Four rewrites and a shoe that wouldn’t go on

The CEO Parent is out. Paperback and Kindle, on Amazon, with my name on the cover and nothing left to change. That last part took some getting used to.

I rewrote this book four times, and each time it turned into a quite different book. One version read like a management book, all models and arrows. One leaned so far into stories that the point got lost somewhere around chapter three. At one stage I seriously considered turning the whole thing into a novel. It went in every direction a book can go.

The examples kept moving too. I wrote in the evenings and worked with founders during the day, so every few weeks I walked out of a client meeting with a better story than the one I had just spent a weekend writing up. There are far more of them than fit in one book. The ones that made it are the ones that kept surprising me.

In the end, what held it all together was a single question underneath every chapter: what is actually happening here?

You know the moment. One of the kids is stamping in the hallway, close to tears, because a shoe will not go on. Or the two of them have just hit each other on the head, for reasons nobody will ever fully reconstruct. And before you have thought about anything at all, you are already reacting. Louder than you meant to, and more cross than the shoe deserved. Ten minutes later, when everyone has calmed down, you think: that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

I have done it more often than I would like to admit in a newsletter. When a child gets emotional, my instinct is to get emotional right back, and that is almost never what they need. They need someone who stays calm long enough to see what is going on. And it is rarely about the shoe.

Companies work the same way. A deadline slips, a client complains, a manager escalates something they could have solved themselves, and the founder reacts to the shoe. He steps in, takes over and fixes it. In the moment that feels like leadership. Afterwards it usually turns out to be the reason the same thing lands on his desk again next month.

That question runs through the whole book. Every chapter starts with a moment that surprised me, at home or at work, and asks it again.

This week, catch yourself once. The next time something lands on your desk and you feel the urge to jump in, wait ten seconds and ask what is actually happening here. Then notice whether the answer changes what you do.

Get your copy today. Paperback or Kindle edition, both on Amazon.

Want a preview before you buy? Download chapter one for free at theceoparent.eu/chapter-one and discover a different way to think about leadership, parenting and letting go.

I am really proud that it exists. Read it, and tell me which story you recognised yourself in. I read every reply.