S5:E36🎙️ LIVE — Leadership Lessons from Rev. Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr.

¡Hola!

Hi, I'm John Maxwell. When the top companies in the world are looking for trainers, speakers, and coaches, there's one name that stands above the rest, and that's Maxwell Leadership. Our certified team members have gotten proven results for companies all over the globe, and our reputation, I'm proud to say, is second to none. Some of our members have risen to the top of their profession, including the one you're going to meet today. I proudly introduce you to my friend, Bob Fabien Zinga.

Welcome to the Leadership and Success Podcast with your host, Coach BZ, where we help you lead with purpose and succeed with impact. If you're ready to grow into the kind of leader others want to follow, this podcast is for you. If you're determined to elevate your success and leave a lasting legacy, this podcast is for you. As my mentor, Dr. John C. Maxwell, reminds us, everything rises and falls on leadership. Our goal is simple, to inspire you, challenge you, and equip you with insights that can transform the trajectory of your leadership journey. Welcome aboard to another episode of the Leadership and Success Podcast. Podcast with Coach B.

Ready on the stump? Yeah. Okay, here we go. I am, I am somebody.

Somebody.

I am, I am somebody.

Somebody.

I may be poor.

I may be poor.

But I am, I am somebody.

Somebody.

I may be young.

I may be young.

But I am But I am somebody. I may be on welfare, but I am somebody. I may be small, but I am somebody. I may make a mistake, but I am somebody. My clothes are different. My face is different.

My face is different.

My hair is different.

My hair is different.

But I am.

But I am.

Somebody.

Somebody.

I am black.

I am black.

Brown.

Brown.

White.

White.

I speak a different language.

I speak a different language.

But I must be respected.

But I must be respected.

Protected.

Protected.

Never rejected.

Never rejected.

I am. I am God's child. I am somebody. Give yourself a big hand.

All right, this reminds me of being at church. I am somebody. We are celebrating the life and really the legacy of a legend, Jesse Jackson. Uh, it's really amazing what one man can do, and that's what we are going to do today. Again, welcome to the special edition of the Leadership and Success Podcast. This is going to be really based on an article I wrote when I learned about the passing of Reverend Dr. Jesse Jackson a couple of days ago. Let me share my screen and this is the article I wrote just thinking about his legacy, what the life of one person can really do, I believe, to change the world. Let me see, let me change that a little bit. Okay, so as you can see on the screen, so my article was titled Leadership Lessons from Reverend Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr., keeping hope alive. That was really the message of his life. I have a quote there from the Reverend himself. He says, you must not surrender. You may or may not get there, but just know that you are qualified and you hold and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. And that is so powerful, just to believe that our country will get better for all of its citizens. And I also have a quote from President Barack Obama, and I believe there would be no President Obama without Jesse Jackson. President Obama says, Michelle and I were deeply saddened to hear about the passing of a true giant, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Justice, and so very appreciative. Of that. All right, without any further ado, I am going to go ahead and play. It's gonna be, I think, about 30 minutes or so. It is going to be based again on the article I just showed you. Just taking a few moments to remember the life, the legend, and the legacy of Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.

Here we go.

Let me try this one more time. Looks like my— okay, here we go.

Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today is Wednesday, February 18th, 2026. And I have to say the, uh, the vibe in the studio today, and honestly just looking at the news feeds, it's heavy. It's a really heavy day.

It is. It's one of those days where history feels, you know, very present, like it's right here in the room with us.

We are recording this exactly one day after the passing of the Reverend Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr., who left us yesterday, February 17th. And you know, usually when we sit down here, we are dissecting a tech IPO or we're looking at some new management framework from, I don't know, Silicon Valley or the Harvard Business Review.

Right.

But today the entire world is looking at this one figure. The eulogies are already pouring in. The retrospective documentaries are— they're already airing. It's everywhere.

It's a moment of global mourning. Yeah. I mean, you really can't overstate his impact on the 20th and even into the 21st centuries. But you and I had a conversation just before we hit record. We were looking at the stack of articles and obituaries, and we both kind of hesitated.

We did.

Right.

Because we aren't a history podcast, and we are certainly not a political talk show. If we're gonna do a deep dive on Jesse Jackson, it has to be about utility. It has to be about—

Yeah.

What can we actually learn from him?

Exactly.

Not just admiring what he did, but really understanding the mechanics of how he did it. The how is what matters for us.

Precisely. We wanted to move past the, you know, the great man theory of history, this idea that he was just sort of born with this magical charisma, and look at the actual strategic framework he was using using. And that right there is why we chose the source material we're using today. Yeah. Because, well, it's unexpected.

