This is where my leadership story begins – not in theory, but in execution. It is Part 1 of a three-part series tracing how my lens changed, moving from system-level wartime, to the personal cost of ownership, to the smallest unit of leadership – judgment in a single decision.
Ben Horowitz draws a sharp distinction between wartime and peacetime leadership in his book: “The Hard Thing About Hard Things“. Wartime is existential – when a company’s survival is at stake. Peacetime is stability – when leaders can focus on optimization, culture, and scale.
It’s a clean definition. It is also CEO-centric.
What I’ve learned through lived experience is this: the danger is not entering wartime too early, but failing to recognize when wartime has ended. And that failure shows up first, not at the CEO level, but at the execution layer.
Wartime and peacetime are role-relative. Below the CxO layer, you are not accountable for whether the company survives, but you are responsible for execution, delivery, and credibility. When those break down, the threat is no longer theoretical – it becomes structural. That distinction is why I once labeled a phase of my leadership as wartime, even though by Horowitz’s definition, it technically wasn’t.
When I stepped into my role leading our cloud team, the system was already in chaos. For the first month, I did nothing except observe. I wanted to understand the system before changing it. What I saw was a team working hard without accountability. Sprints came and went. Work rolled over endlessly. No code reached production for months. Defects stayed open – some for over a year. Everyone was busy. Nothing shipped. Activity was abundant. Ownership was absent.
One morning, I pulled up our backlog. The oldest open defect was fourteen months old. When I asked the team lead about it, he said, “Yeah, that one’s been around a while. We’ll get to it eventually.” There was no urgency. No ownership.
From a CEO’s vantage point, this might still look like peacetime. Revenue was intact. Customers were still buying our products. The company was not facing an immediate existential threat. From where I sat, it was dangerous – not existential in a company dies next quarter sense, but existential in a credibility and execution sense. The kind of danger that doesn’t announce itself immediately, but quietly erodes relevance over time.
Product teams stop asking you to build new features because they no longer trust delivery. They turn to external providers for the same capability, accepting additional cost to reduce risk. Other functions grow frustrated but stop escalating because they have learned escalation changes nothing. Competition keeps innovating. You can see this trajectory years before it is a post-mortem. When you see it clearly, you can’t unsee it, and urgency stops being a choice. That’s why I treated that phase as wartime. Not because the company was about to collapse, but because we were losing credibility at a rate that would eventually make us irrelevant.
Most organizational failures don’t begin as existential crises. They start as execution failures, and leaders misclassify them as standard peacetime friction.
Over the next three years, we fought to bring order. I was responsible for setting the direction – putting structured KPIs in place, establishing delivery commitments, and making quality non-negotiable. The difficult people decisions followed. We executed together. We published six-to-eight-quarter roadmaps, communicated expectations consistently, and gradually changed the system. We became predictable. When we committed to eight weeks, we delivered. Other teams began to rely on us, and trust was rebuilt quietly through execution.
For outsiders, this looked like optimization. For insiders, it still felt like wartime. Then came the more challenging part. Even after most delivery and process failures were resolved, a different question remained.
Were we a mature team? Probably not. Were we efficient? Absolutely not.
Work was getting done inefficiently. People were stretching. Vendors were adding headcount to mask inefficiencies to maintain timely delivery. Incentives rewarded activity over productivity. From my vantage point, the conclusion felt obvious: we were still not where we needed to be. So I stayed in wartime mode.
That’s when the system pushed back. Vendors argued and convinced others that we were no longer in wartime. That delivery was stable and is now business as usual.
From their perspective, they were not wrong. A stabilized system favors incumbents. Efficiency threatens slack and vendors’ revenue. Appropriate optimization reduces the requirement for excess capacity. What I saw as an unfinished transformation, others saw as normalization. What I framed as necessary urgency, they framed as unnecessary pressure. This is where I misread the transition.
Wartime leadership had resolved chaos and restored order. But order and maturity are not the same.
Continuing to operate in wartime mode without a shared definition of what came next created friction. I was not wrong about the inefficiencies. But I underestimated the degree of alignment required among incentives, expectations, and the narrative. I realized them from resistance.
Six months after delivery stabilized, I called a planning review to drive down supplier costs and prepared with a headcount analysis, velocity comparisons, and a six-to-eight-quarter roadmap. As expected, suppliers pushed back hard. Their argument was 2-fold: further optimization would compromise the reliability built so far, and additional headcount is ready to perform at short notice.
From their perspective, they weren’t wrong.
After one meeting, a senior executive pulled me aside. Paraphrasing, he said, “You’ve done good work getting us here. But you are losing the political capital. Understand the asset versus the liability.” That stayed with me. The inefficiencies were real; perception was too. Only then did I fully see wartime leadership as layered.
At the CEO level, wartime means survival. Revenue drops. Competitors win.
At a dysfunctional execution level, wartime means structural failure. The gap between strategy and reality widens. You may have years before this shows up in the P&L, but the trajectory is evident and quiet.
Each layer demands different leadership. Each challenge requires a different buy-in. My mistake was treating efficiency problems the same way I treated execution failures. The tactics that restored order – urgency and non-negotiable standards- created friction when applied to efficiency.
Efficiency requires buy-in and shared understanding.
Switching modes requires more than competence. It requires self-awareness and understanding: are we solving today’s problem or still fighting yesterday’s war? I held onto execution-layer wartime longer than necessary. Not because the system was perfect, but from my vantage, it‘s still not optimal, and it’s still broken. The difference matters. Broken systems need a firm decision. Functional but inefficient systems need alignment.
Leadership isn’t just about creating order from chaos. It’s about recognizing when order has been achieved and having the discipline to lead differently once it has.
The real question isn’t whether you are in wartime or peacetime. It is: what kind of wartime you are in, what that phase actually requires, and whether you are willing to change when the phase changes.
I’m learning that leadership maturity is about recognizing when the rules that once helped you are no longer the right ones.