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Surrender to Lead: The Counterintuitive Approach to Driving Extraordinary Results
Unlock the power of surrender with the Results Equation.
When it comes to leadership, the idea of total control can be seductive. But it may also be what’s holding you and your team back from achieving extraordinary results.
Motivated by fear, leaders too often become caught in the Action Trap, a bias toward top-down directives and management that may produce short-term gains but ends up stifling adaptability—the most important engine of growth.
Drawing on decades of experience and extensive research, including a study of 243 companies in collaboration with Stanford Graduate Business School, corporate culture transformation experts Joe Terry and Jessica Kriegel have found a solution.
Through intimate storytelling and real-life examples, they reveal the Results Equation (Purpose + Strategy + Culture = Results), a powerful new way of thinking about leadership based in love rather than fear that has proven
Drive more than 4X revenue growthImprove clarity, alignment, and accountabilityFoster a culture of adaptability and continuous improvementThe most important key to this approach is also the most counterintuitive—surrender. Not surrender as in quitting, but surrendering the need for control to a focus on creating the conditions for greatness by creating experiences that change how people think and, ultimately, how they act.
If you’re looking to revolutionize the way your team works and supercharge your results in a scalable and repeatable way, Surrender to Lead is your blueprint to getting better by letting go.
When it comes to leadership, the idea of total control can be seductive. But it may also be what’s holding you and your team back from achieving extraordinary results.
Motivated by fear, leaders too often become caught in the Action Trap, a bias toward top-down directives and management that may produce short-term gains but ends up stifling adaptability—the most important engine of growth.
Drawing on decades of experience and extensive research, including a study of 243 companies in collaboration with Stanford Graduate Business School, corporate culture transformation experts Joe Terry and Jessica Kriegel have found a solution.
Through intimate storytelling and real-life examples, they reveal the Results Equation (Purpose + Strategy + Culture = Results), a powerful new way of thinking about leadership based in love rather than fear that has proven
Drive more than 4X revenue growthImprove clarity, alignment, and accountabilityFoster a culture of adaptability and continuous improvementThe most important key to this approach is also the most counterintuitive—surrender. Not surrender as in quitting, but surrendering the need for control to a focus on creating the conditions for greatness by creating experiences that change how people think and, ultimately, how they act.
If you’re looking to revolutionize the way your team works and supercharge your results in a scalable and repeatable way, Surrender to Lead is your blueprint to getting better by letting go.
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Published January 27, 2026
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February 1, 2026
Control Is the Most Expensive Illusion at Work: What “Surrender to Lead” Gets Right About Culture, Accountability, and the Myth of the All-Powerful Manager
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In an age when leaders are told to be “visionary” and “data-driven” and “relentlessly accountable” – and are then handed an org chart that behaves like weather – “Surrender to Lead” arrives with an almost mischievous proposition: stop gripping the wheel so hard. Not because outcomes don’t matter (the authors are practically allergic to hand-wavy inspiration), but because control, as a leadership strategy, is a kind of superstition: comforting, familiar, and ultimately impotent in the face of how human beings actually work.
The book’s central spell is concise enough to fit on the back of a badge: Purpose + Strategy + Culture = Results. What makes this equation more than another corporate mantra is the authors’ insistence that culture is not a vibe, not a perk set, not the wallpaper of values posters – it is a system of beliefs that produces behavior that produces outcomes. Beliefs, in turn, are shaped by experiences. This is their repeating logic, their written DNA: if you want different results, stop begging for different attitudes and start engineering different experiences. In a moment when many organizations are re-learning – often painfully, often publicly – that people can comply without committing, “Surrender to Lead” argues for a leadership practice that is less about command and more about conditions: the careful staging of clarity, alignment, and accountability so that the right actions become the natural ones.