Unexpected is, uh, putting it mildly. The article is titled Leadership Lessons from Reverend Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.: Keeping Hope Alive. And the author is Bob Fabien B.Z. Zinga. Now, for those who don't know that name, he is not a civil rights historian. He isn't a theologian.

No, not, not at all. Zinga is a cybersecurity executive and an information warfare commander in the US Navy.

Which is just a wild combination. It really is. You have a guy who spends his life thinking about threat vectors, nation-state actors, digital infrastructure, military hierarchy—

All of it.

And he sits down to write a leadership breakdown of a preacher from South Carolina.

It sounds like a mismatch, doesn't it? You'd expect him to be writing about Sun Tzu or Clausewitz or, you know, some Roman general.

Totally.

But that's actually the hook. That's the whole point. Zinga's premise is that Jesse Jackson wasn't just a moral leader, he was a tactical genius. He argues that Jackson's methods, the strategy, the coalition building, the resilience, the negotiation, are directly applicable to these other high-stakes fields like national security and tech leadership.

Okay, so the mission for this deep dive is pretty specific then. We're gonna try to take off the political lens for a bit and put on the strategic lens. We wanna see if we can like reverse engineer the Jesse Jackson operating system.

That's a great way to put it. We want to unpack the framework. We want to move beyond the slogans because let's be honest, we all know the slogans and see the discipline that was underneath them. And Zinga, he frames this entire discussion around a question posed by President Obama in his tribute. Obama said, we stood on his shoulders. Zinga takes that and flips it. He asks the reader, he asks us, who are you lifting today so they may stand tomorrow?

It's a haunting question, a really powerful one. But before we get to the legacy stuff, the shoulders part, We have to start at the beginning. And I don't just mean he was born in Greenville. I mean the beginning of his leadership identity. Zinga calls this the origin story and the crucible.

Right. And context is everything here. Zinga really emphasizes that Jackson's leadership style wasn't formed in a vacuum. It wasn't developed in a business school. It was forged in the segregated South, Greenville, South Carolina.

Which, let's be really clear, wasn't just unpleasant. It wasn't just a place with bad manners. It was an apartheid state.

It was a totalitarian environment if you were Black. I mean, inequality wasn't a theory from a book. It was the law.

Mm-hmm.

It was the air you breathed every single day.

From the water fountains you could use to where you could sit on a bus.

Exactly. And Zinga makes the point that this kind of environment, it calibrates your moral compass, sure, but it also forces you to be intensely strategic.

Mm-hmm.

You can't just be loud. You have to be smart. You have to be calculating. Because if you make a wrong move, you get arrested, or beaten, or killed.

It's a high-stakes training ground.

The highest. But the real shift, what Zinga calls the crucible of responsibility, that happens in Memphis.

1968. The Lorraine Motel.

April 4th, 1968. Jackson is there. He's young, he's ambitious, he's part of Dr. King's inner circle, the SCLC, and he's in the parking lot below the balcony when the shot is fired.

I think we've all seen the photos so many times, the pointing fingers on the balcony, the blood on the shirt that Jackson would later wear.

Yeah.

That we've become sort of desensitized to the sheer chaos of that moment. But Zinga asks us to really put ourselves there. Imagine the command and control breakdown.

That's the military term he uses for it. And it's perfect. It's a decapitation strike. The leader is gone. The head of the movement has just been assassinated in front of his closest aides.

In a military context, when the admiral's ship is hit and the admiral is dead, there is this moment of absolute paralyzing shock.

It's chaos. Who has the con? Who gives the orders now? What's the next move? Does everyone scatter? Do you freeze?

And it's not happening in a vacuum. The nation is on fire. Literally. Cities are burning. There is this explosion of rage and grief and this massive, massive power vacuum right at the top of the movement.

This is the moment Zinga focuses on. He calls it the crucible of responsibility. In that void, in that absolute chaos, Jackson didn't wait. He didn't wait for a committee meeting to be called. He didn't wait for the dust to settle. He stepped up.

Now, to be fair, that was and still is controversial. There were a lot of people in the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who felt he stepped up too fast.

Oh, absolutely.

Who felt he was grabbing the spotlight, that he was trying to inherit a mantle that wasn't his to take.

Without a doubt. And Zinga doesn't shy away from that at all. Leadership, especially in a crisis, always involves friction. But his analysis is that in a crisis, speed matters. Action matters more than consensus in that initial shockwave. Jackson stepped into the void not as a replacement for King, because, as Zinga notes, you simply cannot replace a Dr. King, but as a continuation of the mission.

Continuation, not replacement. That's a very subtle distinction, but a huge one.

It's vital. It's everything. If you try to replace a legend, you will always fail. You look like usurper. You look arrogant, right?

You're setting yourself up for an impossible comparison.

