasn't general applause or like jeering yeah that's what i meant total disrespect when my predecessor

left the ship for the final time with his parents and his wife and his kids and as his departure was announced on the public address system my new crew stood and cheered wildly that he was leaving and i had never heard of or seen such a blatant sign of disrespect in my entire career and i was terrified. And the first thought that went through my mind was, what do I have to do to keep that from happening to me? Exactly. Two years of now when I leave this ship. Yeah, I think having somebody essentially booed off the boat. Correct. It's a verdict on their tenure. Yeah. Yeah. And the stories that you talk about, I don't know if this was just this predecessor, but there were some stories of him really throwing his weight around and like doing kind of everything wrong that you could

possibly. So he's a brilliant man. Yeah, you have to be nice about it now, but yeah. But he never left his comfort zone. And he was an engineer his whole life. And so he focused on the engineering plant and tried to do everything himself. And so his engineers folded their arms and say, okay, you do it. And they became the first ship in the history of the Navy, first new construction ship in the history of the Navy to flunk their first engineering certification.

Oh, man. And it's because instead of becoming the captain, he wanted to be the super chief engineer. And I see that in business all the time. Like a very good salesperson becomes head of sales. And then they have to become the super salesperson and close every deal. Instead of training the other salespeople to close deals on their own, they have to be seen to be doing it all. Yeah. And it doesn't end well.

It's very, it's funny you bring up the sales example. That's one of the most classic problems in sales is promoting your best salesman to a sales manager. Right. Because they, I think at its core, a lot of salesmen don't want to be a salesman. manager in the first place. They're happy working by themselves, being an individual contributors, and they're not prepared to step into a leadership role. They've done nothing to prepare themselves. And what happens in that situation, they can drive the good people out who have options and want to be hired by other companies. Yeah, you don't, LeBron James doesn't

want to be the coach. He wants to be the player that's in giving interviews and stuff like that. Yeah. And sales guys, a lot of times especially are like that because they're the ones that get the most flexibility. They don't have to necessarily show up to all the meetings. They're generating business. And then you say, here's a stack of paper, manage all these other people and make them look good. And they go, what are you talking about? I'm the one that makes a bunch of money and gets bonuses. I'm not sitting here trying to schlep people around. Laying low in taking no risk in the military also sort of historically is a great way to get promoted and take no risk. It is. You can get by if nobody notices you. You don't screw up. And you don't go out on a link. And you don't go out on a

them and try new things, you can get by. But it doesn't get outstanding performance. And what drove me at this point wasn't my next promotion. I never wanted to have to write the parents of any of my sailors telling them that their sons or daughters weren't coming home because we didn't give it our best. Yeah. So it wasn't about just getting by. I wanted to put ourselves in a position to control our own destiny so that if we go into combat, we come out number one because we're not playing to come in number two. And so everything that we did on that ship, was driven towards controlling our own destiny and creating a climate where every sailor, and I used to tell them, I don't care what your age is, I don't care what your rank is,

I don't care how long you've been here, you can come to work every day and challenge every process on this ship. And if you have an idea how to improve something, 1%, I want to hear from you. And I wanted to create, and I think we did, an intellectually curious organization that didn't fear change, but actually embraced it and let it so that we could control our own destiny. And that's what's at stake today in business and every organization globally. I think that's highly unusual for the military, of course, because you think rules should be questioned and challenged. That's not really kind of a mindset or a paradigm that you see

applied often to top-down command structures at all, ever. And where junior people can question me in the appropriate moment. is this the best way to do this? And I'm free to admit that my way may not always be the best way, and I'll listen to what you have to say. And when I listen to my sailors, they take ownership. And what my goal was is to get away from that top-down command and control and to get them to take ownership of their own destiny. And they came together, formed a great team, had a shared sense of responsibility, and we became the leader in our industry. And the timing has to be important, right? Because if you're engaged in a military exercise or, God forbid, actual combat, now's not the time to go, you know, I don't think we should handle this this way. I've got another idea. Let me walk upstairs. It's like, no, do this unquestioningly now and then maybe later improve the process.

That's exactly right. Because when people take ownership, discipline improves, and if I've got a missile coming at me and I give the order to shoot, I don't want them to say, hey, Captain, have you thought of this? There are times when you have to be directive. But if you're directive 24-7, it wears people down and they don't have the mental stamina or the physical stamina to do what's required. And so that direction has to be saved for when it's critical and you really need them to do something then and now in order to save your organization. Yeah, I think now you don't need robots controlling these different computer systems and things like that. You want people to be, you want to leverage their skills as humans, essentially. It's not a crew rowing a Roman or a Greek ship anymore where they need to fire arrows and cover themselves with the shield, right? You need people going, this doesn't look right. I'm going to run this up the flagpole and double check it.

And I think of your top down all the time, you just end up with people going, I don't have to think. I'm going to hear what I need to think from the top. You're going to create order takers. And order takers don't take accountability for the results. Yeah, and that can obviously generate huge problems later on. Exactly. One thing that seemed a key distinction is you promoted the organization. you never promoted yourself.

Or maybe not never, but in this particular situation, why is this distinction important? Because I think a lot of people, they end up running into problems because they end up promoting themselves instead of the organization. And that's what rubs people the wrong way. And my sailors had a term for it, me, me, me, I, I, I. And that's what they said about previous leaders on the ship, that they were just in it for themselves. and I took a step back and I'm willing to admit there may have been times in my career when I may have been perceived that way. And so I wanted to go the other way and put them.

They got the credit. And when something didn't work out, I took the blame. And as a result, they became even more dedicated and loyal. And what's funny is when I stopped caring about my next promotion, they delivered the results that got me promoted four years to captain ahead of my classmates. from the Naval Academy. So there's something there, obviously. Yeah.

If you focus on results, you will get the credit. It will come back to you. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mike Abrashoff. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode,

so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Mike Abrashoff. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show. And now back to our show with Mike Abrashoff.

I almost went to the Naval Academy and I luckily decided, hey, you know, I don't know if I can handle this and if I want to handle this, and I should probably think about that before dedicating the next, I don't know, 12 years or something. I hated all four years. I'm not going to lie, but I'm glad I went there. Yeah. I mean, it's a great school. It is.

