Between the Boardroom and the Backwoods

When you hear the word “boardroom,” you might think of a bunch of wealthy people sitting around a dark wooden table, scowls on their faces, plotting and planning how to pump up that shareholder value. Conversely, when you hear the word “backwoods,” you either think of a brand of rough-cut cigars or of forested wilderness, probably in a mountainous area, where overalls and moonshine stills are mandatory.

There is a place somewhere between the boardroom and the backwoods where I’ve spent most of my life.

I literally grew up in the woods, but for more than thirty years, I’ve worked in business leadership roles ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I’ve led large teams, worked on major transformation efforts, and spent plenty of time talking about strategy, operations, growth, and execution.

And since I was a little boy, I’ve been drawn to heroes and characters that didn’t fit a particular mold or to cultures that weren’t necessarily mainstream. American moonshining is one such culture that drew me in, and at some point, along the way, I realized there are many great business lessons to be learned from it.

Brands and identities are created with every story handed down through the hills. Ingenuity under pressure comes with the territory. Limited resources. Constant obstacles. Changing conditions. Little margin for error.

The legal business world isn’t all that different.

The longer I worked in leadership, the more I realized many of the best business lessons didn’t come from buzzwords or corporate trend-chasing. They came from people who understood how to adapt, solve problems, build trust, and keep moving when conditions got difficult.

All of this eventually came together as Against the Grain: Business Lessons from the Still.

Against the Grain includes a little bit of the history of moonshining and a little bit of how to make moonshine, but it’s about neither. It’s a collection of lessons on leadership, entrepreneurship, resilience, operational discipline, and the habit of going against the grain when conventional thinking stops working.

Some lessons come from the boardroom. Some come from the still. Most come from somewhere in between. Because somewhere between sophistication and hillbilly is a kind of practical wisdom modern business occasionally forgets.

That’s the space Champaign Shine was built to explore.