SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS LEADERS MUST KEEP THEIR HEAD ON A SWIVEL

Lesson: In the wild real-life story below, I want you to learn to be constantly observant and ready to react quickly. I became comfortable and dropped my competitive radar, allowing organizations with other agendas to easily destroy us. I am ashamed of my leadership weakness. Fortunately, I regained my edge.

Author

Jeff Martinovich
May 23, 2025

Lesson: In the wild real-life story below, I want you to learn to be constantly observant and ready to react quickly. I became comfortable and dropped my competitive radar, allowing organizations with other agendas to easily destroy us. I am ashamed of my leadership weakness. Fortunately, I regained my edge.

The below wild story is an excerpt from my book, When Not If: A CEO's Guide to Overcoming Adversity, Forbes Books, January 2024.

Our readers know well that at an existential moment in my career I decided to reject three federal government plea offers to stand up for our company, teammates, and myself. So…

Soon I was receiving daily lessons in humility while I focused on survival at Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix, New Jersey. Four thousand Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Russians, and Jamaicans forced me to navigate my day with extreme awareness and focus. The key was not to be subservient, because then you became someone’s bitch, but to balance humility and strength while maintaining a fragile détente with your potential attackers.

One Saturday morning in the fall of 2014, I awoke early in my 12-man room to prepare my legal work and make the 8:00 AM bell when they opened our building doors for the move. I had 10 minutes to make my way to the next location. I threw on my grey prison sweats because I wanted to get a quick run in at the track before spending the day in the law library. I heard yelling and swearing in the room next door followed by loud thuds against the wall and banging of metal bunks, a regular fight that barely went noticed. I would later learn that Jose, of the Puerto Rican gang, had refused to pay back Hector, of the Mexican gang, a book of stamps which served as prison currency.

As I circled the track, the 9:00 AM bell rang and the doors to the buildings all opened with a stream of nearly one hundred members of the Puerto Rican and Mexican gangs sprinting toward me, everyone holding a knife or shank high in the air, some as long as swords. Like a scene from the Scottish battlefields in Braveheart, the prisoners ran at each other and clashed in violent struggles stabbing each other all around me. I watched in amazement as Jose grabbed the top of a six-foot fence and vaulted into the next zone. Prisoner after prisoner vaulted after him while never dropping their knives. I grabbed my book bag with my stack of current legal motions and held it in front of me bouncing off attackers as I kept my head on a swivel. Fortunately, I didn’t appear to be a target, but I didn’t want to catch an indiscriminate swing of the blade, prematurely ending my own battle.

I shuffled from the center of the track toward the side gates, reliving my basketball defense shuffle drills, keeping my bag in front for protection, with time seeming to move in slow motion and the distance to safety seeming insurmountable. After what felt like a lifetime, I slipped through the end gate just as the prison guards in riot gear entered the track and began clubbing inmates and subduing the crowd. I sprinted back to my building before all the doors were locked and I would have been left outside to be identified as a rioter. I kept sprinting upstairs back to my room and jumped under the covers in my rear corner bunk since a standing count would be coming soon to identify the guilty missing parties.

My corner bunk window in Building 5802 overlooked the medical facility where many days I would watch inmates wheeled out to ambulances by guards smoking without urgency. If someone had a heart attack, or was stabbed, the compound would go on lockdown, so the ambulance was safe to enter the facility. This process normally took 45-minutes, and we knew any heart attack victim, or recipient of a significant shank, had little chance of survival by the time they eventually made it to a hospital.

I regularly watched stretchers being rolled out with the sheets covering the occupants’ heads. I could never reconcile these observations with the relatively low number of official inmates reported by the Bureau of Prisons.

If I had kept my head on a swivel during my fortunate business success, possibly I would have been able to put my bag in front of coming shanks and not been so naively comfortable. Stay diligent. Stay a little paranoid. Don’t get soft like I was – certainly no more.

Have a great week!