So what is a crisis leader? 

I think it's an individual who remains calm under pressure, who can instill confidence in those with whom he's interfacing and leading. 

It's a person who recognizes talent beyond their own capability and doesn't let their own hubris get in the way of success. In other words, they're not trying to be a hero. They're trying to instill an opportunity for a heroic outcome. [laughing] 

So they're interested in results without getting credit. I always like to say that I wanna take the blame and I never wanna take the credit. 

I want the people that do the work to take the credit and get the credit. I really hate attention. I operate best under cover of darkness. 

So, and I also think, and we talked about this earlier, that common sense being a skill set that is less common as the years go by. 

There's a poster that I love that says, "Common sense, it's so goddamned rare "it's a superpower." And I truly believe that to be true. And the older I get, the truer it seems to be. 

So I guess those are some of the characteristics I see in being a good crisis leader.

So this is a more difficult question, but I think of one scenario in my life as a kind of an enterprise risk manager working as an employee of a company that had a very serious problem with some failures in technology. 

This is a company that operated coin exchange kiosks around the country. And when I was brought on, they were experiencing very high rates of loss nationally that historically had been attributed to internal theft thinking that they had transport employees that were stealing from them. 

And to the extent that they were sending investigators out, spending lots of money on time and travel, meals and interviewing employees that were associated with locations that are experiencing high volumes of loss. 

In some cases, employees were confessing to just totally de minimis loss amounts. Yeah, I took 20 bucks, loose change that fell on the transport truck and gave it to my kids so they could buy bubble gum. They would get confessions like that and spending thousands of dollars to do an investigation to get a $50 admission.

So I started looking at this from a technical technology perspective and saying, this is a machine and machines can fail. 

One of my favorite stories growing up is the story of the Christmas ham. Have you heard of that? 

The Christmas ham story goes like this:

Mom's making the Christmas ham.

Mom's making Christmas ham and little Janie comes into the kitchen and sees that Ma has brought out a hacksaw and it's carving the end bone off the ham before she puts it in the oven. 

Little Janie says, "Mom, why are you carving the bone off the ham?" And she says, "Well that's cause what my mom, your grandma used to always do every year at Christmas. So that's what I do. 

So let's go ask her why she did it." So they go find grandma in the dining room sitting at the table, chatting. "Grandma, how come you used to cut the bone off for Christmas ham every year?" And she says, "Well that's because my mom, your great grandma used to always do that. So I did it.".

So they go in to great grandma who's 95 years old and passed out with a scotch in the rocker in the living room by the fireplace. They wake her up and say, "Great grandma, why did you used to cut the end bone off the Christmas ham every year?" "Well, we homesteading there in Oklahoma and all we had was this wood burning stove and the ham wouldn't fit. So I had to send Johnny out to the barn and get the saw to carve that bone off so I could fit it in the stove."

So the moral of the story is you need to ask why in order to figure out what's really going on.

And my grandfather was a big influence on me. 

He used to say, "You need to ask why five times and you'll get to the truth." 

So I started asking myself and asking people about why is it that we're losing money in these machines and is there a mechanical reason why that could be happening? 

So one day the lead technician for the company happened to be in the office. He was the guy that trained people all over the country and he happened to be in town and I went up to him and I said, "Is there a component on this machine that could break and if it broke would cause the machine to count the coin but not collect it, in other words, reject it and send it back to the customer?" He said, "Sure. There is...".

There is a device called a, anyway, there was a piston in the kiosk that sat behind the sensor that measured whether or not a coin was legitimate. And if that sensor identified a coin as being good, it would trigger the piston to shoot the coin into the acceptance barrel. But if that piston failed when the sensor told it to kick, the coin would be returned to the customer. 

And this was a device, solenoid is the word I'm looking for, so exchange the word piston for solenoid. So if this solenoid failed, the coins that were counted as good coin by the sensor would be returned to the customer. The machine would pay off like a slot machine effectively over time as the solenoid would progressively fail further and further.

So with that one question of trying to ask why could this be happening, the guy answered a mystery that saved the company almost a million dollars a year in the years to come. 

Because I took that information and implemented a program to monitor for every kiosk in the network, failures associated with certain denominations of coin that we could monitor progressively the number of shortages associated with every denomination in every bin that was counted. 

And we got to the point where we could predict that that solenoid was about to fail in a kiosk and replace it. So we replaced a loss prevention problem with a prevented maintenance solution and saved the company $1 million a year.

I would say one of the lessons in life for me, and it's not restricted to crisis management, is really around the importance of sticking to something, maybe even beyond the point of a certain level of tolerance that you think you've just surpassed and you can't take it anymore. 

But I've had several occasions in my career where I made choices to move, where if I had not moved, I would've been a lot better off. 

So one of the lessons in my mind is to really have the discipline and the foresight and maybe even take the time to reach out to folks that might be able to provide you other perspectives as you're making really important decisions around long-term, not just incidental or in-the-moment crisis situations, but very long-term situations that could affect your life, your family, your professional situation. 

And really take the time to be very introspective as well as looking externally towards what the implications might be of making a decision.

Bottom line is I've made decisions that probably cost me millions of dollars because I left an opportunity just as it was coming to fruition. 

And I really actually have done that twice in my career. And in one of those occasions, I went just because the new opportunities sounded really fun and I wasn't mature enough at the time to think about this may be a really fun thing to do, but is it the smartest thing to do from a long-term perspective? 

So that's, I got to say definitely in retrospect, that's something I wish I knew now, or then that I know now.

I don't think there's any shortcut here in terms of improving leadership skills of any type, whether it's crisis or otherwise. 

It's a long and progressive series of learning events. 

I think you have to be an intense reader and understand that, you know, lessons from the past almost invariably will apply to the current and to the future. 

And that I think readers are leaders and people that are focused on those things that interest them. And in this case we're talking about crisis management. So you would expect that people would be reading about what folks have done historically and there's so much documentation, you couldn't possibly read it in a lifetime in this space. 

But I would say that is first and foremost is being an avid reader.

Number two, obviously there's probably a lot of video entertainment that you could watch and learn lots of life lessons and that's probably less relevant. But finally having a mentor or someone that can provide you with a professional example of what leadership looks like. And you know, the difference between being a leader and a manager. The difference between being a leader and just being a figurehead. 

You know, I've worked in organizations that were led by people that were not leaders, but they just happened to be there at the right time. 

So, I guess those would be my thoughts about what to do if you really want to develop leadership skills is to read a lot and find a great mentor.

A crisis leader that influenced my career. 

This is, I guess, a little more difficult for me. I am a very avid reader. I'm a very avid reader of history. I'm very much a student of the civil war, so I really enjoy reading about what went on in the course of the war and leading up to the war. 

In particular, I think you mentioned earlier someone talking about Lincoln and Lincoln is my hero. He's one of my security questions. Don't tell anybody this. But he's my all-time favorite historical figure because he saved the union, but he did it in a way that under today's standards he'd never make it to the White House, certainly. From Lincoln's example to this very day if I see a politician who is an artistic orator, I immediately discount them as being a phony.

And I don't need to reference anyone in particular in our recent past but I firmly believe the guys that have difficulty in oration oftentimes are the ones that have that lack of hubris and that capability to think outwardly as opposed to inwardly, and maybe their skill set isn't all about reading from a prompter, but it's about doing the right thing at the right time.

So, when I think of great influencers I think of guys that are just really great at getting the job done, and they're not about, as I said earlier, taking credit for it. 

Anytime I see somebody that wants to be the guy at the front of the pack, the guy at the podium I immediately discount them as being irrelevant. So, that's my thoughts on the topic.