Star CEO Michael Schreibmann: Discipline Is Built, Not Inherited

Star CEO Michael Schreibmann argues that leadership discipline is developed through circumstances and practice — not inherited at birth. "I do not believe that," he writes of the popular image of leaders as mechanically precise superhumans who wake before sunrise and arrive at the office first. "I believe leaders are made, not born, and discipline is developed through circumstances and practice."

His evidence is close to home. Since the full-scale war began, Schreibmann says, members of Star's Ukrainian team have stepped forward under conditions none of them chose and demonstrated leadership qualities they may not have known they possessed. Research conducted before and during the pandemic reached a parallel conclusion: transformational leadership became particularly effective during crisis, when complexity and uncertainty increased.

The caveat is obvious and worth stating. A single company's war-time experience and one set of pandemic-era studies do not prove a universal law of leadership. What they suggest, more modestly, is that pressure reveals capacity that calm conditions never test.

What does running have to do with running a company?

Schreibmann's own discipline practice began during the pandemic, when, in his words, life felt like being stuck on a highway, unable to see beyond the next car's taillights. He started with long walks around his neighborhood after his children went to bed, listening to books and podcasts.

One of those books was James Clear's "Atomic Habits," which examines how small improvements compound over time. Schreibmann began walking faster. Eventually he jogged the 10-minute route to collect his son from school instead of driving.

"There was no dramatic transformation," he writes. "I simply increased my capacity for discomfort one step at a time."

He is careful not to oversell the activity itself. The chosen discipline matters less than the fact that it challenges you and requires you to keep showing up. For Schreibmann, running creates what he calls radical accountability: "Nobody else can complete the distance for me. I cannot delegate the difficult miles, blame a team for my performance, or talk my way around the commitment. I either put on my shoes and go outside or I do not."

His design principle is blunt. The challenge should be difficult, but starting it should be simple — running asks only for a pair of shoes and a door. As a CEO and father of three, he says he can usually find 30 minutes to get outside, and he treats consistency as more valuable than occasional intensity.

Why does he call leadership an ultramarathon?

Schreibmann frames careers and companies as built brick by brick, in a culture shaped by instant gratification. His argument: there is no shortcut. You do the work, make mistakes, absorb the lessons, and return the next day, because employees and customers place their trust in you.

Running also functions as his mobile classroom. He listens to technical books and podcasts while running and says he has gradually become able to visualize complex concepts without diagrams in front of him. Whether audiobook absorption during exercise works as well as focused study is a claim he does not evidence — but the consistency itself is the point he is making.

His sharpest observation concerns the current moment. In the AI era, he writes, "we will never experience change this fast and this slow ever again." Technologies advance almost daily, while meaningful organizational transformation can take years. That gap, he argues, produces stretches of visible progress followed by long stretches of fatigue and doubt — conditions under which a leader must keep showing up with confidence in the vision and clarity about what comes next.

A difficult discipline outside work, he concludes, teaches you something about your relationship with yourself: whether you keep promises when nobody monitors you, whether you can tolerate slow progress, and whether you return after a hard day.

His closing lesson is a single sentence: "Radical accountability begins with a promise only you can keep. Choose something difficult, then keep showing up."

For executives weighing the advice, the honest read is this: the mechanism is plausible and cheap to test, and the cost of finding out is roughly one pair of running shoes.