What is the most important part?

Systems thinking is an important part of Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline. In an organization, it mostly means having the ability to see the whole while balancing the importance of the parts. For me, this has always been a touchstone of lean thinking. Every part has its own role and in any system, their interactions make […]

How Deep Can You Go?

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard this question asked. For the past seventeen years I have been delivering speeches to all kinds of organizations about submarine operations during the cold war. Submarines played a key role throughout the Cold War and some of the stories remain buried in secret […]

Steam Will Replace Sails? Madness!!!

An Ohio class submarine slips its mooring next to the Delta pier in Bangor Washington. Silently, she glides down the flat calm waters of the Hood Canal on her way to the open ocean. This five hundred sixty foot vessel will soon submerge and begin her primary mission. For over fifty years, ships like this […]

Escape to Freedom – Submarine Escape and Rescue

The Buoyant Ascent The tower at the US Naval Submarine Base was one of the most memorable features of the Groton, Conn. Skyline. Submariners from the past who trained there will always remember that tower as one of the defining points in their submarine journey. This tower was used to prepare us for the day […]

Waiting

Ask any submariner what one of the most common statements they hear from non-submariners is “Oh I couldn’t do what you do (or did in some of our cases)”. The reasons are as varied as the people who make that statement. Fear of confinement, fear of the unknown, fear of being crushed or drowned, or […]

We’re doing 5S… Isn’t that Lean?

We’re doing 5S… Isn’t that Lean? Good news, bad news. The good news is that 5S (or 6S if you want to lump safety into the pot for convenience sake) is the traditional first step in many lean implementations. The bad news is that if you are doing it as a standalone without linkage to […]

The First Civilian Submarine

The Birth of the First Civilian Submarine While we were on our last trip, I stopped by a used book store and found a book that had been a part of my life growing up. In my Grandfather’s library was a collection of books called “Source Records of the Great War”. These books were collected […]

122 Years of Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement for over 122 Years While submarines have existed in one form or another for a very long time, the US Navy formalized the marriage of technologies that would lead to the modern steel warhorses that range the oceans of the world today. After a series of trials in the late 1800’s, a man […]

Liberty Call

The crew and I are making a liberty call this week to the location where my Dad’s old Boot Camp was once located near Geneva, NY on Lake Seneca. I wrote a book about his service in World War 2. The book was based on a collection of his letters we found after he passed […]

Prepare to Hover

Hovering Submarines are incredible machines that are designed to operate in a number of configurations. One of the difficult ones is something called “hovering”. A submarine has ballast tanks that control its buoyancy. To start descending, the submarine floods these tanks with outside sea water and to surface, you make that water leave in a […]