You Don’t Have to Be an A-Hole to Win
Why I wrote this book
I’ve worked with—and worked for—leaders who believed intimidation was a leadership style and ego was a prerequisite for success.
It’s not.
My book, You Don’t Have to Be an A-Hole to Win: How Servant Leadership Took Me from a Double-Wide to the C-Suite—and Out the Other Side, is available now, and it’s the most honest account I can give of what leadership actually looks like when the stakes are real and the titles eventually fade.
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a field report.
I didn’t set out to write a leadership book. I wrote this because I reached a point in my career where I had enough history to be useful—and enough distance to be honest.
My career started with responsibility long before authority, moved through executive leadership inside multimillion-dollar organizations, and eventually led me out of the C-suite and into independent advisory work. Along the way, I learned a few things the hard way:
- Effectiveness doesn’t require cruelty
- Influence outlasts power
- And success always carries a cost, whether you choose to measure it or not
This book is for leaders who want to do meaningful work without losing themselves in the process. It’s also for the next wave—those climbing now—who deserve better examples than the ones many of us inherited.
- You don’t have to burn bridges to move forward.
- You don’t have to cling to a title to lead.
- And you don’t have to be an asshole to win.
Thank you to everyone who inspired, challenged, and pushed me to finally write this down.
That Could've Been an Email!
Why I wrote this book
I wrote That Could’ve Been an Email! because I’ve spent enough time inside modern companies to know two things for sure:
- Everyone is trying their best.
- Absolutely none of that guarantees anything will make sense.
This book introduces you to the employees of Applied Systems, inc. (ASYS)—a perfectly normal company where meetings multiply, priorities blur, dashboards stay green, and no one is entirely sure who owns what anymore. The work never stops. The conversations never end. And somehow, everything important keeps getting postponed until later.
The story unfolds over a single workweek because that’s all it takes for the absurdity to reveal itself. Every email sounds reasonable. Every decision feels defensible. And yet, by Friday, everyone is exhausted and nothing is meaningfully different.
ASYS isn’t exaggerated. It’s familiar. That’s the joke.
If you’ve ever:
- Sat through a meeting that should have been an email
- Read an email that explained nothing
- Watched a problem get “aligned” instead of solved
- Or recognized your coworkers in fictional characters a little too quickly
…this book is for you.
I didn’t have to invent much. I just wrote it down.
(This is Book 1 of an upcoming series)