Education Quote by Kevin Rollins

Rollins isn’t dressing this up as “talent development”; he’s describing a failure mode. The bluntness is the tell. In a corporate culture that loves to talk about innovation, he points to a far less glamorous bottleneck: managerial competence. Growth doesn’t usually die in a dramatic blaze. It stalls quietly, when the organization outruns its own capacity to make decisions, ship reliably, and replace departing leaders without panic.

The phrasing “we learned several years ago” reads like a scar. It implies a near-miss or a period when the company felt the drag of thin leadership benches: too many projects, too few people who actually know how to run them. “Know-how” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not raw intelligence or even hustle; it’s the operational literacy that turns strategy into repeatable execution - budgets, hiring, prioritization, process, politics. Rollins is signaling that those skills are not automatic byproducts of success; they have to be deliberately cultivated.

The subtext is also about power and succession. Companies prefer to believe they’re systems, not personalities. Rollins admits the opposite: if you don’t replicate leadership capacity, the entire machine becomes dependent on a small priesthood of veterans. The end point - “we would just stop” - is deliberately stark, a reframing of corporate risk away from markets and competitors and toward internal neglect. It’s less a pep talk than a warning: your biggest threat might be your own inability to scale people as fast as you scale ambition.