I was featured in US Insider in a piece about the formula I've spent 36 years learning, and this one gets personal.

Keep reading below for more. Or read the full article on US Insider instead.

The Feature

My name's Tom and I'm an alcoholic. That's how I introduce myself in recovery meetings. I have been sober for 36 years, and in those rooms I learned something that took me decades to understand: everything I really needed to know about business success, I learned in recovery. Not in business school. Not from consultants. In the rooms with broken people rebuilding their lives, one relationship at a time.

When you're a drunk who's lost everything, you learn that success isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about remembering that every person in that room matters.

I call it Love Like Crazy then… Love More and Remember To Remember. And every leader who has ever transformed an industry has used this exact formula, whether they realized it or not.

Key Topics

  • The three-part formula: Love Like Crazy, Remember To Remember, and Then… Love More, and why it's strategic genius rather than soft leadership
  • How Herb Kelleher built Southwest Airlines starting in 1971 by loving employees, their families, and the communities Southwest served, and stayed profitable through multiple recessions while every other major airline didn't
  • Colleen Barrett on what made Herb different: "Herb loved his employees. He loved their families. He loved the communities we served. He couldn't contain his love to just the workplace."
  • How Howard Schultz scaled Starbucks from 6 stores to 30,000+ worldwide by remembering partners and customers as individuals, and what barista Maria Santos's story reveals about why the system works
  • Why authentic human connection at scale is the one moat AI can't replicate, and why the person who loves the most, wins

Want to read the full article? Read it on US Insider.