Olivia: A study of urban firefighters found something fascinating. Under extreme stress, the performance of experienced officers actually improves. But for inexperienced ones? It plummets. Jackson: Really? So it’s not just about being brave, it’s that your brain literally works better under fire if you’ve been there before? Olivia: Exactly. It turns out, in a crisis, your gut instinct might be the very thing that gets you or your team killed. And today, we have two stories that prove it in the most dramatic way possible. Jackson: Wow, so experience isn't just helpful, it's a survival mechanism. That's intense. Olivia: It is. And it’s the central question in Michael Useem's incredible book, The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All. Useem is a professor at Wharton, and he's obsessed with what separates triumph from disaster in these high-stakes moments. He doesn't just give you theories; he drops you right into the action. Jackson: I like that. Less textbook, more… trial by fire. Olivia: And there's no greater test of leadership under pressure than the one faced by Eugene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission.

Jackson: Ah, the "Houston, we've had a problem" mission. I know the famous line, but I feel like the real story of what happened in Mission Control is probably even crazier. Olivia: It's almost unbelievable. Picture this: April 13, 1970. The Apollo 13 crew is over 200,000 miles from Earth, coasting toward the moon. Suddenly, a catastrophic explosion rips through the service module. Alarms are blaring. Oxygen is venting into space. Power is dying. The command module, their only way home, is freezing and losing life support. Jackson: Hold on. So they're 200,000 miles from Earth, basically in a dead spacecraft, and his first instinct is... to tell everyone to calm down and work the problem? How is that even humanly possible? Olivia: That's the magic of Eugene Kranz. He’s the flight director, the guy in the vest. While panic is rippling through the room, he stands up and says one of the most important things in leadership history. He tells his team, "Let's solve the problem. Let's not make it any worse by guessing." Jackson: That takes a level of composure I can't even fathom. Most people would be looking for the eject button, but there isn't one. Olivia: There isn't one. And what Useem points out is that this calm wasn't an accident. Kranz had spent years building a culture specifically for this kind of moment. They ran hundreds of simulations, each one designed to be harder and more disastrous than the last. He trained his team not just to follow procedures, but to think, to innovate, and to trust each other implicitly. Jackson: So he was preparing for a disaster that had never happened before. Olivia: Precisely. He immediately organized his best people into what he called a "Tiger Team." Their only job was to brainstorm solutions. He told them, "From now on, what I want from every one of you is simple: options, and plenty of them." He didn't want reports on what was broken; he wanted ideas for how to fix it. Jackson: So he wasn't a micromanager. He was more like a conductor of geniuses, keeping them all focused on the same piece of music, even as the concert hall was burning down around them. Olivia: That’s a perfect analogy. He trusted his experts. When they needed to figure out how to restart the frozen command module with less power than a coffee maker, he turned to his 26-year-old electrical specialist, John Aaron, who devised a procedure that had never been attempted. When they realized the carbon dioxide filters from the command module wouldn't fit the lunar module—their lifeboat—engineers on the ground were given a box of junk that was available on the spacecraft and told to build a solution. Jackson: You’re kidding. They literally had to invent a life-saving device with duct tape and spare parts? Olivia: Duct tape, a plastic bag, a flight manual cover, and a sock. And it worked. They radioed the instructions up to the astronauts, who built it and saved their own lives. Every step of the way, Kranz was the steady hand, the unwavering voice of confidence. Jackson: And that famous line, "Failure is not an option"? Olivia: It was actually a paraphrase for the movie, but it perfectly captures his ethos. For Kranz and his team, it wasn't a boast or a slogan. It was a fundamental operating principle. He had built an organization where failure was simply not a conceivable outcome. They would work the problem until it was solved. And because of that leadership, they brought those three men home. Jackson: That's incredible. It feels like with that kind of leadership, you can solve anything. It makes you wonder if there's a situation where even the best idea can fail.

