Piece 2: What Experience Is For (Fulda Marathon, Germany, September 7, 2003) Two years after I ran the Marine Corps Marathon, I was stationed in Würzburg, Germany, working on the division staff. My friend Mike and I had become close in that job and had deployed together to Turkey. Somewhere before we left for that deployment we got to talking about distance running. He said he wanted to run a marathon someday. I said I’d run one already and would love to take another shot at

Piece 1: The Rookie Race (Marine Corps Marathon, October 2001) We’ve talked a lot about leadership lately, about culture, vision, and the hard work it takes to build lasting programs. For the next few weeks, I want to take a different direction. Over the past twenty-four years, I’ve run seven marathons. Looking back, I learned more about myself, both as a person and a leader, through training and racing than I ever expected. Marathons often serve as a metaphor for anything in

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

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

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.