I recently had the honor of being the first guest on a brand-new podcast, The Black Swan Club, hosted by Maximilian Glodde and presented by MEO Continuity. We recorded the first episode on September 22 and went live on LinkedIn and YouTube.
What is The Black Swan Club?
Max has wanted to build this show for a long time. Over the last ten years, he has met people who took real risks and lived through moments nobody saw coming, and he decided their stories deserved a stage.
The premise is simple. Every guest has been on the other side of a black swan, the event nobody predicted. That means founders who bet everything, CFOs who made the call, and risk leaders who ran the response when the fire, the flood, or the cyberattack hit. There are no frameworks and no theory, just the decision, the fallout, and what they would do differently.
Why I said yes
I spent decades as Goodyear’s “Director of Uncertainty.” After 9/11, I built the company’s global business continuity program, and over the years my teams guided response and recovery for nearly 4,000 crises and incidents. Those experiences are also the foundation of my book, Excellence in Operational Resilience.
A show that puts the people who lived through these events at the center is the kind of conversation I want to be part of. Practitioners learn more from each other’s real decisions than from any slide deck.
What we talked about
Max and I got into three areas:
- The incidents that kept me up at night, and what made them different from the ones that didn’t
- What happens when the plan breaks, because sooner or later it does
- How I got leadership to invest before the bad day, which is often the hardest part of resilience work