What I watched happen inside powerful people — and why I finally wrote about it
Over 29 years of advising executives, boards, and public sector leaders, I observed something that none of the management literature I had read prepared me for.
It wasn’t the corruption. It wasn’t the incompetence, the infighting, or the short-term thinking — though all of that was present. What unsettled me most was something quieter and harder to name: the gradual erosion of the self inside people who held significant power.
Not a dramatic fall. Not a scandal. Just a slow, almost imperceptible narrowing — of curiosity, of conscience, of the capacity to be honestly wrong.
I watched it happen in boardrooms and government agencies, in organizations that genuinely started with good intentions. The leaders involved were not villains. Most of them were talented, and many were deeply committed — at least in the beginning. But over time, the system shaped them. Rewarded certain instincts. Punished others. And eventually, the person who had entered the institution was no longer quite the same person operating within it.
In my 2020 book, Management by Intent, I tried to address the structural side of this: the frameworks, the principles, the design of organizations that could resist this drift. That work was important to me. But there was something the nonfiction format couldn’t reach.
It couldn’t reach the interior, like fiction could.
“It’s about realizing that a system shapes you long before you realize you’ve surrendered to it. It molds you in its own image.”
— from Political Suicide
That line was not invented at a desk. It emerged from observation. From conversations with leaders at moments of private reckoning — moments that almost never make it into case studies or leadership panels.
What does it feel like to be a capable, well-intentioned person who slowly realizes that the story you’ve been telling yourself about your own integrity no longer holds? What is the moment just before that recognition? And what becomes possible after it?
Those are the questions that became Political Suicide: An Inward Journey for Redemption. Three fictional political leaders — a Secretary of State, a Secretary of the Treasury, a White House Chief of Staff — each confronting that exact reckoning. Not through scandal or prosecution. Through something slower and more honest: the collapse of their own justifications.
I drew on Sufi thought to frame this — not as doctrine, but as a set of extraordinarily precise images for what inner transformation actually looks like. The self as a river. The heart as a mirror that power slowly clouds. Change as movement rather than arrival.
These images resonated with what I had seen. Power doesn’t break people loudly. It obscures them gradually. And redemption, if it comes at all, is not a moment of clarity — it’s a long, uncomfortable process of clearing.
If you have worked inside an institution, led a team, or watched someone you respected slowly become someone you no longer recognized — this novel was written with you in mind.
It’s available now, worldwide. You can get a copy at Political_Suicide. If you’ve already read it, I’d be grateful for a rating on Goodreads — it matters more than most people realize for helping a book find its readers.
And if something in this resonates, I’d welcome hearing from you. The conversation this book is trying to start is one I’ve wanted to have for a long time.