Yes, And

Before I learned to lead well, I believed leadership was a competition.

Not consciously. Not as a stated philosophy. But embedded in how I made decisions as a government program manager: resources were finite, budgets were zero-sum, and for my program to succeed, another program somewhere had to absorb the loss. Us versus them was not strategy. It was assumption.

Then I became Deputy Chief Engineer for GPS.

GPS had 2.5 billion customers at the time — navigation systems, financial networks, military operations, civilian aviation, smartphones in pockets on every continent. Decisions made in our program affected all of them, often simultaneously, often in ways that conflicted. We made decisions like that a dozen times a day.

The us-versus-them framework collapsed immediately. There was no them. There were only stakeholders with legitimate competing needs, and a responsibility to find the path that satisfied as many of them as possible without betraying the mission.

What I found already waiting for me at GPS — built into the culture before I arrived — was something I came to think of as Yes, And. Not yes-but, which is polite refusal. Not either-or, which is false constraint. Yes, And: the creative insistence that a way exists to honor multiple legitimate needs simultaneously, even when it isn’t obvious, even when it requires more work than simply choosing a winner.

I fostered that culture for three years. Then I passed it on and carried the lesson with me.

———

I did not know, when I walked into Karnak or climbed toward the cliff temples at Hampi or stood inside the carved halls of Ajanta, that I was still practicing the same discipline.

But I was.

What the columns at Karnak taught me — those stones that absorbed three thousand years of conquest, renaming, conversion, burial, and excavation and are still standing — is that endurance is not the same as dominance. Every king who scratched his predecessor’s name from the walls believed he was winning. The walls held all their names equally, and outlasted all of them equally. Power competed. Stone endured.

What the craftsmen at Ajanta taught me — generations of workers who carved monasteries from solid rock and died before the work was finished — is that the most significant contributions are often made by people who never see the outcome. They didn’t build for recognition. They built because the work was worth doing. Their irrelevance to history is precisely what made their work historical.

What the first week in India taught me — the gout, the over-planned itinerary, the joy I couldn’t access because I was too busy managing the experience — is that control and presence are often in direct competition. The tighter the grip, the less you actually receive.

Three different lessons. The same underlying discipline: allow the revelation to occur. Notice it. Accept what it is teaching you rather than defending against it.

———

That is harder than it sounds for people like me. Trained in systems thinking, credentialed in program management, experienced in high-stakes decision environments where the cost of being wrong is measured in billions and sometimes lives. We are not naturally permeable. We are trained to be defended, structured, decisive.

But GPS taught me that the most creative and effective leadership I ever practiced came not from imposing a framework but from asking a better question. Not who wins but what does this situation actually need? Not how do I control this but what is this trying to teach me?

The columns at Karnak were not designed to teach me anything. They were designed to glorify kings who are dust. But they taught me something the kings never intended: that what endures is rarely what was built for permanence, and what matters is rarely what was built to impress.

The things I have built in my career — programs, teams, systems — are satellites. Precise, capable, fragile, finite. I am proud of them.

But I am building something now that I want to be more like a column. Not large. Not imposing. Grounded in something that does not move — biblical truth, mission clarity, faithful stewardship — and patient enough to still be standing when the sand rises and falls again.

The lesson from GPS. The lesson from Hampi. The lesson from Ajanta and Karnak.

Yes. And.

What would you build differently if you measured it against columns instead of quarters?