About this episode

The episode explores leadership lessons from naval aviation, focusing on how to respond to failure and the importance of culture in high-stakes environments.

What separates the best from everyone else isn't talent — it's what they do with failure. At the Navy's elite TOPGUN school, thirty percent of training flights end in failure by design. The question is never whether you'll fall short. The question is how you respond when you do. In this conversation, host Jonathan Kirschner, CEO of AIIR Consulting, welcomes three veterans of naval aviation to A Podcast About Leadership: Mike "Wizzard" McCabe, a former Top Gun instructor, J. Todd Ross, who served as Top Gun's intelligence officer after nearly four years of flying in the backseat of an F-14, Traci Ross, one of the very first women to deploy on a U.S. aircraft carrier in a combat role. All three are now executive coaches who bring the culture of carrier aviation directly into the boardroom. "We, Not Me" as a Culture Strategy — Top Gun's legendary patch means nothing if you're playing for yourself; Wizzard breaks down why culture always defeats tactics, and how one founding principle has held for five decades. The Top Gun Debrief — Goods and others, never strengths and weaknesses: J. Todd unpacks the debrief framework that built a learning culture across an entire…

People in this episode

Host: Jonathan Kirschner

Guests: Mike "Wizzard" McCabe, J. Todd Ross, Traci Ross

Topics covered

• leadership
• naval aviation
• failure
• culture
• coaching
• representation

Keywords

• TOPGUN
• leadership
• failure
• naval aviation
• coaching
• culture strategy
• debrief framework
• representation
• military
• executive coaching

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AIIR Consulting, TOPGUN, U.S. Navy

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