Reality > Plan: How Leaders Actually Win

Everyone teaches “Leadership 101.” No one teaches what happens after the first punch.

I launched Rogue Risk in early 2020.

Seven days later, the world shut down.

My clever “handshake” strategy—flyers, folders, face-to-face—died before it took a breath.

The market didn’t care about my beautiful plan.

It cared about reality.

So I killed the “in-person” playbook and went all-in on digital.

That call didn’t just keep us alive; it made Rogue Risk acquisition-ready by 2022.

That’s the job. Not defending yesterday. Commanding now.

Leadership 101

Leadership gets romanticized as vision decks and consensus votes.

That’s theater. Real leadership is decisiveness under partial information.

It’s seeing the room, naming the risk, and owning the call—knowing you might be right, or you might get your ego body-checked into the boards.

Clausewitz called it the “Fog of War.”

You know it as Monday at 900am when the plan is already melting.

Daniel Kahneman mapped the reflexes—hedging when you should strike, and overextending when you should stabilize.

Heifetz says step to the balcony to see the board, then get back on the floor and move.

All of that is useful—until it becomes a stall tactic.

F*ck Best Practices

“Best practices” are the most dangerous drug in business because they sound like discipline.

Too often they’re camouflage for fear—confirmation bias telling you the old way is still fine, overconfidence convincing you the spreadsheet is reality, loss aversion whispering that inaction is safer than a reversible experiment.

Meanwhile, your competitors aren’t waiting.

In chaos, the ones who win are the ones who move.

Command the Present

Command the Present is the muscle of turning live signals into decisive motion.

It starts with uncomfortable honesty: what changed this week that breaks last week’s plan?

Not “what do I wish were true,” not “what does the deck say,” but what customers, revenue, and ops are screaming right now.

Then you name the bias that’s about to blind you—and set the bar for action.

Is this a one-way door or a two-way door?

If it’s reversible, move fast.

If it’s permanent, raise the evidence, not the slide count.

You can listen to the audio on iTunes or Spotify as well.