Dr. Thom Mayer

And now, you know, we're at a place where the league takes great pride in calling them the NFL concussion protocols. That's great, as long as it's for the good of my player patients. But having the courage, the integrity to stand up and say, no, we are going to have guidelines. And these are the scientific protocols that are our best knowledge at this time.

The book, as you know, is kind of a litany, very brief, 176 pages of contrarian types of statements, starting with the title, Leadership is Worthless, but Leading is Priceless. What I learned at 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine. You know, when I was called to the Pentagon on 9-11, I was a command physician at the And I got there.

First of all, you fly in and you think, my God, these are the gates of hell. I mean, you see the Pentagon of all things burning. You know, couldn't even see that there was any remnants of a plane and the southwest wall was completely on fire. But the gates of hell take you to some pretty interesting places. And so what I learned was that, first of all, it was a civilian operation.

I was the medical director of the local EMS agency and the chairman of the emergency department. But I had 32 generals standing behind me, facing the Pentagon, willing to help in any way. Good men, good women who were there to help me any way they could. But I realized I'm not going to get anywhere by sucking up to these generals.

I have to suck down to the people actually doing the work, to the structural engineers, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to the paramedics, to the firefighters, to the suppressant folks, to the FBI evidence recovery team, in order to secure that building so we could safely, they could safely get into the building.

To help rescue those who were in there or recover those who had not made it through the horrific crash. And I think that's true in all of our lives. We kind of suck up guests. I always say the boss is someone who thinks that he's the most important person in the room, whereas the leader.

knows that her job is to make sure that everyone else feels that they're the most important person in the room. No need to suck up. We need to suck down and discover the answers within us.

Yeah, shortly after I first started my job, I had a very difficult issue with the NFL. And I laid the issue out. And I knew that I can't just say, hey, boss, solve this problem for me. I had to come in with solutions. So I had three solutions. And I laid out the solutions and said, here they are. One, two, three. I said, what do you want me to do? And he said, he thought for a second.

And he looked at me and he said, just go be Tom Mayer. That's why you are Tom Mayer. That's why I hired Tom Mayer. I realized what he was saying is, I trust you, trust yourself to be able to make the right decision and I'll support you all the way. You know, the leader we're looking for, the leader you're looking for is you. You are the one.

Well, that's true. Definitely. You know, I always talk about innovation at the speed of not genius, intelligence, creativity, but of trust. Because if people don't trust you, they're not going to step outside the lines and try something that might fail. We have to make failure our fuel. We have to understand that if you're not failing, you're not innovating.

You know, you're only adopting best practices, adopting what has already been identified maybe as the next phase, but it's something that's clearly there. You know, we want people to be able to think we're really completely outside the box. Most of the time when the boss says, think outside the box, they don't mean that. They mean think inside my box. Mm-hmm.

The way I'm thinking, guess what I'm thinking. So, that's like sucking up. So, the answers are not in, you know, they're not in the C-suite, they're in the we-suite. The people who do the work, the team of people who do the work in the trenches on a daily basis. And that's where innovation should come from.

Well, first of all, I always hired people not only who were better than me but were much better than me. People would say, what's it like working for you? And the answer is I have zero idea because no one's ever worked for me. They've worked with me. I started almost every statement that I made to my folks, my team, by saying two things. One is, I need your help. Instead of, you've got a problem.

Starting with, I need your help. I mean, even if the person you're working with is a difficult person, you know, egocentric, whatever it might be, locked into the boss mentality instead of the leader mentality. When you say, I need your help, most people are going to say, okay, I'm going to try to help you. And two is I like saying, what would have to be true?

My point being, what would have to be true in order for us as a team to be able to deliver what it is you've just told me is something, a desired state we need? You know, here's where we are, here's where we want to be. What would have to be true in order to get there? Yeah. There's a difference. There's a fundamental paradox between a team of experts, a very smart, talented group of people.

And that's not the same as an expert team, people who work seamlessly across boundaries, who understand what the goal is, the ability to trust each other, to come up with ideas. The Kansas City Chiefs, you know, famously are a very innovative team.

Well, that starts at the top with Andy Reid, who sits down with his entire staff, his entire team on the whiteboard and looks at ideas about different plays that they could run. How could we exploit in this situation, this down in distance, they're going to be in cover one, they're going to be in cover three. That's an expert team, a group of people saying, let's take creative chemistry.

That's a great question. First of all, I didn't get a phone call. I made a phone call. Wow. I picked up the, you know, I saw what was happening. I thought, you know, I've been very fortunate, as you know, to have led in some of the most prominent crises of our generation. It's an honor to serve others in the course of that and to have been asked to have done so.

But to me, I thought this is an injustice that can't stand. I'm an emergency physician, so I'm uniquely trained. and have a mentality, you know, we have this weird thing of, you know, explosions, fire, you know, gunfire. We run into that, not away from it. You know, we're just not normal. And so I made phone calls connected with Team Rubicon, a group of former Marines.

And so literally within three weeks of the invasion, We were there, boots on the ground in Ukraine in order to take care of patients. So having been at the tip of that sphere, exposed to air raids literally every day and every night, you know, I saw the results.