But if you frame your leadership as the vessel that carries the mission forward, that keeps the flame alive, you gain legitimacy. You're not saying I am him. You're saying his work must continue through us.

And Zinga connects this directly to modern crisis management.

He does. He says, great leaders don't wait for perfect conditions. They rise when history calls. He argues that leadership isn't about having all the answers. It's about being willing to act in the face of uncertainty.

It reminds me of the whole fog of war concept. If you are a commander on a battlefield or even, you know, a CEO during a market crash or a massive data breach, you never have 100% of the data.

Never. Not even close. You're operating with maybe 40% of the information you wish you had.

And if you wait until you have 100% of the data to make a decision, you're already dead. The opportunity is gone. The company has failed. The battle is lost.

Exactly. Jackson's leadership was born in that fog of war. He had to make decisions in real time, in the middle of unimaginable grief and violence. Zinga argues that this ability to operate within chaos, to navigate without a map, is what defined the next 60 years of his life. He wasn't a fair-weather leader. He was a foul-weather leader.

Okay, so he steps up, he takes the con, to use the naval term. But you can't run a movement on adrenaline alone. That will burn out. You need fuel. And this leads us to the second part of Zinga's framework, which I find fascinating: hope as a discipline.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and I know what the listener is probably thinking. Keep hope alive. It's a catchphrase.

It is.

It's on t-shirts. It sounds soft.

It sounds like something you'd see on a greeting card or a corporate motivational poster with a mountain on it that nobody actually reads.

That's right. With an eagle. Soaring.

Exactly. But Zinga, the Navy commander, stops us right there. He says, "You are misunderstanding the technology of hope." The technology of hope.

Okay, I'm intrigued.

He completely rejects the idea of hope as passive optimism.

Mm-hmm.

You know, the everything will work out in the end or everything happens for a reason mindset.

Hallmark Channel version of hope.

Yes. Zinga defines Jackson's hope as active resilience. It's a verb, it's a practice. He quotes Jackson directly, "If you fall behind, run faster. Never give up. Rise up against the odds." Run faster.

That's an instruction. That requires sweat. That's not a feeling. It's an action.

It's an action. And Zinga uses this really gritty, compelling analogy from his Navy life to explain it. He talks about the watch team at 0200 hours.

Okay, break that down for the civilians among us. What does 0200 on a warship actually look like?

It's the graveyard shift. You are in the middle of the ocean, maybe the South China Sea. It is pitch black outside. Your body is screaming for sleep. The ship is just humming, the monitors are blinking, but for hours nothing is happening. It is monotonous, it is soul-crushingly exhausting, and it is lonely. But the threat is still very real.

An enemy submarine could be out there, a missile could be incoming. If you zone out, if you fall asleep at your station, people could die, the ship could be lost.

That's the whole point? Zinga asks. What keeps that sailor staring at the radar screen when every cell in their body wants to shut down? It's not excitement. It's not even fear necessarily, because you get used to fear after a while. It is operational stamina. It is the learned discipline to believe that your vigilance matters even when there's no evidence of a threat. That, Zinga says, is hope in a military context.

Wow.

He also draws a direct line from that to cybersecurity incident responders.

Which is an even more high-pressure environment in some ways because the attack is already happening. Imagine you are in the SOC, the security operations center.

Uh-huh.

A major ransomware attack hits a hospital system.

The worst-case scenario.

Screens are turning red, servers are encrypting one by one, life support systems could be at risk. The executives are on the phone screaming at you. The attackers are in your system taunting you, telling you to just give up and pay the ransom.

It feels like the sky is falling. It feels completely hopeless.

It feels like you have already lost. That is the psychological weapon of the attacker: to induce despair. Because if the defender gives up hope, the attacker wins by default. So keeping hope alive in that context isn't about feeling happy or optimistic. It's about cognitive discipline. It is the absolute refusal to surrender to the entropy of the situation. It's a cold, calculated decision.

It's saying, "I will find the kill switch. I will restore the backup. I will isolate the network. I will not quit." I will not quit.

That's the mantra.

I really love that reframing hope as operational stamina.

Yeah.

It takes it completely out of the emotional fluffy realm and puts it squarely into the tactical realm. It's a resource you have to manage, just like ammunition or bandwidth.

And just like any resource, it can be depleted. Which brings us to the other side of this psychological warfare: identity. Zinga talks about the famous chant, "I am somebody." I am somebody.

We've all seen the clips. It's usually in a school auditorium, kids yelling it back at him, the call and response. It's powerful theater.

But Zinga says it's much more than theater.

Fucking cool.

He calls it psychological armor.

Armor against what, specifically?

