Story

I come from a long line of Russell Reeders.

I'm the fourth. My great-grandfather was an Army doctor and colonel in the First World War. My father, Russell Reeder III, went to Vietnam. But the person who shaped my understanding of leadership most deeply was my grandfather, Col. Russell P. "Red" Reeder.

Red commanded the 12th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach on D-Day. His regiment landed two miles south of its assigned position, and the landmarks on the map were nowhere to be found. When President Clinton spoke at the 50th anniversary of D-Day, he quoted my grandfather's response:

It doesn't matter. We know where to go.

That line captures a lot about him. He was calm under pressure, clear about the mission, and unwilling to let confusion become an excuse for inaction. Five days later, on June 11, 1944, an 88-millimeter round shattered his left ankle in Normandy. His leg was later amputated at Walter Reed. He came home, but he did not stop serving. West Point asked him to help create a leadership course for cadets, and he spent much of the rest of his life teaching, coaching, writing, and shaping leaders.

Red also conceived the idea for what became the Bronze Star Medal. He believed ground troops needed recognition similar to the Air Medal, something commanders could award to deserving soldiers serving under them. The original idea was simple and powerful: recognize courage, merit, and service close to the ground, where the work was hard, dangerous, and often invisible.

My parents divorced when I was two years old, so most weekends my father drove my sister and me to my grandparents' house at West Point. At the time, I didn't understand how unusual those weekends were. To me, they were just family dinners. We ate, listened, laughed, and heard stories from a world that felt both distant and completely normal.

The people around that table had lived through moments most of us only read about. Red had known Eisenhower. Omar Bradley had been his math instructor. He was close with Army coach Red Blaik and knew a young assistant coach named Vince Lombardi. The stories included war, football, West Point, duty, mistakes, humor, and hard-earned perspective. But the point was never celebrity. The point was responsibility.

That was the lesson underneath everything. Red talked about making decisions when the facts were incomplete. He talked about taking care of your people. He talked about staying calm when the plan changed. He talked about the cost of command, although he never made it sound heroic. That was not his style. He had no interest in turning leadership into mythology. To him, leadership was duty, discipline, judgment, and service.

I just thought it was normal.

He lived into his mid-nineties. Even after I finished college, I would drive to Fort Belvoir once a week to have lunch with him and my grandmother at their retirement community. The dining room was full of retired generals and colonels. I would sit there, listen, and absorb stories I was still too young to fully understand.

It took me years to realize those meals were shaping how I saw the world.

Later, I saw the same lessons show up in companies. I saw integrations that looked clean on paper but broke down in execution. I saw boardrooms where everyone agreed on the strategy but no one owned the hard next step. I saw talented teams lose momentum because the mission was unclear, the operating cadence was weak, or accountability was too soft to move the business.

That is when the lessons became real.

Across nine companies, more than 50 acquisitions, turnarounds, integrations, scaling challenges, and hard CEO moments, I kept coming back to the same truth: strategy is rarely the hardest part. Execution is. And execution is a people problem before it is a process problem.

You have to define the mission clearly enough that people know what matters. You have to make decisions before ambiguity turns into drift. You have to take care of the team without lowering the bar. You have to create accountability without losing empathy. Then you have to build systems so the work holds after the hero leaves the room.

That is the thread that runs from my family history to the work I do today.