Crisis-Proof Leadership: The Executive Red Team Series, co-authored with John Grommers.

Over the next few months, we’ll explore how organizations can strengthen executive readiness through practical, tested resilience practices. Each post focuses on a specific blind spot leaders often overlook, and the steps to fix it.

This series is written for executives, senior leaders, and those responsible for equipping and advising them, including boards, business continuity teams, risk leaders, security teams, and crisis managers.

These posts reflect patterns observed across executive simulations, real world crisis activations, and red team exercises. John and I have both been personally pressure tested by high consequence events, not just as observers, but as operators and advisors accountable for decisions under uncertainty. The insights here draw on decades of combined experience across CIA, DHS, FEMA, and Fortune 500 institutions, with a deliberate focus on decision quality, escalation, and coordination when conditions are degraded and stakes are real.

In this series, red teaming refers to stress-testing leadership assumptions, decision authority, and coordination under pressure, not technical penetration testing or system exploitation.

We begin this series tomorrow with the most overlooked vulnerability: the executive blind spot.