Today we’d like to introduce you to John Lentini.
Hi John, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I spent over two decades on Wall Street to start my career. I survived the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11, when a plane literally went through my desk. That life-altering experience ultimately led me to adopt a carpe diem approach to life and to seek global assignments.
In 2014, while still on my last overseas assignment in Europe, I embraced a volunteer opportunity to design a Coaching & Mentoring program for a South Africa based NGO partner of the bank I was with at the time. As I dug into the mandate, working with my company’s Learning & Development team and the NGO leadership in South Africa, the 5-day program I designed ultimately covered a much broader suite of leadership skills, not all that different from what I do with Crestcom International today.
I didn’t know it then, but the seeds had been planted. I would ultimately start my own Leadership Development business with Crestcom in 2019, and COVID hit just as I was getting it off the ground. The timing was brutal, but I was convinced the world after the pandemic would need a different kind of leader, and I was determined to help build them. From day one I worked alongside my veteran partner and colleague David Brotman, who had already spent a decade serving New Jersey based businesses with wild success, building on a Crestcom legacy in the Garden State that stretched back decades before his own tenure. Together we have continued to extend that legacy today.
Today, BOLD Training Corp is an authorized Crestcom International partner delivering the LEADER program across the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware, with clients based elsewhere including globally. We work with executives and emerging leaders across industries, helping them build the practical skills that show up under pressure, the same kind I had to learn the hard way throughout my own corporate leadership career.
Alongside my Crestcom business, I’ve built a personal platform as The Leadership Engineer. In June 2025 I delivered a TEDx Talk called “Three Dials to Lead You,” which has since crossed 200,000 views. That talk became the foundation for my first book, Engineering Character: Six Dials to Build Better Leaders, publishing with Forefront Books on July 20, 2027. The premise is straightforward: real character is engineered, not inherited, and it gets built one dial at a time.
When I’m not working, you’ll find me underwater with a scuba tank, maintaining mental and physical fitness through martial arts, or in transit to a new travel destination. The same threads that drive the business drive the rest of my life: curiosity, discipline, and the conviction that the best leaders are the ones who keep engineering themselves.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Struggle is an important part of the process, and it has certainly been an important part of mine. Today I have built a lane as a corporate keynote speaker helping organizations lead through crisis and disruption. This is a specialty I have developed through a host of historic real-world moments. 9/11 developed my Resilience dial and enabled me to navigate the dark corridor that COVID presented just as I was starting to see success as a new entrepreneur. When the world shut down, in-person leadership development looked, on paper, like one of the worst businesses to be in. Boardrooms went dark, training budgets froze, and new outside partners were not very welcomed.
I leaned in instead of pulling back. We adapted the LEADER program for the virtual environment, kept showing up for clients who needed steadier leaders more than ever, and used the disruption as a chance to deepen relationships rather than transact through them. The business survived, and we came out the other side stronger.
Since then, the challenges have stockpiled rather than receded. Trade wars and supply chain shocks. Rising rates and economic uncertainty. Geopolitical volatility that touches every industry. And most recently, real anxiety around AI and what it means for the future of work, for entire careers, for whole organizations.
Each of these has made the operating environment harder for the leaders we serve, and by extension harder for us. But many of these challenges are exactly what leadership development is built to address. The uniquely human and relationship skills at the heart of our work, presence, judgment, empathy, the ability to align a team under pressure, are precisely the capabilities that offset the impact of AI and keep organizations steady through volatility. That is exactly where our work meets the moment.
The other quiet struggle, less dramatic but no less real, has been the work of building a personal platform alongside the business. Writing a book while running a firm, delivering a TEDx Talk, launching The Leadership Engineer, all while continuing to facilitate, coach, and serve clients on a full schedule. There are no shortcuts and no off weeks. But each of those struggles has built a different dial, and over time, those dials are what hold a leader together.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am exceedingly proud of the structured business I have built through Crestcom. At the current moment though, I am most proud of the personal brand I have developed alongside that business as a trusted thought leader in my own markets.
My 2025 TEDx Talk, “Three Dials to Lead You,” introduced the roots of my framework, and my upcoming book, Engineering Character: Six Dials to Build Better Leaders, documents the entire model.
As a kind and wise mentor, Marshall Goldsmith, recently advised me, I don’t hold on to any of my ideas as particularly precious. I don’t ring-fence them as proprietary IP. I instead give them away. I offer free value where I can. So while I am positioned as an individual thought leader outside of my Crestcom business, I firmly understand that all thought leadership is built on existing ideas. My weekly Newsletter, The Leadership Engineer, shares my content via LinkedIn and Medium for public consumption.
In today’s age, coaching and training clients no longer pay for information. They pay for organization and application. My private coaching fees have steadily increased, yet my Crestcom program clients continue to get access to my proprietary coaching at scale.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I first started diving when I was around 14 years old, and from around 2010 to 2020 I spent a decade fully entrenched in the scuba life, traversing the globe and diving across diverse environments from the arctic regions to tropical reefs. I came face to face with a very broad spectrum of marine life large and small, with an impassioned focus on shark species. Along the way I joined expeditions with some of the world’s leading oceanic luminaries, including Michael Aw, David Doubilet, Ernie Brooks, Wyland, and Dr. Sylvia Earle.
COVID slowed my dive travel, and I pivoted my attention to another childhood passion, martial arts, which helped see me through the adversity. Diving and ocean conservation remain deeply embedded in my DNA. Both pursuits have enhanced my expertise on leadership and my unique value to clients as a coach.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.johnjlentini.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnjlentini
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boldtrainingcorp
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjlentini/
- Twitter: https://x.com/BOLDTrainingCrp
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@johnjlentini
- Other: https://crestcom.com/leadership-trainer/john-lentini/
