The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

by Adam Steltzner

At which he said, “No. You look. I don’t need this,” and stormed out of the room. Everybody who saw it was stunned. He was like the guy who pulls the pin on the grenade with the handle down and says, “Do what I say or else!” His storming out was like letting the grenade explode. It’s upsetting to confront that kind of emotional brinksmanship; even more so to go over the brink! To me it felt like I’d seen what too much emotion could look like. We solve problems at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Dara was and is a naturally intuitive leader and problem solver. His emotion was there to protect the space he needed in order to problem-solve in a kind of subconscious, perhaps even slightly irrational, way. In an engineering environment, this combination of the rational and the irrational is so unusual that it shakes people up. That makes it an incredibly powerful catalyst for getting at the truth, but like any powerful ingredient, it needs to be used sparingly.