You know, what's funny is today it's considered one of the top academic schools. Sure. And there are surveys of hiring managers, and the Naval Academy ranks 12 or 13th of colleges that hiring managers want to hire from. I think anybody would be lucky to hire somebody who went to a school like that, because you know that not only are they qualified, they're also going to do the work. Right.

Yeah. Which is now, should kind of be table stakes, but isn't anymore. Correct. So the value of somebody who's willing to put their head down and put their nose of the grindstone is now increasing today. There's a lot of innovation that you mentioned in the book as well. For example, and this sort of, I almost didn't even believe this. Use the ship's food ration to buy civilian brands, which were cheaper and tastier. How come if civilian brands are cheaper and tastier, why don't we always use those?

Because the Navy wanted to buy, use bulk contracts in the hopes that it would standardize everything. But a lot of times the quality decreased after the contract was let. And we really weren't getting the best prices. And so I knew the rules. And it's just that nobody ever pursued it before because it took extra work. but we use the rules to our advantage. We live within the rules, but we tried to do what was best and what was most economical for the taxpayer as well.

And so that's why we went out and bought food off commercial from commercial sources. It seems like common sense, but I also, I do understand that, look, if you've got cabinets that measure this and you need to fit 40 cereal boxes in there, you buy the ones that fit in there 40 at a time. But if you buy Cheerios from Walmart, you can only fit in 32 boxes, and now you come up a little short. Like, there's probably reasons behind some of this. I didn't get into those reasons.

But you didn't get into those. You just went, look. I had people who worried about that. People want Cheerios, damn it. I'm going to get Cheerios. Exactly. Yeah. I don't want Navios.

All right. Well, and what was disgusting is, like, we'd get these five gallon tins of peanut butter, and you cut the top off, and there's like two inches of grease on the top. And it's like, we put that out on the chow line for the sailors, and there's nothing remotely appealing about that. is why don't we get GIF, you know, why don't we get Skippy Peanut Butter that is fresh every time you open the top? So it's stupid stuff like that that we challenged. And people could have challenged it before.

Yeah. But it's always, you know, follow the rules and not challenge them. And I'm going to challenge the rules. If something doesn't make sense, we're going to do it and find the most efficient way to get it done. To be fair, real peanut butter, like made out of peanuts that doesn't have chemicals in it, it has that and you stir it and it goes away. Jif doesn't have it, which really freaks me out. Sorry, Jif. But real natural peanut butter has that.

Now, whether that was what you were getting or whether you just had a layer of random grease on top. It was a layer of random grease. Yeah, yeah, I believe that. Something tells me that suppliers aren't like, look, we want to make sure it's all organic. There was nothing appetizing about this peanut butter. No, I believe you. I definitely believe that. You took the balance of the ship's food budget that was left over after buying civilian brands and sent the cooks to culinary school.

That comes out of a different budget. I have like five different budgets. Sure. One is food that only goes to food, but then I have a training budget that I sent the cooks to culinary school. And what's funny is, you know, nobody joins the Navy and wants to be a cook. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yet the recruiters have to fill cook quotas.

And so if you walk into a recruiting office on the 30th of the month and the recruiters haven't filled their cook quotas, well, guess what? You could have a 1600 on the SAT. You're going to be a cook. That seems inefficient, though. Awfully. I remember taking, I took the, what is it called the AFAB? As VAB. I was close.

And I remember at the end, they went, oh, you got a perfect score on this test, which is funny because I didn't know a lot of the answers. But apparently they don't count some of the categories like mechanics and spatial recognition, all that stuff they don't care about. They care about math or something. And I went, oh, good. Does that mean I can have any job I want? And she was like, no, no, it doesn't. And I went, oh, that's kind of scary. Right.

So go figure. So we put non-volunteers in the job. Yeah. And then we don't give them the training and we give them substandard food. And what do you get? Crap on the other end. Yeah. And so I took a hit to my training budget to sent half of them to culinary school in San Francisco.

Guess what? The Navy now has started their own culinary school to train how to cook. Because, hey, if you're on a boat for how long at a time. Typically, you go on a deployment away from home port for seven to eight months. Now, you're not out to sea all that time. Okay. But you're out to sea 45 days continuously. That's a long time to eat food that you don't want to eat anymore.

Correct. Yeah, that's so culinary school. The whole ship morale goes up when you were eating eggs that taste. So once we won the Spokane trophy, which is the trophy for best ship in the Pacific Fleet, my admiral came over and asked me how I did it. And he says, I said, I didn't do it. The crew did it. And he said, well, what was your top priority?

And I said, the food. And he looked at me quizzically and says, What? How is that possible? How is that possible? Everybody needs to eat is the answer to that question, right? Exactly. Everybody needs to eat. Projecting movies on the deck of the ship while people do routine tasks and things like that.

These are rules that probably don't have a high cost of breaking, or these are molds that you can break without too much sort of backlash. I am curious, what was the favorite movie on the ship? Was it Top Gun? Probably Top Gun. Yeah, okay. Or what was that Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise movie about the Marines in Guantanamo? Oh, a few good men? A few good men.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so it was a military movie, not like Gremlins or something like that. And that makes sense. You're from a military family, though, Naval Academy? Well, I'm one of seven children. Okay. And I have a sister who was a nurse in the Air Force, and my father served in World War II, but other than that, we're not a military family. Okay, but that's more than a lot of people who have no previous service.

I guess the reason I bring that up is because it seems like somebody whose dad was in the military, sibling in the military, and then you going to the Naval Academy, you'd, in theory, be the last person to then go, I'm going to break tradition and break the mold. It seems like that's a job for somebody who's got a background that doesn't have a lot of service in it. So it's a little counterintuitive that you would be the person to break all the rules and break all the molds having a history of military.

So just prior to getting command of the ship, I worked for William Perry, who was the Secretary of Defense, and I was his number two assistant. And I sat in every meeting of his for 27 months. And they never asked me for my opinion on whether we should bomb anybody or not. I sat in the back row, but I learned and I listened. And I saw what it's like to run a large organization and try to improve everything every day. And that's what William Perry told us is improve every day, be 1% better today than you were yesterday.

