The Reckoning: What 1929 Teaches the Building Materials Industry About Sales Leadership

Andrew Ross Sorkin spent nearly a decade writing 1929, his definitive account of the most catastrophic market collapse in American history. His central warning: that boom cycles breed a seductive illusion that “this time is different” wasn’t written about the building materials industry. But it could have been.

In the past thirty days, I’ve sat across from multiple presidents of LBM companies across the country. What I’m hearing is striking in its consistency: sales managers are being replaced, standards are being raised, and in a growing number of cases, the VP of Sales position has been eliminated entirely. Sales teams are now reporting directly to the president. The message being sent, loudly and without apology, is that the game has changed.

To understand why, you have to understand what the boom years did to people.

The Euphoria That Built Soft Leaders

Sorkin opens 1929 not with a villain, but with a warning about human nature. The roaring bull market of the 1920s didn’t corrupt people so much as it rewarded the wrong behaviors. When prices rise long enough, people stop asking why and simply accept that they will continue to. The skills required to survive a difficult market, discipline, grit, competitive hunger, atrophy during a boom because they aren’t needed. Abundance is forgiving. It masks and creates weakness.

The housing boom of 2021 and the subsequent surge of 2023 did exactly this to a generation of sales leaders in the building materials industry. The phone rang. Orders came in. The job of a sales manager became logistics management, not market combat. Teams were trained, unconsciously but effectively, to be order-takers. And nobody got fired for it because the numbers looked fine.

Sorkin describes this phenomenon in 1929 as “the illusion of intelligence” when the market makes everyone look smart, the fool and the genius post identical results. In LBM terms: when housing starts are booming and builders are desperate for product, an average sales rep performs like a superstar. The sales manager who built that team looks like a genius. Until the music stops.

“Your competition with ambition — maybe Home Depot, Lowe’s, BFS, or QXO — will come to the knife fight with a gun.”— Bradley Hartmann

2026: A Knife Fight

The music has stopped. Today’s market is what seasoned presidents in this industry are calling exactly what it is a knife fight. A street-level, winner-take-all competition for market share where relationships, tenacity, and competitive psychology determine who wins. The polite order management skills cultivated during the boom years are not just insufficient they are a liability.

Sorkin writes about how 1929 revealed a brutal truth: the crash didn’t create bad actors, it exposed them. The boom simply delayed the reckoning. In our industry right now, the reckoning has arrived. And the presidents who came up through sales, who spent years cold-calling, losing deals, clawing back business, and learning the psychology of a competitive sales, they recognize exactly what they’re looking at. They’ve seen this before. More importantly, they know what it takes to fix it.

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, identified exactly why boom cycles produce this kind of organizational blindness. He called it WYSIATI What You See Is All There Is. The human mind builds its reality from the information immediately available to it and discards what isn’t visible. During a boom, all a sales manager sees is a full pipeline, a ringing phone, and a team hitting quota. The warning signs, softening competitive instincts, declining prospecting discipline, an entitlement creeping into the culture are invisible because the numbers don’t reveal them yet. As Kahneman put it, “We are blind to our own blindness.” The boom didn’t just create soft sales leaders. It made their softness invisible until the market turned.

This is the critical divide emerging in the building materials industry today. There are companies led by presidents who came through operations, finance, or ownership succession and there are companies led by presidents who came up through the sales ranks. In 2026, that distinction matters enormously. Because understanding the psychology of a sales team what drives them, what breaks them, what transforms an order-taker into a competitor is not something you learn from a P&L. You learn it on the street.

Flattening the Structure to Force the Fight

The decision to eliminate the VP of Sales and have the team report directly to the president is not an org chart preference. It is a psychological intervention. These presidents are not doing it because flat structures are theoretically superior. They’re doing it because speed and accountability matter more than elegance right now.

Sorkin describes a moment in the 1929 crash when banker Charles Mitchell walked up the steps of 55 Wall Street projecting total confidence, shoulders back, and smiling intact, even as the market collapsed around him. He understood that in a crisis, behavior sets the tone. Leaders either project resolve or they accelerate the panic. In the same way, a president who steps directly into the sales leadership role is making a visible, unambiguous statement to the entire organization: we are in a fight, I am in the fight with you, and the standards just changed.

The message lands differently than any memo or sales kickoff could. When the president of the company is personally reviewing your pipeline and sitting in on your calls, the culture shifts immediately.

The Conversation That Matters Now

Here is what Sorkin understood, and what the best presidents in this industry are grappling with: the flat structure is not the destination. It is emergency surgery. You flatten the org to stop the bleeding, to reset the culture, to establish new standards of competitive behavior. But it is not sustainable at scale.

The most important conversations I witnessed at IBS this year were not about product or technology. They were about how to rebuild sales leadership in a way that doesn’t recreate the softness that the boom years produced. What does a VP of Sales or Sales Manager look like in 2026 and beyond, one who was forged in a competitive market rather than shaped by an order-taking one? How do you codify a gritty sales culture into a leadership structure that can scale without losing its edge?

Sorkin ends 1929 with a sobering observation: financial memory is dangerously short. A new generation always arrives that hasn’t experienced the last crash, and the behaviors that lead to disaster gradually reassert themselves. The building materials industry is in the rare and painful position of having the lesson fresh. The presidents who are taking swift action, right now, who are restructuring and raising standards and getting personally into the fight, understand that the window to change the culture is narrow.

The boom made everyone look smart. The reckoning is separating the leaders from the order-takers. The only question is which side of that line your company is on.

Misura Group: Built for This Moment

At Misura Group, we specialize exclusively in executive search and talent advisory for the building materials industry. We’ve spent over thirty years building relationships with the leaders, sales executives, and emerging talent across LBM dealers, distribution, manufacturing, and specialty products. We understand this industry at a level no generalist firm can match, because it’s the only industry we serve.

The conversations happening right now about rebuilding sales leadership, redefining what competitive looks like, and identifying the right VP of Sales or Sales Manager who was forged in a difficult market rather than shaped by an easy one, those are exactly the conversations we exist to support.

If you’re a president who has flattened your org structure and is now thinking about how to rebuild it the right way, we should talk. If you’re trying to identify sales leadership candidates who have the psychological makeup to compete in a knife fight, not just manage a team, we have the database, the relationships, and the assessment depth to find them.

The window to change your culture is narrow. Let’s make sure you put the right people in the room.

Hire Smarter™

Tony Misura

If you’re ready to elevate your hiring strategy, let’s have a conversation, click to connect.