Jason Redman
Most leadership playbooks are written for conditions that never actually arrive. When a crisis hits, teams discover that the plan, the hierarchy and the assumptions they trained on do not hold. What leaders need is a way to make the first decision under fire, and a method their people can apply when the leader is not in the room.
Jason Redman is a retired US Navy SEAL officer who teaches leaders and teams a tested method for making decisions under pressure and recovering from crisis, built on his Get Off the X framework.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jason Redman
- A named decision framework, Get Off the X, that translates combat crisis response into language a commercial team can use when a project, customer or market situation collapses.
- A New York Times bestselling author of The Trident and Overcome, the second built on interviews with Admiral William McRaven, General Stanley McChrystal and Jocko Willink.
- Combat credibility that is specific and documented: wounded by machine gun fire outside Fallujah in 2007, awarded the Bronze Star with Valor and the Purple Heart, returned to active duty and commanded again.
- Works with Fortune 500 audiences including NASCAR, NFL and MLB organisations, Dell and McDonald’s, which gives him a tested range across corporate, sports and operational cultures.
- Founded Wounded Wear and the Combat Wounded Coalition, so the resilience content is not theoretical. He has built and run an organisation whose entire purpose was helping people rebuild after catastrophic loss.
Biography highlights
- Retired US Navy SEAL Lieutenant, 21 years of service, 11 enlisted and roughly 10 as an officer.
- Awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Valor, the Purple Heart and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal; holder of the US Army Ranger Tab.
- New York Times bestselling author of The Trident: The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader (William Morrow).
- Author of Overcome: Crush Adversity with the Leadership Techniques of America’s Toughest Warriors (Center Street, 2019).
- Founder of Wounded Wear, which evolved into the Combat Wounded Coalition, a non-profit supporting combat-wounded warriors and families of the fallen.
- Keynote speaker for Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organisations including NASCAR, the NFL and MLB, and global employers such as Dell and McDonald’s.
Biography
Outside Fallujah in September 2007, a SEAL assault team walked into heavy machine gun fire. Their commander was hit multiple times, including a round to the face. He kept directing the fight. That commander was Jason Redman, and the next several years of surgeries, rehabilitation and return to duty became the foundation of the leadership method he now teaches to corporate and sporting organisations.
Redman spent 21 years in the US Navy, 11 as an enlisted SEAL and nearly a decade as a SEAL officer. His decorations include the Bronze Star Medal with Valor and the Purple Heart. His first book, The Trident, is a New York Times bestseller and is unusual among military memoirs for the candour with which he documents early leadership failure. The book works because he describes being broken as a leader before he describes being rebuilt as one.
His second book, Overcome, moves the argument out of his own story and into a wider frame. He interviews Admiral William McRaven, General Stanley McChrystal, Jocko Willink and others to draw out the specific mental and behavioural patterns that let people function in catastrophic conditions. The result is a usable framework rather than a war story. That framework, anchored by Get Off the X and the REACT model, is what he teaches when organisations bring him in to work on crisis response, decision quality and team accountability.
The programmes sit on top of operating experience. He founded Wounded Wear, which became the Combat Wounded Coalition, to help combat-wounded service members and Gold Star families rebuild. He also runs Pointman for Life and Get Off the X coaching work. Fortune 500 organisations, including Dell and McDonald’s, and major sporting bodies across the NFL, MLB and NASCAR, have used him to put a language around leadership under pressure that their own teams can carry into the next difficult quarter.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under pressure
- Crisis response and decision-making
- Team accountability and ownership
- Resilience after setback
- High-performance team culture
- Mission planning and execution
- Personal and organisational recovery
Ideal for
- CEO, COO and senior operating leaders facing a live crisis, restructure or turnaround.
- Executive teams rebuilding after a failed strategy, product or market entry.
- Sales, trading and high-pressure commercial functions where decision quality under stress is the core job.
- Professional sports and performance organisations where team culture and recovery from loss shape the season.
Audience outcomes
- A shared vocabulary for crisis response, anchored by Get Off the X and the REACT model, that leaders can use in live situations.
- A sharper view of what personal accountability looks like when the plan has failed and blame is the easier option.
- A usable model for rebuilding a team after a public setback, drawn from Redman’s own command experience and recovery.
- A clearer understanding of how elite operators think about preparation so that the first decision in a crisis is not the worst one.
Talks
A keynote on making the first decision when a team or organisation is ambushed by a crisis.
Key takeaways:
- The Get Off the X model applied to business, not combat
- The 3 Rules of Leadership used to hold a team together under pressure
- A practical sequence for moving from reaction to command in the first minutes of a crisis
A programme-style keynote on leading yourself before leading others, built on Redman’s personal recovery.
Key takeaways:
- How to set mission, values and destination when circumstances have collapsed
- Risk assessment and early indicators leaders routinely miss
- The Overcome Mindset as a daily operating posture, not a slogan
A talk on the mental patterns that let elite operators function in catastrophic conditions, drawn from the Overcome book research.
Key takeaways:
- Patterns shared across interviews with Admiral McRaven, General McChrystal and Jocko Willink
- How teams build an Overcome culture rather than relying on individual grit
- The difference between resilience as recovery and resilience as a readiness discipline