Against the pervasive narrative of worthlessness. I mean, think about the people Jackson was leading in the '60s, '70s, '80s.

Poor.

Black. Disenfranchised. They lived in a country that told them every single day, through laws, through wages, through media, through policing, that they were nobody. That they were gears in a machine, or worse, obstacles to be cleared.

You can't lead people into a difficult fight if they fundamentally believe they are already defeated.

Precisely. If you are an insider threat expert in cybersecurity like Zinga is, you know that the most dangerous person in an organization is often the one who feels undervalued. The employee who feels invisible, who feels like they are nobody, they check out, they stop caring, or in the worst cases, they actively sabotage the mission.

That makes so much sense.

So Jackson understood that before he could ask people to boycott or march or vote, he had to rebuild their internal infrastructure first. He had to convince them against all external evidence that they were somebody, that they mattered.

So it's really about identity driving performance. You have to establish the value of the asset before you can deploy it.

That's a great way to put it. And Zinga poses this as a direct question to modern leaders. Do your people feel seen? Do they know they matter to the mission? Because if a sailor or a software developer or a sales rep feels like a cog in a machine, yeah, you are getting compliance at best. You are not getting commitment.

That is a massive distinction. Compliance versus commitment. I am somebody is the tool you use to move people from compliance to commitment.

It turns a victim into an agent. It turns a pawn into a player. It is a fundamental shift in self-perception.

Okay, so we have the origin story, which is really about crisis management. We have the fuel, which is this disciplined hope and identity. Now we need to get into the machinery, the strategy, because this is the part that I think gets glossed over the most when people talk about Jackson. Section 3 in Zinga's article, the rainbow strategy.

The rainbow coalition.

Now I'll be honest, when I hear rainbow coalition, my first thought is of a nice multicolored button from the '80s or like a diversity poster you'd see in an HR office. It feels very, I don't know, benign.

And that is exactly why we underestimate it.

Hmm.

Zinga warns us not to get stuck on the warm and fuzzy imagery. He argues that the Rainbow Coalition was a ruthless, sophisticated, and incredibly difficult strategy of force multiplication.

Force multiplication. Okay, unpack that military term.

Force multiplication is any factor that dramatically increases the combat effectiveness of a military force. A new technology like night vision goggles, is a force multiplier. Superior tactics can be a force multiplier. Jackson's insight was that a coalition is the ultimate force multiplier in politics. Also, his core insight was this: minorities by definition do not have the numbers to win a majority vote alone. Just simple math. Black people alone could not elect a president. Poor people alone, if they are divided by race, cannot change economic policy. Farmers alone can't change agricultural policy.

So the math just doesn't work if you stay in your lane, in your silo.

It never will. So he had to build a coalition. But— and here's the really hard part— he didn't just gather people who already liked each other and agreed on everything. That's easy. He gathered people who had shared interests but who had been taught historically to dislike or even hate each other.

Give me a concrete example of that.

The most famous one is when he went to rural white farmers in Iowa and Missouri during the 1980s farm crisis. Now these are guys who culturally had very little in common with urban Black labor activists in Chicago.

Right. On 90% of social issues, they are probably on opposite sides.

Probably.

In fact, they might have been politically opposed on almost everything. But Jackson found the 10% where their interests aligned perfectly.

The foreclosure crisis. The banks.

Exactly. The big corporate farms were crushing the small white family farm with debt, just like the big corporate factories were crushing the Black autoworker by moving jobs overseas. Jackson went into those white communities, places where he was not exactly welcomed with open arms, and said, "We are fighting the same enemy. Our boats are different, but we're in the same storm." That is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

The transaction costs of building that kind of coalition are huge. You have to overcome decades, centuries even, of racism, suspicion, cultural language barriers.

It's the hardest kind of leadership there is. Leading your own tribe is easy. Everyone speaks the same shorthand. Everyone shares the same grievances. Leading a coalition of different, often competing tribes, that is advanced operational art. And Zinga connects this directly to joint operations in the military.

Joint ops. So Army, Navy, Air Force working together.

Right. Look, the Navy has a culture. The Army has a culture. The Air Force has its own culture. They have rivalries. They make fun of each other. They don't like sharing their budget.

The stereotypes are legendary.

They are. Yeah, but you absolutely cannot win a modern war with just the Navy. It's impossible. You need the Army to hold ground. You need the Air Force for air cover. You need the Marines to take the beach. You need coalition partners, Brits, French, Japanese, who speak different languages and have different equipment.

So you have to find the shared mission that is so important it overrides all the tribal differences.

It has to. The mission has to be the unifying principle. And Zinga applies this directly to tech too. He talks about cross-functional collaboration.

Which is the corporate buzzword for "please, for the love of God, stop hating the other departments." It basically is.

