High-performance driving and high-performance leadership have more in common than most executives realize. Over eight essays, I connect what happens behind the wheel of a drift car or a race car to what happens at the helm of a fast-growing company: vision, balance, momentum, problem-solving, and knowing when to let go. Here is the complete series in one place.
In this series
- Vision Techniques to Stay on Track — Why looking two moves ahead keeps both cars and companies on line.
- Get Traction from Balance — Four hand-sized contact patches, and how weight transfer maps to organizational alignment.
- The “Hypothesis Mindset” to Achieve Performance — Test, learn, and master one thing at a time, on the track and in the business.
- How to Carry Momentum — Win the corner exit: turning small wins into compounding speed.
- What’s Your (Biggest) Problem? — Find and fix the single biggest constraint on speed, again and again.
- How to Let Go of the Wheel — When loosening your grip is the fastest way to keep control.
- Startup Traction — Surviving the pre-apex stretch where cash is thin and signal is low.
- See Far, Feel Near — Holding long-range vision and short-range awareness at the same time.
1. Vision Techniques to Stay on Track
Vision: It’s Where the Car Goes
In performance driving, vision is everything. In my opinion, it’s the #1 technique and habit to learn.
If you want to master high-speed car control, you’ve got to look where you want the car to go, not just where it is. It’s harder than it sounds. Perhaps because in daily driving we’ve formed some bad habits of looking at the car in front of us.
The importance of vision is preparing your body to react to what is coming. Because what your eyes see, the body — and controls and input — will follow.
So always be looking ahead, even before you finish a turn. In fact, on a race track, it’s best to look ahead two “moves” from where you are. So, if you have a braking zone and an apex coming up (two moves), you should be looking past that apex.
Vision on the road (performance driving and daily driving) can be thought of as “eye work.” Accept the explicit job your eyes have to consume information. Keep your eyes moving, scanning ahead. Use your peripheral vision to stay aware of what’s in front of you. Before you complete that turn, start looking at the exit and the next turn.
This forward-thinking approach ensures you’re ready for the next move, making your driving smooth and controlled. Paul Gerrard, the “Stig” from the US Top Gear, said it to me like this: “You can’t plan your future when you’re worried about the present.”
The most common mistake? Target fixation. That’s when you get so locked onto an obstacle that you end up steering right into it. Instead, keep your eyes up, looking through the top half of the windshield, so you point your eyes to where you want the car to go.
A Company on Track Is Led with Vision
Shifting gears to company leadership, the parallels are clear.
Just like a driver must focus on the right path, leaders need to have their eyes, mind, and voice focused on the core objectives, S.M.A.R.T. goals, and key problems. It’s the non-urgent, high-importance stuff. Moreover, they need to communicate the vision effectively.
Just as a driver looks ahead of turns, leaders anticipate future challenges and opportunities. A forward-looking approach allows for strategic planning and preparedness, positioning the company to navigate the business landscape effectively.
Business “target fixation” is on competitors or the latest industry trends. Yes, you need to be aware of these factors, but becoming overly fixated can lead you down a reactive rather than strategic path.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day, or the turn that you’re in. But leaders are the ones needing to focus on the organization’s long-term goals, ensuring the team stays aligned and moves in the right direction. Leaders keep the broad perspective of the business environment for potential disruptions. You don’t lose sight of peripheral factors like team morale and market shifts. This holistic view ensures no critical aspect is overlooked.
And vision in leadership isn’t just about what you see; it’s about ensuring the entire organization shares and understands that vision. Communication is key. Regularly repeating the purpose and vision keeps everyone aligned. Every executive should be able to articulate the company’s top goals and problems-to-solve, and ensure planning reflects these priorities. Consistently sharing and reiterating keeps everyone on track.
Whether you’re behind the wheel of a high-performance car or at the helm of a company, vision is critical. By looking ahead and anticipating the next challenge, you’ll steer your organization toward sustained performance and growth. Just like in driving, it’s the ability to look ahead that sets the best apart from the rest.
2. Get Traction from Balance
Imagine four very small “contact patches” — not much larger than your hand — holding your one-ton car to the road. The texture of the road (concrete, asphalt, gravel, dry, wet, etc.), temperature, weather, the degree of the turn, and the camber (slope) of the road are out of your control. All that’s in your control are the tires you chose and how you balance the weight transfer of the car loaded onto the tires. Managing all these factors to push the limits of grip at high speed is tricky.
Metaphorically speaking, managing balance in a car is similar to keeping a company “on track” during a high-growth phase.
