Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux · 2026-07-07 · 35 min
What if the hardest part of leading through change is not building the plan, but accepting that the plan will never survive contact with reality? In this episode, Elizabeth Ledoux talks with Mike Wettlaufer, a retired Navy rear admiral and lifelong entrepreneur, about leading people through change. Across 38 years and thousands of people, Mike learned that a straight line from A to B is a fantasy. You hope you land somewhere near where you aimed, but the value was never the plan itself. It lives in the planning: the relationships you build, the options you explore, and the readiness to pivot when something you never saw coming arrives. Mike and Elizabeth get into the human side of transition, from why communication is the hardest work a leader does to how you win the middle of a room instead of exhausting yourself on the people who will never come along. Mike maps his own framework of drones, renters, and owners directly onto Elizabeth's Transition 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and he makes the case that ownership is something you build in a successor over time, not something you hand them on day one.
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