But think about it in real cybersecurity terms. You have the security team. They're often called the "no" department. Their job is to manage risk.

You can't do that. It's not secure.

Then you have the product team. They're the "go" department. Their job is to innovate and ship features fast. Then you have Legal, who worries about compliance. You have sales, who just wants to close the deal.

And usually the security and product teams are at war. Product wants to ship new features as fast as possible. Security wants to lock everything down and do 6 months of testing.

Right.

If they stay in their silos, the company fails. It's guaranteed. Either you ship a product full of holes that gets hacked on day one, or you ship nothing at all, your competitor eats your lunch. Jackson's genius was being the silo buster. He showed that you could build an ecosystem where the security engineer and the sales guy realize they both ultimately want the same thing: a successful, sustainable, profitable company.

Zinga has this aha moment in the text where he says, "Mission success is never solo. It is coalition-enabled." I love that phrase.

It's so true. And he challenges the reader with a really pointed question: Are you building silos? Tribes or bridges ecosystems? Because silos feel safe. They feel comfortable. It feels good to be in a room where everyone agrees with you and speaks your language.

But bridges are where you get leverage. That's where the power is.

That's where the force multiplication happens.

And speaking of leverage, that is the perfect segue to Section 4, because Jackson didn't just want people to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. He wanted to change the system. And to do that, he needed real leverage.

This brings us to Economic Justice and Operation P.S.H.H.

This is the so what. Of the civil rights movement. This is the pivot. Jackson realized very early on that civil rights, the right to vote, the right to sit at a lunch counter, were fundamentally incomplete without civil rights, which was his term for the money to actually buy the burger. There is a, quote, Zinga pulls that is just— it's brutal and it hits you right in the chest. Tears will get you sympathy. Sweat will get you change.

It's so unsentimental. It's almost cold in its clarity.

It is.

It's a complete rejection of just appealing to people's Better angel.

And it's intensely strategic. Tears represents the moral appeal. Please stop being racist because it's mean and it hurts our feelings. That gets you sympathy. It might get you a donation from a guilty liberal. But it doesn't change the power structure of the economy. Sweat represents work. It represents leverage. It represents power.

So what was his leverage? What was the sweat?

The wallet.

The consumer's wallet. The corporate balance sheet. Operation PUSH, People United to Save Humanity, popularized the boycott as a surgical weapon. The slogan was, "Don't buy where you can't work." He targeted huge national brands.

Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven, Burger King, Anheuser-Busch.

And he didn't just march with picket signs outside. He used data. He did his homework. He would go to these companies with binders full of research and say, "Black people consume X% of your product, but we represent 0% of your board of directors and 0% of your suppliers and franchise owners." If you don't change that ratio, we will turn off the revenue.

It's a distributed denial of service attack. It's a DDoS attack on their revenue stream.

Left. That is exactly how Zinga, the cybersecurity guy, frames it, and it's a perfect analogy. In the digital world, a DDoS attack floods a system with traffic until it crashes. It targets the availability of the resource. Jackson organized millions of people to deny service to these corporations, to deny them revenue until they patched their vulnerability.

And the vulnerability in this case was systemic racism in their higher —exactly.

And Zinga applies this logic directly to the modern role of a CSO, a chief information security officer.

This is a really crucial point for anyone listening who works in tech or any large corporation. It is, Zinga says.

If you are a CSO and you go to the board of directors and you just talk about threats and hackers and scary things that might happen, you are using tears. You are making an emotional appeal.

And the board might nod and look concerned, but they're not going to give you the $10 million budget you're asking for.

Exactly. To get the budget, to get real change, you have to use SWOT. You have to use data. You have to use something like the FAIR analysis, model factor analysis of information risk. You have to speak the language of the business. You don't say hackers are bad. You say, based on our modeling, if we don't fix this specific vulnerability, it translates to a probable $50 million loss in revenue and a 15% drop in our stock price next quarter.

You have to engage the balance sheet. You have to show them the money.

You have to align your mission, which is security, with their mission, which is profit and shareholder value. That is exactly what Jackson did. He aligned the mission of civil rights with corporate profitability. He made it profitable for companies to be inclusive and made it incredibly expensive to be racist. That is pure game theory.

You're not changing their morals. You're changing their incentives. And it worked.

They signed covenants. Hired Black executives, and started using Black-owned suppliers, not because they suddenly saw the light, but because it was good for business. Okay, let's pivot for a second.

We've talked domestic strategy, but there is a whole other chapter of Jackson's life that Zinga highlights, and I feel like this one gets forgotten by the younger generation especially: his work in diplomacy.

The shadow diplomat.

