The Owner Archives - Page 2 of 3

I Intend To

In 1999 L. David Marquet took command of the submarine USS Santa Fe at Pearl Harbor. The ship “had the worst retention in the submarine force.” Marquet changed one phrase. Officers stopped saying “Request permission to submerge the ship.” They said: “I intend to submerge the ship.” The captain could still stop it.

Marquet called the old way “permission-based… I request permission, and you approve it.” He reported: “We went from worst to first in most measures of performance.” His book Turn the Ship Around! appeared in 2012.

A Message to Garcia

In 1899 Elbert Hubbard published a short essay about a U.S. Army officer, Andrew Rowan, sent during the war with Spain to carry a message to García, a leader of the Cuban rebels. Its key line: “Rowan took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?'”

Hubbard set Rowan against an office clerk who answers a simple task with questions: “Who was he?” “Which encyclopedia?” “Was I hired for that?” The New York Central Railroad reprinted the essay in huge numbers, and it was used as promotional literature by Wanamaker’s, the Boy Scouts of America and the U.S. Navy. Hubbard claimed “Over forty million copies.” A 1977 estimate put the figure at about 4 million.

The story itself is largely false. Rowan’s real orders were to gather intelligence, and there is no evidence that he delivered a letter to García.

The Question Mark

Jeff Bezos kept a public email address for Amazon customers. “I still have an email address that customers can write to,” he said in 2018. When a complaint caught his attention, he forwarded it to one of his executives with one character added: a question mark.

Bezos explained: “That question mark is just a shorthand for, ‘Can you look into this? Why is this happening? What’s going on?'” A former manager described the effect: “By the morning, I better have a damn good resolution to whatever this is.”

Easier to Ask Forgiveness

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” The line is usually credited to Grace Hopper, the computer pioneer and Navy rear admiral. She said versions of it often in the 1980s. In 1983 she put it this way: “On many occasions, especially in government, it’s easier to apologize than to get permission.”

The saying is older than her use of it. In 1977 a newspaper in Waycross, Georgia, quoted the evangelist Bob Mumford: “It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.” In 1983 a book on editing called it an old Army proverb.

Whose Is It?

Who owns this? This is the first question about any task. The answer is a name.

Point person. This is the one named person who handles an issue.

Go-to person. This is the person everyone turns to for a certain kind of problem.

On the hook. A person on the hook is personally responsible for a result. If it fails, the blame is theirs.

The ball is in your court. The next move is yours, and nobody else can make it.

That’s on me. The speaker takes personal responsibility for a mistake.

Too many cooks spoil the broth. Work with too many people in charge goes badly.

The Single-Threaded Leader

Amazon calls it the single-threaded leader. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describe the model in their book Working Backwards. In it, “a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative.”

They quote Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of devices: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.” When Amazon decided to build up its digital media business, Jeff Bezos put Steve Kessel, then head of media retail, in charge. Kessel gave up his previous job. He did not run both.

Pilot in Command

“The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.” This is the first paragraph of Section 91.3 of the Federal Aviation Regulations.

The next paragraph gives the same person room to act. In an in-flight emergency that requires immediate action, the pilot in command may depart from any rule of that part as far as the emergency requires. Afterward, the pilot must send a written report if the FAA asks for one.

The rule speaks of one person. The pilot in command is both “directly responsible” and “the final authority.”

The buck stops here

Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office reading exactly that, and used the phrase repeatedly to describe the presidency. The buck is passed, in American usage, from one person to another. The sign announces where the passing ends — at a named individual, in a specific room.

The DRI

Directly Responsible Individual. Apple’s internal practice attaches a single name to every item on a meeting agenda, and the name is visible to everyone. American project management more broadly insists on one accountable person per item, and the phrase single throat to choke is used without embarrassment.

Owner

Product owner. Process owner. Account owner. Risk owner. Problem owner. American organizations name roles after possession of the thing rather than responsibility for a function, and the word carries the expectation that the owner acts without being asked.