So working for him showed me how to do it, how to challenge the system. within the system. And so I had more confidence to go out and do it when I became captain in the ship. Oh, that makes sense. So you've seen, you saw somebody a few rungs up doing it and you thought, okay, well, if that's the idea, I can bring this back to where the rubber meets the road. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So William Perry was the Secretary of Defense. Okay. And you mentioned the first 75% of your work product got tossed out, but he never gave you any feedback. So between me and him is the general, the senior military assistant. Call and, Powell had the job. John Kelly had the job. Admiral McRaven, who planned the raid on Bidnladen,

had the job. So it's the premier two or three job, two or three star job in the Navy. And so that's who I worked for directly. And so my job, I reported to him. And at the beginning, he threw 90% of my workout. Wow. How do you, how did you even find that out? You just come back and like, I could watch him. I could watch him from my desk. And I watched him work every day. Oh, man. So you're just watching him sort of burn everything. Throw everything away. Rejected. Rejected.

You feel like this tall? Sure. Yeah. And he was the type of guy who never gave you any feedback, positive or negative. And for me, that's the worst type of person to work for because, you know, if I'm screwing up, tell me about it. If I'm doing something great, tell me about it. But don't just throw my work away and give me no feedback. Yeah, that seems feedback would have made the growth and mentorship process a little easier and faster, I would imagine.

But it forced me to get created. on how to get better. And so every night at 8.30, when he went home from work, I would take his classified destruction bag, put it out on his desk, and I'd compare everything of mine that he threw away, compared it to what he sent on, and I got better. So you basically had to go through the garbage and figure out how to get it on your work. 8.30 every night, I went through the garbage. Last thing I did before going home.

So the moral of the story is go through your boss is garbage, but don't kick on. So the moral of the story is I started. putting myself inside his brain and tried to think how he thought. And I would try to make a decision before he ever made a decision. And if he ended up making the same decision that I made, it was like, gee, I can think like a three-star. If he made a different decision, there's a gap in my training that I need to go fill. And what that enabled me to do was start thinking like my boss, anticipating what he needed before he needed it, and be there with a solution. And he started to trust me. And so I took that with me to the ship.

I would put myself in the shoes of my admirals, and I would try to anticipate what they needed, be there with a solution, let them take credit for it, and they become loyalty. And that obviously worked, because at the time you took command, I guess the ship was losing 75 or so percent of its personnel. If not more. If not more. And all of your sailors reenlisted. Almost all. Almost off. Yeah, of course.

Some people have other plans. Right. But everybody who at least was thinking about it. We had the highest retention that year. That's amazing. After having one of the worst two years prior. And your ship broke performance records and then broke many of the same records that they had broke once again. So that's a really dramatic turnaround.

So obviously what you would learn. And it was with the same crew. Right. Yeah. It's not like you just got lucky and got different people. What that tells you is the training was there. The aptitude was there. They just didn't collaborate.

They didn't take ownership. And so when you think about the waste and productivity, that is going to, going on out there where if bosses just were more engaged with their people, they might get better production and better performance. And so that's what I tell my audiences and that's in our consulting business, you know, is how to have that self-awareness as to how you're being perceived so that you can get the most out of your team. That's great. I think it's really, because a lot of people are going to go, oh, well, you know, when you have different recruits or you have different sailors, you know, this could be, there's all these different variables and you can't

really control for that. But if you had the same people, it's hard to argue that it was a, that you got lucky with some other sort of factors or something. I couldn't choose them. It was the same crew. I couldn't choose our missions. And I couldn't ask for more money to get the job done. Yeah. So I could be a victim. Or I could say, I'm going to focus on what I can influence. And first and foremost was myself to become a better leader. Because I grew up, a top down, you know, my way or the highway guy. That is a failed leadership strategy. And anybody who continues to use that they're not going to have the people to drive performance. And so I change first and then ask my crew to change.

And here I am. Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot to this. I'll go back to that in a bit. But I know when you are working for William Perry, you set up some high-level meetings between officials and the USA and overseas officials. And that, to me, that whole process sounds really, really complex. And you hint at this in the book.

A lot of these trips were last minute, too, which makes it even. more complex and ridiculous. But I would love to hear what's involved in these because if someone says, hey, we're going to Dubai in three days, you can't, it's not like going to Manhattan from New Jersey. This isn't, we're flying to Chicago. You need food, transportation, logistics, security. Security. I mean, this is the Middle East. You can't just roll in and you need air clearance permission to to fly over other countries because for our commercial airliners have, it's called the Open Skies Treaty, where they can fly, but military aircraft have to get permission. And I'll never forget it was Labor Day of 96.

The general's daughter was getting married in Dallas, and he took Friday off, Labor Day weekend. Going to take a four-day weekend. Calls me from the airport at 6 a.m. Mike, nothing's going on this weekend. It'll just be calm, and everything will be okay when I get back on Tuesday. Well, at 11 a.m., William Perry called me from the Oval Office and said, Mike, we're going to the Middle East tonight, make it work. And so I'm there by myself, and I've got to move the Secretary

of Defense to Middle East countries that he didn't tell me where he wanted to go. So I had to choose which countries we were going to go to. I had to get the aircraft. And pilots can only fly like 14 hours a day. And so this is more than 14 hours. So I have to line up pilots all around the world on six hours notice I have to get security, logistics, transportation. Oh, and set up the meetings with the foreign heads of state. Right, that too. Right. So, coordinating with all of their logistic GPS, too. So I called the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He was a four-star Air Force general. His name was Joe Ralston, one of the best generals we've ever had. And he says, we're in this together. I'm going to help you do this. And so that must have been music to your ear at that point.

Net net, we left at nine o'clock that Friday night. And over the next, 36 hours. We visited five countries, two of them twice, and it was nonstop. And I had pilots in every city that we landed in so that they could take the plane and take over. And Saddam was massing troops on the border with Kuwait again, threatening to invade. And because of that trip, Saddam backed down. And so, yeah, we planned it on six hours notice. Yeah. And you didn't sleep that whole time, I assume. Not at all. No, no. I actually gave, there was a sergeant in the office, I gave him the keys to my house, go home and pack a bag for me.

