Research and Academics
Published research and applied methodology from a working industrial practitioner
Wayward Leaders maintains an active research and academic practice alongside its industrial training and consulting work. The work serves two audiences: industrial buyers evaluating the depth behind Wayward Leaders engagements, and academic researchers and graduate students who need methodological support from a credentialed practitioner who understands both rigor and application.
Published Books
Before the First Fault: A Field Guide to VFD Installation and Reliability
23 chapters covering the full VFD lifecycle from selection and sizing through long-term reliability. Five appendices including the ORCA-Size technical reference and pre-energization checklist. Written for field technicians, plant engineers, electricians, and maintenance professionals who install, commission, and maintain variable frequency drives. This is not a programming manual. It is the book that should be on site before the drive is.
Digital pre-release edition available now. Print edition releases August 1, 2026.
The 10 Immutable Laws of the Industrial Distribution Specialist: How Top-Performing Distributors Build Competitive Advantage Through Technical Expertise
Industrial distribution is under siege. Manufacturers are going direct, Amazon Business is growing by billions, and AI threatens to automate the human elements that once set distributors apart. In the middle of it all stand specialists, the technical experts who should be distribution's greatest competitive advantage but are too often its most underutilized resource. Based on decades of field experience and doctoral research encompassing over 200 qualitative interviews, Dr. Carl Tolbert reveals ten immutable laws and two multiplier principles that separate thriving specialist programs from expensive failures. From the Inverted U Paradox that explains when selling expertise becomes counterproductive, to the Diamonds and Dogs matrix that exposes how half of all technical support requests drain resources without creating value, to the Triangle of Trust between manufacturers, distributors, and customers that is breaking in real time, this book provides the frameworks that top-performing distributors use to turn specialists from cost centers into profit drivers. This is not theory. It is field-tested, research-backed, and written for anyone navigating the complexity of modern industrial distribution before the window closes.
Demystifying AI for the Christian Leader: Wisdom, Accountability, and Stewardship in the Age of Intelligent Machines
Your employees are already using AI, authorized or not, and a 2025 Stanford study found nearly one-quarter of corporate communications now show evidence of AI assistance. But most resources offer Christian leaders either breathless hype or apocalyptic warnings, neither of which helps someone who must make concrete decisions today while remaining accountable to a higher authority than shareholders alone. Demystifying AI for the Christian Leader bridges that gap, providing principled AI governance grounded in biblical wisdom rather than tech industry ideology. The book's central boundary is seven words: AI may inform decisions but never make them. Across four parts, Dr. Carl Tolbert moves from technical foundations and the real capabilities of large language models, through generative and agentic AI governance challenges, into organizational policy development, build-versus-buy decisions, and workforce transitions managed with dignity, before arriving at the human questions no algorithm can answer, drawing on Thomas a Kempis to address the interior formation that wise governance demands. Written by an author who works as an AI developer and data science professor while publishing scholarship on biblical stewardship, this book assumes no technical background but does not condescend. Neither fear nor worship. Faithful stewardship.
The Red Queen’s Space War (2nd Edition): Dynamics of Proliferation and Competition in the Orbital Commons
Why do nations keep building space weapons even when everyone agrees it is dangerous? The Red Queen in Space answers this question by applying evolutionary biology's most provocative hypothesis to the weaponization of outer space, introducing the Red Queen Space Proliferation framework, a mathematical diagnostic tool that identifies arms race conditions through eigenvalue analysis of Richardson's classic arms race equations. When the first edition appeared in 2013, it predicted that structural competition would drive continuous counterspace development among the United States, Russia, and China. The years since delivered confirmation: Chinese high-altitude ASAT demonstrations, Russian kinetic intercept tests, American Space Force establishment, and India's entry into the kinetic ASAT club. The second edition expands the framework with bounded competition indices, network generalization to five actors, and Monte Carlo simulation capabilities, while updated calculations using 2024 data confirm all major space power relationships remain in arms race territory with eigenvalues substantially exceeding stability thresholds. Of five alternative scenarios modeled through 2050, only one produces system stability, meaningful arms control, and the analysis explains why that path remains structurally improbable even as it grows increasingly necessary. Written for scholars of international security, space policy professionals, military strategists, and graduate students, this book reveals what structural dynamics compel nations to do regardless of their stated intentions.