Where the book earns its authority is in the way it keeps returning to the same human problem from different angles – a kind of narrative circling that feels pastoral rather than punitive. In one chapter, the focus is the slow violence of silos: sales and marketing locked in their ancient romance of mutual resentment, each convinced the other is withholding oxygen. The authors refuse to treat the conflict as a workflow bug. They treat it as a belief problem – a story each team is telling itself about the other. The “fix” is disarmingly intimate: ask for feedback “from love,” defined with the clear-eyed practicality of Thomas Aquinas (“to will the good of another”), and then convert that feedback into a shared contract. “The belief I want you to hold about our team is…” followed by “Based on your feedback, the experience we’re going to create for you is…” followed by the catalytic question: If we do X, Y, and Z, will that be enough to shift your belief? It is a script, yes – but it is also a small ritual of mutual de-escalation, a way of replacing the courtroom with the workshop.
This is one of the book’s most persuasive moves: it offers language that lowers the temperature. In the chapter on difficult experiences, Jessica Kriegel names the illness many organizations quietly run on: MSU, “Making Stuff Up.” A colleague stress-tests an idea, and the mind, hungry for coherence, produces a melodrama: he’s undermining me, he’s not on my team, he’s a roadblock. The authors borrow Chris Argyris’s “Ladder of Inference” to show how quickly we climb from observation to belief, and then they hand the reader a sentence that functions like a pin to the balloon: “The experience I had when you ___ led me to the belief that ___. Is that the belief you would like me to hold?” It is a deceptively soft form of confrontation – neither accusatory nor evasive – and it points to one of the book’s deeper convictions: psychological safety isn’t created by avoiding hard conversations; it is created by having them without humiliation.
The authors’ moral imagination is clearest when they talk about accountability. In the business world, “accountability” often arrives as a euphemism for punishment, the managerial version of a raised eyebrow. Here it is redefined as liberation: the ability to choose one’s response, to take ownership of what is controllable and release what isn’t. Joe Terry’s account of being fired and, almost comically, invited into a private equity Hall of Fame the same day is not included as gossip but as parable: you don’t get to choose the event, but you do get to choose the meaning you make of it – and then the action you take. The book’s “Above the Line” framework (a companion to the authors’ earlier tradition in “The Oz Principle”) splits organizational life into two climates: Above the Line (ownership, action, response) and Below the Line (blame, excuses, denial). It is simple enough to risk sounding simplistic – until you recognize how rarely simplicity is practiced. A leader who models Above the Line behavior in the moment things go sideways becomes, in the authors’ view, a living curriculum. People do not become accountable because you demand it; they become accountable when they experience it as normal.
Still, the book has the good sense to admit that ideals don’t scale on charm alone. One of its strongest sections is the insistence that culture is constantly being taught by systems – the policies, incentive models, approval chains, resource allocation habits, and the ordinary bureaucratic friction that quietly instructs people what leadership truly values. The Ingersoll Rand example is presented as a case study in deliberate alignment: employee ownership paired with financial transparency, training that turns “company financials” into something as comprehensible as a household budget, and the resulting shift from “this is the company I work for” to “this is my company.” Whether one reads these claims as cautionary tale or aspirational fable, the underlying point is sturdy: you cannot preach innovation while building six levels of permission into every minor purchase. Your systems always win the argument.
This emphasis on systems is part of what makes “Surrender to Lead” feel timely without straining for relevance. We live in a period of public contradictions: organizations conducting layoffs while announcing costly HQ renovations; leaders promising “people-first” cultures while tightening control through surveillance metrics; companies proclaiming trust while designing workflows that assume irresponsibility. The authors understand that employees no longer evaluate leadership primarily through statements – they evaluate it through what the organization funds, tolerates, and repeats. One of the book’s cleanest insights is that experience is the real message, and the leader’s job is to become fluent in what their choices communicate.
