Andre Thornton is a mechanical engineer who spent eighteen years at Lockheed Martin building airplanes, then selling them, then leading as an executive. He went to college on a football scholarship. In 2016 he founded Whitman Consulting (Whitman is his middle name), where he and his team teach purpose-driven leadership. He is the author of Disrupted. I came into this conversation fresh off a philanthropy conference in Charleston, where the word everyone kept circling back to was disruption. Andre had written a book on it, and he describes himself as an engineer who likes to control everything and has learned he can control nothing. His path to the book ran through two job losses. Two years before he left Lockheed, his role was one of forty-four director positions being consolidated to nineteen, and he didn’t get one. He moved into leadership development, and then the company sold that division. Two weeks before his last day, his son Carter was born. He started his company anyway. He set out to write a book about purpose and found, once he sat down to write it, that every moment of clarity about purpose had arrived through a disruption. So he renamed it. We started with turbulence. I confessed to the years I spent booking United flights with the in-seat channel that let you listen to the cockpit, and how hearing pilots coordinate with each other and with ground control steadied me. Andre, who has stood next to the engineers who design these aircraft, admitted he still feels the same unease in the air. From there we talked about where control ends and collaboration begins. Bounce back and bounce forward. Andre separates three responses to disruption: staying down, bouncing back to where you were, and bouncing forward. He is clear that growth after a hard moment is a choice, and he has watched people who never recovered. The elephant and the rope. Andre uses a circus fable about a grown elephant held by a small rope, because it was tied that way as a calf and stopped testing it. He sees our identities and habits wired the same way, and capable of being broken. The jump. Andre told the story of a college play against Terrell Owens, where he jumped and kept the ball out of Owens’s hands. His point was that you jump before you feel ready, and that the preparation and movement before the jump matter as much as the jump. His advice to anyone who feels stuck is to start moving in any direction and let the direction reveal itself. The 1440. Andre built a system around the 1,440 minutes in a day. He names five areas of life (spirituality, career, relationships, health, finances), writes a vision for each, sets yearly goals connected to them, and fills those goals with daily habits. One early effect: he found activities that fit none of his areas and stopped doing them. Self-dosing. Drawing on Meet Your Happy Chemicals, Andre walks through DOSE: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. His view is that we can design our days to produce these on purpose, through anticipation, connection, gratitude, and movement, instead of waiting for life to supply them. He used my countdown to Garth Brooks tickets as a live example. The Commute. Andre shares short audio messages on LinkedIn sized for the drive to work or the walk to your desk, built on the idea that a few well-chosen words can change how someone feels heading into the next thing.
