Faced the greatest challenge of his life on D-Day.

Amid an increasing artillery barrage, John Whitehead's boat encountered a long string of metal bars embedded in the ocean floor that blocked the designated route. Disobeying orders, Whitehead directed his boats to turn parallel to shore to look for an opening in the barricade before turning toward the beach. “Because of the delicate coordination of the invasion,” he said, “I was under strict orders to proceed directly to the beach and not deviate for any reason. Had I followed those orders, we would have been hung up on the barricade and blocked all the boats coming in behind us.”

On D-Day, Whitehead relied on his intuition and used a very direct leadership style to make the decision to countermand the orders he had been given. It was a far cry from the consensus-driven approach that he had developed as president of the student council at Haverford College. Haverford, founded by Quakers, required weekly attendance at Quaker meetings and perpetuated traditions of rectitude, modesty, and consensus-based decision making.

“Sometimes you have lots of time to make a decision. I had maybe ten seconds to think about this one. There was no time for consensus or to consult with anybody. There are very few decisions in life where you don’t have some time to think about what your decision should be as a leader. This was the fastest decision that I made. I used my instinctive reactions to decide what should be done.”