The Style of a Turnaround
The sound of leadership isn’t loud—it’s clear
I didn’t expect a short video clip to send me back three decades, but it did. Watching Pete Hegseth speak to the troops, calling for accountability and a return to fundamentals, I suddenly saw the factory floor from my past. The clatter of machines, the smell of warm plastic, the quiet frustration of workers who knew they could do more if only the people above them got out of their own way.
Back then, our family business was stuck. The management layer had grown thick, and meetings had become the new form of production. Charts and memos multiplied, but results didn’t. At one point, I was told with absolute sincerity, “We just need to work harder and the business will be okay.” That line summed up everything wrong—the belief that effort alone could overcome structural failure. You could feel the exhaustion—the kind that doesn’t come from hard work, but from watching your effort evaporate into bureaucracy.
It took a new kind of leadership to break the spell. Someone had to call out the obvious: the fundamentals were being ignored. Machines weren’t being checked. People weren’t being heard. Everyone was busy defending their territory instead of winning the game. The turnaround didn’t begin with a plan—it began with a tone. Accountability over excuses. Action over analysis. The early days were rough; the management layer thinned out fast. But for the average worker on the floor, something remarkable happened: the fog lifted. Pride returned. The hum of progress replaced the hum of frustration.
So when I saw Hegseth walking through military installations talking about “cutting 20 percent of four-star positions” and “returning focus to the warfighter,” it wasn’t politics I heard—it was that same tone. The sound of someone saying, “We’ve drifted from the mission; it’s time to come home.”
Parallels in Leadership
Now, I’ll say this clearly: you don’t have to agree that the military needs a turnaround. You don’t even have to agree that Pete Hegseth is the one to lead it. I haven’t done deep diligence on the man. What caught my attention wasn’t the résumé—it was the rhythm.
In business, turnarounds begin when someone stops rearranging the org chart and starts questioning the purpose. Hegseth’s orders to trim the upper ranks and re-center on warfighting read like a corporate memo written for the Pentagon: less overhead, more output. The Defense Department has ballooned into a vast structure with over 2 million personnel and layers of leadership that slow decisions to a crawl. It mirrors the kind of middle-management bloat that once threatened to the family business.
The moves are bold—cutting four-stars by 20 percent, consolidating commands, trimming headquarters staff—but beneath the controversy is an ancient managerial truth: when leaders lose proximity to the mission, the mission suffers. In our business, we rediscovered that by walking the floor. Listening. Watching. Asking, “What’s blocking you?” not “Who can I blame?” Slowly, energy began to move in the right direction again.
Turnarounds are not about destruction; they’re about reclamation. You reclaim standards, you reclaim pride, and you reclaim the right to make things better. What’s worth noting in Hegseth’s push isn’t the politics, but the principle. Whether in a plant or a platoon, morale is not restored by slogans—it’s restored by a leader willing to strip away the layers that dull a sharp edge.
The Seed of Style
I’ve come to think that every organization—military, business, or personal—eventually hits a point where it must decide whether to protect its comfort or renew its purpose. Bureaucracy is the natural byproduct of success. It begins as structure and ends as stagnation. You don’t see it happening until you feel it, like rust beneath fresh paint.
When I look back at our turnaround and now at this moment in the military, I see the same seed buried beneath both stories: the courage to go back to basics. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t trend. It’s daily work—the tightening of bolts, the walking of floors, the insistence that excellence isn’t a speech but a standard.
So while I can’t tell you whether Hegseth’s reforms will succeed, I can tell you this: the style he’s chosen—demanding clarity, cutting bloat, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the people who do the work—is the same style that once saved a company I love. And maybe that’s enough of a reason to pay attention.
✨ Seed Thought: When systems grow soft, truth hides in the fundamentals. The turnaround always starts where someone dares to look again at what everyone else stopped seeing.
