Picture a rowing eight at full speed.

Eight people. One boat. Every blade entering the water at the same instant. Nobody pulling harder than anyone else. The whole thing moving like a single organism.

Now here is the question worth sitting with. What is actually happening inside those eight people?

Frank Rowe has spent a lifetime asking a version of that question, first in the boat and then in the boardroom. He walked onto the rowing team at UC Santa Barbara with no experience, made it to the 1991 Pan American Games, and somewhere along the way discovered that everything the boat demands of you, trust, timing, precision, and the willingness to say what is actually true, is exactly what great leadership requires too.

His new book is The Leadership Stroke: Precision, Practice and Performance Under Pressure. And the conversat ...