David Marquet

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Distancing: The Leadership Superpower for Better Decisions

  In the heat of decision-making, leaders often get stuck in the moment — overwhelmed by emotions, biases, and immediate pressures. But what if there was a superpower that allowed you to rise above the noise, see situations more clearly, and make better choices?

  In this keynote, David Marquet introduces “distancing”, a transformative leadership approach that helps leaders break free from reactive thinking and sharpen their decision-making.

  By using three key dimensions of distancing — be someone else, be somewhere else, and be sometime else — leaders can see reality more clearly, reduce anxiety, and lead with greater foresight. Whether it’s becoming your own coach, observing situations from a broader vantage point, or thinking like your future self, this is the unlock leaders use to navigate complexity with clarity and precision.

  Key takeaways include:

  • Be someone else: Shift your perspective by adopting the mindset of a coach, mentor, or outside observer.
  • Be somewhere else: Step onto the metaphorical “balcony” to see the bigger picture and make more strategic decisions.
  • Be sometime else: Think like your future self to anticipate consequences and make choices you’ll be proud of later.
  • Practical tools and techniques: Walk away with actionable strategies to integrate distancing into your daily leadership habits.
  • Sharper decision-making: Learn how to cut through cognitive biases, emotional traps, and situational blind spots.

  This session will equip leaders with a new superpower — one that allows them to reframe challenges, see opportunities more clearly, and lead with confidence in uncertain times.

• Leadership is Language

  Do you ever feel like the language we use at work doesn’t quite fit the modern workplace? Well, there’s a reason for that. We’ve been programmed to use a playbook from the Industrial Age — and it is a language focused above all on conformity and doing.

  What we need now is a language the balances that with creativity and thinking. This requires us to rewrite the Industrial Age playbook for the modern era. The new playbook balances doing with thinking, and conformity with creativity.

  In this session, David Marquet will show audiences how our language anchors us to the past, and how the new playbook needs to sound at work. Not only will your team walk away with an “aha moment” about why we say the things we do but have immediately actionable changes they can implement such as how to ask better questions, and how to run better meetings.

• Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level

  David Marquet delivers the powerful Intent-Based Leadership message: that leadership is not for the select few at the top. In highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level.

  Creating Intent-Based Leadership organizations results in a work place where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. A place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work — a place where everyone is a leader.

  Intent-Based Leadership organizations create an environment for people to contribute so that they feel valued. They set clear goals so their people know how to do their jobs. They push control and decision making down the organization so people take responsibility and rise to the occasion. They maintain unity of effort by ensuring the supporting pillars of technical competence and organizational clarity are in place.

  As a result, they achieve:

  • A highly effective organization with superior morale.
  • The capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization, and remove it from the personality of leaders.
  • An organizational culture that creates of additional leaders throughout every level of the organization.

  Intent-Based Leadership starts with rejecting the idea that leadership is for the select few at the top and instead embracing in highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level. This method of leadership is based on empowerment, not ego, and process, not personality.

  • Practical Empowerment: When we give our people more authority, we actually create more effective leaders.
  • Technical Competence: When we engage our minds in what we are doing, we perform with better results.
  • Organizational Clarity: When leaders set clear goals and people know how to do their jobs, we can take deliberate action.

  Objectives:

  • Think afresh about what leadership means.
  • Practice language that empowers your people.
  • Understand organizational design in the context of how to push decision making downward.
  • Commit to change behaviors tomorrow.

  What you will learn from attending:

  • How to create an environment where people actively engage and think.
  • Have a personal commitment to talk with to their co-workers in an empowering way.
  • Implement the idea of leadership as creating more leaders — not more followers.
  • Implement the idea of leadership as giving control — not taking control.

• Intentionally Safe: Changing Safety from Compliance to Culture

  In this interactive and multimedia delivered, fast moving keynote, David Marquet takes your team on a story about creating a culture of safety. Safety does not come from “wanting to be safe” but rather from an interlocking set of organizational practices and individual behaviors that create optimal conditions for thinking, responsibility, and team intervention.

  Based upon proven principles and practices from the nuclear submarine operations, Marquet covers key practices that embed safety into the culture of the organization and move from a compliance approach to safety.

  • Always be thinking. Safety results when everyone is engaged and thinking.
  • Brake pedal leadership: the person at the top can only say stop.
  • Certify, Don’t Brief. Instead of telling people what to do before an operation, certify the team’s readiness.
  • Deliberate Action. Apply a deliberate pause before operating a switch, valve, or breaker and how that works.
  • Embrace dissent. Avoid trap of building consensus, instead embrace dissenting viewpoints. In most accidents, someone saw a warning sign but didn’t share it.

  These practices apply at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels in the organization.

  When done, your team will have a better perspective of what makes people safe as well as a toolbox of practices for immediate implementation.

• The New Playbook for Leaders

  Why do we organize the way we do? Why do we run meetings the way we do? Why do we use the words we use when communicating and asking questions? Turns out, most of us are using language, meeting formats, and organizational design inherited from the industrial age where the leaders were the thinkers and the workers were the doers.

  In today’s work environment, we want every team member to be a thinker and a doer. Industrial-age language is obsolete — it’s time to cast them aside for a new playbook.

  Based on the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Leadership is Language, David Marquet explores the origins of our language at work, how it was shaped by the industrial age and the language we should use in its place to balance the rhythm between thinking and doing.

  Through this presentation, leaders will leave equipped to build environments where people think deeply and broadly and work is disciplined and focused, resulting in adaptive, agile, and enduring organizations even in volatile and uncertain times.

• WORKSHOP: Think Like a Leader

  Duration: 3-5 hours
  Target Audience: Managers, Leaders, and Employees
  Group Size: 30-50
  Suggested Pre-engagement: Read speakers’ book

  Gallup’s recent employee engagement poll reports worldwide only 13% of employees are engaged at work. For many of our people, the workday is something to be tolerated. Their daily objective is a negative one — to avoid errors, problems, and confrontations. As a result, they do not put their full passion and intellect into their work.

  Our mission is to change all that by creating empowering work environments that release the passion, initiative, and intellect of each person. This bold and highly effective leadership approach can be summarized as “give control, create leaders.” This is possible, but not with the current leadership paradigm. It will require us to think differently and be open so that people are encouraged to share their ideas and act on what they learn.

  In this fast-paced and fun workshop, David Marquet uses snippets from the movie “Master and Commander” to illustrate the negative impacts of traditional leader-follower model where people are motivated to avoid errors. This is contrasted with leader-leader organizations where people are motivated to achieve truly remarkable things.

  At the end of this workshop, your group will be able to apply what they have learned immediately in order to:

  • Create an environment where people actively engage and think.
  • Discover mechanisms to encourage questions and feedback.
  • Have a plan to give control, for pushing authority to where the information lives.
  • Have a personal commitment to talk with to their co-workers in an empowering way.
  • Implement the idea of leadership as creating more leaders — not more followers.
  • Implement the idea of leadership as giving control — not taking control.