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It’s a big jump from dreaming of being a cowboy to launching an emergency relief group with about 95,000 volunteers, but that’s the story of Jake Wood — if you throw in earning a business degree, playing football for the Wisconsin Badgers, and becoming a U.S. Marine scout sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wood is bringing his saga, and the lessons he learned from it all, to the area Nov. 15 to deliver the Wilkes University Allan P. Kirby Lecture in Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship.

“The lecture is really talking about the lessons in leadership and entrepreneurship, about my journey and the lessons learned along the way,” Wood said in a phone interview. “I talk a lot about the importancee of building an organizational culture, that the key is how to define the culture you want.”

Wood has become famous for his “The one and the nine” theory: For every 100 people in an organization, 10 shouldn’t be there, 80 have a neutral impact, nine perform exceptionally and one is a true leader. He concedes the numbers, of course, aren’t always the same for every group, but it’s the philosophy that’s important.

“Ethical leadership requires a vision that is clearly communicated,” he said. “You cannot compromise when building out the people in your organization. The question is how do you put in place the mechanics of organizational governing that reflect what you say you want. You cannot allow a disconnect to creep into what you say and what you do.”

He practices what he preaches, as co-founder of Team Rubicon, originally a group of military veterans, first responders and medical workers forged to respond to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, now a group with about 95,000 volunteers prepared for quick response to disasters around the world.

Why Rubicon? On that first mission, one of the initial unknowns was whether they could even get into Haiti from neighboring Dominican Republic — two nations sharing a single island, with their joint boarder closely following the Dajabon River for a long stretch. Getting to Haiti, in some spots, literally required crossing the river.

“We weren’t quite sure what we were going to do or accomplish, we weren’t sure we were even going to get into the country,” he said. “We knew there were going to be a lot of obstacles if we got into Haiti.” Thus, on the team’s first foray, getting over the border and over those obstacles aptly echoed the spirit of Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC with his army, action that the roman Senate had explicitly ordered him not to do.

“The Marines love history,” he added. “They love learning from the past.”

Knowing veterans have a wide range of invaluable skills, Wood joined with fellow Marine William McNulty to bring veterans and first responders together for that first effort in 2010. Team Rubicon has grown dramatically since. Wood estimated about 95,000 volunteers that, according to the website, have provided nearly $19 million in volunteer labor since 2013. Just in the last 90 days, Team Rubicon has run 35 field operations worldwide.

Woods will speak at the Kirby Center for Creative Arts at Wyoming Seminary Upper School, 201 N. Sprague Ave, Kingston, beginning at 7 p.m. Nov. 15. After the lecture he will do a book signing of his 2014 publication, “Take Command: Lessons in Leadership.” He will speak to Wilkes University students earlier in the day.

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By Mark Guydish

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Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish