Dr. Thom Mayer
Medical Director for the NFL Players Association
- Disaster Leadership- Pentagon on 9/11, Inhalation Anthrax at the US Capitol in 2001
- Managing NFL Concussion and Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis
- New book “Leadership is Worthless…But Leading is Priceless”
Full Profile
About Dr. Thom Mayer
Dr. Thom Mayer stands among the world’s foremost authorities on crisis leadership, medical emergency response, organisational resilience, and operational excellence in high-performance environments. With a career defined by navigating some of the most significant public and corporate crises of our generation, Dr. Mayer’s insights and strategies are highly sought after by executive teams, healthcare leaders, and organisations facing rapid transformation.
As Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, Executive Vice President of Leadership at LogixHealth, and Founder of BestPractices, Inc., Dr. Mayer has shaped policy and safeguarded well-being on the NFL’s front lines for over two decades. He is also a Clinical Professor at George Washington University, Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, and a “Master of Disaster” credited with lifesaving leadership during events such as 9/11 at the Pentagon and bioterrorism incidents at the US Capitol. His crisis deployment in Ukraine further demonstrates a hands-on approach to global emergency response.
Tom Peters, the celebrated leadership expert, and USA Today have recognised Dr. Mayer as both “gaspworthy” and among the “100 Most Important People in the NFL.” Dr. Mayer has received the American College of Emergency Physicians’ highest honour and has been acknowledged for entrepreneurship, building, and successfully exiting multimillion-dollar ventures in healthcare staffing, management, and innovation.
Business Challenges Addressed
Dr. Mayer helps organisations tackle complex, high-impact challenges such as:
- Leading teams through crisis: Offering frameworks drawn from disaster zones, NFL emergencies, and hospital frontline practice, Dr. Mayer equips businesses to thrive under intense pressure and uncertainty.
- Battling burnout and driving resilience: His evidence-based approach to employee wellbeing, resilience, and adaptive capacity is rooted in research, unique field experience, and the latest strategies from sports medicine and emergency care.
- Cultivating innovation and trust: Dr. Mayer’s keynote “Making Failure Your Fuel” demonstrates how innovation grows fastest where trust is strongest, and how leaders can reframe setbacks to unlock creativity and positive transformation.
- Hardwiring patient/customer flow: Drawing from his seminal work, “Hardwiring Flow,” Dr. Mayer equips executives and managers with tools to increase efficiency, optimise service delivery, and address bottlenecks across healthcare and corporate operations.
- Building high-impact culture: With unique stories from NFL sidelines, trauma centres, and war zones, he shares methods to instil purpose-driven, adaptable teams ready to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
Awards and Publications
- Author of 20 acclaimed textbooks and hundreds of articles on leadership, emergency medicine, and patient experience.
- Multiple award-winner: including the ACHE’s James Hamilton Award and the ACEP’s Outstanding Speaker of the Year.
- Nominated to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his work transforming sports medicine safety protocols worldwide.
Talks
Dr. Thom Mayer has led a life at the forefront of leading through some of the most prominent crises of our generation, including serving as the Command Physician at the Pentagon on 9/11, Incident Commander for the US’s first bioterrorism incident, Medical Director of the NFL Players Association, and leading a Mobile Emergency Team during the Ukraine invasion. This keynote is a contrarian approach to leadership, which is: Leadership is worthless…because it is a noun – something you say. But Leading is priceless…because it is a verb – the things you do, all day, every day, in every walk of life.
Dr. Mayer challenges his audiences to ask the right question – “How will I lead myself and my team today?” By helping them to embrace that leading occurs – no matter what job you do – in everything you do, he inspires others to lead themselves, their teams, and their families
Filled with stories and examples from Dr. Mayer’s career as “The Master of Disaster,” leading at the forefront of crises on the world stage, this presentation challenges but also inspires new and practical approaches to leading your life in times of crisis.
In his book “Leadership is Worthless…But Leading is Priceless” Dr. Thom Mayer presents many actionable yet contrarian concepts. One of the most intriguing of these is the idea of “Making Failure Your Fuel,” which builds upon the idea that innovation, which is an essential skill in these turbulent times, occurs not at the speed of genius, creativity, or intelligence, but rather at the speed of…trust. And the only way we can trust ourselves and our teams to innovate is to develop and perfect the talent of making failure our fuel.
Using stories and personal experiences from the NFL, the US Women’s’ National Soccer Team (including Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach), 9/11 at the Pentagon, Ukraine, Capital One, and world history and literature, this talk examines the details of using failure to motivate success, including:
- Failure is not the opposite of success-it is an integral part of success
- Failure motivates-Tom Brady and the NFL Draft
- Developing Your Failure Muscles-11 ways to use failure as fuel
- The Healing Power of Failure
- Limits Begin Where Vision Ends
- Taking ourselves lightly-and failure as our fuel
As Senator Mark Warner said in his comments on Dr. Mayer’s book, “Perhaps the greatest lesson Dr. Mayer has to offer is not to be discouraged by failure, but rather to use it as fuel-to take risks and get yourself back in the game. Leaders of all stripes can learn much from reading this book.” You can learn much from this talk.