#534 Chris Majer: Why does coordination fail as companies grow?

Chris Majer is a former University of Washington rugby captain, performance psychologist, and organizational consultant, and we spoke about how practice, mood, and coordination determine whether growing companies can actually transform. An airport-bookstore encounter with George Leonard’s The Ultimate Athlete led him from rugby into Aikido, sports psychology, and work with elite athletes, Olympic teams, and Special Forces. That path eventually took his methods into business, where a 48-month engagement helped an AT&T division generate $3 billion in profit.

Majer’s governing lesson is blunt: “Understanding is the booby prize.” Transformation fails when companies install new practices and processes on top of resignation, resentment, or distrust. Because “mood is everything,” leaders must first change the organization’s predisposition for action, then develop new leadership and coordination practices, and finally align compensation, recognition, promotion, and workflows with them. He recommends judging learning by what people can do, dedicating 3–10% of working time to development, and allowing months—not a weekend—for competence to become embodied: “It’s simple, but it’s not easy.”

Listeners will leave with a concrete sequence for turning stalled coordination into sustainable performance: shift mood, practice new actions, and make systems coherent with them.

Key takeaways

Dedicate 3–10% of working time to deliberate learning and practice.Change organizational mood before introducing new practices or systems.Align rewards, compensation, promotion, and workflows with teamwork.Treat coordination as the core capability required for scaling.Build competence through repeated action, not information alone.Sustain transformation through months of follow-up, not one intensive event.