Welcome back to the Built to Deliver podcast, also available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major podcasting platforms. Today, I’m thrilled to share our inaugural conversation with Dr. Antonio Corrales Antonio is the operational engine, co-founder and co-creator of Built to Deliver’s core frameworks. In this episode, we talk about Antonio’s personal and professional journey and how it led to the Built to Deliver project finally coming together. We sat down to dive deep into his raw personal journey, the high-stress environments that shaped his worldview, and how applied neuroscience completely redefines how modern teams approach the execution of big, bold strategic plans. Antonio and I are actually childhood friends who grew up in the same classrooms in Venezuela. Life eventually took us on completely separate paths across the globe, and we didn't talk for nearly 20 years. But when he recently reached out to invite me to lead the international expansion of Built to Deliver, the decades of silence evaporated instantly. As we spent hours catching up, I realized just how extraordinary his journey had been. Antonio started out studying civil engineering. Later, he found himself in the high-stakes, dangerous arena of Venezuelan politics, facing literal security threats that eventually forced him to leave the country. Arriving in the US, he reinvented himself in academia and today directs the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Over the past decade, he has dedicated himself to teaching strategic planning to his doctoral students, but the experience exposed a systemic flaw that drove him crazy. He watched brilliant leaders routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on beautiful, complex strategic plans, only for those plans to end up sitting in binders on a shelf, completely dead to the organization. He realized that traditional management was failing because it ignored how the human brain actually processes change, and became obsessed with eliminating execution friction through applied brain science. When he met E. Ted Fujimoto and his Agile Action Strategy Process (AASP), the pieces clicked immediately. Together, they blended the AASP framework with Antonio’s neuroscience-based leadership research and deep institutional expertise, and Built to Deliver was born. Highlights from our Conversation with Dr. Antonio Corrales You: As I looked over your career trajectory, it’s quite a winding road. You started in civil engineering, transitioned into high-stakes politics in Venezuela where you had to wear a bulletproof vest and drive bulletproof cars, and now you’re an educational leader directing a doctoral program in Educational Leadership in Houston. How do you connect the dots between those worlds? Antonio: It only makes sense when you connect the dots in retrospect. In engineering, you are dealing with rigid structures. But when I entered politics in Venezuela, I quickly realized that human organizations don’t operate like steel beams. When you are wearing a bulletproof jacket just to do your job because of toxic political operators, you become hyper-aware of human behavior under pressure. When the real estate market collapsed in America and I lost my engineering job, I took a teaching position as a last resort to stay legal. But in that classroom, I fell in love with the profession. I realized that whether you are running a political campaign or a school district, you aren’t just managing systems; you are dealing with people and human behavior. You: Speaking of your childhood in Venezuela, we actually went to the same pre-K through 12 music magnet school. You mentioned an epiphany you had back in middle school during a rather rough high school tradition that completely shifted how you viewed your relationship with people. What happened there? Antonio: Yes, we had this ritual where on your birthday, you had to pass through a human tunnel of classmates who would slap your back really hard. One day, it got completely out of control with a smaller, shy kid. He fell to the floor, and everyone was beating him up. I was one of the popular guys, but I had this sudden epiphany: What the heck am I doing? I literally jumped on top of him to cover him from the blows and whispered, “Don’t move, I’m trying to protect you.” Afterward, when the administration investigated, the kid actually protected me by telling them I had saved him. That single event completely changed my life. It made me realize you don’t have to hurt people to be happy, and it made me constantly recalibrate the kind of person I wanted to be. You: That drive to protect and elevate people seems to carry directly into your business journey. Later in your career, you encountered a unique early childhood education system in Canada and convinced the founder to bring it to public schools in the US. What did you see in that system that felt so revolutionary? Antonio: I was intellectually bored with traditional educational programs at the time. But when I visited this daycare chain in Canada, I saw two- and three-year-old children acting like little adults, none of the usual “terrible twos” behavior. The founder had cracked the code on how to systematically measure and close brain gaps in executive function before they become permanent. The system was making a massive impact on affluent kids who paid $30,000 to $40,000 a year. I challenged the founder: “Can you make it work with poor people in America?” We brought the coaching and brain-development model to US public schools, and seeing it transform struggling kids proved to me that if you design frameworks around how the brain actually learns, the sky is the limit. You: It seems like a clear pattern in your life is this dissatisfaction with purely intellectual or elite exercises, you always want to see how concepts actually play out in the messy real world. And that brings us directly to Built to Deliver. You’ve spent a decade teaching traditional strategic planning at the university level, yet you often criticize the industry because most of these expensive corporate plans just sit dead inside a binder. Why do so many brilliant corporate strategies fail to launch? Antonio: Strategic planning is a $100 billion industry in America, but research shows most organizations don’t do anything with their strategic plans after the first year. They become a nice PDF or Power Point presentation, but nobody follows up. I wanted to break that cycle. Execution fails because traditional planning doesn’t account for how the human brain actually operates. If you understand what the right cadence is to maximize your capacity, the sky’s the limit. Our framework focuses on institutional effectiveness and elevating the collective intelligence of an entire organization by working with brain science, not against it. You: Breaking that cycle is exactly what led you to write the book, Built to Deliver. But you didn’t do it alone, you co-authored it with E. Ted Fujimoto. How did that partnership come together, and how did his work as a co-founder of the New Tech Network and creator of the Agile Action Strategy Process (AASP) reshape your entire approach to leadership? Antonio: Ted and I met about five years ago during a training session he was conducting for the management team of the Canadian education company I mentioned as part of an evaluation process for potential investors. What caught my attention was that his framework was deeply rooted in brain science and leadership. Up until that point, I had been teaching traditional strategic planning at the university level for a decade, but I felt like I was being complacent by teaching the same old ineffective models. I started testing some of Ted’s philosophies in my university classes, and the feedback was incredible. Two years ago, I approached him and said, “Listen, I want to write a book about strategic planning, but I want to infuse it with brain science. Do you want to do this with me?” He accept… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit builttodeliver.substack.com
