Dr. Thom Mayer

People blown out of their homes, blown out of their apartments in the middle of the night, having to get on a train and go 900 miles west and hope someone would be there to take care of them. But you see, it's hard not to think about what kind of mentality

results in men doing that i think your point is extremely well taken that authoritarian way of dealing with things does not in my opinion have the right results

You know, how does a team operate as an expert team? Certainly you recruit smart people. But Bill Belichick said, talent sets the floor of a team, but character sets the ceiling of a team. And I think that's true in any team. So our group came together and bonded. I mean, serious badasses. And that's the highest compliment I can give somebody in an emergency situation.

You quickly develop those bonds of trust. You talk about team, how are we going to react in this situation? I can tell you, when I was dealing with those patients, They're right there working with me and I almost never had to ask them to do anything.

You know, it's like in the midst of an emergency resuscitation, I put my hand out when the nurse puts a chest tube in because she knows what I'm thinking. And the same thing occurred there. So, you know, from great teamwork comes great preparation. great trust, a great sense of the ability of people to work across boundaries. You develop that very quickly.

And I think the more we understand that the work begins within, but it turns very quickly towards teamwork.

Wherever we're leading, whether we're leading our family, our kids, you know, whether we're leading a large organization, we have to learn to tell the story of the people we serve. Tell a story about the people. that you represent. Too many organizations, too many teams are so bogged down in statistics and data instead of telling the story of the people that we serve.

Mark Twain was very good at this, as most things, when he said, if you want to rise to the meteoric heights of literary greatness, don't write about man, write about a man. Tell the story of the person who's doing it.

Yeah, obviously, I think failure has to be our fuel. But driving failure is curiosity. That, huh, I wonder why. Why, why not? Why did we do it this way and why not do it a different way? Why are we doing it this way? We hear that all the time and the most common answer to that, because we've always done it that way.

Because we've always done it that way, that doesn't show curiosity, that doesn't show, you know, hey, why couldn't it be done another way? So, the question, you know, why should be, it adds value to the people we serve. But the bigger question is why not? Why couldn't we do it another way?

Because I ask people to think about leading in a radically different way, to act on those thoughts within a week because if the people who listen to this don't, in some small way, do something differently if they don't act on it within a week, they're not going to act. And the third is to innovate. Think, act, and innovate.

And to innovate takes that curiosity to say, why couldn't it have been done another way? Why couldn't this, the play that we drew up, why couldn't that have been done in a different way? Why the strategic plan that we laid out? How did it fail? To what extent did it fail? Sure, it's nice to have stats to show, data to show, you know, the delta between what we aspired to and that which we achieved.

But again, that human story that's behind that. So, to me, it's read to lead. Read to lead. Read the lives of great men, great women. Those who've been through it. I just got back from Normandy. I had the great privilege working with Donnie Edwards, a former NFL player, Best Defense Foundation. We took 60 World War II veterans back to the Normandy beaches. Wow. Unbelievable.

Cold chills just thinking, talking about it, listening to those men, what they went through, how they faced it. You know, you can't do better than to see the people who've been through it before and hear their experiences, read their lives. How did they make decisions? What guided them? What went right? What went wrong?

It's just that curiosity, as you so correctly say, is the only thing that we can do to fuel our failure to understand how did we fail.

anytime i put myself in front of those i serve i feel like you know i'm too old to be making that mistake i made that mistake so many times and i just made it over again and whenever i've you know answered a reporter uh given the talk i've been in a meeting and i've let my ego get in the way as opposed to thinking first last and always and in between

about the people I serve, then I've regretted it. You know, I can give you an example of what I said once, and there was a shooting at the CIA, and I was the chairman of the emergency department at the time. And I tell this story with the permission of the patient and his family. This guy named Nick Starr worked at the CIA, waiting to turn in, was shot at close range with an AK-47 and

And he came into our trauma center, flown in by my police paramedics that are the police helicopter unit, got 28 units of O negative blood. For some reason, they determined that I was the only person that was going to talk to the press. This was a national story. So I walk outside the emergency department. Reporters are all there.

And as you know, often you can hear the question go into their earpiece. lately before they asked the question. So, they're peppering me with questions and, you know, Dr. Mayer, everybody was interested in donating blood to help because they knew he'd had so much blood. They said, you know, patient had 28 units of O negative blood. What blood type is he?

And before I could think, I said, I don't know what he was before, but he's O negative now. And I thought, oh, my God, I can't believe I just said that. And I thought, well, this has been a good job. You know, I'll pick up back up the office. Got a phone call from the chief of police. I thought, well, this is it.