Jim Fixx didn't always look like a guy who belonged on the cover of a fitness book.
When he started running at 35, he was a heavy smoker with a desk job. But running made him a new man. He quit cigarettes and was eventually running marathons. Then he wrote a book about it.
Fixx was the poster child for everything he taught. The Complete Book of Running sold a million copies and became a best-selling source of inspiration for an entire generation. Strangers stopped him for autographs and advice. Readers sent letters thanking him for changing their lives.
Then one day, Fixx went out for a run... and died... of a heart attack at age 52. In a sad case of "two things can be true at once" it turned out that Jim also had severe heart disease.
It opened up a national conversation about what “healthy” really means. Here was a guy who looked like the picture of health, but under the surface, there was a ticking time bomb.
Simply put: being able to keep running (and do it well!) wasn’t proof that everything inside him was working. There were warning signs that went unheeded. Had Jim not started running when he did, chances are good he could have ended up like his father, who died from a heart attack in his 40s.
It's a cautionary tale I wish more organizations took to heart. Like Fixx, you can still be “running well” on paper while something vital inside your organization is deteriorating.
Profit matters. It's the lifeblood of a company. It's what keeps things "pumping" as we grow. I own a business and I've had more than a few times where we were "bleeding money" and it feels like the company's going to die.
But fixing profitability doesn't mean your company is healthy. If your brain isn’t functioning properly, your kidneys are failing, or another major organ is shutting down, having great bloodwork means fuck-all. So why treat your bottom line as proof that your company is healthy?
Cutting payroll may cost you the person who knows why a critical process works the way it does. You can save on salaries and end up spending that savings on training replacements. You can reduce customer support costs until poor customer service costs you customers.
But hey... look at that bottom line!
Some leaders understand those consequences and make the call anyway. Then we ask the people that remain to "do more with less" to keep everything running.
Why are we so surprised that leadership burnout is a hot topic lately? This has been happening for decades... and it appears to be getting worse.
Gallup’s 2026 global workplace report shows manager engagement falling by almost 10 percentage points. That's not a small number. The people responsible for keeping teams moving have lost considerably more of their own connection to the work.
Executive leadership isn't much better. A Gartner survey indicated that 67% of respondents were being asked to do more than two years earlier, and 44% said their responsibilities were causing them more stress. More than half said they were likely to leave their role within two years. More than a quarter of them within six months of the survey. According to a DDI report, 40% of stressed leaders had considered leaving leadership roles to improve their well-being.
What would happen if 27–56% of your leadership left between now and Easter?
When the people charged with making the organization function are questioning whether they want to keep doing it, it's hard for me to think this is just a personal preference and not a systemic issue.
No amount of "support" or "employee assistance" will stem this tide if you don't also examine what you’re asking them to return to. Otherwise, you're just helping them catch their breath so they can return to carrying the same unsustainable load.
When I was a contract employee working at Delphi in the ’90s, my boss handed me a copy of William Bridges’s JobShift and told me it was the future of work.
Portfolio careers. Less organizational loyalty. A working life that depended less on staying with one employer and more on keeping yourself employable... the same things I hear people complaining about now.
Published in 1994, JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs examined a shift away from stable jobs toward more fluid arrangements for getting work done.
In a 1998 interview, Bridges described organizations being “dejobbed,” with work moving across projects, contractors, and changing teams. He challenged the expectation that doing good work would keep you on the payroll or that long service would necessarily work in your favor.
That was more than thirty years ago!
Now we see experienced people advertising themselves as “fractional.” Some deliberately chose that arrangement. Others tell me privately that they would LOVE a full-time job. They’re offering pieces of their expertise because they haven’t been able to find someone willing to hire them for the whole role.
These are people who never wanted to run a business. Now they’re having to hustle to find clients, sell their services, and piece together an income.
“Fractional” sounds sexy, but it doesn’t tell you whether a person chose a portfolio career or is trying to survive on one.
Add that to the potential leadership exodus on the horizon and you've got real questions about what organizations expect people to commit to and what those people can reasonably expect in return.
In my experience, leaders who’ve had enough aren't quiet quitters. They find another, "better" offer and leave, taking their institutional knowledge with them.
You can hire someone for that role and they may be excellent. But they still need time to learn which customer requires a phone call instead of an email, why a seemingly pointless step exists, or what went wrong the last three times someone proposed the initiative currently being presented as a breakthrough. Until they're up to speed, someone has to absorb the mistakes and delays.
Gartner’s findings showed more-tenured executives were more likely to anticipate leaving, and companies with longer-tenured executive teams performed better on several measures. Sometimes those losses are worth accepting. But necessary decisions still have consequences.
If a financial improvement depends on people continually compensating for lost capacity, then their ability and willingness to keep doing that are conditions for success of the plan.
When an experienced leader says they’re exhausted, disengaged, or looking elsewhere, what does that say about the organization they're leaving? What is that leader holding together that will unravel when they leave? Who could take it on? What would have to stop?
And before approving the next cut, ask:
What must remain healthy for this company to keep producing the results we expect? What is this decision doing to it?
That question won’t always prevent making a tough call. It will make the decision more honest.
Jim Fixx’s endurance was real. It just couldn’t tell the whole story of his health. Your company’s profits are real. What else do you need to know before you call it healthy?