Sure. So I didn't even get to go home and pack. But it was like my graduation exercise on logistics and planning trips. Oh, my God. And what's neat was it appeared on every news outlet. And my parents didn't even know I was going. And so we'd land in Bahrain or we'd land in Riyadh. And it would be carried live.

And I'm standing right behind the Secretary of Defense. So it was a pretty neat mission. But it's funny. the general said nothing's going to happen. Yeah. Don't worry. Just keep a low profile and we'll be fine. Meanwhile, on Al Jazeera to CNN live for the next 36 hours, there you are, walking behind.

He probably, I wonder how your boss felt at that point because he must have been like, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with this, but also I'm a little bummed that I'm not right behind this kind of a big deal. He was bummed that he wasn't there. Yeah. This was a big deal. This is like game time for him. And he can't go, sorry, honey.

I got to go to work. It's his daughter's white. It's like the one thing he can't really skip. Exactly. Yeah. That's good limelight for you, I guess, at that point, though. So what's funny is the plane that I chose to fly us was a cargo plane called the C-17. And they were brand new in the inventory at the time.

And we only had 10 in the entire Air Force. And when I talked to General Ralston, I said, we're going to take this plane because I have pilots. I can put pilots in the Middle East and stage them there because I have crew rest to move us around. And so out of the 10 in the entire inventory, five were in Asia. And General Ralston flew all five of them and parked one in every city we might be going to in case our plane broke down. And so this plane was so new, William Perry, he's the Secretary of Defense, sat in the cockpit as we were landing the first time. And then he decided to sit in the cockpit again. And he turned to me and said, boy, this is odd. everywhere we go, there's a C-17. He says, we only have 10 in the inventory. He said, I wonder how

that happened. And I said, you don't need to worry about it. Did you say it happened because I've been awake for three days? Yeah. Right. Exactly right. I think the moral of this story also is that you try to think ahead as much as you could so that your boss didn't have to do this stuff. Correct. And I had spent two years preparing to do this by watching the general and how he did this. And so that's what I talk about in my presentations is if you try to train yourself to think like your boss, that's how you claim the latter of success. You even called your boss's wife to update her on what was going on. So tell us about this because I think people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, think like your boss. And it's like, well, wait a minute.

Every little detail here matters. Correct. And I would let her know what was going on. And what's funny is one day she came into the office just to see me. And she thanked me for everything I was doing because I was lifting down. burdens off her husband's shoulder and that he was coming home happier at night. And it's because, you know, I was taking more and more of his responsibility. And it wasn't the big stuff. It was the crappy little stuff that needed to get done. But he didn't need to do it anymore.

So I did it. Right. I think it's not just, hey, thanks for updating my wife. It's he then goes, I don't have to worry about calling her because you're going to do it. And that means that I don't have to worry about this. I don't have to be distracted by this. I don't have to be in a meeting going, got to call my wife after this. Let me see if I can get 10 minutes to call my wife after this. He just doesn't have to think about it at all. And that gives him cognitive bandwidth to work on, you know, avoiding conflict in the Middle East. And make no mistake about it. The Secretary of Defense's office, as you might expect, is a pressure cooker. And you are responding around the world to incidents. Like just this morning, the Iranians shot down one of our drones.

Oh, I didn't know that. $130 million drone that they shot down. in the Strait of Hormuz. Oh, wow. And so, I mean, we can't say, well, this is, we'll get to it tomorrow. I mean, you have to drop everything you're doing and respond to crises all over the world. So it was a 27 months of a pressure cooker that I loved every minute of it, but never want to do it again. Yeah, I don't think I could do that job.

Because if I'm, obviously, you have more training when you're in that position. But if I ran shoots down $130 million drone, It's not an accident. This wasn't a Canadian. Oops, sorry, we'll cut you a check. This is Iran. There's a whole lot of this cascade and dominoes all across the whole world. And everybody else, every other adversary and potential adversary is watching what our response is.

Sure. Everybody's cracking their knuckles and rubbing their hands together and going, oh, what are you going to do about this? Exactly. We'll just, we'll wait. How is this going to get handled? Do we get to shoot down a drone and then enhance our public profile standing up to the United States? or do we go, wow, good thing we didn't do that because Iran got spanked for that. You have to really balance that and then go, if I deliver this message, is it going to result

in U.S. servicemen getting killed as a result? And then I'm going to regret it or look bad to it. I mean, there's so many things you've got to balance. So I took that ability to balance to the ship. And whenever I did anything, I put myself in all the stakeholders' shoes to try to understand in advance how they were going to perceive it. And if I couldn't perceive it by putting myself in their shoes, I had to do a better job of communicating it to them. Yeah, because of course the crew in this particular situation, servicemen probably want a response,

but they also don't want to be the person who has to then go to Iran and be in the line of fire as a result. Exactly. And so you have to think about those people. You can't just go, oh, well, I'm going to look really good if I put all you on the firing line right now. And that's one of the things that our civilian leaders take personally. is their decisions could end up with people dying. And just like every decision I made on the ship could end up with somebody dying. So it's something you take personally.

And so you need to be measured and understand the consequences of your actions. So everything I did, I gamed it out in my mind before I did it to make sure it was being perceived the right way and that it would get us the results we were looking for. This line from your book here is if your bosses see you acting independently and they don't have to worry about your judgment. They will give you more independence and freedom, and you can use that to innovate and improve your ship. I'm paraphrasing here, I guess.

But the important part here is when you act such as you're an extension of their brain, then they don't have to worry about what you're doing, and then they're not going to sit there and try to micromanage and question you. And that gives you a little bit more leeway, which you can then dedicate to, since I haven't screwed up anything before, how about I improve this process? And they go, well, you haven't screwed up anything before, so why not? I call it the American dream, never hearing from your boss.

