Michael Langwiser

Understand these two charts and you understand the lethal trajectory the JCPOA set in motion: nuclear sunsets, expanding missile arsenals, expiring UN arms and missile embargoes, and Iran’s terror ring of fire. Add $1 trillion in sanctions relief, and the lethal Iran end state became unmistakable. We had to act.

Free trade is simple: both parties walk away better off. That's what made America great. Limited government, low taxes, balanced budgets, and leaving people alone to make their own decisions.

While serving with the 5th Special Forces Group, I participated in a one-month leadership exchange program with GE’s Lights and Appliances Division in Louisville, Kentucky. Four leaders from our unit were embedded on the GE campus, where we shadowed and mirrored executives across manufacturing and operational roles. The experience proved profoundly instructive. I received a comprehensive introduction to Lean Six Sigma and the Toyota Production System, and observed these methodologies applied effectively on the factory floor each day. The central principle I adopted is what I term "Leadership by Walking Around", the practice Toyota refers to as going to the Gemba. The approach is straightforward: leaders must leave the office and conference rooms to engage directly at the site of the actual work. At GE, the most effective executives did not manage from behind desks or through reports alone. Instead, they moved among the production lines, observed processes firsthand, spoke with operators, and inquired about challenges and potential solutions. Briefings and PowerPoint presentations convey one perspective. Genuine understanding and meaningful improvement, however, require direct observation in the physical environment.

Taiichi Ohno built Toyota’s production system. His training method was a literally chalk circle on the factory floor. He’d put a new manager inside it and tell them to stand there and watch! 8 hours No phone No notebook Just watch After an hour they’d come back saying they’d figured out the problem. Ohno would send them back. “Keep watching.” By hour 3 they’d notice the worker reaching awkwardly for a part. By hour 7, the pause before every weld because the operator was waiting on the guy behind him. None of that shows up in a report. Reports compress 8 hours into just a number. The number says output is 94% of target. It doesn’t say why the guy is standing on his tiptoes. Most executives have never watched their own operation for 8+ hours. They’ve read a 1000+ dashboards. Those are not the same thing. By the time it reaches you, it’s just a bar chart. On a bar chart, everything looks pretty fine. The only way out is to go sit in the circle. Sit there until you notice something that isn’t in the summary or bullet points. Because the summary is always wrong in exactly the places that matter.