Balance in Driving and Business
CEOs of fast-growing companies often confide that operations seem “out of control” or chaotic. They juggle numerous initiatives, new products, markets, and regions. They navigate a hundred details at low and high levels, across a spectrum of short and long-term requirements. And they have functional leaders that have to work together on all of this.
Vision is crucial; it serves as a north star, guiding everyone and helping them manage their roles without constant oversight. In driving, looking ahead keeps the body anticipating the right inputs to stay on track. Similarly, in business, a clear vision keeps the organization aligned and focused.
Balance, however, is equally important. In a car, a high-performance driver manages the inputs (gas pedal, steering wheel, brake) in a coordinated dance to manage the load to the tire patches on the road. For example, turning hard while trail braking can overwhelm the front outside tire, and getting on the gas too early mid-corner can overwhelm the rear outside tire, either way losing grip. Instead, braking in a straight line maximizes the use of the two front contact patches, while balancing the car front to rear in a corner maximizes all four contact patches.
Most spinouts occur when a race car is still in a turn (with the weight transfer to the side) and the accelerator is applied too fast, too early. This overloads the outside back wheel, causing a loss of grip. To avoid this, drivers “feather” the throttle, gradually applying pressure until the car has finished its turn and is straight enough to handle maximum torque. The Navy SEALs’ adage, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” perfectly encapsulates this approach.
Moving Together = Balance in a Company = Traction & Speed
In a fast-growing company, change is constant. It feels like direction shifts, akin to pivots or sudden accelerations. In these moments, the company gains maximum traction — progress and impact — when leaders maintain a balance, ensuring the entire organization moves together.
Anecdote from Dell. At Dell, I was responsible for the consumer customer-centricity strategy. Turning a $7B ship toward the customer required all functions to be balanced. For instance, if our policies were ahead of our IT capabilities, we’d never make progress. Over two months, I conducted a “capabilities” audit, mapping the alignment of IT, marketing, customer service, sales, and finance. This audit revealed gaps, primarily with IT lagging. By closing these gaps, we re-prioritized our roadmap to achieve a balanced, customer-centric organization.
Turning a company, like turning a car, only works when the whole organization moves together. Functional leaders operating at different speeds or with diverging agendas create chaos.
Practical tips to get balance. Traction in a company means aligning to the same vision, goals, problems, and initiatives. Leaders must communicate clearly and frequently, ensuring everyone understands expectations and how to achieve them together. This involves regular 1x1s, operational meetings, and using metrics to measure progress. Tools like “red, yellow, green” scorecards help track team alignment and capability forecasts.
When an organization maximizes its “contact patches,” each leader, team, and individual feels engaged, empowered, clear, and confident — even in the midst of rapid changes. In a startup or fast-growing company, it often feels like navigating a series of hairpin turns, but with balance and vision, it can be managed smoothly and effectively.
3. The “Hypothesis Mindset” to Achieve Performance
In high-speed performance driving and company leadership, the ability to master capabilities will ensure success. The best path to accelerate achievements is using a “hypothesis mindset.” That means testing, learning, and mastering one thing at a time. It’s as relevant to accelerate on the racetrack as it is in corporate hallways.
The Hypothesis Mindset in Driving
High-performance driving demands focus and an intimate understanding of the car’s behavior and the driver’s capabilities. To achieve this, drivers adopt a hypothesis mindset.
Trying new things. There are many ways to win. In any race, drivers follow similar principles and lines. But each has slightly different ways to brake, steer, or accelerate. To test new techniques or limits, you can methodically try one at a time and find what works best. Adjust your seating position, change your line, tweak your grip on the steering wheel, or modify your braking method. Each change is a hypothesis to be tested against the problem of grip and speed.
Learn one thing at a time. When honing driving skills, the best approach is to tackle one skill, one habit, or one technique at a time. Whether it’s mastering braking points, finding the ideal line, or refining throttle control, the goal is to focus on one element until it becomes second nature before moving on to the next. The best drive — the fastest drive — requires little conscious thought. Muscle-memory flow is achieved through focused repetitions of various capabilities, each requiring cognitive attention until they don’t.
As co-owner of Texas Drift Academy, I coach students from time to time (Dax Shepard session here!). I first teach the importance of vision, and we revisit this critical habit regularly. Students next learn how to initiate a drift with a handbrake, an entirely new muscle memory and one of the easiest of the four ways (e-brake, power over, weight transfer, clutch kick) to initiate a drift. Then comes learning countersteering (or letting go of the wheel). Next, throttle control, so you slide without spinning. In drifting, 75% of your steering is done with the accelerator pedal. Once these skills start to set in, I return to vision. I watch the students’ eyes to ensure they’re looking where they want the car to go right after initiating a drift. Then, all those skills of handbrake, steering, and accelerator work together to head in the right direction — going sideways!
