I was shuffling through the seventh K of a five K training run, because math and masochism are the last respectable addictions left when you’re ignoring doctor’s advice. The body wheezes, the knees crack, but you keep moving because stopping means you have to face the truth: you’re not running for fitness, you’re running from the machine. Learn to follow directions or you’ll run out of water and die like a sun-cracked armadillo on the side of Route 50. It was a Saturday. Warm breeze. Virginia horse country rolling by in its genteel arrogance, million-dollar barns for horses living better than half the country. My phone rang. My wife’s phone rang. The dog’s phone rang. That’s how you know a CISO’s weekend has been declared dead on arrival.
Billionaire clowns brag about working ninety-hour weeks like it’s some badge of honor, some grotesque mating call. Let me be blunt. If I’m working ninety hours, it’s because the server racks are actually burning, routing tables look like they’ve been rewritten by a math cult, and the CEO is rehearsing ritual suicide on the boardroom mahogany while the board debates whether the carpet stains are covered under insurance. That’s ninety hours. Everything else? It’s performance art. Corporate masochism staged for LinkedIn applause.
And then there’s the cowboy. One of my wife’s students. Later, one of my employees. A good man cut out of Colorado bedrock. Jeans so tight they squeak when he walks. Shirt with epaulets that make him look like he’s starring in a made-for-TV romance. Boots polished to a holy shine. Horses on the cubicle walls instead of women. Easy to laugh at. But beneath the costume was something you don’t often find in the digital economy—competence. Real, genetic-level competence. He was a router mechanic who spoke packets like a second language. Code was not his job, it was in his marrow. My wife doesn’t waste her time teaching hobbyists. Her law is simple and final: write production code that makes money or get out. And he had that law burned into him. He didn’t just pass. He thrived.
We’re in a bar near Garden of the Gods one night. My wife, five feet and ninety-eight pounds of lethal intellect, is explaining recursive pointer math. I’m trying to keep pace, throwing in words like TCP-IP and ifconfig so I don’t drown. The cowboy shows up, chair flipped backward, grin wide, thanks us for the mentorship that stuck like barbed wire in his brain. And I could tell he meant it. He’d been listening when others weren’t. He’d absorbed the quiet lessons, the offhanded stories, the unglamorous truths about how the world really works.
Cue the Jaws theme. He gets suckered into being IT manager. Which is to say, CIO without the paycheck, without the power, with all the responsibility, and the entire weight of twenty years of lazy hacks and bad decisions wrapped around his neck like an anchor. The network was a frat house disaster, servers soaked in bad code and worse judgment. Downtime eight hours a day. He walked into hell and instead of screaming, he rolled up his sleeves and started rebuilding. Within thirty days, downtime was down to an hour and only when nobody was looking. Within sixty, it was minutes. Within ninety, it was six sigma. This wasn’t luck. It was sheer, hard labor. The kind of labor nobody brags about on stage but everybody depends on. He carried the place on his back.
And how did he do it? Cowboy calm. Slow talking. Boots on the desk. Coffee in hand. While servers hummed like they’d just been baptized. He didn’t strut or scream or beg for credit. He just got it done. That’s competence. Quiet, deliberate, and infuriating to anyone addicted to drama.
Enter the VP of product. Two weeks into the job. Walks in, sees boots on a desk, and loses his mind. Calls him disrespectful. Threatens to fire him. A tantrum dressed up as leadership. Here’s the thing most of these new VPs don’t understand: slow talking isn’t slow-witted. Silence isn’t agreement. And a man with squeaky jeans and arms like steel beams isn’t going to bow to your emotional outburst. The cowboy stood. Drank his coffee. Said “excuse me.” And quit. On the spot.
He walked down the hall, straight to the CEO’s office, and told the truth. Not a polished version. Not spin. Just what happened. The VP followed, frothing, accusing him of lying before even hearing the story. And there it was. The crucible. The moment where culture gets defined, not by posters or slogans but by the split-second reaction of leadership. The CEO listened. Looked at the VP. Told him to shut up. Maybe he said it politely, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. The VP was radioactive from that moment on, exiled from meetings like a contagious rash. The cowboy? He walked out with EVP stitched to his name, CIO title in his pocket, direct line to the CEO, and a pay raise fat enough to take us all to dinner and maybe buy a Cadillac.
That’s culture. Not the laminated HR handouts about values. Not the posters of mountain climbers captioned TEAMWORK. Culture is forged when someone calls bullshit and refuses to swallow it. The cowboy had his tack clean, ducks aligned, story sharp. He didn’t need the job. He needed respect. He knew what I’ve told my teams for years: long hours are for fools. If you’re grinding ninety, you’re either incompetent or auditioning for sainthood in the Church of Burnout. Competence is not about suffering. It’s about making shit happen and then going home to your family.
So he flipped his chair, grabbed his hat, and walked out into a Colorado night that probably ended with whiskey, a supermodel in cowboy boots, and the smug calm of a man who knows his worth. Not HR-approved. Not sanitized. Not the kind of story you tell in onboarding. But real. And reality, stripped of corporate propaganda, is the only thing that actually matters.
And don’t forget when this was. Not boom times. Not easy money. This was the dot-com bust. Pink slips fell like confetti at a funeral. Whole careers evaporated in a week. Futures turned to rubble. But competence—real, undeniable competence—proved to be armor. Not invincibility. Not a guarantee. But armor strong enough to stand up, walk out, and make the company blink first.
If you’re interested in the topic. I’d point you toward “The Peter Principle” by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. It’s an older book, written with wit and a sharp edge, and it basically argues that people in hierarchies rise to their level of incompetence. You’ll see echoes of today’s corporate absurdities everywhere in its pages.
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