April 2026 — 11,000 Steps a Day, And I'm Still Walking Around In Circles
The first of a brief monthly email series
Q1 is finished, and I find myself two months into an amazing new role — still calibrating to a completely different cadence of daily life. What came before it was a long, necessary exhale. The grief of winding down Eden Green gave way to rest — a lot of it. Holiday gaps where I lingered at home, quiet winter walks in the mountains, reading the same book twice (more on that below), a 25th anniversary trip I won’t soon forget. If it all sounds slow, it was — and I needed every bit of it.
What I Read (September thru March)
Andrew Murray — Waiting On God — this was the one I read twice. Active, expectant, patient waiting as a spiritual posture rather than passive drift; the right frame for the season I was in. Paired well with Waiting Isn’t A Waste (Mark Vroegop), which covers similar ground from a different angle.
David Whyte — Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words · A poet takes 52 everyday words — grief, friendship, rest, anger — and finds what they’ve actually meant all along, underneath how we usually use them. In the middle of grieving one season and not quite arriving in the next, I needed someone to redefine the words for where I was.
Robert Coram — Boyd · Biography of John Boyd — the fighter pilot who became arguably the most influential military strategist of the 20th century. Created the OODA loop, rewrote air combat doctrine, and was nearly written out of official history because he was impossible to manage. Two months into a defense manufacturing shop, Boyd keeps clarifying things. His operating manual - institutional resistance to disruptive thinkers is to be expected - resonated with me.
Eliyahu Goldratt — The Goal · A novel about a factory manager discovering the Theory of Constraints — rewires how you see bottlenecks in any system. I’ve been applying the core framework almost daily at Albers. The constraint isn’t where you think it is. That’s the whole lesson — and it applies to everything. My biggest regrest is that I wish I had known about this, and read it, while at Eden Green.
P.W. Singer & August Cole — Ghost Fleet · A near-future war novel imagining a conflict between the U.S. and China, written by actual defense analysts — the scenarios are uncomfortably plausible. If you work anywhere near the defense sector, read it.
Nathan Vardi - For Blood And Money · follows the money and the science behind the biotech industry’s race to build life-changing cancer drugs simultaneously; the characters are as good as any fiction.
What I’m Thinking Through
You would think a new gig in an aerospace and defense company — wartime footing, precision manufacturing, 600 people — would have snapped me back into high gear. After 2,190 days running Eden Green flat out, even this can’t quite match that pace. And honestly, that’s been the most disorienting part. I’m still sitting somewhere in that liminal space between what was and what comes next — not fully arrived, not fully departed. More reflections on that in future issues, should you want to keep receiving these.
The Sub-Plot
But something’s been clicking into place on my 11,000-step walks, and I want to get it down before I overthink it.
From inside a defense industrial base manufacturing shop — with multiple locations — you start seeing things you can’t see from a distance. The actual defense industrial base isn’t Lockheed and Raytheon. It’s the manufacturers nobody names. The primes can only build what their sub-tier suppliers can make. And roughly 20% of those sub-tier operators have failed in the last 18 months.
I’ve heard this argument before. Just in different industries.
At Eden Green, the thesis I kept making to our board was: food security is national security. A nation that can’t feed itself can be held hostage. I thought that was a vertical farming argument. Turns out it was something else.
In Washington, before and after 9/11, my job was reading geopolitical chokepoints — where dependencies become leverage against you.
Three career chapters. One problem. Different variants and looks.
The sentence I keep coming back to: what you choose not to build, you eventually choose to need. Munitions, semiconductors, food, pharmaceuticals — the sectors where America said “the market will sort this out” are the exact sectors where the vulnerabilities show up.
So maybe I’ve been walking in circles my whole career.
-eddy-
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