Industrial folks are tired of two consulting archetypes. The strategy generalist who walks in with a slide deck and walks out with one too, having learned nothing about the plant they just spent two weeks advising. The executive coach with a middle-management resume, charging premium rates to ask reflective questions about anyone’s authentic leadership journey.
Wayward Leaders is neither. The practice is built around a third archetype that has been around longer than either of those, an archetype that has produced most of what the industry actually knows: the senior practitioner who also writes, teaches, and researches. Eliyahu Goldratt was that. W. Edwards Deming was that. Ron Moore is that. None of them presented like McKinsey. That was precisely the point.
To be wayward is to choose the longer path. A PhD on top of years in the plant. Faculty appointments on top of consulting work. Published books on top of training classes. Each layer paid for in time, none of it shortcuttable. The result is a practice that speaks operator language because the operator language was the first language, not a vocabulary picked up from a brand guide.
To be wayward is also to be plain about what works. Substance over theater. Original frameworks over recycled methodology. The conviction that expertise should be an asset, not a mystery.
The buyer this practice serves is the experienced operator constrained by mediocre leadership and surface-level consulting. The maintenance manager whose recommendations get overridden by production-first decisions. The engineer whose technical judgment loses to financial priorities. Wayward Leaders exists to give those people somewhere serious to turn.
That’s what the name means.
Same answer every time you ask.
Here Am I. Send Me!
I’m Carl Lee Tolbert. I live in the middle of Sioux Falls with my wife Jill and a brilliant cat named Wendy, blocks from two universities and the city center. Instead of a bio, two stories that shaped me.
The Boxing Coach
My first real teacher was a chain-smoking Irish priest who coached boxing. The way he ran intake was simple: every new kid stood in the middle of the gym while the older kids took turns punching him in the face. He said it got the shock and awe out of the way and let him see who would stay. Most didn’t. I stayed.
For the next several years, while I trained, he flicked ashes from his Camel non-filters onto my shoulders and told me, with the same regularity, that I was buggering up my life and wasting my potential. He was wrong about that. He was right about most other things.
Joliet
Years later I took a job at a steel mill in Joliet, hired specifically to be mentored by an electrical guru who had run the plant’s drive systems for decades. He died on my way out there. By the time I started, the mentorship was an open chair. So was the seat at the head of the table.
I was suddenly in charge of twelve electricians and fifty-two acres of steel production, making rebar hard and fast at industrial scale. The plant ran on the second major ABB installation of my career, this one spliced to a 1960s-vintage roughing mill at a right angle. As far as I could tell at the time, the only one in the world configured that way. Sink or swim, the mentor I came for already gone, and the plant kept making rebar. That’s where I learned what the books leave out.
And a sense of humor
What’s with the les misérables outfit?
Every year, my wife and I create a grand spectacle of a Christmas card. In 2022, the card was a “Bourguise Christmas in Canton.” The pictures were so well done and fits with my favorite literary quote from Munchausen’s new adventures riding cannonballs and being absurd. From 1785: “This is a satirical production calculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of some parliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons, the author’s design is not ill-founded; for the marvelous has never been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent.”
And loyalty. The tattoo on my left hand.
It is a dedication: there were 12 of us at the start, and now only two remain. I miss my friends, the unbridled patriotism, the love of family, and the plans to take over the world. Late at night, with the cool air rolling like fog off autumn waters, we created myths and became legends restless over the possibility of freedom and powered by unrelenting loyalty. We were invincible. Every day in America, 22 veterans commit suicide. Never forget that the wars still rage even at peace.
ATD Master Trainer™
Awarded by the Association for Talent Development, September 2026. In ATD's own words, an ATD Master Trainer™ "can walk into any learning program, in any modality, and demonstrate advanced training delivery and facilitation to achieve learning outcomes."
ATD does not publish how many people hold it. Fewer than 2,500 worldwide since the program began in 2012, by my estimate rather than by anyone's count, which makes it a rare credential and rarer still in industrial maintenance.
Nobody needed another credential saying I know drives. This one says something else: that the teaching has been assessed by somebody other than me, against a standard I did not write.