That fluency extends to interpretation. A particularly sharp chapter breaks experiences into four types: Type One (clear, unmissable, belief-forming without explanation), Type Two (meaningful but ambiguous – powerful only if you interpret it), Type Three (neutral background noise), and Type Four (the dangerous kind – actions that almost inevitably create beliefs you don’t want). The stories here are memorable because they are concrete: airline executives airborne at midnight on January 1, 2000 to prove confidence in Y2K readiness; a new CEO replacing the ritual of parking-lot pink slips with a table of doughnuts and greeting. But the authors don’t romanticize gestures. Doughnuts alone don’t undo a fear-based belief system. What changes a culture is consistency – the boring heroism of reinforcement – the steady accumulation of experiences that make a new narrative plausible.
There is a tension running through the book that is both its strength and its risk: it wants, passionately, to moralize leadership without becoming moralistic. The language of love, faith, and surrender is used earnestly, and for some readers it will feel like a corrective to the brittle, mechanistic management literature that treats human beings as inputs. For others, it may feel like spirituality smuggled into a boardroom. Yet the authors are careful to anchor the sacred language in operational practice. “Surrender,” as defined here, is not passivity. It is the disciplined choice to stop fighting reality and start serving what matters: clarity over chaos, alignment over ego, accountability over blame. Their SHIFT model – Stop fighting reality, Have faith, Identify what’s yours, Free yourself from fear, Take the next right action – is essentially a leadership translation of the Serenity Prayer without insisting on any particular theology. It is an attempt to give leaders a repeatable internal sequence for moments when the instinct is to control, punish, or retreat.
If “Surrender to Lead” has a weakness, it is the one shared by many effective business books: it sometimes reads like a series of well-lit training rooms. Its examples move briskly from friction to resolution, and the messiest human realities – power politics, structural inequity, the way “accountability” can be weaponized down the hierarchy while immunity floats upward – are addressed more as mindset problems than as the complex, sometimes non-negotiable constraints they can be. The authors argue, persuasively, that silos are a mindset problem, not a structure problem – but anyone who has lived inside an incentive model that pits functions against each other knows that mindsets are often rented from the compensation plan. The book’s tools are strongest when leaders have enough agency to redesign experiences and systems, and less satisfying when readers are trapped in environments where the “experience” is dictated by forces far above them.
And yet: the book’s insistence on starting where you stand is one of its most energizing moves. The chapter on cascading change uses the example of a single leader inside a large organization living the principles of “The Oz Principle” so vividly that performance shifts, attention follows, and eventually the culture unifies. The lesson is not “wait for permission.” It is: create a pocket of undeniable success; let results become your rhetoric; allow excellence to function as a kind of upward influence. In a time when many employees feel held hostage by the moods of executives and the churn of reorganizations, this is a bracing reframing: you are in control of yourself, not others – and that is more power than you think.
The conclusion’s Nike story lands a little like a rallying speech, but it also reveals the book’s clearest aspiration: to move leadership away from obsession with the perfect plan and toward devotion to the next right action. “Just do it,” in their telling, becomes less a hustle command than a surrender practice: you can’t always think your way into right acting; sometimes you act your way into right thinking. This is not an argument for recklessness. It is an argument for movement rooted in service rather than fear – for leaders willing to trade the illusion of control for the craft of conditions.
Placed on the shelf beside “Dare to Lead,” “Drive,” “Measure What Matters,” “The Culture Code,” “The Advantage,” “Switch,” “Atomic Habits,” “The Speed of Trust,” and the ever-haunting “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” this book distinguishes itself by insisting that culture is not an abstract “thing” leaders talk about when performance lags – it is the performance system itself, taught daily by experiences, reinforced relentlessly by systems, and made visible in the stories people tell themselves when leaders don’t explain what their actions mean. It is also, to the book’s credit, unusually interested in interior leadership: the private work of ego, fear, and surrender that determines how a leader behaves when the pressure hits.
