NOW, ALL MAKES SENSE

I'm writing this from seat 12A on a Tuesday flight to somewhere I'll forget the moment I leave the airport. Twenty-eight years, thousands of flights, a thousand identical conference rooms, and coffee from breakrooms that all taste like disappointment - that's what it takes to learn what nobody tells you about being a consultant: you don't get frequent flyer miles, frequent flyer miles get you. Business books are written from 37,000 feet, where the highways make sense and even the chaos looks like it has a pattern. I'm writing this one from ground level, where the org chart is fiction, the strategy deck is wishful thinking, and the transformation initiative just got killed by Karen in Accounting, who's been there twenty-three years and knows exactly where the bodies are buried.

This isn't a methodology with an acronym that spells something clever. It isn't a fable with woodland creatures teaching you leadership. It's the conversation consultants have with each other in the hotel bar at 11 PM, after the client's gone home, when the corporate-speak finally drops and the truth comes out - twenty-eight years of watching transformations succeed, fail, and occasionally catch fire, told straight, with the names changed to protect the guilty. Somewhere in these pages is your company. Possibly your boss. Maybe, if I've done my job, you. Buckle up.