Salus Forum: January 7, 2026

Jeremy

I love that, Jack. In the same way, I stay quiet to people’s amazement because I do like to talk, as you probably all figured out. One of my biggest jobs in meetings is actually to not come up with solutions. So, I like the notion of intentional incompetence. The master of that was Socrates. His followers and students would say that he’s the wisest man in all of Greece. And he’d stand up at the theater and declare: I am not wise. I really don’t consider myself wise at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I experience joy when other people accomplish things. It really makes me feel great. And I noticed there are a lot of leaders who don’t have that experience. They feel like they should get credit for what has been accomplished. They even try to take credit for the things other people do—though everybody knows who should get the credit. And it just looks ridiculous. This need to take credit comes from some terrible insecurity. I just love it when people overcome things and do things better than I ever would have done them.  For me, that’s a big part of leadership.

Walt

Let me comment a little bit about our journey thus far. Remember, master adaptive leadership is the concept, at least for today. Adaptive. What does that mean? Well, about 10 years ago, when I was chief of staff where I was at a residency, I got sent off to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. It was their annual session. And you get to choose what to attend. And I chose to do a day-long conference on adaptive leadership. I thought, I’ve been doing this for quite a while. I hope I learn a few things.

The session lasted eight hours. It’s a pretty big investment. About an hour or two into it, I asked myself: how come I didn’t get to do this 20 years ago? I had made so many mistakes and fell short on so many things that I could have done better had I had this idea of adaptive leadership. This concept came from the Harvard University study of adaptive leadership. This concept has matured over the last 25 years. There has been a lot of evidence-based expansion of the concept of adaptive leadership. Now, this concept is a gold standard regarding leadership.