Feel of the car. As you test methods and approaches, pay attention to the tactile feedback from the car to narrow down what is working. The car communicates through sounds and sensations. Raise your conscious awareness to listen to the engine, tires, and brakes. Feel the road surface and the car’s weight shifts. Feel the pressure in the steering and the vibrations through the seat. Use this information to determine if a hypothesis is working and to develop a unified connection with the vehicle.
The hypothesis mindset for performance driving means making small adjustments to your techniques and feeling or observing the effects. This iterative process helps master each element until everything you do is masterful.
The Hypothesis Mindset in Leadership
In business, the hypothesis mindset involves treating products, markets, initiatives, programs, and tactics as experiments that need to be tested and mastered before scaling or moving on.
Product/market fit. Fast-scaling companies — especially past Series B — have to diversify products, markets, and regions. Before allocating resources to scale a new direction, the first hypothesis to test is ensuring your product or service has a strong market fit.
When I was CMO at Bazaarvoice, the sales team wanted to expand to Europe. Rightfully, they asked for marketing support. I hit the pause button. My first action was to go to the UK and hit the road to pitch our software to London prospects with our first European sales director. Before expanding our budget and resources for this geographical expansion, I got firsthand product/market fit feedback. And further, we secured our first customers, who became case studies to fuel those forthcoming marketing efforts.
Master initiatives. Just as a product’s fit to a market is a hypothesis, so is any initiative, campaign, project, or program aimed at achieving results in a company. The best hypothesis has some data or evidence supporting it as the best chance to overcome one of the company’s top customer or business problems getting in the way of a primary goal. Notice the line-up in that last sentence, now in reverse: Primary Goal → Top Problem → Best Hypothesis (or Solution). What this means is that focusing on the hypothesis or ideas that solve the biggest problems toward your most important goals is the fastest way to achieve results. Or said another way, it’s a method to choose what to do that truly makes an impact vs. nice-to-dos.
Every program or project has a ‘wake’ behind it. It’s something that just seems to keep going and take resources. As you start an initiative, do so with a hypothesis mindset. That means deciding what success looks like and when to determine if it succeeds — to scale the program or shut it down. The most strategic decision to make — especially in fast companies — is where you can say no!
Feel the company. Just as drivers need to feel their car, leaders need to connect with their company. This means understanding your people, customers, product, and market intimately. Practically, that means going on sales calls, having office hours, walking the halls, and leading operational updates. It requires interaction with the people and measurements of the business. Regularly engage with employees through fireside chats, office hours, and effective one-on-ones. Spend time with customers, participate in sales activities, and undergo product training. Have ways to measure the effectiveness of inputs to the company. These interactions provide valuable insights and foster a deep connection with the company’s pulse. The “feel” of the company is knowing the goals, the measures that affect them, knowing where you are, and learning what is moving the needle.
The hypothesis mindset is about continuous learning and adaptation. In high-performance driving, it means feeling the car and mastering one skill at a time. In leadership, it involves connecting deeply with your company and rigorously testing initiatives before scaling. By adopting this mindset, both drivers and leaders can navigate the complexities of their respective fields with precision and confidence.
4. How to Carry Momentum
By 2012, Mass Relevance was proving its expertise in curating real-time Twitter content for TV shows like X Factor, Inside the NBA, the Super Bowl, and the Royal Wedding. On July 6, 2011, we powered the first live Obama Twitter Town Hall, marking a proud moment for our team (read “The Secret Company Behind Twitter’s TV Takeover”).
For about a year, I pursued Facebook to do the same with their data. Every other month, I contacted my Facebook contacts via email and phone. Sometimes I just showed up at lunchtime at their Menlo Park headquarters. Occasionally, they responded and met with me. But for a year, those meetings only served to build trust.
A couple of months before the Obama/Romney debate, I visited Facebook HQ again with my co-founder, Eric. This time, we were warmly received. Facebook was interested in hosting a real-time social dashboard to show audience sentiment during the debate. To do this, they would exclusively open their graph API (“firehose”) to the Mass Relevance platform. We had to do the first event for free, which was challenging for our busy team, but they understood the significance of this opportunity. We nailed the event, showcasing real-time sentiment on CNN. This led to a long-term exclusive relationship with Facebook, dramatically increasing the value of our SaaS social curation platform for TV networks, leagues, and shows.