Never hearing from your boss, yeah. So, I mean, if you're proactive in pushing information and doing things that need to be done, and if your boss doesn't have to worry about you, they'll leave you alone. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mike Abrashoff. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show, because your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard,

so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Mike Abrashoff.

How did you challenge senior officers? He had a couple of rules for this. One was do it in private, which I think is pretty wise. Instead of making a whole show about it and then causing them to lose face. But there were a few other rules that you had. The other one that I think requires a little bit of explanation is you had to make it clear that your only agenda was to improve the organization.

It goes back to what we were saying before, not self-promotion, promotion of the mission. How do you do that in practice? So I do it respectfully and I do it privately. If I were to put other people CC on the email, it's generally not a good thing to to take away your boss's options. And if you CC other people, then it reduces their options. And so I want that boss to think I'm only telling him or her about it so that they get to take credit for it.

But if I really disagreed with something, I had a way of disarming my boss so that they wouldn't take offense. And I would say, can I ask for an NFL instant replay on this decision? or can I throw their red flag, which means, you know, review the play. And so that was a way to disarm my admirals to say, to let them know that I really didn't agree with what they were doing and can they look at it again. And they would always look at it again.

Sometimes I'd win, sometimes I'd lose. But I made my objections known and I saluted when they made the final decision. That's all you can really ask for, I suppose. I mean, for them to go, all right, I will look at this again. given what you've said is kind of a big deal. Because I would imagine some of them went, this guy, who the hell are you? Just do what I'm telling you. Well, please consider these, the following. For the following reason. Yeah. And so William Perry called it iron logic. If you lay iron logic out for your chain of command, there's no choice but for them to accept what your decision is.

The idea that you're always asking yourself, what I want is printed in the Washington Post, I think is probably really wise too, because I think we've all done something where we think, well, no one's going to find out. So who cares? Or this will be fine. What's the worst thing that could happen? These days when everybody has a video on their phone, you know, and can text away what you just did, it can be awfully embarrassing. So if you use that as your guideline, generally, you won't be embarrassed. Right. So it's not, we're not too far away from things actually ending up in the Washington Post and or a video being a, being, being, made available within 24 hours.

Correct. Online for the whole world. Back then, it was more maybe of a hypothetical, would I want this to, in a year, leak out somehow? Now it's like, do I want my kids finding out tomorrow that I did this? Right. Yeah. Seeing the ship through the crew's eyes is an important concept that you wrote about as well.

What does this mean and how do we do it? So, after seeing my predecessor getting cheered off the ship. Yeah, or jeered off the ship. It hit me that I can't command excellence sitting in the captain's chair all day. So I spent my days walking the ship and talking to sailors. And I came across the sailor one day and he said, Captain, we have a term to describe the organization on this ship. He said, this ship is like a tree full of monkeys.

He said, you're the monkey at the top of the tree. On every branch, there's different levels of monkeys and we're the monkeys in the bottom branch. He said, when you look down from the top of the tree, all you ever see are smiling faces coming back at you. When we look up from the bottom branch, we have an entirely different view. Sure. So when that sailor said that to me, I went, hmm i got to start putting myself in their shoes and seeing what they're seeing yeah i think uh i can

see where that's going and you started taking suggestions instead of sitting on tradition tell us about the repainting this is a really good analogy or i guess a metaphor for for what you were doing a lot of this stuff this is why a lot of civilians who think oh it's so simple we're just banging our heads against the wall looking at this because we see our tax money kind of going down the toilet with the fact that and the russiness and the rust. This is the kind of thing where we think, how come the whole organization isn't run like this?

So I interviewed every sailor on the ship individually. I got to know their name, their spouse's name, their children's name, what they were most proud of in their lives, what their goals were. And I also asked them three questions. What do you like most about this ship? What do you like least? What would you change if you were the captain of the ship?

And it was their chance to tell me what really irked them about the ship. that we could change. And one sailor comes in and says, do you know how many times we've painted this ship in the last 12 months? And I said, no. He said six times.

And I didn't know it, which means, and it takes us a month to paint it. So every other month we're painting this ship. And he said to me, have you ever painted your home? I said, of course. He said, it sucks, doesn't it?

And I said, it does. Yeah. It does suck. And I said, well, what's your solution? when we add something top side to the hull of the ship, at the time it was being put in place with nuts, bolt screws, washers, and fasteners that are made out of ferrous metal that rust in salt water. And when it rust, it streaks rust stains down the side of the ship. And no wonder we have to constantly be repainting the ship.

And when the sailor pointed out to me, hit me, this is $5 an hour work. We've been doing it for forever. No wonder they're demoralized. Well, the way it used to work in the Navy, the people who procure the equipment, in Washington, never look at the total cost of ownership of what the sailors have to do to maintain that equipment. And they think, oh, we're going to ship this out to the lowest bidder. But then, and they think the labor from the sailors is free. Right. They're already getting paid, right? That's the idea. But labor isn't free. And so I'd rather get them out of doing $5 an hour work

and have the time in the day to figure out how to defend ourselves better. So we scoured the globe. It was a global mission because you have to get into tensile strength and everything else, finding stuff that won't corrode but still keep all this equipment in place. We spent about $25,000 painted the ship, didn't have to paint the ship again for the next 10 months. And it came from a sailor who was 21 years old. Right. He's gone, hey, you know these are rusting. And if we use this, it's going to be stainless steel.

And if we get it strong enough, it's not just going to fall off the boat when we turn. So why don't we do this? And it's like, you might be on to something. Exactly right. Yeah. It opens up capacity for the sailors to focus on improving systems, getting better at their jobs, because the more you're out in the sun painting over rust, the more you're not, I don't know, looking at a radar system and saying, hey, there's a better way to plug this in.

Correct. Right. Exactly right. So we get out of the low value work that gives us the time in the day to do higher value work. By empowering your sailors, you solved actually a huge communication problem. Can you tell us about this? Because this ended up going all the way to the White House. Yes. Sailors watch and, you know, people watch every decision you make and everything you do.

