Running with Scissors

Running With Scissors is not a book about playing it safe. It is a field guide for leaders, builders, operators, and innovators forced to move inside systems that are tired, overloaded, or moving too slow for the moment in front of them.

Built from real-world leadership experience across military healthcare, organizational redesign, innovation, and operational pressure, this book challenges the obsession with alignment, perfection, and endless planning. Instead, it introduces an unorthodox approach to execution built on controlled disruption, decisive movement, and protecting the people doing the real work.

Inside, Robert Rivers explores what happens when:

• systems become heavier than the mission,
• structure starts replacing momentum,
• burnout becomes normalized,
• and leaders lose the ability to see what is actually happening in front of them.

Through frameworks like SHARP, CARE, Decision Space, and the philosophy of “protect the doers,” Running With Scissors delivers practical lessons on:

• leading under pressure,
• making visible decisions,
• moving through uncertainty,
• tightening systems after failure,
• and creating movement without waiting for perfect conditions.

This is not theory written from the sidelines.
It is written from inside the friction.

For readers of operational leadership, organizational change, military innovation, entrepreneurship, and high-performance team dynamics, Running With Scissors offers a direct, honest, and deeply practical perspective on what it takes to move forward when the environment refuses to cooperate.

Sometimes the safest thing you can do is stop waiting for permission and make the cut.