Long story shorter, in just over three years, we grew to 150 people, achieved $15M in recurring revenue, and merged with Spredfast.
The point: we had built momentum through nearly two years of working with Twitter and networks. From this we leaned into Facebook, creating multiple exploratory meetings. Then we were poised to capitalize on the timing and opportunity.
This is one of many stories I could share about carrying momentum.
Carrying Momentum on the Track
In performance driving, the key to gaining speed, or rather saving time, is in corner exits. For a tight corner leading into a long straightaway, you may take the corner slowly and hit the apex late to accelerate as early as possible, benefiting from increased velocity on the straight. For a long sweeping corner, you maintain momentum through smooth steering and throttle control until you hear the tires slightly ‘sing.’ The goal is to leverage momentum to achieve the highest speed between and into these transitions.
Carrying momentum on a track involves several skills that have metaphorical relevance to business momentum as well:
- Vision: the #1 skill! Look through the entire corner — brake point, apex, exit — to choose the optimal apex for the fastest exit. Prepare your body and inputs to control the car and maintain maximum momentum through the turn. Focusing only on what’s right in front of the hood leads to poor timing, slower speeds, and missed opportunities.
- Smoothness: the smoother your inputs (gas, brake, steering), the more balanced the car, allowing you to carry more speed into, through, and out of a corner.
- RPMs: keeping the engine in its power band, and in a lower gear that multiplies torque at the wheels, gives you more power to accelerate. Maintaining high RPMs is possible by shifting before a corner, rev-matching, or heel-and-toe shifting to keep balanced and in the power band through a corner. After a turn or transition, staying in the power band allows for faster acceleration.
Carrying Momentum in Business
Carrying momentum in business means navigating changes, challenges, and opportunities to sustain forward motion. It requires preparation and efficient execution of transitions, much like a racer optimizes speed exiting a corner to maximize velocity on the straight.
There are key moments in an organization that are high-leverage “momentum” moments, such as: mergers and acquisitions, product launches, market expansion, digital transformation, crisis response, organizational restructures, regulatory compliance adjustments, leadership transitions, innovation cycles, new partnerships, key clients and case studies, research and studies, and new strategic hires.
This theme encourages leaders to not only react to immediate circumstances but also to be prepared to accelerate the next phases of a project, market, or organizational change such as those above. It emphasizes leveraging energy and progress from one success to propel the organization into and through the next opportunity with increased strength.
Where do you have momentum? Do you know where you have momentum in the company? What function, program, initiative, or campaign has success “power”? Or in car terms, what has high torque and high “RPMs” throughout your company?
You might have a robust, defensible product, powerful marketing campaigns, a strong sales team, or be well-positioned in a momentum-driven market. Maybe you’re the thought leader in a trending industry.
Every program, project, product, and initiative is a hypothesis. It should have measurable outcomes and a timeline to gauge success. If it works, scale it.
It’s surprising how many company programs lack measurement and success criteria. Many failing programs continue aimlessly, while successful ones are not scaled properly. Carrying momentum requires focused attention and clear execution. Identify where you have momentum and leverage it.
Example: recognizing market momentum. At my immersive reality company, Fair Worlds, we initially pitched virtual reality. Observing Apple’s focus on augmented reality, we shifted our approach and pitched an augmented reality pool configurator to an international pool products company. They became clients for five years. Had we stuck to our initial VR pitch, we might have missed this opportunity.
Example: scaling success. Hiring a sales team is a hypothesis. Success is measured by meeting or exceeding quotas each quarter. At Bazaarvoice, our small sales team’s success led a VC board member to urge us to hire more salespeople immediately. We scaled rapidly, growing to 100 salespeople and achieving $50M in recurring revenue before I left to start Mass Relevance. Two years later, Bazaarvoice went public.
In business, recognizing and carrying momentum is, at best, a key to success, and at worst, a missed opportunity. Just as racers maximize speed through smooth inputs and efficient transitions, business leaders can accelerate opportunities with strategic execution.
High-leverage moments like mergers, product launches, and market expansions require preparation to maximize growth. By identifying and scaling successful initiatives, over and over again, you accelerate growth dramatically. Said metaphorically, the flywheel starts flying! Carrying momentum demands attention to what’s working, readiness to pivot from what is not, and a commitment to harnessing success for increased velocity.
5. What’s Your (Biggest) Problem?
If you haven’t seen Formula 1: Drive to Survive on Netflix, stop what you’re doing and watch it. Even if you’re not a car enthusiast, this documentary is a rollercoaster of drama and adrenaline.
In Season 2, we follow the Haas F1 team — a scrappy underdog with a budget that’s a mere fraction of what giants like Mercedes and Red Bull spend. Haas built their 2019 F1 car from a hodgepodge of outsourced parts, unlike the big teams. Surprisingly, they performed well in their first race. But then the engineers decided to tinker with the car setup for the next race, aiming for more speed. Their hypotheses were off the mark, and the car got slower. They tried again, and again, only to be slower each time. The frustration mounted across the 100-person team, including the two drivers and the owner who shells out $100M annually.
Guenther Steiner, the Haas Team Principal, was livid. “The car was not bad. So why do we develop a car that goes slower?” he barked at the head engineer. Crickets. “Find out the problem and make progress out of it instead of ‘this is better.’ It isn’t!”
The problem could have been anything — twenty different things, in fact. But Guenther knew they had to prioritize. Could they identify the biggest problem? By solving the biggest problem, again and again, they could make the fastest progress.
In racing, the biggest problem for speed (aside from equipment) is often a gap in skill or a mental block. In a company, it’s something broken in people, processes, or technology. There are always numerous issues to fix or optimize, and they likely interrelate. But there’s always one “biggest thing” that, if fixed, unlocks potential. If you could only fix one thing to increase speed, what would it be?
Identifying your biggest problem, let alone fixing it, isn’t easy. On the racetrack, it’s tough to pinpoint what’s holding you back without telemetry (car performance and input data) and video feedback for comparison.
Once, I got telemetry data compared to another driver — an Eastern European engineer from Microsoft — who was beating me by 2 seconds on COTA in an AMG GT. His data revealed he got on the throttle earlier than me after most corners. We had the same line, apex, and braking points, but I hadn’t figured out how to get on the throttle as early as he did. The tricky part wasn’t just “getting on the throttle.” To do that, I needed to unwind the steering wheel quicker after the corner, which meant improving my vision through the corner to see the exit point.
About seven years ago, when I was learning to drift and stunt drive, my big problem was trying to steer the car with the steering wheel. Crazy, right? I learned that “75%” of your steering is in your gas pedal when you’re sliding sideways. More slide means more turn, or yaw. I was overdriving the car, thinking my steering and weight shifting would do all the work. Nope… it’s all about balancing between grip and slip with the right foot.
In driving, the big problem could be vision, corner exits, concentration, reaction time, stamina, track knowledge, braking points, trail braking, smooth inputs, car feel, courage, or something else. But the fastest path to speed is finding and fixing the biggest problem. You find your biggest problem with data, feedback from coaches, and comparison to a higher standard.
Finding (and Fixing) the Biggest Company Problem
Speed in a company is usually equated with revenue growth — quarter on quarter, year on year. The biggest problem to revenue growth could be product/market fit, pricing, packaging, sales execution, marketing, product reliability, customer success, support, etc. There’s always some broken capability, function, process, technology, or person. The path to faster growth — finding your biggest problem — is similar to driving. Use data. Use feedback. Listen.
Here’s why it’s so hard for fast companies to find their biggest problem: they’re wired to innovate. New projects and ideas multiply like rabbits, and everyone’s juggling too much, too close to everything. It’s hard to listen.
In 2008, after a few years of phenomenal growth selling a reviews SaaS software platform to e-commerce retailers, we set our sights on luxury brands like Coach, Tory Burch, and Michael Kors. Within months, we were getting nowhere. After several sales calls and trips to NYC, I learned that luxury brands didn’t want customers to “rate” their products. They felt it was antithetical to their brand voice. So, I asked the team to remove the rating and invented a new product with a few lines of code. We called it “Bazaarvoice Stories.” Instead of writing reviews, luxury customers would write stories about how they used the product. Maybe it was a story of wearing that dress on an anniversary or taking a vacation with a new bag. By listening and pivoting, we met the market where it was.
One of the primary ways to unearth the biggest problems is through internal voices. By listening to your people and those in your company who talk to customers most, you uncover the biggest growth obstacles. This approach isn’t about listening to the highest-paid opinion in the room. It’s about listening and prioritizing with the team to validate the biggest problem and get alignment for a cross-functional solution.
My co-founder of ClearHead, Matty Wishnow, wrote a book called Listening for Growth. As CEO of ClearHead (I was Chairman), he built an incredible culture that listened to the entire company to identify the biggest business problems slowing growth. We used surveys, voting, and Asana for project-managing solutions to fix these problems and free teams to move faster. Our company was a master class in listening for growth. In five years, we grew to 150 people with over 100 top retail clients before selling to Accenture.
