It was a Monday morning. I walked into the offices of a company that had called me in to help solve a "communication problem". At least that's how they described the situation.
There had been a meeting the previous week that had gone badly. Very badly. The CEO had said something the team had interpreted in a way he hadn't intended. Or maybe he'd said exactly what he meant and later regretted it. I never fully worked out which.
What became clear in the first fifteen minutes was that the problem was not about communication. It was about everything else.
People didn't trust each other. The processes were a collection of habits accumulated over years without anyone questioning them. There were two or three people who drained the energy out of the room every time they opened their mouths. And the leader — a genuinely intelligent and well-intentioned man — had no idea any of this was happening right under his nose.
I'd seen this scene before. Many times.
"Most of the problems in companies are not strategy problems. They are people problems that nobody wants to name."
Over more than ten years working inside and outside organizations — from international restaurant chains to luxury brands, from early-stage startups to companies generating hundreds of millions in revenue — I've been accumulating something. It wasn't quite a method. It was more like an archive of moments.
Notebooks with notes from meetings where something had gone very right or very wrong. Conversations that stayed with me without my quite knowing why. Patterns that kept repeating across different companies, across completely different sectors. And a growing sense that there was something there — something worth trying to understand properly.
Some time ago, after a particularly intense period, I decided to stop. Not to rest. To think. I picked up all those notes, spread across years of work, and started reading them as if someone else had written them. And what I saw managed to surprise me, even though I'd written it.
The problems were always the same. The people were always different. But the patterns — the patterns were almost identical.
And it was through that process that I started writing this book. Not with the intention of publishing it, at first. But because I needed to organize what was in my head. Because there were nights, I lay awake — not from insomnia, but from thoughts — turning over a conversation I'd had months earlier, about a decision someone had made that had destroyed an entire team, about a small gesture that had transformed the atmosphere in a room.
"The most important questions about leadership are rarely asked out loud. They sit in people's heads, at night, when no one is watching."
What this book is — and what it isn't
It isn't an academic manual. You won't find here a model with seven steps and forty-two sub-steps that promise to transform your company in ninety days.
It's also not a self-help book disguised as a business book, the kind that tells you to wake up at five in the morning, meditate for an hour, and thank the universe for its growth opportunities.
It's an honest book. Written by someone who has been on both sides of the table — inside organizations as a manager and employee, and outside them as a consultant. Who has made the mistakes described here. And who still makes some of them.
And the question that runs through every chapter is always the same: Do you recognize yourself?
