Leader-follower caps an organization's intelligence at one head

Marquet's starting diagnosis of the traditional command model — one person decides, everyone else executes — is that it works fine right up until it doesn't, because the whole organization can never be smarter or faster than the single brain at the top. On a submarine, that means hundreds of trained, capable sailors are reduced to executing orders rather than contributing judgment.

He experienced this personally: early in his command, he gave an order to the Santa Fe's crew that was technically impossible to execute on that engine configuration. The crew followed it anyway, because their job was compliance, not correctness. Nobody flagged the error because nobody was empowered to think it was theirs to flag.

That near-miss became his turning point: a genuinely competent crew was being made less effective by a structure that only wanted their hands, not their heads.

Takeaway: if only one person is allowed to think, the organization is only ever as smart as that person.