Leadership

Soon, many tributes to Lou Holtz will appear. While most will provide more detail than this, they will cover his coaching career, the championships, memorable moments on the sidelines, and his decades-long influence in college football. This is not a complete account of Lou Holtz’s life. Instead, this is my personal reflection on someone I have admired and tried to follow. For much of my adult life, I have learned from his leadership ideas, his views on life and work, and the

Leadership accountability requires clarity, composure, and respect. The Jerome Tang situation offers a powerful lesson in holding standards without damaging culture.

The scoreboard doesn't lie. Neither does the film. Yet too many coaches fall into the trap of measuring success by the volume of drills run, hours logged, or plays installed rather than the quality of execution and actual game-day performance. Championship cultures aren't built on busyness—they're built on precision, purpose, and relentless focus on fundamentals that matter. Competitive greatness, as Coach John Wooden defined it, is "performing at your best when your best is

A full military career is full of different assignments, different locations, and different experiences. Even when you spend an entire career inside a single specialty (armor, infantry, aviation, logistics, intelligence) the range of units, leaders, missions, and cultures you encounter is wide. The uniforms look the same. The doctrine is the same. The standards are supposed to be the same. But the reality is not.

Summer of 2020 Most leaders are built in peacetime but judged in wartime. Peacetime is where you build identity, culture, discipline, and systems. Wartime is where you’re forced to act under stress, make decisions with imperfect information, and defend the mission when the world is watching. Crisis doesn’t change who you are; it exposes who you already were. I learned that lesson viscerally in July of 2020 when I assumed command of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Div

Sports, man. What a game. And yes — coaching matters. Leadership matters. Previously, I wrote that “if you want to win championships, you need to build a championship culture — on purpose.” The 2025–26 Indiana Hoosiers just demonstrated that lesson with a clarity that should force every athletic director, business leader, and sports fan to recalibrate their thinking about what winning really takes. They didn’t just get better players. They didn’t just get richer boosters. The

Why do we assume coaches must choose between winning games and developing people? This reflection challenges that false tradeoff and shows how trust, purpose, and discipline create teams built to last.

Most leadership failures in sports don’t come from a lack of effort or discipline—they come from leaders who were promoted for performance without developing the skills or identity required to lead others. That pattern reveals a broader truth about leadership, particularly in athletics: most people are promoted for performance, not for leadership readiness, and the two are not the same thing.

Coaching is demanding in ways most people never face. Leadership is always tough, but coaching stands out because your wins and losses are public and judged right away. It puts a lot on your shoulders, exposes your weaknesses, and makes everything feel bigger. For those in charge, it can feel like living in a pressure cooker.

The sporting world watched with interest over the past six weeks as Lane Kiffin, former head football coach at Ole Miss, went through a very public game of “The (football) Bachelor”.

If you spend time with young leaders like assistant coaches, new managers, or rising captains, you’ll often hear the same answer when you ask, “What kind of leader are you?”

Spend any time on a practice field and in a motor pool, and you’ll notice similarities in language. We rally around the mission, refuse to let our teammates down, preach next man up, and dig deep when it’s the fourth quarter. We leave it all on the field and trust the process. The vocabulary overlaps so naturally that it almost goes unnoticed. But the real connection isn’t linguistic—it’s foundational. The language is the echo. The roots run much deeper.

I recently joined my friend Chris Kolenda in leading a client offsite at Antietam and Gettysburg. Standing on ground where decisions carried life-and-death consequences was a powerful reminder about the essential elements of leadership. It reminded me that success, whether in combat or competition, comes down to people, trust, and the culture a leader builds. Thinking about those experiences, one topic we discussed resonated with me, since I personally struggled with it so o

You might have heard the saying, “where you sit is where you stand.”  Our views are shaped by our own experiences. Whether you’re a parent, a child, a frontline worker, or an executive, everyone sees decisions differently. This dynamic is no different in athletics. Early in my career, I was often a lieutenant, not just by rank but in how I acted. I worked hard, followed orders, and sometimes quietly disagreed with my commander’s choices or approach. Like many young leaders, I