Why the little exceptions leaders make are never actually small. In the 1970s, engineers at Ford knew the Pinto’s fuel tank design had a serious flaw. In certain rear-end collisions, the tank could rupture and the car could catch fire. The leadership team ran the numbers. They weighed the projected cost of settling the wrongful … Read more
Before you can lead people anywhere, you have to know where you’re going — and so do they. Alice comes to a fork in the road and looks up at the Cheshire Cat. She asks which way she ought to go from here. The Cat answers that it depends a good deal on where she … Read more
Why the discomfort of two seconds of silence is the discipline most leaders skip, and the one their teams notice first. Count it out slowly. One. One-thousand. Two. One-thousand. That brief gap, two full seconds, is one of the most underused tools in leadership, and it costs nothing to use. It sits between the moment … Read more
As I’ve described earlier, West Point and the Army made deliberate decisions to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of commitment, from measuring who could survive to investing in who could lead. That is a culture turnaround. It is one of the most transparent examples I know of what large-scale culture change … Read more
In the spring of 2020, Patrick McBrayer was the CEO of ACell Inc., a medical device company with a workforce that had gone home, a supply chain under pressure, and an industry landscape that was changing by the week. The pandemic was not a problem that could be solved with a good quarter or a … Read more
The Real Mutual Accountability Early in my career, not long after I became the Platoon Leader of an armored cavalry platoon with 41 Soldiers and 10 armored vehicles, my Platoon Sergeant (second in command) asked to inspect my fingernails. I was stunned but complied. His name was Sergeant Mac, and he was the kind of … Read more