And by this sailor, me listening to the sailor on the rusty bolts sent signals to other sailors, he'll listen to us. So we get to the Middle East. And, you know, this was the late 90s. You know, we still had AOL dial up at 56 kilobits, you know, back in those days. and but because we now had this capability to send data, we never increased the, we didn't have the speed to increase the bandwidth because these are going through satellites and you just can't launch a satellite tomorrow.

Sure. You have to plan for this. So as a result, we were sending too much. There wasn't enough bandwidth. Communications ground to a halt. One of my sailors in a different department in the communications division, John Rofalco, on his own,

studied the satellite architecture over the middle East. He said, there's a satellite over here that we're only using 10% of the capability. If we just switch this over to that satellite, it will solve the problem. And so I pass it to the Admiral's communicator. He said, oh, it won't work. Just dismissed it. First word out of his mouth was no. We waited another two weeks. It got even worse. I went straight to the Admiral. He looked at it and said, let's try it, switch it over, and it cleared the communications problem, just like that. And this was so serious, Washington put together a panel of admirals to study the architecture of what our satellites should look at, and they asked me to come

testify. And I said, nothing doing. I'm taking my petty officer. So a mid-grade petty officer presented in front of nine admirals who were studying this architecture, and he got such rave reviews from this presentation, he got chosen to be President George Bush's communications advisor, and for six years, patched in all of the president's communications. How old was he at that time? He was probably 27 when he came up with the idea on the ship, and he was probably 31 when he went to work at the White House. That's incredible.

So he's a kid at that point. Right. By my standards, at 39. 27, I had no appetite for that level of responsibility. but for him to feel comfortable coming to you and saying, hey, if we move this over here and we switch the comms, because the problem was grave. I mean, the book, you wrote that urgent,

essentially combat communicates are being delayed by like six days. Correct. Which is probably really bad. And the thing is, it wasn't even his job to study this. He did it on his own because he saw that we listened to this guy over here about the painting. It gave him permission to challenge this about the settlement. lights. Tell me about the value of trust because people have to be able to give you bad news. And to do that, they have to know that you're not going to shoot the messenger, which is a really common problem,

and that something's going to be done about it. And they're not going to end up putting their neck out for no reason. So you do have to, I did have to be careful not to shoot anybody when they brought me bad news. Yeah. And it's something William Perry taught me. He said, Mike, no matter how hard you try, your ship will never be perfect. And if you don't get the results you're looking for, assume your crew wanted to do a great job. Have that at the starting point. And if you don't get the results, look inward and ask yourself, did you clearly communicate the goals? Did you give them the training necessary to be successful? Did you give them the time and the resources to do a great job?

But most importantly, did the process support them delivering the results you were looking for? And there came a time to do an exercise with two aircraft carrier battle groups. we were to screen them from enemy submarines. In the morning we were to get underway to do this, my number one department head on the ship came to me and said we couldn't participate. And I said, why not? He said the sonar is broken.

And this is highly complex equipment. Yeah, you don't just unplug it and plug it back in. Well, and sometimes a Monday morning when you flip a switch, a tube breaks or something, and it doesn't work. I said, how long have you known about it? And he said two weeks. Oh, man.

Oh, man. And so I didn't yell at them. I didn't scream. I looked at them just like I'm talking to you. And I said, John, I've never been more disappointed with anybody in my life than I am with you right now. Because in the last two weeks, you took away all my options. And one of the things you never want to do to your chain of command is to leave them with only

bad options. And that's what happens when you cover stuff up and you can't fix it. You've take, with all that time that goes by, you take away your bosses. options. Right. You wrote bad news doesn't improve with age, and I love that. Yeah. Correct. And so I didn't have, instead of blaming him, I thought he should have known better. And to his credit, he was so outstanding. He thought it could get it fixed on his own without ever bothering me. But at the end of the day, he didn't. And, you know, in those two weeks, I could have called the manufacturer to come send a tech rep. I could have gotten apart from the logistic system.

at a minimum, I owed it to my chain of command to let them know we were not mission capable. And so I changed the process afterwards of what you need to do when a piece of equipment breaks. And you have 60 seconds to pick up the phone and call me and tell me about it and say, this broke, here's my plan to get it fixed. This broke, I don't have a plan. Let me get back to you. Or this broke, I need your help. And so I put in a new process so that it didn't happen again.

But I never yelled at him. I just looked him in the eye and said, I'm very disappointed in you. And he felt worse that I had yelled at him. Yeah, of course, because he wants you to yell at him at that point. Exactly. Let me get punished now, so I don't feel so damn guilty about it. The idea, the moral here, the rule, never bring petty problems upward if you can solve them yourself. But with big problems, go get them early.

Correct. Bring them up early. Correct. Because bad news doesn't improve with age. And I like this. idea because if you do your homework and you don't go up with petty problems, bosses or higher-ups will finally, if you do finally come to them with something, they'll listen. And Jacco Willink, I don't know if you've heard of him. I have. So he's been on the show. Yeah,

I would imagine. Extreme ownership. Yes. Yeah. He mentioned in extreme ownership that when the CEOs would come and say, hey, what do you guys need? A lot of the other commanders would say, oh, we need better Wi-Fi. We got, you know, our weights. We need a squat rack because we He would say nothing. Nothing. We don't need anything. We don't need anything. We don't need anything.

So that when he finally said, hey, we need this. They went, ooh, task you in a bruiser, they never ask for anything. So now that he's asking for this different thing, let's get him that because this isn't a guy who says we need faster Wi-Fi. This is a guy who says we're good. So when he says this optic isn't working, he means this is not going to work. That's correct. And that's really important. You only ask when you really need something, but you communicate enough so that your bosses are aware of

that. Correct. How do you know when to break the rules? Like, do we have rules for breaking rules, guidelines? So I had a rule on the ship. If what you're doing could kill somebody, injure somebody, waste taxpayers' money or do damage to the ship, don't go there without me. So the other rules I had was we don't waste taxpayers money. And if what we were doing appeared on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow, would we be proud or embarrassed? And so rules are guidelines. And it's like guardrails on a highway. Generally, you want to stay within the guardrails. Because when you go outside the guardrails, bad things are going to happen to you.

