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The meeting had been moved without me.

Not cancelled — moved. The invitation simply no longer included my name, and nobody had thought it worth mentioning, which told me more than the meeting ever would. I sat looking at the calendar for a while. The slot where the meeting used to be was empty, and very quiet, and I understood — with the particular clarity that arrives only after months of not letting yourself understand — that I was no longer being managed. I was being processed.

Here is what makes that moment worth a book. In the preceding year I had done the best work of my career. Not adequate work. Not defensible work. The best. I had been sent into a situation that was failing expensively and visibly, for reasons several senior people had excellent motives not to examine, and I had fixed it — by doing the one thing the situation actually required, which was forcing those reasons into the light. The results were not in dispute. Nobody ever argued with the results.

They simply never forgave me for them.