A boy on his first day at a bank, in bell-bottom pants and a black shirt with metal studs because he did not own a suit. He sat next to a senior teller in branch number three and tried to look like he belonged. He did not. He learned to.
That boy is the reason I am writing The Two Suits.
He went on to spend the next eighteen years inside rooms he did not understand at first and then understood too well. A back office at the start. Then his own. Then an open space with a team. A small office of his own. Then one of seventy square meters, with balconies. Country offices with his name on the door. A regional desk above those. A glass tower in a European capital. The chief executive’s seat. And then, the decision to stop working for other people.
The book is for him.
It is also for two readers I think about often. The first picked up Awakening Consciousness years ago, the book I co-authored on personal transformation, and has asked, in private messages and at events since, what the working life behind it had really looked like. The second is the operator. The man or woman who runs the rooms, who makes the calls, who sits in the seat. Most business books split those two and address them separately. The seeker on one shelf, the operator on another. They are the same person. That is what I want to put on the page.
The title carries two meanings, and it holds both without explaining either. There is the personal pair, the boy who did not own a suit and the man who no longer needs one. And there is the corporate pair, the seat I held in someone else’s company, and the seat I built in my own. The reader will feel both in time, without me having to name them.
The seat I held in someone else’s company, and the seat I built in my own.
The promise is harder than the usual promise. Most business memoirs offer a manual, a set of moves the reader can copy. This one offers something the genre does not often offer. A clear-eyed inventory of what the work cost, what it built, and what stayed standing on the other side. The reader will not close the book and think about my life. They will close it and think about their own.
The thesis sits under the dedication, and I will say only the second half of it here, because the first half belongs to my wife. Build the asset on the other side of the work. The work stops one day. The other side is what stays.
Build the asset on the other side of the work. The work stops one day. The other side is what stays.
That is what I am writing, and why I am writing it now, at forty, while the rooms are still warm and the door is still close enough to remember.
The book has a working title, a working cover, and a long way to go. Updates will appear here, in this same column, when there is something worth saying.
Follow the work as it comes together.