Short pieces on corporate life, leadership isolation, and the things that go unsaid — written by Sachin Gupta, from twenty-five years inside the same system you are navigating.
A meeting I used to be in started happening without me. Nobody mentioned it. I never asked. That is the whole story. There is nothing else to it, which is why I could not say it to anybody. It takes different forms.…
Read →People tell me things they have not told anybody else. There is nobody I do that with. Not for lack of people. There are three or four I could call at any hour and they would pick up. But every one of…
Read →At some point, people stopped telling me things. Not lying. Just the version arriving a little cleaner than the truth. A problem brought to me after it had already been handled. A disagreement settled in the corridor before anyone walked into the…
Read →There is a man I spoke to every day for four years. I could not tell you which city he lives in now. Nothing happened. No falling out. One of us changed jobs, and that was the whole of it. I have…
Read →Twenty-five years in, and I cannot remember anybody asking me how I was doing. People ask all the time, of course. In corridors, at the start of calls, walking into meetings. Nobody means it and I never answer it, and everybody knows…
Read →The posts always look the same. Excited to share that after fifteen years I am starting a new chapter. What nobody posts is the sixth week and weeks that follow. By then the goodbye messages have stopped. The calls that used to…
Read →Somebody told me he has enough money to stop working tomorrow, and cannot. Children studying abroad, still a few years from standing on their own. Quitting does not cost him a salary, it costs him the retirement he spent twenty-five years building.…
Read →Some people have nobody to tell at the end of a bad day. Not obviously. They have colleagues, a family, people who would come if called. What they do not have is one person they can hand the day to, without having…
Read →I have watched people in their first few years get stuck on something they could not see. The frustration is always at work. The recognition that did not come. The increment that went to someone with less to show for it. It…
Read →Nobody has ever asked for my time to talk about a parent who is unwell, or a problem at home. But it comes up. Somebody starts with a difficult manager, or a decision they have been going back and forth on for…
Read →Somebody mentioned a number to me in passing once. It took me a while to understand what it had just told me. I had stayed somewhere much longer than I should have. Not because I could not see it. Because I was…
Read →For a long stretch of my career I used to wake at three in the morning. Never the big things. The big things you can deal with in daylight. It is Tuesday’s meeting. The sentence you should have said differently, and the…
Read →Some of the most tired people I have known were not overworked. They just had nowhere to put anything down. It is a particular kind of tiredness. It comes from holding things in for so long that you have stopped noticing you…
Read →I remember exactly where I was when I found out. Not from my boss. Not in a meeting. Someone mentioned it to me in passing, assuming I already knew, that the role had gone to someone brought in from outside. Years ago…
Read →Every place I have worked, there has been someone the whole team quietly runs on. Not the loudest person. Not always the most senior. Just the one everyone drifts towards when something is wrong. The one who takes the bad news in…
Read →Over the past few weeks a fair number of people have told me, quietly, that something I wrote landed. A message. A short reply. Sometimes just a reaction and nothing else. Very few of them ever say the next thing. I understand…
Read →Some people I managed years ago have started reaching out. Not one of them wanted anything from me. That is what made me pay attention. They had all reached out to say more or less the same thing. That at some point,…
Read →Something I have noticed over the years, and only really understood late. The higher you go, the shorter the list gets. The list of people you can actually say things to. Early on there are more of them. A colleague who understood…
Read →There is a particular kind of bad day nobody prepares you for. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The meeting where credit for your work goes to someone louder, someone who spoke first. The decision that goes against you and nobody…
Read →Nobody tells you this part. That somewhere along the way, after enough years, enough performance reviews, enough town halls where you said the right thing, you stop knowing how to say the real thing. Not to your manager. Not to your team.…
Read →Corporate culture has perfected one thing above all else. Teaching people to be fluent in their own silence. We learn early. Keep it professional. Leave our problems at the door. Do not show weakness. Perform. And we get very good at it.…
Read →I once watched a senior leader sit in his cabin for 20 minutes after a smooth and successful board meeting. Not on a call. Not checking phone. Not looking at laptop. Just sitting. When I knocked on his door, he said something…
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