Taylor B. Kiland

With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last fourteen years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organization and made it an industry leader in customer service. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Dawson's leadership philosophy and guiding principles, offering tangible and practical insights for readers who want to learn how to chart a similar course of success--one of exponential growth without compromising a company's bedrock principles.

How do you quadruple the size of an 85-year-old company in one decade without changing its cultural DNA? How do you accomplish this while keeping your original base of customers wildly loyal and your employees passionately engaged? With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last 14 years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organisation and made it an industry leader in customer service. A retired Navy vice admiral with an esteemed 34-year career commanding ships and fleets, Cutler arrived at the venerable and conservative credit union and Set it on a course for meteoric growth. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. How did Cutler and his team at Navy Federal do it? What did he learn on the ship's bridge that that helped him successfully run a bank--a credit union, actually? What did he learn leading ships and crews into harm's way that helped him weather the storms of the 2008 financial crisis without a layoff? And what can you learn from his leadership experience that began when he took command of his first ship at the age of 27? This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Cutler's leadership philosophy and guiding principles, offering tangible and practical insights for readers who want to learn how to chart a similar course of success--one of exponential growth without compromising a company's bedrock principles.

Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organisational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork. The book takes readers inside the mind of James Stockdale, a fighter pilot with a degree in philosophy, who was the senior ranking officer at the Hanoi prison. The theories Stockdale practiced become readily understandable in this book. Drawing parallels between Stockdale’s guiding philosophies from the Stoic Epictetus and the principles of modern sports psychology, Peter Fretwell and Taylor Baldwin Kiland show readers how to apply these principles to their own organisations and create a culture with staying power. Originally intending their book to focus on Stockdale’s leadership style, the authors found that his approach toward completing a mission was to assure that it could be accomplished without him. Stockdale, they explain, had created a mission-centric organisation, not a leader-centric organisation. He had understood that a truly sustainable culture must not be dependent on a single individual. At one level, this book is a business school case study. It is also an examination of how leadership and organisational principles employed in the crucible of a Hanoi prison align with today’s sports psychology and modern psychological theories and therapies, as well as the training principles used by Olympic athletes and Navy SEALs. Any group willing to apply these principles can move their mission forward and create a culture with staying power—one that outlives individual members.