So that's what rules are. And so it doesn't mean you have to go straight down the center of the highway. You could go to the left or you could go to the right. And we leave you the option to decide what is best for you. And to me, that's what rules are. They're guard rails that you have to stay within. But if you want to go down the right side of the guard rails, Have that it.

And that's what we decided to do. Yeah. Yeah. I think this goes in line with people not telling you the problem is actually, this is dangerous. But as long as they're able to innovate within a certain set of guidelines, I suppose you would allow outside the guidelines or outside the guard rails as long as they say, hey, look, this is a big problem and I need to go, I need to make a detour through this. What do you think? Do I have your permission to give us a shot? Correct.

Yeah. And so there's a. there's a set of responsibility or a level of responsibility that you're giving to these sailors, to these people under your command, that they know they can bend things, but if they need to break something, they need to at least give you a heads up or maybe get cleared for that beforehand. If I can get fired for it, you better tell me. Yeah, that's a good rule. I know you intercepted some smugglers from Iran, and you had to board ships and inspect them.

And I'm just, I'm curious, how do you search a ship? Because it seems really hard and really dangerous. And ships aren't exactly. It's not like looking in this room. I mean, there's all these nooks and crannies and pipes and... And they're cargo ships, which aren't very dedicated to comfort. So you're going into these cargo holds that could have methane gas in them that could kill you, or they're not air conditions.

So the big thing is checking the manifest and then spot checking the cargo containers to make sure it matches the manifest. And if you see something amiss, then you bring it to the attention for more thorough inspection. I mean, this is a needle in a haystack situation. Correct. You're looking for 100 kilos of heroin and the ship has 700,000 tons or whatever those things carry of automotive parts. It almost seems hopeless to be able to find something like that. So by and large, it was an effective program, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you that contraband did not get through. I'm sure it did.

Yeah. But we have to balance how much time it takes to inspect versus what the return is. is going to be. Well, yeah. And so we came up with a metric on on things we needed to do, and we would do it. It seems really dangerous to go, hey, we're going to get on this Iranian ship that probably has guns and drugs on it. And these guys might know that that stuff is in there. And I'm just going to send a bunch of, I mean, these are qualified sailors. They're in their 20s and 30s, but still, like, how you got to have eyes on the back of your head for this. That didn't worry me as much as the physical danger of methane gas or...

really? Or something. That worried me more. So you're less worried about them getting shot in the back looking at the boat because you know you're going to just sink them if that happens. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. The threat of the implied power or the, what we're going to do to you if you get out of line. Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose if I were a smuggler, I would probably mind my peas and cues when there's a bunch of... Or take a different route. Yeah, extreme kind of weapons aimed right at the hull of my boat. And my best case scenario is getting torn in half by those.

Yeah, it's the methane gas, I suppose, at that point. Yeah. These guys didn't, they don't become wealthy smugglers by playing Russian roulette with their their lives. You almost shot down the fleeing Kuwaiti Air Force. That could have been a big mess. This was before I took command of Benfold. Oh, okay.

But, yes, so I've made seven month deployments to the Middle East, and I have no desire, you know, to ever go back there again. No vacation plans. No, but I'll fly through there, but I've seen it all. And so we were there on the 2nd of August 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait. And at 4.30 that morning, we detected 21 unknown fighters coming directly at our ship. And we sound the general quarters alarm when I get to my radar screen. And I'm looking at these 21 fighters.

And I'm thinking, we'll be able to shoot down many of them. But I gave us only a 50% chance of being able to shoot down all 21. and we have to be perfect. We have to be right 100% of the time. Yeah. And the first thought that went through my mind that morning was my life insurance has paid up and my will is up to date. And we tracked these fighters as they got closer and closer.

And just as we were getting ready to fire the first missile at them, they hung a right turn into Saudi Arabia. And we later found out it was the Kuwait Air Force fleeing Kuwait that morning. Why didn't they say anything or they couldn't? So we wouldn't have trusted them. Oh, yeah. They said, we're Kuwaitis, we would have thought, oh, you're Iraqis lying to us. So they're in a no-win situation.

And there's no, at the time, there was no, like, AWACs going, hey, we got... At the time, there were none in the air. Wow. Our capabilities have come pretty far since then. Now they're up continuously. Yeah. So AWACs, those are the big 747-looking things with a big, the UFO dish on top. So they're actually 707s, but they have a UFO dish on the top.

And that says, this is a mig. that's from Iraq and we've tracked it since it took off. Correct. So this just pops up and everyone's going, I don't know. It looks like a mig, but it could be Kuwaiti and it could be Iraqi. We don't know. And there's no other US ship within 100 miles of us. So it's not one of it.

Oh, man. Yeah, that's a scary thing to wake up to, I would imagine. It actually made the Wall Street Journal the next day. That's how big a deal this was. And after the excitement died down, I started thinking, I don't like a 50% chance of survival. Oh, no. And so from that formed everything I did on Benfold in that we are going to win with overwhelming force and not have a 50% chance of survival. Yeah.

Oh, yikes. You often gave people who technically weren't qualified for maybe that particular task, a lot of responsibility. And a lot of people argue this is too much for their level. But what are you looking for specifically? Like, okay, of course, they can do the job. But what would you look for now, maybe outside the Navy, and somebody who's under-use? utilized at work? If they have the desire to do it, and if they have the aptitude to do it.

And if they have the desire in the aptitude, I can train you to do anything. And so if they don't have the desire, I've either got to create that desire or keep them in their current position where they can't do any harm. And so attitude is what I look for. And I figure everything else I can work with. How does somebody, let's say I feel underutilized at work, how does someone who feels like they're underutilized at work bring this up to their boss without sounding like an arrogant ass who just thinks too much of themselves or overestimates their own capability? I would come with the plan. I would identify things that I would like to be doing extra or in addition to.

And what people need to think about is, you know, they need to plan for their future and how they control their own destiny. when the workplace is changing, and even the concept of work is going to be changing. And if you wait till it already changes and you haven't prepared for it, you're going to be a victim. But if you anticipate what that future is going to look like, and then you start adding that skill sets, and you'll, you will have a job and you'll be in control your own destiny. I'm laughing because I'm thinking my sister. Sure. She was getting older.

