Here is an excerpt from an article written byJeremy Andrus for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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One morning in October of 2014 I pulled into the parking lot at my office to find it surrounded by fire trucks. On the previous visit I’d made a big announcement: Traeger, the Oregon-based outdoor cooking company where I had recently become CEO, would be closing its warehouse and trucking operations and outsourcing them to UPS. The move made strategic sense, and we had offered generous severance and outplacement assistance to the several dozen employees affected. Nonetheless, the news hadn’t gone over well. When I got out of the car, I learned that one of our big-rig trucks was on fire. We didn’t know who was responsible, but it was obviously arson.

I gathered my executive team inside to talk about how to handle the incident. Someone’s online news feed was reporting on an office in Alabama where just that morning a disgruntled employee had shot and killed a couple of coworkers. It made us reflect on how much worse things could get at Traeger. An hour or so later a longtime employee stuck his head in the door and said, “Rumor has it something big is going down today.” I knew I had to stand in front of the company to address the team, and what might come next made me nervous. It was the first time I’d ever felt physically unsafe at work.

There is no case study for what to do when employees start burning your assets, or a potentially mutinous mob begins to form. Sadly, these incidents were just extreme examples of a larger problem: Our company had developed a toxic culture characterized by lack of trust, negative attitudes, and a stubborn refusal to collaborate. As a new CEO I had spent months trying to figure out how to solve the problem. The day of the truck fire represented a turning point: I knew we needed to dismantle the existing corporate culture and build a new one from scratch.

The Lure of Entrepreneurship

My route to becoming the CEO of Traeger was circuitous, to say the least. Like a lot of other people, I had a hard time when I was in my twenties figuring out what I wanted to do. After college I spent three years as a management consultant, and although I learned a lot, I didn’t love it. Then I spent six months day-trading stocks, which was the most stressful and exhilarating job I’ve ever done. I helped a company build hotels. I enrolled at Harvard Business School, but when I graduated, in 2002, in the aftermath of the dot-com recession, the only companies interested in me were management consultancies and real estate development firms, because that’s the experience I had on my résumé. I knew I wanted to do something different.

After a few months of sleeping in my parents’ basement, I moved to Dallas and became a partner in a small frozen-drink company. It was the first time in my career that everything came together. One minute I’d be driving a forklift in the warehouse; the next I’d be negotiating with a banker; the next I’d be trying to make a sale to a distributor. I loved being able to touch every part of the business, and the experience convinced me that I’d be happiest as an entrepreneur.

A few years later someone introduced me to Rick Alden, who’d founded a company called Skullcandy. It was still tiny—only $500,000 in sales. (It was still putting speakers into snowboarding helmets and hadn’t yet moved into headphones.) In 2005 I became Skullcandy’s VP of operations. We grew so fast that I always felt a step behind, but I was learning a ton. Rick struggled to raise funds from outside investors, so we built the brand on very little money. I ended up becoming CEO, staying for eight years, growing the business to $300 million in revenue, and taking it public. I eventually learned that I didn’t particularly like running a publicly traded company. We were dealing with a lot of short sellers, and in retrospect, we were too small to have gone public. In early 2013 I left and joined a private equity firm to look for a smaller company I could buy and run myself.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.