Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is officially a book you can buy, hold, dog-ear, and argue with in the margins. (Please argue with it in the margins. That’s how I’ll know it’s working.)

I wrote it for one person. She got the job because she was the best in the room. She’s the calm one in every meeting, the one everyone leans on, and nobody holds her steady. Somewhere along the way she started wondering if she even likes this anymore.

If that’s you, this book is for you. If that’s someone on your team, hand it to them.

Each of the eleven chapters names a leadership pattern that smart, capable people fall into without noticing. Then I tell you where I learned it on the trail, usually the hard way, at least once with a wheel in the air. Every chapter ends with steps you can take this week. Not journal prompts. Steps.

The whole book comes down to one argument: leadership breaks down when we optimize for looking good instead of reading what’s real. Force fails. Reading wins.

Where to get it

📕 Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
📗 Barnes & Noble (paperback and eBook)
📘 Bookshop.org: (paperback and eBook)
Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores, so if you have a favorite indie, this is a great way to buy and help them at the same time. You can also walk into your local store and ask them to order it by title. That tells a bookstore someone wants it, which matters more than people think.

Your help is valued.

• Leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads once you’ve read it. Reviews are how new books get found.

• Forward this email to one leader who needs it.

Thank you for being here for the long, bumpy road to this day. I couldn’t have gotten here without the people who read early drafts, sent notes, and kept asking “when’s the book coming out?”

The answer is today.

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This week’s question: What’s one thing at work you’ve been handling by looking calm instead of reading what’s real?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

TODAY’S THE DAY!!!

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is officially out in the world. A real book. With a real spine. That you can hold in your actual hands. 📖

👉 GET YOUR COPY

Where to find it

Pretty much any online bookseller can get it to you. Amazon will probably get it to your door the fastest, but pick your favorite:

• Amazon (paperback)

• Barnes & Noble (paperback)

• Bookshop.org (paperback) if you love supporting indie bookstores

• Ebook at every ebook store for the Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books crowd

Still on the fence? Read the free sample first. I’ll wait. 😄

Who it’s for

You got the role by being the best in the room. You’re the calm one in every meeting, the one who sees the holes in the plan, the one everyone counts on to hold it together. And some days you wonder if you climbed the wrong mountain.

This book is for you. (Also for anyone who has ever stared at an obstacle and thought, “Well. That’s a problem.”)

What early readers are saying ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The combination of actionable wisdom and intellectual humility in Read The Terrain makes it one of the best management books I’ve read.”
Dallas Jones

“Most leadership books read well and are hard to apply. This is not one of them.”
Dan Kasper

“Laura starts the conversation—and as a reader, we can all call shotgun!”
Dr. Pamela Rabin

Three small favors that make a HUGE difference

1. Buy a copy. Or two! Leaders you love make excellent gift recipients, and the holidays are coming up fast.

2. Share it. Forward this email. Post the link. Hand it to the calm one in your life who is holding everything together.

3. Leave a review. A sentence or two is plenty. Reviews are how a book finds readers who have never heard of me, so yours carries a lot of weight. Post it on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever you bought it.

Thank you for being on this trail with me. Every share, every review, every copy in someone’s hands means the world. 🙌

Force fails. Reading wins.

Laura

Nobody asked me to do this. One of our rigs had come out of the crossing at Monache Meadows minus its license plate, and the plate was sitting somewhere in water that was knee-high and cold enough to make you rethink your life. So I volunteered, because I’m the person who volunteers. I changed into shorts, waded in, and made it almost to the middle, every step a negotiation with my own shins, when one of the drivers rolled his rig into the river, leaned out the door, and plucked the plate out of the water like he was grabbing the mail.

There were a dozen of us that weekend from the So Cal Rover Club. Some are friends. Some I’d never run with before, which is one way to get to know people (I recommend a less frigid one).

There should have been more of us. The week before the trip the weather was HOT, around a hundred degrees, then the forecast turned to rain and cold, and a few people canceled. They thought the trail could get unruly and that it was more than they wanted to take on. That’s a fair call.

But the rain never came. The trees had turned, the river was running, and it was the kind of weekend you try to describe afterward and end up showing people pictures instead.

Two rigs still overheated, coolant both times. Both times the group did what this group does: gathered around an open hood and improvised until it worked. Both rigs made it home.

I wasn’t the fix for any of it. I was the one with the camera, yelling “woohoo, you’ve got this, isn’t this fun” at people working their way over ruts, taking pictures while somebody else figured out a cooling system. I loved it. I loved not being the one.

I also spent more of the weekend than I’d like to admit fighting the urge to step in. Not because anything was wrong, but because people were doing things differently than I would have. Everything was fine. I was having a great time. And part of me was still standing at the edge of the river, waiting for my turn to fix it.

Maybe that’s what the plate was about. I waded in to solve it my way; someone else solved it from the driver’s seat, and the plate came back either way.

I’ve thought a lot this week about the people who stayed home. Not because they were wrong, but because they made the call off the forecast, and the forecast turned out to describe a different weekend than the one we got. Leaders do this constantly. We decide off the projection, the rumor, how it went last time. And when a hard week follows a decision we did make, we treat the hard week as the verdict. Two breakdowns didn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone. They were part of going.

“A good leader reads the situation they’re actually in, not the one they remember.”
From Read the Terrain, Chapter 5

Try this week

Find one decision you’re making off a forecast: a projection, a prediction about how someone will react, how it went last year. Write down what you’d need to see to know the real conditions.

1. Go look. Have one conversation, do one walk-through, or ask the one question you’ve been assuming you already know the answer to.

2. If something goes sideways on a call you already made, ask before you retreat: did the decision fail, or did the terrain do what terrain does?

3. The next time someone handles something differently than you would, ask yourself one question before you step in: is it wrong, or is it not how I’d do it? If it’s the second, keep your hands off the wheel.

A question

What are you staying home from because of a forecast?

I turned this weekend into a three-part video series on Instagram and YouTube: the people who stayed home, the breakdowns, and why my job was the camera.

The Book

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is built on this kind of reading: name the pattern you’re stuck in, then do something about it on Monday. Paperback and ebook come out November 2, and the Kindle preorder is open now.

Get the book