High-Speed Leadership: See Far, Feel Near
- Sam Decker
- 9 minutes ago
- 4 min read
A few weeks ago my son Kyle (www.kyledecker.com) and I spent 5 days driving Can Am UTVs up, down and across Baja Mexico (Baja 1000 trails from Tecate, Ensenada, etc.). We sped or torqued over every imaginable terrain (except snow). One moment we’re floating across hard-pack sand, the next we’re in deep sand, or dropped into a muddy bog, then climbing over rocks, and hitting the occasional washboard section that rattles your teeth.
I’ve included a video so you can get a sense of what my eyes were consuming and my hands and feet reacting to at all speeds:
The whole world was vibrating at high speed. The horizon was miles out in front of me. It’s a beautiful, wide-open promise of where we were headed. But the next five feet were everything too. A rut, a loose rock, a soft shoulder — that’s what could flip you if you got complacent.
On this trip it hit me that leadership is the same.
To go anywhere worth going, you have to hold two realities at once:
See Far. Feel Near.
Vision + Situational Awareness.
Future + Present.
Strategy + Reality.
Leading at high speed means refusing to choose between them.
The Leadership Lesson Hidden in High-Speed Terrain
When you’re driving 80 mph over unpredictable ground, you learn quickly that staring only at the horizon isn’t bravery, it’s just silly. But you also learn that staring only at the ground in front of you makes you slow, reactive, and unprepared for what’s coming.
The art is holding both.
You scan far ahead to anticipate what’s coming. But keep your hands, your instincts, and your awareness tuned to what’s happening right now. And then ACT, allowing little shifts in the steering, gas or brake.
Leadership is the mixture of long-range clarity and short-range sensitivity, combined with action.
Below are five principles, in some rational order, that may help bring this topic to life:
1. Scan the Horizon, Grip the Wheel
Vision is non-negotiable. You will never outrun confusion with speed.
But execution happens on the next inch of ground.
Some of the greatest business failures weren’t because teams were slow — they were because leaders were blind. Kodak had the vision (they literally invented the digital camera), but they didn’t “feel near” enough to realize that the customer’s immediate habits were changing.
Leadership requires a split-screen view: One eye on the future you’re building. One eye on the customers, cash flow, and culture under your feet.
2. Lead by Feel
Plans matter. They set direction and provide some clarity. But the ground truth always lives in the present moment.
Leaders who operate only from the plan miss the signals the trail is giving them:
employee feedback
customer behavior
market movement
team morale
resource constraints
culture shifts
You don’t feel those things in spreadsheets. You feel them in motion.
In the book “The Toyota Way” the executives got dirty. Some took trips across the US in American-made minivans to see what was missing. Then, they created their winning Toyota Minivan. The Honda Odyssey is pretty great too…I’ve owned two!
Leadership at high speed requires learning to trust your senses. Collect the human data coming from the people beside you and the environment around you.
A great plan gets you in the car. A great feel gets you across the desert.
2. Micro-Adjustments Beat Big Turns
Flying across a desert isn’t a number of heroic steering moves. It’s hundreds of tiny corrections.
And in leadership, the organizations that execute well rarely succeed because of a single brilliant decision. They succeed because of constant, humble refinement: tightening the message, adjusting the team, refining the product, recalibrating priorities.
You get this from simple things like 1x1s, operational reviews, walking the floor, and getting on the road to listen to customers. Then translating those insights into a current picture held against the vision to achieve alignment.
Daily adjustments are what actually carry momentum forward. Momentum comes from responsiveness, not bravado.
3. Never “Lock Your Elbows”
You can’t make precision tiny adjustments, let alone strong steering moves, with locked elbows. Best practice in performance driving is your arms are bent 45-90 degrees. Bent elbows allow for both precision and strength with the steering wheel. Failing to have the right steering mechanics on Baja terrain could mean hitting a big rock at 60mph and a flip.
Locking your elbows when driving would assume nothing is going to change. When the terrain changes instantly, there is no certainty. In fast-changing industries, the companies that win are the quickest to adjust when the ground shifts beneath them.
Think about how many legacy brands were once untouchable but fell simply because they held on to their path like a desert highway. They weren’t listening to the terrain of the market. They weren’t feeling the feedback.
Blockbuster saw the future coming for streaming, yet clung to the comfort of the present. They simply didn’t react to what they saw. Their elbows were locked. The most important part of “react” is “act”!
In my experience, politics plays a part to blame for companies that ‘lock their elbows’. It’s fear or risk (mostly career risk!). There’s such a strong desire for predictability that is the present. The key to agile action is culture. Small teams. Intrapreneurship. Action over perfection. The willingness to fail. The idea that you try a hypothesis which Is tied to solve a big problem, determined by data-based decision making.
In the end...
I like to think of entrepreneurship (and performance leadership) as a journey across shifting terrain. You’ve got a destination, sure. But you don’t ignore the bumps, the blind turns, the unexpected dips. You ride with eyes on the horizon and the ground.
That’s “Seeing Far and Feeling Near”. You create speed without chaos, momentum without burnout, and clarity without losing connection.
And maybe, like driving across Baja at high speed, it’s a risky ride, but also the most alive.