It's an incredible story. Jackson went to places the US State Department wouldn't go, or couldn't go, Syria, Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and he brought American hostages home.

Let's zoom in on one of these because Zinga really emphasizes the method he used. Let's talk about Syria, 1983-1984.

Okay, set the scene for us. So a U.S.

Navy pilot, Lieutenant Robert Goodman, is shot down over Lebanon during a bombing run. He's captured by the Syrians and taken to Damascus. The Reagan administration is to put it mildly, furious. Tensions are incredibly high. Through the roof. The US is bombing Syrian positions. The Syrians are digging in. It is a complete stalemate. And Goodman is the pawn in the middle of this superpower chess game.

And the official State Department line is probably something like, "We don't negotiate with terrorists," or, "We aren't going to beg for his release." Right.

The official diplomatic channels are totally frozen. It's all ego. It's all posturing. It's, "We are the superpower. You must yield to our demands."— which never works.

So Jackson decides to go. A private citizen, no official authority.

And everyone in the Reagan White House is horrified. They're convinced he's going to embarrass the country. He's gonna fail. He's gonna make things worse.

So what does he do when he gets there? How does he approach it? This is the key.

Zinga breaks it down to a simple formula: appeal to shared humanity first, politics second. Uh-huh. Jackson gets a meeting with President Hafez al-Assad. We're talking about a brutal dictator, a very hard man.

So Jackson doesn't go in hot demanding the release.

No. That's what a politician from the State Department would do. Jackson goes in as a minister. He talks about peace. He talks about the value of life in the Christian and Muslim traditions. He listens to Assad's grievances about the U.S. shelling. He validates the human emotion in the room before he ever talks about the political problem. He de-escalates.

He takes the armor off, both his and Assad's.

He creates what Zinga calls a psychological bridge. He basically reframes the situation for Assad. He says, "Releasing this man isn't a sign of weakness. It's not you bowing to America. It's a sign of mercy. And mercy is what strong leaders show." He gave Assad a way to say yes without losing face.

And he walked out of Damascus with L.T. Goodman? He walked out with the pilot.

President Reagan had to awkwardly welcome them both at the White House. It was a masterclass in what the intelligence community calls human-human intelligence, understanding the motivations and psychology of your adversary.

And Zinga connects this to the concept of strategic de-escalation, right?

In the military or in law enforcement hostage negotiations, or even in corporate crisis communications. If you come in hot, if you come in with your ego flaring and making demands, you almost always make the situation worse. You back your opponent into a corner where they can't retreat without looking weak.

He asked the question. Do you lead with ego or empathy?

And that's the core of it. Strength isn't always volume. Strength isn't always a drone strike. Sometimes real strength is the retreat to sit down with your enemy, find that tiny sliver of human connection, and use that as the foundation for a resolution.

It's so interesting because empathy in a corporate setting is often dismissed as a soft skill. Oh, he's a people person. But Zinga is arguing that empathy is actually a high-yield tactical weapon.

It's a mechanism for resolving deadlocks that force and intimidation cannot resolve, and that makes it incredibly useful. That is pure utility. All right.

We have to talk about the tree shaker. This is Section 5, and this is where we get into the politics, the presidential runs of 1984 and 1988.

The Rainbow Coalition in action on the national stage.

Now, look, if you just look at the scoreboard, Jesse Jackson lost.

Technically, yes. He did not become the nominee.

In 1988, he did amazingly well. He won 13 primaries and caucuses. He got almost 7 million votes. He came in second to Michael Dukakis. But he didn't get the nomination. Dukakis did. And then George H.W. Bush won the general election. So a cynic, and I'll play the cynic here for a minute, would say, great effort, but he failed.

And that is the conventional view. That's how most people see it. Winning is the only thing. Yeah. But Zinga introduces this incredible metaphor, the tree shaker versus the jam maker, that completely reframes what winning actually means in a long-term strategy.

And this comes from a book Zinga reviews in his piece, A Dream Deferred, by the journalist Abby Phillips. Break down this analogy for us.

Okay. Imagine an apple tree. The best fruit, the ripest apples, are way up at the top. They're stuck. Someone has to go up to that tree and shake it violently. You have to disrupt the branches. You have to cause a commotion to get the fruit to fall.

That's the tree shaker.

That's the tree shaker. It is messy work. It is loud. It is controversial. And this is the crucial part. The tree shaker often gets hit on the head by the falling branches. They get bruised, They are seen by the establishment as disruptive or radical or dangerous. And very often they don't get to be the one to eat the fruit.

Because it's on the ground now for someone else to gather.

Right. Then someone else comes along. The jam maker. The jam maker is calm. They're polished. They gather up all that fallen fruit. They process it. They make it palatable and appealing for the mainstream. They put it in a nice jar with a nice label. They get the sales. They get the credit.

