March 10, 2026·Media

Taking the Stick

Matt Zeigler·podcast

What separates the leaders who navigate crisis from the ones who get consumed by it? We pulled a clip from Rachael Goldfarb's explanation of the Chief of Staff renaissance because in these "AI can probably do every job" times - if anybody has a reaction to it, it's crisis communication expert Elie Jacobs.

Elie is the founder of Purposeful Advisors, a strategic communications and public affairs firm that has repositioned itself around something harder than message management: finding real problems before they become all to visible or worse - irreversible. He calls them Type 3 errors, when an organization is focused on the wrong issue entirely. The organizations that will thrive in the future are the ones with someone in the room willing to say the house is on fire while everyone else debates which wine glasses to save. (He actually says that. It's quite the metaphor.)

Elie's other perfect metaphor is the 1202 alarm going off on the lunar lander. Neil Armstrong stopped trusting the computer and took the stick. That's the story Elie keeps returning to - and you'll have to watch to see if it lands for you the way it landed for us.