As an aside, Matty founded a new consultancy called facts & feelings to help organizations grow faster. I’m an advisor and investor because we share similar operating systems, and it works! If you’re interested in some playbooks to unlock innovation and revenue to grow “FastStrong,” let me know!
Oh, by the way, if it wasn’t clear, the point isn’t just to find one big problem. Once you fix your biggest problem, there’s the next one. It never stops — just one big problem after another, like a Pez candy dispenser. By fixing the biggest problems in order of importance, you’ll go faster. You’ll build a culture that can consistently identify the biggest problem, fix it with the best solution, scale it, and repeat.
6. How to Let Go of the Wheel
You might wonder why “letting go of the wheel” would be a relevant topic. In high-speed racing, you’re taught to keep your hands at 9 and 3 on the wheel, rarely moving them from that position except to shift gears. But when it comes to other forms of performance driving, like drifting, a different approach is required.
I’ve been drifting and stunt driving for eight years. Now I even co-own Texas Drift Academy. In drifting, the car slides sideways, and you countersteer, then slide the other way. As the car’s rear swings like a pendulum pulled by a rubber band, your front tires need to adjust quickly. Instead of manually steering, letting go of the wheel allows it to spin rapidly, countersteering faster than you could with your hands — maintaining control by letting the car do the work.
Now, let’s shift gears to business.
First, a qualification. As a leader, you DO want to keep your hands “on the wheel” of your organization, managing your team, products, and market with precision. Business, like driving, is subject to the law of entropy — things naturally drift toward disorder. If you don’t actively guide your team, they might lose focus. If you don’t manage by metrics, progress stalls. If processes aren’t maintained, effectiveness decays.
How and where are the hands on the wheel? A tight grip in racing leads to fatigue, overcorrection, and loss of precision. The same goes for leadership — micromanagement stifles creativity, demotivates employees, and can steer the organization in the wrong direction.
There will be moments when you must grab the wheel with both hands to steer back on course. But the real aim is to create an organization where you can “let go of the wheel” more often, enabling speed and scale.
Now we pick up speed. Too often, heavy-handed leaders slow down company growth. Employees, reacting to executive oversteering, become hesitant, fearful, and risk-averse.
I know of a late-stage startup where a new CMO instilled a culture of constant questioning and required exhaustive justifications for every decision. Within a year, the CEO reported that they were spending twice as much for half the results.
The goal of letting go is simple: unleash the entrepreneur in every employee while ensuring everyone is aligned.
How Do I Let Go of the Wheel?
Two questions arise: What’s necessary for success when I let go? And how do I resist the urge to oversteer?
I recently spoke with a CEO who had to step away from his company for six months due to a family emergency. Known for his hands-on, meticulous management style, he was surprised to find that his leaders stepped up in his absence, implementing new programs and driving growth. This unplanned experiment showed him the power of letting go.
So, what’s necessary to let go of the wheel? First thing: good people. (See my article on the 5 Stars of a Rockstar Employee.) And perhaps some second things: values, a clear vision, specific and measurable goals, planning, accountability through KPIs, budgets, and regular reviews, and a process to continue to get and keep good people.
The paradox is that good people will likely put or maintain some of the second things in place. As a leader, it’s your job to set the culture, hire the right people, and then trust them. If you have the right team and a clear framework, letting go of the wheel will often lead to better outcomes than trying to control everything yourself.
But what if you can’t let go? What if you’re a Type A, OCD, detail-oriented perfectionist? Ah. That’s a personal issue, not a personnel issue. It’s a YOU mindset and behavior that needs addressing.
High-achieving leaders often reach their positions through control and meticulous attention to detail. But as you move into leadership, you must adapt to achieve results through your team.
Mea culpa. My learning curve was steep when I ran marketing for a startup in 1998. I managed a designer who presented a UX design for our product. With some design experience under my belt — I owned a Mac! — I took his design, crudely cut it up in PowerPoint, and handed it back with instructions on how it should be done. Two weeks later, he quit.
By the time I joined Dell, I had learned my lesson. I managed a team of 13 product managers and web producers. One of the best hires was a web producer who didn’t have extensive digital experience, but she was curious, analytical, and took initiative. I set clear goals and provided the necessary tools, including access to web analytics. She used this data to experiment and measure, ultimately tripling our conversion rates.
It takes self-awareness and discipline for a Type A leader not to grab the wheel at every opportunity. Here are four strategies to help you let go:
- Manage by measures: set specific, measurable goals and incorporate them into reviews. Make your expectations clear and revisit them regularly.