So in this political analogy, Jesse Jackson is the tree shaker.

And Barack Obama is the jam maker.

That is— wow, that is a powerful way to look at it.

Think about what Jackson did in '84 and '88. He registered millions of new voters who had never participated before. He built that rainbow coalition of Black and white and Latino voters. He normalized the very image of a Black man standing on a debate stage, not as a token, but as a serious contender for the presidency. He moved the Overton window, the range of what is considered an acceptable idea in public discourse. He shook the tree of American politics so hard that the system itself cracked.

And 20 years later, Barack Obama walked right through that crack.

Exactly. Obama could run a campaign of hope and change, which was smooth, polished, mainstream, reassuring, because Jackson had already done the rough, jagged, uncomfortable work of disruption.

This is such a profound lesson for leaders, especially in the tech world or in any entrepreneurial field, because we are all taught to want to be the jam maker. We want to be the CEO who rings the bell at the NYSE. We want our face on the magazine. We want the credit.

We want the exit. We want the billion-dollar valuation. But Zinga argues that true transformational leadership is often about having the courage to be the tree shaker. It's about being the founder who maybe gets fired by their own board, but whose idea changes the industry, or the activist who gets arrested but whose protest leads to a change in the law years later, or the engineer who builds the foundational backend architecture that nobody ever sees, but that makes the flashy frontend app possible for someone else.

Impact is measured by what you make achievable for those who come next.

That's a direct quote from the article. That's the key metric. It's a different way of keeping score. If you are a leader, you have to ask yourself a hard question. Am I willing to do the work that won't pay off until after I'm gone? Am I willing to shake the tree even if I know I won't get to taste the jam? That requires a suppression of ego.

That is— yeah, frankly, it's rare. It's almost superhuman. It is rare.

And that's why true tree shakers are historical figures, not just successful contemporaries. They change the landscape itself.

This idea of ego suppression leads us perfectly into the final section of Zinga's analysis: the personal and the spiritual. Because Zinga actually met Jackson, this isn't just theory for him.

He did. Section 6, it's a very personal story that really grounds all this high-level strategic theory in a real-world moment.

The year is 2003. The place is Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Roll Tide. Right. Zinga is a graduate student at the University of Alabama. And the context is tense. The university is in the process of looking for a new head football coach.

Which in the state of Alabama is arguably a more important position than the governor. No question.

And there are rumors and reports that qualified Black candidates are being systematically overlooked for the job. It's the old boys' network in full effect. It's all about who you know.

So Jesse Jackson comes to town. Now remember, this is 2003. This is well past his presidential runs. He's an elder statesman. He's already a legend. He doesn't need to be there. He could be giving 6-figure paid speeches in New York or London, but he flies to Alabama to march and advocate for a fair hiring process for a football coach.

Zinga meets him there. And what was the big takeaway from that encounter?

It was the risk. Jackson took a personal and a reputational risk to step into a hostile environment. And trust me, Alabama football fans who feel their sacred process is being threatened by an outsider can be extremely hostile, just to stand on principle.

For fairness, he didn't wait for a safe moment or for an invitation. No.

And Zinga says this taught him a fundamental lesson: true leaders step into discomfort. If you only lead when it's safe, when everyone already agrees with you, you aren't really leading. You're just managing a consensus.

And he kept doing this. He kept showing up even as his body began to fail him in recent years.

The Parkinson's diagnosis, And then the progressive supernuclear palsy. We've all seen the recent footage of him. He was frail. He was shaking. He needed help to walk, but he was still showing up at protests, still advocating.

Zinga writes a line that just floored me. Titles may retire. Purpose never does. It's powerful.

And that resilience, that purpose, Zinga argues, is rooted in his faith. And he ends the entire analysis by breaking down what he calls a biblical leadership triad. Now, I know we have listeners of all faiths and no faith. With, but you should treat these as leadership algorithms. They're universal operating principles regardless of their source.

Okay, let's run through the 3 pillars of this triad. Number 1, Micah 6:8.

Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. Zinga calls this the principle of moral authority.

How does that work mechanically as a leadership tool?

It means your authority doesn't come from your rank on an org chart. It doesn't come from your title on a business card or the stripes of your uniform. It comes from your character. Jackton could walk into a room with a dictator or a president and command respect, not because he had an army, but because he had moral weight. Zinga's point is, if you are a leader and you have to constantly rely on your formal title to get people to listen to you, you have already lost the real game of leadership.

Number 2 in the triad: Ecclesiastes 4:12.

A cord of 3 strands is not quickly broken. This is the principle of coalition leadership.

This is the anti-silo principle we talked about earlier.

