Most leadership training assumes the leader has a title and a team. Justin Fulcher found that assumption did not hold at the Department of Defense.
During his six months as a senior advisor working under Secretary Hegseth, Fulcher needed cooperation from people who did not report to him. The Secretary’s agenda included rebuilding military readiness, reorienting procurement culture, and modernizing the tools service members rely on. Turning that direction into operational change meant working across defense organizations with their own inertia and their own ties to external oversight.
“Your credibility is the only lever you actually control,” Justin Fulcher has said. “The institution has absorbed reformers before. It knows the difference between someone who is genuinely trying to understand how things work and someone who has already decided.”
Credibility Over Position
Fulcher’s influence depended on showing he understood how the institution actually functioned. Business schools tend to teach leadership as a product of position and process. Private companies usually connect organizational authority with accountability. Government rarely allows that neat arrangement.
Justin Fulcher’s leadership describes is earned through relationships and grounded in operational knowledge. It also has to last inside an institution that has watched outside reformers arrive and leave many times. Justin Fulcher argues that this is the form of leadership that scales.
Where Founders Stumble
The founders who struggle most in government, Fulcher has observed, often show up expecting clear vision and fast execution to carry them. Federal agencies are built around something else: process, precedent, and the need to defend each decision against institutional and political review.
None of this means founders should abandon their instincts. Fulcher’s point is that those instincts need company. Patience, procedural fluency, and a reputation for listening matter as much as ambition.
That is part of why Justin Fulcher describes public service as a kind of MBA for technology founders. The lesson on leadership arrives without a syllabus, and it tends to stay. Check out this page for related information.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrjustinfulcher