Team Rubicon’s Jake Wood: From Combat to Communities

It’s not every day that a keynote speech opens on an ancient battlefield. But that’s exactly how Team Rubicon founder Jake Wood began his remarks at Monday’s Opening General Session. Wood reached back more than 2,000 years to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus and his famous breakdown of 100 men heading into combat, from the 80 who are merely targets (in corporatespeak, they’re the clock punchers), the 10 who shouldn’t be there at all, the nine who are the real fighters, and the one true warrior.

That “one,” Wood said, is the person who holds the sacred responsibility of bringing all the others home. The question he asked is: How do we become that person in our own work? The stakes of an engineering firm may differ from those of an ancient battlefield, but the premise holds: how do you build a team of warriors who show up even (especially!) in moments when it’s easier not to?

Childhood Inspiration

Wood lived in Europe for part of his childhood. A visit to the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria as a 10-year-old opened his eyes to “the depths of what human beings were capable of.” Wood shared that before this tour, his concept of evil was limited to Wile E. Coyote. But in experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust, something else clicked for Wood that day. In one of the buildings at Mauthausen were a number of black and white photos of troops liberating the camp. “These were 18, 19-year-old kids, not much older than I was,” Wood said. “It was inspiring. That was what I aspired to be.”

From Football to the Marines

Fast forward a few years. Wood has left Europe and returned stateside, settling in Iowa, and eventually playing football at University of Wisconsin. The 18-year-old made the 18-year-old’s choice, opting for dreams of an NFL career versus a career in the military. Wood first questioned that choice one sunny morning in September 2001, when he strolled into his school dining hall for breakfast — just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

“I made the wrong choice,” Wood said. “The world hadn’t changed yet.”

It was during his senior year when football star Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan that Wood had what he called his “man in the mirror moment.” He joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq in 2007 during The Surge. Two weeks into his deployment, the lead Humvee in his caravan encountered an IED. The driver stumbled from the destroyed vehicle, suffering from a horrific wound. His first words to Wood were to ask for a radio to coordinate the evacuation.

Leadership Is About Love

That was when Wood made the realization that leadership is about love. It’s about giving the people who work with you a sense of safety. The formula, Wood said, is that love equals safety and safety equals courage.

Safety was in short supply in Wood’s next role — a sniper hunting the Taliban. When his tour ended, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. “I figured I’d get an MBA, like everyone else who doesn’t know what they’re doing with their life,” he joked.

Team Rubicon Is Born

Then another disaster once again changed the course of Wood’s path. The 2010 Haiti earthquake killed 150,000 instantly; another 100,000 would die in the ensuing days and weeks. Wood looked at the coverage and was struck by how familiar it looked.

It looked like the warzone he’d just left.

Determined to leverage his “unique set of skills,” Wood volunteered his services to assist with the recovery effort. His offer was rebuffed, but Wood was undeterred. He headed to Port-au-Prince, determined to build “the best disaster response in the world.” From that effort, Team Rubicon was born.

Wood’s thinking was simple. Two million men and women were returning from the Mideast, taking off their uniforms, and no one was asking them to do anything with their skills. Team Rubicon has grown to nearly 200,000 volunteers who have placed boots on the ground in disaster after disaster: earthquakes, fires, civil unrest, hurricanes, and tsunamis.

“If it’s a bad thing that’s happened, Team Rubicon has been there,” Wood said.

Building A Story Worth Fighting For

So, what’s the leadership lesson in disaster response? How do you unlock the heroes of your own firm?

Wood has an answer.

“Every organization is a story. Your mission statement should be like a Bat Signal that makes someone want to work for you. Is the story you tell worth fighting for?”