Bombs, Bacon, and Bankruptcy

Henry J. Evans wrote Bombs, Bacon & Bankruptcy for the moment your plan meets a punch to the face. The consultant from a Brooklyn neighborhood spent more than 20 years in terrorism detection and deterrence after 9/11 and now puts those street smarts in leaders' hands.

The consultant organizes it around three crises he lived, a classified IED fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, a grocery chain scrambling when COVID emptied shelves and threatened a warehouse strike, and a mid-cap manufacturer that unraveled after its founder died. From those cases he builds a usable sequence that starts with understanding the crisis, then mobilizing people, planning strategy, and executing. It is for leaders who must decide with incomplete information, keep a team from freezing or overreacting, and protect tomorrow while saving today. You cannot plan the next punch, he argues, but you can prepare by sorting incubating, emerging, and acute threats, pairing data and AI with human intuition, choosing the consultative model over autocratic leadership, and holding people accountable without stripping Emotional Safety.

Evans writes in plain language and avoids jargon. He wants the book to feel like he is in the room with you, giving the straight truth. Stories from an Air Force base, supermarket warehouses, and a widow at her husband's desk sit next to 90-day sprints and the best possible outcome in an imperfect world. Its strongest move is honesty. One of the three crises ends badly, and he uses that failure as instruction rather than branding.

If you lead a team through disruption, read it against a live problem you are facing. Ground yourself first, then get your team moving on the next right thing with the facts you have. The aim is speed to objectivity, so you can outpace the crisis.