In the end, “Surrender to Lead” is not a perfect book – it is a persuasive one, and a humane one, and (at its best) a practically spiritual one without asking the reader to convert. It offers a toolkit that is actually usable: scripts that de-escalate, frameworks that translate blame into ownership, a repeated emphasis on clarity and alignment that feels like oxygen in a jargon-thick genre. My rating is 84 out of 100 – not because the authors lack conviction, but because their most elegant frameworks sometimes glide past the knottiest structural realities of organizational life. Still, the book’s core truth feels stubbornly accurate: you cannot control people into greatness. You can only create the conditions where greatness becomes likely – and then choose, again and again, to lead from love rather than fear.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In an age when leaders are told to be “visionary” and “data-driven” and “relentlessly accountable” – and are then handed an org chart that behaves like weather – “Surrender to Lead” arrives with an almost mischievous proposition: stop gripping the wheel so hard. Not because outcomes don’t matter (the authors are practically allergic to hand-wavy inspiration), but because control, as a leadership strategy, is a kind of superstition: comforting, familiar, and ultimately impotent in the face of how human beings actually work.
The book’s central spell is concise enough to fit on the back of a badge: Purpose + Strategy + Culture = Results. What makes this equation more than another corporate mantra is the authors’ insistence that culture is not a vibe, not a perk set, not the wallpaper of values posters – it is a system of beliefs that produces behavior that produces outcomes. Beliefs, in turn, are shaped by experiences. This is their repeating logic, their written DNA: if you want different results, stop begging for different attitudes and start engineering different experiences. In a moment when many organizations are re-learning – often painfully, often publicly – that people can comply without committing, “Surrender to Lead” argues for a leadership practice that is less about command and more about conditions: the careful staging of clarity, alignment, and accountability so that the right actions become the natural ones.
Where the book earns its authority is in the way it keeps returning to the same human problem from different angles – a kind of narrative circling that feels pastoral rather than punitive. In one chapter, the focus is the slow violence of silos: sales and marketing locked in their ancient romance of mutual resentment, each convinced the other is withholding oxygen. The authors refuse to treat the conflict as a workflow bug. They treat it as a belief problem – a story each team is telling itself about the other. The “fix” is disarmingly intimate: ask for feedback “from love,” defined with the clear-eyed practicality of Thomas Aquinas (“to will the good of another”), and then convert that feedback into a shared contract. “The belief I want you to hold about our team is…” followed by “Based on your feedback, the experience we’re going to create for you is…” followed by the catalytic question: If we do X, Y, and Z, will that be enough to shift your belief? It is a script, yes – but it is also a small ritual of mutual de-escalation, a way of replacing the courtroom with the workshop.
This is one of the book’s most persuasive moves: it offers language that lowers the temperature. In the chapter on difficult experiences, Jessica Kriegel names the illness many organizations quietly run on: MSU, “Making Stuff Up.” A colleague stress-tests an idea, and the mind, hungry for coherence, produces a melodrama: he’s undermining me, he’s not on my team, he’s a roadblock. The authors borrow Chris Argyris’s “Ladder of Inference” to show how quickly we climb from observation to belief, and then they hand the reader a sentence that functions like a pin to the balloon: “The experience I had when you ___ led me to the belief that ___. Is that the belief you would like me to hold?” It is a deceptively soft form of confrontation – neither accusatory nor evasive – and it points to one of the book’s deeper convictions: psychological safety isn’t created by avoiding hard conversations; it is created by having them without humiliation.
The authors’ moral imagination is clearest when they talk about accountability. In the business world, “accountability” often arrives as a euphemism for punishment, the managerial version of a raised eyebrow. Here it is redefined as liberation: the ability to choose one’s response, to take ownership of what is controllable and release what isn’t. Joe Terry’s account of being fired and, almost comically, invited into a private equity Hall of Fame the same day is not included as gossip but as parable: you don’t get to choose the event, but you do get to choose the meaning you make of it – and then the action you take. The book’s “Above the Line” framework (a companion to the authors’ earlier tradition in “The Oz Principle”) splits organizational life into two climates: Above the Line (ownership, action, response) and Below the Line (blame, excuses, denial). It is simple enough to risk sounding simplistic – until you recognize how rarely simplicity is practiced. A leader who models Above the Line behavior in the moment things go sideways becomes, in the authors’ view, a living curriculum. People do not become accountable because you demand it; they become accountable when they experience it as normal.
