About
Jim Rembach
Executive Director, Leadership Execution Institute
Author of The Drift Tax (LEI Press)
I grew up in a blue-collar family in the industrial Midwest, surrounded by people who worked hard and expected results. I started my career the same way, on the frontline of a contact center as a supervisor, and later ran multi-site operations.
Which means I have lived the thing I now study. I have launched the initiative that faded. I have sat in the meeting where we re-approved budget for a problem we thought we already fixed. I did not see the real cause either. Not at first.
The career arc
Thirty years of watching the gap
After operations, I spent seventeen years inside a research firm converting real-time execution data into strategy. My job, company after company, was to measure the distance between what organizations promise and what they actually deliver.
The pattern never changed. Smart people. Funded strategies. Strong training. Short-term lift, long-term slide. For years I assumed we needed better programs. The data kept saying something else: the programs were fine. The environment could not hold what the programs installed.
Only 12% of people trained on a new behavior apply it consistently over time. The other 88% drift. Not from lack of commitment, but because the structural environment was never built to hold them.
That is Execution Drift. It is not a talent problem. It is a structural one. And once you see it, you start to see the bill.
The book
Forthcoming from LEI Press
The Drift Tax
That finding, and what it costs, became a book.
The Drift Tax is an audit of the most expensive line item missing from every P&L: the cumulative cost organizations absorb when behavioral stability decays after investment, forcing the same performance to be paid for again.
It is not a leadership training book. It does not blame leaders. It shows the invoice. About the book →
The work today
Where the work lives
Leadership Execution Institute
I serve as Executive Director, leading research on how leadership behavior holds, or fails, under real operating conditions. Institute research is published with permanent DOIs through Zenodo, the open research repository operated by CERN. LEI Press, the Institute’s publishing imprint, publishes the research catalog and The Drift Tax. leadershipexecutioninstitute.org
Execution Architects
The systems side of the work: designing Leadership Execution Systems and the execution environments that carry the weight training was never built to carry, for organizations that are done paying twice.
Call Center Coach
Where the research meets the most demanding proving ground I know: frontline leadership in contact centers. callcentercoach.com
The Fast Leader Show
Hundreds of conversations with the researchers and operators behind the frameworks the leadership industry runs on: Gallup’s chief workplace scientist, the researcher who rewrote motivation science, the co-founder of FranklinCovey, students of Deming. fastleader.net
Credentials
Credentials
Certified Emotional Intelligence Practitioner (MHS, EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360)
Certified Mental Performance Coach
ORCID: 0009-0004-6525-5634
And one more, the one that taught me the most about systems and human limits: certified baseball pitching coach. After six shoulder surgeries of my own, I became a certified pitching coach to protect my son from the same fate.
Bodies drift under load the same way organizations do. Nobody plans the injury. The structure either protects you or it does not.
I write and speak for the leader who did everything right and still watched it fade.
If that is you, you are not failing. You are running on a system that was never built for this. That is fixable, and seeing it clearly is where it starts.