By: Brenda Myles
Maj. Gen. John L. Barry, USAF (Ret.), has spent his career moving between worlds that, at first glance, have little in common.
He spent more than 30 years in the United States Air Force, flew fighter aircraft, participated in the investigation of the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, led a public school district of approximately 40,000 students, headed a major youth organization, and later ran an aerospace museum.
Each transition required Barry to enter a new environment, understand the people within it, and figure out which lessons from his previous experience still applied. Over time, that became an education of its own: leadership may look different depending on the setting, but some of its fundamentals travel remarkably well.
Those experiences provide context for Power and Peril, in which Barry draws on his career and study of history to examine leadership, decision-making, organizational resilience, and the pressures organizations face during periods of change.
Barry graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1973 and went on to serve for more than three decades in the Air Force, eventually rising to the rank of Major General. Throughout his Air Force career, he worked in environments where preparation, discipline, teamwork, and adaptability were not simply leadership principles. They were part of doing the job well.
Later in his career, Barry became involved in one of the most consequential investigations in American aerospace history. Following the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, he served as a board member and executive director of the accident investigation.
The experience added another dimension to Barry’s understanding of leadership: examining what happened, understanding why it happened, and being willing to change course when the evidence demands it. It reinforced the importance of looking beyond immediate assumptions and remaining open to what new information might reveal.
For Barry, that kind of learning extends beyond individual experience. His longstanding interest in history has shaped the way he approaches leadership because the past offers something one career alone cannot: generations of decisions, successes, mistakes, and consequences from which to learn.
His own career would eventually give him an opportunity to test what he had learned in settings far removed from his earlier professional life.
After retiring from the Air Force, Barry became superintendent of Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. He was now responsible for an organization serving approximately 40,000 students across roughly 60 schools, along with the educators, administrators, and families connected to them.
Barry helped pioneer an early concurrent enrollment approach that connected high school students with opportunities to earn college credit while developing pathways toward future careers. The work required him to adapt his leadership experience to an environment with a very different mission and very different measures of success.
Education presented new challenges, but Barry found that some of the fundamentals remained surprisingly consistent. Leaders still had to listen, prepare, communicate, make decisions without always having complete information, and accept responsibility for the results.
More importantly, he had to determine which approaches from one leadership environment could be adapted to another, and which had to be left behind.
That distinction became increasingly relevant as Barry’s career continued to evolve.
He went on to serve as president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver, where his work centered on young people and communities. He later became president and CEO of Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum, bringing him back to aviation from an entirely different direction, through education, preservation, and public engagement.
Moving among those environments gave Barry an unusual opportunity to see leadership from multiple perspectives. The organizations he has led have differed dramatically in their missions, cultures, and measures of success.
What worked in one setting could not simply be transplanted into another.
Instead, Barry found that leadership required understanding the environment first. Preparation, adaptability, accountability, communication, and sound judgment remained important, but how those qualities were put into practice depended on the people, mission, and circumstances involved.
That perspective also shapes Power and Peril.
Rather than writing a conventional memoir that simply traces his career from one position to the next, Barry uses experiences accumulated over decades as a starting point for examining leadership, history, education, innovation, decision-making, and the ability of organizations to adapt when circumstances change.
The result reflects someone who has spent much of his professional life moving between theory and practice. Barry has studied leadership, but he has also had to reconsider how to practice it each time his professional environment changed around him.
His interest in history remains part of that work. Barry served as chair of the Air Force Historical Foundation from 2024 to 2026 and has also served in leadership with the National Aviation Hall of Fame. He earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Oklahoma and continued his education throughout his career, including advanced study in leadership.
Barry says Power and Peril is intended for readers from different backgrounds, including educators, business leaders, students, and those interested in leadership, history, and organizational change.
Perhaps one of the more interesting lessons from Barry’s career is that experience can travel without remaining unchanged.
The surroundings can be completely different. So can the mission, the people involved, and the problems that need to be solved. A lesson learned in one environment may still have value in another, but only if a leader is willing to reconsider how it applies.
That requires something beyond experience itself. It requires the willingness to keep learning.
After decades spent moving among remarkably different organizations, Barry has had an unusual opportunity to do exactly that.
Power and Peril brings those lessons together.
Power and Peril is available on Amazon.
