Field Note: After the Headline
The morning after the UnitedHealthcare CEO was killed in New York, the air here in Florida felt heavier.
No one said it out loud, but everyone in my world was thinking the same thing, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.
By midday, a board chair from a healthcare firm in Naples called. Their executives were a married couple, both visible, both steady. The company had grown fast, quietly, the kind of success that draws attention before anyone’s ready for it. They weren’t scared. They just wanted to understand what they didn’t know.
When I arrived at their office, everything looked ordinary. Phones ringing, meetings underway, sunlight spilling through the glass. But there was a stillness in the room, the kind that settles in after bad news. They were polite, tired, watching me as if I might already have the answers.
They told me they weren’t high-risk people. No controversies, no enemies, no reason to believe anyone meant them harm. But leadership itself changes the math. Visibility creates pattern, and pattern creates vulnerability.
I told them what I tell most clients. You can’t control the world. You can only control what makes you predictable.
We began with their calendar. It looked like a flight map; conferences, investor meetings, charity events, family travel. They had access to a fractional jet program but rarely used it. “Feels excessive,” the CEO said. I told him that being cornered in a crowded terminal would feel excessive too. He laughed, and the tension broke.
From there, the work spread outward. Home, office, travel, digital life. The places their worlds overlapped. Most of the exposures weren’t dramatic, recurring routes, public schedules, predictable posts. The kind of small things that only matter once you chart them together.
We called it a whole-of-life audit, though to them it probably just felt like someone quietly taking apart their routines. We built structure around what couldn’t change, corrected what could, and left behind a plan that no one would notice except the people who needed to.
Their children were young, online in all the ways kids are. They posted freely, tagged locations, lived in real time. None of it was wrong, but all of it was revealing. We made small adjustments — when and how trips were shared, who saw what, how schools handled travel notices.
It wasn’t about restriction. It was about space. About giving them enough distance between public and private life for normal to feel normal again.
By the end of the week, I met with the board. They didn’t want reassurance. They wanted structure. Something quantifiable they could point to and say, this is how we manage exposure.
We formalized everything in a written study, executive travel protocols, digital mapping, facility controls, continuity planning. Nothing showy. Just a framework, reviewed quarterly like any other part of governance.
When it was done, I remember the silence in that office. The same space, the same light through the windows, but the quiet had changed. It wasn’t fear anymore. It was order.
That’s the part that stays with me. The reminder that security isn’t what you buy after the fact. It’s what you build before you need it.
The best work doesn’t feel like protection at all. It just feels like calm returning.