Olivia: That's the perfect question, because it brings us to our second, and much more tragic, story from the book. The Mann Gulch fire of 1949. It's the dark mirror to Apollo 13. Jackson: A fire? Okay, that sounds dangerous, but how does it compare to a spaceship exploding? Olivia: In terms of leadership failure, it's even more haunting. We have a team of fifteen elite smokejumpers, the best of the best. They parachute into a remote gulch in Montana to fight what looks like a routine forest fire. Their foreman is a man named Wagner Dodge, highly experienced and respected. Jackson: Okay, so far, so good. Sounds like the A-team. Olivia: It was. But the situation changed in an instant. The wind shifted, and the fire 'blew up'—a terrifying phenomenon where it creates its own weather system and explodes into a wall of flame, racing up the gulch faster than any human could run. They were trapped. Jackson: Oh man. So what does Dodge do? Olivia: This is where it gets fascinating and tragic. Dodge, in a moment of pure genius, invents a technique no one there had ever seen or heard of. He realizes they can't outrun the fire. So he stops, takes out a match, and lights a fire in front of them in the dry grass. Jackson: Wait, what? He lit another fire? In front of the giant fire that's about to kill them? I'd think he'd gone insane too! Olivia: Exactly! And that's what his crew thought. His idea was to quickly burn a patch of ground and then lie down in the cool ashes. The main fire would then roar right over them, with nothing left to burn in their small safety zone. It was a brilliant, counter-intuitive solution. The only solution. He yelled at his men, "This way! This way! Come in here with me!" Jackson: And they didn't do it. Olivia: They didn't. They hesitated. One of them was later quoted as saying, "What the hell is the boss doing, lighting another fire in front of us?" They saw it as the final act of a leader who had lost his mind. They thought he'd panicked. So they did the only thing that made sense to their terrified minds: they ran. Jackson: And... they ran right into the main fire, didn't they? Olivia: They ran right into the 2,000-degree wall of flame. Thirteen of them died within minutes. Only Dodge, who lay safely in the ashes of his escape fire, and two other men who managed to find a rockslide, survived. Jackson: That is absolutely heartbreaking. He had the answer, the one thing that could have saved them, and they didn't take it. Why? Why didn't they trust him? Olivia: This is the core of Useem's analysis. Dodge's leadership had been subtly eroding all afternoon. He was a quiet, reserved man, and his communication was poor. Earlier, he had made a couple of questionable calls—he misjudged the fire's location initially, and then he gave a confusing order to drop their heavy tools, which to a firefighter is like telling a soldier to drop his rifle. Each small decision chipped away at his credibility. Jackson: So by the time he had his brilliant, life-saving idea, his 'leadership bank account' was already overdrawn. Olivia: That's the perfect way to put it. He hadn't built a foundation of trust. Unlike Kranz's team, which was a cohesive unit trained for years, Dodge's crew had been assembled just hours before the jump. They didn't know him well enough to make that leap of faith. In the moment that mattered most, his brilliant idea was useless because he couldn't persuade anyone to follow him. He had the right technical answer, but he failed the human test of leadership.

Jackson: Wow. So you have Kranz, whose team would have followed him to the ends of the Earth, and Dodge, whose team ran away from him to their deaths. The difference wasn't the idea; it was the trust. Olivia: Precisely. Useem's ultimate lesson is that leadership moments are won or lost before the crisis ever hits. Kranz built his team's trust through years of rigorous training, transparent communication, and a shared, unwavering mission. He made daily deposits of credibility. Dodge, leading a crew of relative strangers, had no such foundation. His leadership bank account was empty when he needed to make the biggest withdrawal of his life. Jackson: So the takeaway isn't just 'be calm in a crisis.' It's 'build a culture of trust and clarity every single day, so when the crisis comes, your team is ready to follow you, even if your idea sounds completely crazy.' Olivia: That's it. You have to earn the right to lead in a crisis. You earn it in the quiet, everyday moments—by being clear, by being consistent, by showing your team you have their back. You can't just flip a switch and become a great leader when the alarms go off. The foundation has to already be there. Jackson: It makes you think about all the small interactions at work or even at home. Every time you explain the 'why' behind a decision, or take the time to listen, you're making a small deposit in that trust account. Olivia: Exactly. And it leaves us with a powerful question to reflect on: Are we, as leaders in our own lives—at work, at home, in our communities—making daily deposits into our own leadership bank accounts? Because you never know when you'll face your own Mann Gulch. Jackson: That's a heavy thought. We'd love to hear what you all think. What's a small way you build trust every day? Let us know on our socials. We read everything. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.