Battlefields and Ballfields: Adaptability, Risk, and Tone

Josh Cox opens by identifying three decisions that define leadership maturity: knowing when to push, knowing when to trust, and knowing how to regulate. Pushing means moving yourself or your people outside their comfort zones for growth. Trust means developing people enough that you can confidently let them execute and deliver. Regulation applies both to the leader’s own behavior and to the team environment, so high performance remains steady rather than becoming emotional or inconsistent. Derin McMains explains that the episode will revisit three recent guests: Major League Baseball.com reporter Steve Gilbert, former NFL head coach Bruce Arians, and Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla. The format is built around clips from those conversations, followed by comparisons to McMains’s experience in professional sports and Cox’s experience as a United States Navy SEAL. The goal is to translate lessons from journalism, football, basketball, battlefields, and ballfields into practical guidance for people leading teams in a boardroom. McMains describes Gilbert as a reporter who has spent more than 25 years investigating excellence, including conversations and observations involving figures such as Michael Jordan and Randy Johnson.

Steve Gilbert tells McMains that staying relevant has required constant adaptation as journalism moved from newspapers to digital publishing, social media, and instant reactions. He says adapting was easier when he was younger, but the real challenge is continuing to challenge yourself later in your career. If he ever loses the ability to do that, he says it may be time to do something else. He recalls the early internet as the “wild west,” including helping create an online ticket-selling system in 1999 without knowing whether people would actually buy tickets that way. Gilbert now has to learn baseball concepts such as wOBA, launch angle, and exit velocity, but he does not want the numbers to erase the human element that makes his writing distinctive. He also warns against idealizing the past. A player once told him the 1980s were baseball’s best era even though the player had not been alive then; Gilbert says people forget the uncertainty and anxiety that accompanied earlier periods of their own lives. Cox connects this to his Navy career. When he joined in 1997, GPS was a large, fragile device that lasted about 15 minutes on its batteries, night vision was not available to everyone, and SEALs still relied heavily on maps and compasses. Modern equipment, including quad-tube night vision, required him to evolve while preserving his core identity. Cox’s conclusion is that early-career discomfort comes from learning the role, while later discomfort comes from deliberately leading differently. A comfort zone should be a temporary address, not a permanent residence.

McMains extends Gilbert’s lesson by arguing that adaptability depends on mastering fundamentals. He uses Major League Baseball as an example, describing a period from roughly 2014 to 2022 when hitting instruction emphasized optimizing the perfect or “A” swing. Players became highly skilled at generating power from the ground up, but strikeouts climbed because hitters were trying to execute an ideal swing against moving pitches. The result, McMains says, was a less watchable game: hitters could produce dramatic power when they connected, but they often could not adjust to pitches that moved. He points to Manny Ramirez as an example of a hitter who could operate from a suboptimal position. Against a slider moving away from a right-handed hitter, Ramirez could get off his backside, “walk through it,” and flip the ball into right field for a base hit. McMains’s point is that Ramirez could adapt because he had first mastered the fundamentals and understood the boundaries of what he could do. Cox describes how the SEAL teams reinforce that principle. Members practice basic shooting at the range several times a week and must requalify in pistol and rifle marksmanship, sometimes twice a year. They also must jump and dive twice a year to remain qualified, regardless of how long they have served. A basic, sharpshooter, or expert rating is displayed on a service uniform, so failing to maintain the standard is visible and embarrassing. McMains applies the same idea to leadership: repeatedly revisit foundational principles so that new learning and adaptation remain connected to the organization’s mission and “True North.”

Bruce Arians explains that leaders create risk-taking cultures by putting people, especially young quarterbacks, into pressure situations during practice. He wanted to see them fail in controlled conditions. One scenario gave a quarterback 25 seconds, 75 yards, and one timeout, then asked how he would win. Arians told Andrew Luck that winning 50 percent of the difficult situations he created would already mean Luck had done “one hell of a job.” A young coach was assigned to develop unusual end-of-half and end-of-game scenarios each week so the team could rehearse them before they occurred in competition. Arians recalls that the Vikings once scored with 30 seconds left, leaving Jacksonville with a chance to win. Andrew Luck ran onto the field already knowing the plan because the team had practiced the situation. He completed one pass, completed another, took a knee, and the team kicked the winning field goal. Arians connects the result to Paul “Bear” Bryant’s maxim to “expect the unexpected.” Cox says this is not blind delegation. A leader must know people well enough to determine who is ready for a particular challenge, who needs support, and who should be allowed to struggle. In SEAL training, leaders increase pressure by manipulating time, contingencies, and information. They may give a team less time than expected, introduce multiple problems, or provide limited information. Business leaders cannot usually stop operations for months of preparation, but Cox argues that they can find opportunities in daily work to create measured pressure and discover what people are ready to handle.

McMains describes how baseball coaches created pressure while reinforcing fundamentals. Infielders took 10 to 15 warm-up ground balls and then had to field 30 consecutive balls perfectly. If they bobbled one, they returned to zero. The exercise could involve at least 50 ground balls a day, or approximately 1,400 over a month, and it happened in front of the entire team. His coach Fred Stanley would call out the count as it rose—“25,” “26”—and then loudly announce “zero” after a mistake. The public pressure tested consistency, but McMains stresses that good leaders also know when to work privately, especially when asking someone to learn a technique they are likely to perform poorly at first. Cox adds that leadership at higher levels is largely about risk and the willingness to let go. In SEAL mission planning, teams may joke that the only way to eliminate all risk is not to go. A leader therefore has to accept that risk cannot be removed and decide when a person or team is prepared to act. He distinguishes a delegated task from a development opportunity by the context the leader provides. A leader might tell McMains to complete a project that would take the leader two hours but a developing employee five, explain that the first attempt may be only 80 percent, and then work beside him to reach 100 percent. The coaching happens in that final 20 percent. Once the employee has practiced and corrected the work several times, the leader can let go with a clearer understanding of the risk.

Joe Mazzulla argues that teams must repeatedly reset their identity during a season. A losing streak does not make a team “losers”; it means they are losing games. A winning streak does not permanently make them “winners”; they are simply winning at that moment. He wants the Celtics to behave the next day—through their tone, communication, practice, walkthrough, and film session—as if they could not tell whether they had won or lost the previous game. He also says a coach must leave the coaching identity at work and be the person the family needs at home. Cox frames Mazzulla’s point as a test for leaders: if someone walked through an organization’s workplace without speaking to anyone, could they accurately tell whether the team had just experienced major success or failure? A high-performing group should not show dramatic differences in how it approaches its work. McMains clarifies that this does not mean becoming emotionless. In baseball, a major win may involve a disco ball, lowered lights, a smoke machine, hugs, and celebration—but that lasts roughly 10 or 15 minutes before the team turns to recovery and preparation. After a loss, players may spend 10 or 15 minutes examining where they fell short and what must change, then they also return to preparation. Cox compares this with the 1990s movie Soldier, in which a super-soldier waits mechanically between wars, but says real SEAL teams celebrate successful missions and grieve serious losses. The regulation applies to the next day: the best teams can celebrate without becoming complacent and lose without becoming defeated.