Exactly. It's the mathematical formula the Rainbow Coalition. Unity multiplies strength. You are fragile alone, you are unbreakable together. It's a recognition that no single person or group has all the strength or all the answers. And the final one, number 3, Galatians 6.9: And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap a harvest if you do not give up. This, Zinga says, is the principle of hope under pressure.

It's the operational stamina.

It's the operational stamina. It's the algorithm for endurance. Leadership is rarely a quick victory. It's often about what Tolkien called "the long defeat." It's about having the grit to stay on watch at 0200 when nothing is happening. It's about having the faith to keep shaking the tree for 40 years so that someone else, maybe someone who isn't even born yet, can make the jam.

Justice.

Unity. Endurance. That's the triad. That's the core of the operating system.

So as we wrap up this deep dive, we have covered a lot of ground. We've gone from the chaos of Memphis to the cool strategy of the Rainbow Coalition, the hard leverage of economics, the soft power of diplomacy, and the ego-crushing humility of being the tree shaker.

It is what Zinga calls full spectrum leadership. And I think that is why a Navy commander, an information warfare expert, is the one writing about him. Because very few leaders in any field managed to operate across all those domains effectively. Jackson did.

We started this deep dive with that quote from President Obama, "We stood on his shoulders." It's the defining image, isn't it?

Mm-hmm. Zinga reflects on his own career. He's a Black man who became a commander in the US Navy, an executive in Silicon Valley. He knows with absolute certainty that he is standing on the shoulders of the tree shakers like Jesse Jackson who came before him.

But Zinga doesn't let us, us, the readers, off the hook with a nice warm feeling, he ends with a direct challenge.

He turns the camera right back on the listener. He asks 3 very direct questions. First, where are you called to keep hope alive? Which means, where in your life, your job, your community is the entropy taking over and where do you need to apply that disciplined operational stamina?

Second, who feels invisible on your team?

That's the "I am somebody" check. As a leader, who are you failing to arm with a sense of identity and purpose? Who on your team is just a cog? And the third one—

this, this is the one that really keeps me up at night. What systems are you shaking today that others will benefit from tomorrow? That is the ultimate legacy question.

And Zinga closes with this final, incredibly provocative thought. He says, if your leadership ended today, what infrastructure would remain? Are you building a legacy that allows someone else to make the jam, or are you just trying to hoard the fruit? Hoarding the fruit.

That is the default mode of modern careerism, isn't it? Look at my resume. Look at my stock options. Look at my quarterly numbers.

It is. It's all about personal gain. But nobody builds monuments to the fruit hoarder. They remember the person who shook the tree. They remember the tree shaker.

Well, I think that is the perfect place to land. To the memory of Reverend Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr., a strategist, a diplomat, a leader, a tree shaker.

Indeed. Let's learn together, lead together, rise together.

Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We will see you next time. Keep hope alive.

All right, thank you so much for listening. This is all I have for you today, and again, today is definitely a day we need to celebrate this legend, Reverend Dr. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr., born October 8th, 1941, and he passed away February 17th, 2026, 2 days ago. All right, uh, we definitely want to take the time to celebrate him. And like he has taught us, I am somebody. It doesn't matter who you are— black, white, male, female— you are somebody. And I think we can all be reminded of that. All right, I'm gonna be back later today. I actually have, I think, 4 episode I need to catch up on because we did the study on the Book of Proverbs. This is not a religious study, we just go through the Book of Proverbs looking for wisdom and leadership lessons. And I'm gonna have all of it handled by artificial intelligence. We're gonna have an AI recap. We went through the entire book last month, and today I think we're gonna start with chapter 16. Yeah, 16, 17, 18, and then today is the 19th. I'm gonna attempt to do all 4 chapters by the end of today. All right, until next time, for those of you who are going to join me later today for those 4 chapter recap with AI, thank you. And for everybody else, I'm going to have some leadership and success interviews tomorrow and Friday as well. And we also have a freestyle admiral, a vice admiral who has agreed to be on the podcast soon. So really excited about that. All right, until next time, have a great rest of your day. And the last thing I'm going to ask, please type in the comment, 3 things that you've— 3 takeaways from today's episode. What did you learn? And what is one thing you are going to put in practice starting now? All right, bye for now.

Thank you for tuning in to the Leadership and Success Podcast with your host, your host, Coach BZ. If today's episode added value to your leadership journey, be sure to subscribe, share, and join us again for more wisdom nuggets on how to lead better and achieve greater success. Remember, leadership is the most critical skill of our time. The world will always need leaders to inspire others, drive innovation, and execute meaningful strategy. So why not count yourself among the bold leaders shaping 21st century. Until next time, stay inspired, stay committed, and keep leading with excellence.