In this talk, Sean Glaze recounts a personal college story about a dead Mitsubishi Starion that wouldn’t start because its battery was covered in yellow corrosion. His senior roommate, Rich, quickly diagnosed the problem as hydrogen‑gas‑induced corrosion and showed him how to clean the terminals with a baking‑soda solution and tighten the connections. Glaze uses this experience as a metaphor for human energy in teams: most people aren’t broken, they’re merely “corroded” by factors that drain their vitality. To restore their energy, leaders must connect individuals to two critical elements (implied later in the talk) that remove the corrosion and enable them to deliver their full power. The narrative blends humor, vivid description, and a persuasive leadership lesson, positioning the battery analogy as a practical framework for teamwork and motivation.
Chapters
Now, not everything I learned in college was on a class syllabus. If it had been, people would have enjoyed doing their homework a whole lot more, I'm sure. This is the car I drove in college. I went to Georgia Southern University., and this is purple glaze. Jimi Hendrix fans will appreciate that. That was a 1980-something Mitsubishi Starion, and ladies loved it. If only. So I'm walking out of the room that I'm renting in a house that year. I'm a freshman at Georgia Southern. I walk out and And it's again, you can imagine, even early October in Statesboro, Georgia, it's a little warm. So I've got shorts on, I've got a t-shirt on, I got my backpack over my shoulder, and I opened the door of the Mitsubishi Starion and I put my key in and I turned the key and nothing happened. Nothing. Now, you know Sam Cooke, right? Don't know much about— <LYRICS>It's a living thing.</LYRICS> Well, I don't know much about cars. I knew even less back then, but I was able to find the hood latch. And I walk around to the front of the car and I pop the hood, and I had no idea what I was looking for. But I did see in the front right-hand corner where the battery is— knew what a battery was— there was this yellow crud all over it. You guys ever seen that stuff? Yellow crud. It's the official technical term. So having no idea what to do about yellow crud and knowing it probably wasn't good, I ran inside to find my older roommate whose name was Rich. Now Rich was kind of like my Yoda. He was a senior, he was a whole lot smarter, a whole lot more experienced. And I go in and I find Rich and he's there in the living room of the home that we were renting together. And I say, Rich, dude, you're not gonna believe this. I've got a 9 o'clock class, it's 8:45. And there's some yellow crud on my battery. What am I going to do? And he laughed. He said, dude, it's not crud. It's just corrosion. Now, if he had really been my Yoda, he would have said, corrosion it is, dude. But he explained that it's really hydrogen gas that had come out of and leaked out of the battery somehow and actually mixed with the air up underneath the hood. And that together is what kind of coagulates there, and he was saying stuff that I'm sure made all kinds of sense to Richard. To me, it was kind of like the Peanuts cartoon teacher. Womp womp womp womp womp. I just needed to get to class. How do I start the car? So he goes into the kitchen, he grabs a box of baking soda. Some of you guys know how to do this stuff. And he says, take this baking soda, put it in a cup of some warm water. If you pour it on the top, that corrosion will melt away. You just need to take an adjustable wrench, tighten the connections. If you don't have good connections, you're not going to get any energy. It was years later when I realized how unbelievably wise Richard had been. Because after working with thousands of participants and audiences, you realize that people really are just like that battery that I had that day. Most people, if they're not giving the energy that you know they could, they're not bad, they're not broken, they're just corroded. And so what you need to do if you want to get that energy is to connect them to two very important things.
