Leadership is lonely. It doesn't have to be.

On a submarine, the most important hours happen while the captain sleeps. We called it the midwatch: midnight to 6 a.m. A skeleton crew runs a $2 billion warship through the dark while nearly everyone, including the commanding officer, is racked out. No one is checking your work. No one is watching. And the ship still has to be run exactly right, because the ocean doesn't grade on effort. Here's what I learned down there: the quality of the midwatch tells you everything about

Why the isolation of leadership is a performance problem, not just a feeling. I recently started watching the History Channel series Alone, where contestants are dropped into the wilderness by themselves and last as long as they can. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the hunger or the cold that caused many people to quit. These highly capable, prepared people slowly came undone not because they couldn’t build a shelter or catch a fish, but because they had no one to talk to. Many conte

Resilience isn't built in the middle of a crisis. It's built long before one starts. On a nuclear submarine, we didn't prepare for a specific emergency. We prepared for any and every emergency. The drills were relentless, sometimes inconvenient, and absolutely non-negotiable. Because when something goes wrong 400 feet below the surface, you don't get to call a consultant. Most companies I work with think about resilience like insurance. It’s something you buy after somet