To Be Wayward
The word didn't pick itself. I picked it.
Industrial folks are tired of two consulting archetypes. The strategy generalist who walks in with a slide deck and walks out with one too, having learned nothing about the plant they just spent two weeks advising. The executive coach with a middle-management resume, charging premium rates to ask reflective questions about anyone's authentic leadership journey.
Wayward Leaders is neither. The practice is built around a third archetype that has been around longer than either of those, an archetype that has produced most of what the industry actually knows: the senior practitioner who also writes, teaches, and researches. Eliyahu Goldratt was that. W. Edwards Deming was that. Ron Moore is that. None of them presented like McKinsey. That was precisely the point.
To be wayward is to choose the longer path. A PhD on top of plant-floor years. Faculty appointments on top of consulting work. Published books on top of training cohorts. Each layer paid for in time, none of it shortcuttable. The result is a practice that speaks operator language because the operator language was the first language, not a vocabulary picked up from a brand guide.
To be wayward is also to be plain about what works. Substance over theater. Original frameworks over recycled methodology. The conviction that expertise should be an asset, not a mystery.
The buyer this practice serves is the experienced operator constrained by mediocre leadership and surface-level consulting. The maintenance manager whose recommendations get overridden by production-first decisions. The engineer whose technical judgment loses to financial priorities. Wayward Leaders exists to give those people somewhere serious to turn.
That's what the name means.
Same answer every time you ask.
Wayward by Richard Booth, UK
Here Am I. Send Me!
I'm Carl Lee Tolbert. I live in the middle of Sioux Falls with my wife Jill and a brilliant cat named Wendy, blocks from two universities and the city center. Instead of a Bio...Two Stories that shaped me...
The Boxing Coach
My first real teacher was a chain-smoking Irish priest who coached boxing. The way he ran intake was simple: every new kid stood in the middle of the gym while the older kids took turns punching him in the face. He said it got the shock and awe out of the way and let him see who would stay. Most didn't...I stayed.
For the next several years, while I trained, he flicked ashes from his Camel non-filters onto my shoulders and told me, with the same regularity, that I was buggering up my life and wasting my potential. He was wrong about that. He was right about most other things.
Joliet
Years later I took a job at a steel mill in Joliet, hired specifically to be mentored by an electrical guru who had run the plant's drive systems for decades. He died on my way out there. By the time I started, the mentorship was an open chair. So was the seat at the head of the table.
I was suddenly in charge of twelve electricians and fifty-two acres of steel production, making rebar hard and fast at industrial scale. The plant ran on the second major ABB installation of my career, this one spliced to a 1960s-vintage roughing mill at a right angle. As far as I could tell at the time, the only one in the world configured that way. Sink or swim, the mentor I came for already gone, and the plant kept making rebar...That's where I learned what the books leave out.