Still, the book has the good sense to admit that ideals don’t scale on charm alone. One of its strongest sections is the insistence that culture is constantly being taught by systems – the policies, incentive models, approval chains, resource allocation habits, and the ordinary bureaucratic friction that quietly instructs people what leadership truly values. The Ingersoll Rand example is presented as a case study in deliberate alignment: employee ownership paired with financial transparency, training that turns “company financials” into something as comprehensible as a household budget, and the resulting shift from “this is the company I work for” to “this is my company.” Whether one reads these claims as cautionary tale or aspirational fable, the underlying point is sturdy: you cannot preach innovation while building six levels of permission into every minor purchase. Your systems always win the argument.
This emphasis on systems is part of what makes “Surrender to Lead” feel timely without straining for relevance. We live in a period of public contradictions: organizations conducting layoffs while announcing costly HQ renovations; leaders promising “people-first” cultures while tightening control through surveillance metrics; companies proclaiming trust while designing workflows that assume irresponsibility. The authors understand that employees no longer evaluate leadership primarily through statements – they evaluate it through what the organization funds, tolerates, and repeats. One of the book’s cleanest insights is that experience is the real message, and the leader’s job is to become fluent in what their choices communicate.
That fluency extends to interpretation. A particularly sharp chapter breaks experiences into four types: Type One (clear, unmissable, belief-forming without explanation), Type Two (meaningful but ambiguous – powerful only if you interpret it), Type Three (neutral background noise), and Type Four (the dangerous kind – actions that almost inevitably create beliefs you don’t want). The stories here are memorable because they are concrete: airline executives airborne at midnight on January 1, 2000 to prove confidence in Y2K readiness; a new CEO replacing the ritual of parking-lot pink slips with a table of doughnuts and greeting. But the authors don’t romanticize gestures. Doughnuts alone don’t undo a fear-based belief system. What changes a culture is consistency – the boring heroism of reinforcement – the steady accumulation of experiences that make a new narrative plausible.
There is a tension running through the book that is both its strength and its risk: it wants, passionately, to moralize leadership without becoming moralistic. The language of love, faith, and surrender is used earnestly, and for some readers it will feel like a corrective to the brittle, mechanistic management literature that treats human beings as inputs. For others, it may feel like spirituality smuggled into a boardroom. Yet the authors are careful to anchor the sacred language in operational practice. “Surrender,” as defined here, is not passivity. It is the disciplined choice to stop fighting reality and start serving what matters: clarity over chaos, alignment over ego, accountability over blame. Their SHIFT model – Stop fighting reality, Have faith, Identify what’s yours, Free yourself from fear, Take the next right action – is essentially a leadership translation of the Serenity Prayer without insisting on any particular theology. It is an attempt to give leaders a repeatable internal sequence for moments when the instinct is to control, punish, or retreat.
If “Surrender to Lead” has a weakness, it is the one shared by many effective business books: it sometimes reads like a series of well-lit training rooms. Its examples move briskly from friction to resolution, and the messiest human realities – power politics, structural inequity, the way “accountability” can be weaponized down the hierarchy while immunity floats upward – are addressed more as mindset problems than as the complex, sometimes non-negotiable constraints they can be. The authors argue, persuasively, that silos are a mindset problem, not a structure problem – but anyone who has lived inside an incentive model that pits functions against each other knows that mindsets are often rented from the compensation plan. The book’s tools are strongest when leaders have enough agency to redesign experiences and systems, and less satisfying when readers are trapped in environments where the “experience” is dictated by forces far above them.