- Encourage managing up: empower your employees to manage up. They should feel comfortable telling you when you’re too involved, leading to more productive discussions about unmet expectations.
- Reflect on time investments: are you spending too much time doing the work instead of setting the vision and inspiring your team? Focus on breaking down obstacles for your employees rather than carrying their burdens.
- Own your change: if you’re high-strung, OCD, and particular, recognize it. Seek feedback, be mindful, and celebrate when you successfully let go of the wheel. Reflect on where and why you still struggle to do so, and share those insights.
In high-speed drifting or stunt driving, sometimes letting go of the wheel is the fastest way to maintain control. The same principle applies in leadership. To truly excel, leaders can learn to loosen their grip, trust their team, and let the organization steer itself toward success. It’s not relinquishing responsibility but empowering those around you to take charge and innovate. The real art of leadership is knowing when to guide with a light touch, allowing your organization to reach its full potential.
Let go of the wheel — sometimes, it’s the fastest way forward.
7. Startup Traction
There’s a stretch in building a company where everything feels tight at once. Cash is thin. You’ve got a handful of initiatives in motion. You believe in what’s ahead… but you can’t hit the gas yet. Not until something proves it can actually move the needle.
It’s that weird moment of playing defense and offense at the same time. The closest thing I know to it is approaching a corner fast in motorsports.
Before the apex, you’re carrying speed but you can’t yet see the exit. You’re braking enough to stay in control, but not enough to lose the momentum you’ll need on the straight. You’re easing the wheel in, feeling for grip, trying to rotate the car without committing to a line you can’t recover from. Every input matters.
The whole job is to survive the uncertainty long enough to reach the apex.
And once you do, the track opens up. The wheel straightens. You know exactly how much throttle you can give it. Acceleration stops being guesswork and starts being confidence.
Startups work the same way. Before the apex, you’re testing ideas, conserving cash, and reading the road. You don’t know which initiative is the real setup for the straightaway. You’re trying to avoid spinning out… but also trying not to tiptoe through the turn.
Then one of those bets connects. The car rotates. You get your line. And you can finally accelerate with intention instead of hope.
People love the straightaway moments. These are the wins, the momentum, the “hair on fire” chaos of growth. But the race is actually decided in the messy, pre-apex stretch where visibility is low and judgment matters most.
And if you want to enter that corner with measured confidence, a few principles help:
1. Brake in a straight line
Cut unnecessary burn before things get chaotic. Clean up expenses, simplify priorities, and come into the “turn” stable instead of sideways.
2. Choose your turn-in points deliberately
Don’t chase every idea. Pick a small number of initiatives that actually have a shot at becoming your exit path.
3. Let the car rotate before you get greedy
Wait for real signal before you assume you’ve found the line to speed. This could be early traction, paying customers, usage patterns. You’ll know when the car has rotated to the point of accelerating to the exit line.
4. Keep some grip in reserve
You need just enough margin (cash, time, focus) to adjust mid-corner. Running out of runway here is like running out of track. Accelerating too early, before you have evidence the car is balanced, overloads the rear tires and spins you.
5. Communicate like you’re leading a pit crew
Your team needs to know the plan: why you’re slowing here, what you’re testing, and what “apex” looks like. Clarity becomes stability.
6. Commit once you see the exit
When a bet finally lines up and the path opens, go. You have the data, you have evidence. Don’t hesitate. It’s offense now. Straighten the wheel and get on throttle.
The part before the apex is uncomfortable. But it’s also where founders earn their speed, their intuition, and their conviction. Everything after that is just acceleration.
8. See Far, Feel Near
A few weeks ago my son Kyle and I spent 5 days driving Can-Am UTVs up, down, and across Baja Mexico (Baja 1000 trails from Tecate, Ensenada, etc.). We sped or torqued over every imaginable terrain (except snow). One moment we’re floating across hard-pack sand, the next we’re in deep sand, or dropped into a muddy bog, then climbing over rocks, and hitting the occasional washboard section that rattles your teeth.
The whole world was vibrating at high speed. The horizon was miles out in front of me. It’s a beautiful, wide-open promise of where we were headed. But the next five feet were everything too. A rut, a loose rock, a soft shoulder — that’s what could flip you if you got complacent.
On this trip it hit me that leadership is the same. To go anywhere worth going, you have to hold two realities at once: See Far. Feel Near. Vision + situational awareness. Future + present. Strategy + reality. Leading at high speed means refusing to choose between them.
