Everyone eventually asks some version of the same question, usually with some version of the same face.

Why would a 52-year-old CEO go to paramedic school?

I’ve spent thirty years in and around crises. I built and led global crisis management, business continuity, and intelligence programs at one of the largest retailers in the world. I led teams through Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic. For the last twelve years I’ve run a consulting firm that helps organizations get ready for their worst day. I have stood in more conference rooms than I can count and told executives what to do when everything goes wrong.

And then, in September of 2025, I watched a man die at a football stadium.

I was working the game as a volunteer EMT. His heart stopped, and twenty people fought for his life. Firefighters, police officers, EMTs, paramedics. We got him back.

I had a role that day, and I did it, and it mattered.

But somewhere in those minutes, I understood something I had been avoiding for years: watching wasn’t enough for me anymore.

Two weeks later, I was enrolled in paramedic school.

A return, not an entrance

Here’s the part most people don’t know. A county sheriff’s department in rural Indiana trained me as a first responder thirty years ago, before Target, before the MBA, before any of it. Emergency services is where I started.

So this was never a midlife swerve into something new. It was a return to something old, by a longer road than I planned.

I know how the story pattern-matches from the outside.

Man turns fifty, acquires ambulance instead of sports car. I’ve looked for the crisis, and I can’t find it. What I found instead, somewhere around my fiftieth birthday, was an honest question about what I wanted the decade between fifty and sixty to contain.

The answer was the moment. Hands-on work. Operational. Human. Not the strategy of the response, but the response.

What the front line teaches

For eleven months I was a paramedic student: coursework at night after full days running my firm, thirteen-hour clinical shifts on ambulances, skills weeks in a working 911 station four hours north of my house. I was the oldest student in every room the program put me in. I finished this summer, passed my boards, and I’m about to start work as a paramedic in the Twin Cities.

Here is some of what the back of an ambulance taught me that the boardroom couldn’t.

Distance is the whole difference. For thirty years I managed crises from headquarters. Dashboards, briefings, conference bridges. The decision was always somewhere else, executed by someone else, and by the time it reached me it had been abstracted into a status update.

On an ambulance the distance between you and the decision is zero. The patient is three feet away, the clock is running, and whatever happens next happens because of what your hands do now.

Every executive who runs crisis response from a tower should spend one shift that close to the actual work their decisions land on. It recalibrates everything.

Short beats comprehensive, every time. EMS runs on protocols that fit on a card. They’re short because they have to be executed by tired people, under stress, with gloves on. They get used on every call.

Meanwhile, corporate crisis plans run three hundred pages and get opened once a year, during the exercise, by the consultant who wrote them.

I’ve preached short, usable plans for my entire consulting career. The ambulance is where I finally lived the proof.

You can’t prevent. You can reduce. One night last fall, our team got word about ten minutes before the end of a football game that fifty thousand people were about to rush the field.

Nobody tried to stop them. You can’t.

Instead, security did something that has stayed with me ever since: they unlocked the stairways from the stands to the field. The injuries in a field rush don’t come from people being on the field. They come from people jumping a six to twelve foot drop to get there. Open the stairs and most of them walk down.

I have spent a career telling executives that they cannot prevent most of what they’re afraid of, and that the real work is reducing what it costs when it comes. I had said it in a hundred conference rooms. I had never once watched somebody do it with a key.

People come. The thing nobody explained to me at twenty-two, and it took until fifty to learn: when a scene grows past the people standing on it, other crews leave their own territory and drive toward it.

Not their patients. Not their problem, in any sense a lawyer would recognize.

They go because the call went out. There is no corporate analog for that, and there should be.

What this site is now

That’s what I’ll be writing about here.

Crisis leadership from both altitudes: the boardroom where I’ve spent thirty years, and the ambulance where I’m starting over as the newest, oldest rookie in the metro.

Some essays will be about organizations.

Some will be about the back of the truck. The good ones will be about both at once.

Thirty years telling people how to survive their worst day.

Turns out I still had things to learn about it. I’ll share them as I go.