And yet: the book’s insistence on starting where you stand is one of its most energizing moves. The chapter on cascading change uses the example of a single leader inside a large organization living the principles of “The Oz Principle” so vividly that performance shifts, attention follows, and eventually the culture unifies. The lesson is not “wait for permission.” It is: create a pocket of undeniable success; let results become your rhetoric; allow excellence to function as a kind of upward influence. In a time when many employees feel held hostage by the moods of executives and the churn of reorganizations, this is a bracing reframing: you are in control of yourself, not others – and that is more power than you think.
The conclusion’s Nike story lands a little like a rallying speech, but it also reveals the book’s clearest aspiration: to move leadership away from obsession with the perfect plan and toward devotion to the next right action. “Just do it,” in their telling, becomes less a hustle command than a surrender practice: you can’t always think your way into right acting; sometimes you act your way into right thinking. This is not an argument for recklessness. It is an argument for movement rooted in service rather than fear – for leaders willing to trade the illusion of control for the craft of conditions.
Placed on the shelf beside “Dare to Lead,” “Drive,” “Measure What Matters,” “The Culture Code,” “The Advantage,” “Switch,” “Atomic Habits,” “The Speed of Trust,” and the ever-haunting “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” this book distinguishes itself by insisting that culture is not an abstract “thing” leaders talk about when performance lags – it is the performance system itself, taught daily by experiences, reinforced relentlessly by systems, and made visible in the stories people tell themselves when leaders don’t explain what their actions mean. It is also, to the book’s credit, unusually interested in interior leadership: the private work of ego, fear, and surrender that determines how a leader behaves when the pressure hits.
In the end, “Surrender to Lead” is not a perfect book – it is a persuasive one, and a humane one, and (at its best) a practically spiritual one without asking the reader to convert. It offers a toolkit that is actually usable: scripts that de-escalate, frameworks that translate blame into ownership, a repeated emphasis on clarity and alignment that feels like oxygen in a jargon-thick genre. My rating is 84 out of 100 – not because the authors lack conviction, but because their most elegant frameworks sometimes glide past the knottiest structural realities of organizational life. Still, the book’s core truth feels stubbornly accurate: you cannot control people into greatness. You can only create the conditions where greatness becomes likely – and then choose, again and again, to lead from love rather than fear.
Read
January 7, 2026Surrender to Lead presents a refreshingly human and research backed rethinking of modern leadership. Jessica Kriegel and Joe Terry challenge the deeply ingrained belief that control drives success and replace it with a compelling alternative rooted in trust, adaptability, and intentional culture design. Their Results Equation Purpose + Strategy + Culture = Results offers a clear and actionable framework that feels both intuitive and transformative.
What sets this book apart is how effectively it bridges rigorous research with relatable storytelling. Drawing on their extensive study of 243 companies in collaboration with Stanford Graduate Business School, the authors demonstrate how fear-based leadership fuels the “Action Trap,” limiting growth and innovation. In contrast, their concept of surrender letting go of control to create conditions for greatness empowers leaders to unlock alignment, accountability, and sustainable performance across teams.
Surrender to Lead is not about doing less—it’s about leading better. With practical insights, real-world examples, and a deeply resonant philosophy, this book offers a scalable blueprint for leaders seeking long-term impact rather than short-term wins. It’s a timely, thoughtful, and highly relevant guide for anyone serious about driving extraordinary results in today’s fast-changing organizations.
What sets this book apart is how effectively it bridges rigorous research with relatable storytelling. Drawing on their extensive study of 243 companies in collaboration with Stanford Graduate Business School, the authors demonstrate how fear-based leadership fuels the “Action Trap,” limiting growth and innovation. In contrast, their concept of surrender letting go of control to create conditions for greatness empowers leaders to unlock alignment, accountability, and sustainable performance across teams.
Surrender to Lead is not about doing less—it’s about leading better. With practical insights, real-world examples, and a deeply resonant philosophy, this book offers a scalable blueprint for leaders seeking long-term impact rather than short-term wins. It’s a timely, thoughtful, and highly relevant guide for anyone serious about driving extraordinary results in today’s fast-changing organizations.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 1/25, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.
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