The Leadership Lesson Hidden in High-Speed Terrain
When you’re driving 80 mph over unpredictable ground, you learn quickly that staring only at the horizon isn’t bravery, it’s just silly. But you also learn that staring only at the ground in front of you makes you slow, reactive, and unprepared for what’s coming. The art is holding both.
You scan far ahead to anticipate what’s coming. But keep your hands, your instincts, and your awareness tuned to what’s happening right now. And then ACT, allowing little shifts in the steering, gas, or brake. Leadership is the mixture of long-range clarity and short-range sensitivity, combined with action.
Below are five principles, in some rational order, that may help bring this topic to life:
1. Scan the Horizon, Grip the Wheel
Vision is non-negotiable. You will never outrun confusion with speed. But execution happens on the next inch of ground.
Some of the greatest business failures weren’t because teams were slow — they were because leaders were blind. Kodak had the vision (they literally invented the digital camera), but they didn’t “feel near” enough to realize that the customer’s immediate habits were changing.
Leadership requires a split-screen view: one eye on the future you’re building, one eye on the customers, cash flow, and culture under your feet.
2. Lead by Feel
Plans matter. They set direction and provide some clarity. But the ground truth always lives in the present moment. Leaders who operate only from the plan miss the signals the trail is giving them: employee feedback, customer behavior, market movement, team morale, resource constraints, and culture shifts.
You don’t feel those things in spreadsheets. You feel them in motion. In the book The Toyota Way, the executives got dirty. Some took trips across the US in American-made minivans to see what was missing. Then, they created their winning Toyota minivan. (The Honda Odyssey is pretty great too… I’ve owned two!)
Leadership at high speed requires learning to trust your senses. Collect the human data coming from the people beside you and the environment around you. A great plan gets you in the car. A great feel gets you across the desert.
3. Micro-Adjustments Beat Big Turns
Flying across a desert isn’t a number of heroic steering moves. It’s hundreds of tiny corrections. And in leadership, the organizations that execute well rarely succeed because of a single brilliant decision. They succeed because of constant, humble refinement: tightening the message, adjusting the team, refining the product, recalibrating priorities.
You get this from simple things like 1x1s, operational reviews, walking the floor, and getting on the road to listen to customers. Then translating those insights into a current picture held against the vision to achieve alignment. Daily adjustments are what actually carry momentum forward. Momentum comes from responsiveness, not bravado.
4. Never “Lock Your Elbows”
You can’t make precise tiny adjustments, let alone strong steering moves, with locked elbows. Best practice in performance driving is arms bent 45–90 degrees. Bent elbows allow for both precision and strength with the steering wheel. Failing to have the right steering mechanics on Baja terrain could mean hitting a big rock at 60 mph and a flip.
Locking your elbows when driving would assume nothing is going to change. When the terrain changes instantly, there is no certainty. In fast-changing industries, the companies that win are the quickest to adjust when the ground shifts beneath them.
Think about how many legacy brands were once untouchable but fell simply because they held on to their path like a desert highway. They weren’t listening to the terrain of the market. They weren’t feeling the feedback. Blockbuster saw the future coming for streaming, yet clung to the comfort of the present. They simply didn’t react to what they saw. Their elbows were locked. The most important part of “react” is “act”!
In my experience, politics plays a part to blame for companies that ‘lock their elbows.’ It’s fear or risk (mostly career risk!). There’s such a strong desire for the predictability of the present. The key to agile action is culture: small teams, intrapreneurship, action over perfection, the willingness to fail, and the idea that you try a hypothesis tied to solving a big problem, determined by data-based decision making.
In the End
I like to think of entrepreneurship (and performance leadership) as a journey across shifting terrain. You’ve got a destination, sure. But you don’t ignore the bumps, the blind turns, the unexpected dips. You ride with eyes on the horizon and the ground.
That’s “seeing far and feeling near.” You create speed without chaos, momentum without burnout, and clarity without losing connection. And maybe, like driving across Baja at high speed, it’s a risky ride, but also the most alive.
About Sam Decker
Sam Decker is the co-owner of Texas Drift Academy and a longtime founder, operator, and marketer. He was an early leader at Dell, CMO at Bazaarvoice, and founder and CEO of Mass Relevance (which merged with Spredfast). He served as Chairman of ClearHead, acquired by Accenture, and founded the immersive-reality company Fair Worlds. Today he advises and invests in growth-stage companies, including facts & feelings. Sam has been drifting and stunt driving for eight years and writes about the intersection of high-performance driving and leadership at samdecker.com.
Ready to feel high-speed leadership from the driver’s seat? Explore Texas Drift Academy courses and put your vision, balance, and throttle control to the test.
