When Robin Bailey Jr. arrived at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2021, a colleague warned him he was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. He knew she was right the moment he walked through the door.
“They were very stressed, fatigued, and giving everything that they had,” Bailey told Fortune‘s Kristen Stoller at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. “But the public scrutiny was such that everything you have isn’t good enough.”