She was 58. and she wanted to work for another eight years. And she saw people her age getting downsized. And so she studied to become the tech manager of her group. In addition to doing her sales job, she became the tech expert at age 58. Wow. Yeah.

And so she never got downsized. And she was able to work till age 66 because she saw what was happening and acquired the skills so that it wouldn't happen to her. And so that's, If I'm out there in the workforce today, that's one of the things I'm looking at is what skill set do I need to continue to acquire so that I control my own destiny? Sure. So if they say, if you're, let's say you're in a sales position and you're thinking, huh, our sales methods are really outdated. We need a new CRM. Maybe you go explore CRM options, present those to your boss. Your boss says, well, maybe we can do this in two years. So in the meantime, you learn how to use Salesforce. And then when it comes about, you go, hey, I'm already pretty well schooled. on this. I've taken some Skillshare classes. I know how this works. I've got a contact that's going to help train us. We can bring him in. Then they're going, all right, well, you're essentially

in charge now of this, which is a good place to be rather than, well, you're the slowest one learning Salesforce and we needed to let someone go. So you're on the chopping block. That's exactly how it works. Yeah. So you kind of as a boss assume everyone is inherently talented enough, unless they've proven otherwise, and then challenge them to catch up to that expectation? I assume they want to be there. Okay. Because we're all volunteers. Yeah. So I assume that you have the attitude and that you want to be there. And then I have to make the assessment whether you have the technical capability to do what's required of you and whether I can train you to get that technical capability. So that's what I'm assessing. How did your leadership, with sort of unconventional leadership, affect other leaders and boats? Because I would imagine if you've got your guys having a New Year's party on a barge or you're eating civilian brands, there's got to be other, Word travels fast, even ship to ship. So there's got to be leaders who are going, damn it, Hevershoff, I don't want to buy Cheerios.

Why do you keep making waves? You're making my job harder. You're making us look bad. I did make their job harder. Sure. But what's interesting now is the references my book gets in the private sector. And last July 18th, my book, It's Your Ship, got a shout out in Sports Illustrated. And they're doing an article on the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line coach.

In that previous year, the Eagles were acknowledged to have the best offensive line in the NFL. And they asked him how he did it. And he said, I used to be a my way or the highway hardass. And five years ago, somebody gave me this book called It's Your Ship. And he said, I realized I needed to become a better leader. And so suddenly the players are able in team meetings to provide suggestions on things that they're seeing, things that they might be able to do better. And so his name is Jeff Stalind,

became a better coach and a better leader, and the players took greater ownership, and they go to the Super Bowl. Even my limited middle school football experience, we had a really good coach, and he said, if you're on the offensive line, which I was at the time,

that just goes to show how long ago this was. I was one of the biggest kids in the football team at 5'4 or whatever I was in seventh grade, said if there's somebody who's not blocking you, and you can make a hole, you've got to come and tell us. And no other coaches were doing that. They were just running plays. And if they didn't notice that there was a hole there, it just never happened.

So I remember all of our line would say, hey, there's a hole here, there's a hole there. And we went all the way and we dominated the whole league at that point. It was so unique. It was unique. And so after this appeared in Sports Illustrated, I tracked Jeff Stalland down. I said, I want to come to Philadelphia, get my photo taken with you in the offensive line. And he let me. And while I was there, he told me that during the Super Bowl, they ran a play that gained two yards.

And one of the offensive linemen saw something and went to Stoutland and said, if we run this exact same play again, only put this person in his left guard, will gain more yardage. Stoughton takes it to Doug Peterson, the head coach. They run the exact same play again, and it went for a touchdown. Wow. And it turned out to be the winning touchdown of the Super Bowl. And it came because a lineman saw something that nobody else saw, and they listened to him. That's incredible because, of course, a lot of people look at linemen, of course, just spectators, but also I would imagine players and coaches. And they go, these are the guys that their job is just to follow the play.

They're not supposed to innovate. They're supposed to stand there and not move. They're supposed to execute. Right. Let us do the thinking you execute. Right. Yeah, you're not paid to think one of those kind of positions. Do you think that this type of out-of-the-box tradition breaking is the type of thinking that's going to be necessary to win future conflicts against unconventional enemies like ISIS, criminal gangs?

Absolutely. We have to become more entrepreneurial, and we are. Yeah. The good news. We're raising a new generation of military who are awfully entrepreneurial and think outside the box. But my first shout out in Sports Illustrated was the 9 August 2004 edition. They were doing an article on Bill Belichick. And in this article, they asked him what his favorite leadership book was, and he said, It's Your Show. Oh, wow.

And so most people either love Belichick or they hate his guts. There is no middle ground when it comes to him. But you have to admit deep down, even if you hate him, he's probably the best coach of any sport in the United States today. It's because he's technically competent at what he does. He has a passion to win. But he takes castoffs from every other team in the NFL. He brings him to New England. And the first thing he instills in them is the concept of teamwork and shared responsibility.

And that's what we did on the ship, was instill that concept of shared responsibility. responsibility and teamwork. And that's what got all that talent that was there previously to work together as a team. Well, thank you very much for your service and for your time today. My honor, Jordan. Thanks for having me on your program. Great big thank you to Mike Abrashoff. The book title is It's Your Ship. And of course, we'll link to that in the show notes as we always do. And we're teaching you how to connect with great people like Mike Abershaw and the other guests you've heard on the show. You don't have to be booking a show to get value out of this. This is for personal and professional reasons. Everybody

needs a network. You got to dig that well before you get thirsty. Don't wait until you need something to reach out to people. You know how that feels? It feels crummy. They're going to ignore you. They're going to think you're a taker because you didn't put in the work. I've got a free course teaching you how to do this right at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The drills take six minutes a day. Not even. This is the stuff I wish I knew two decades ago. It's not fluff. It is crucial. and it's all free, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter.

So come join us. We'd love to have you. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Mike Abroshoff. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and there's a video of this interview on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason DeFilippo and Jen Harbinger. Notes and Worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

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