For twenty years, I never worked alone.
I want to start there because it is the truest thing I can tell you about the life I led.
Everything I built, I built with other people.
That is what leadership looks like once you reach a certain altitude. You have an idea in the morning. By lunchtime it has been challenged, improved, pulled apart and put back together by people who are better than you at different parts of the work. Someone spots the flaw you missed. Someone else quietly solves it. A decision that begins in one mind ends up carrying the fingerprints of many.
I loved that way of working.
I knew how to pull the best thinking out of a room. I knew whose silence meant disagreement and whose meant conviction. I knew how to leave a meeting with twelve opinions and one decision that everyone could stand behind, including those who had argued against it.
For two decades, that was my craft.
And then I made a book.
The obvious assumption is that this would have felt familiar.
After all, I didn’t write it alone. The cover says so plainly: The Next Mountain, as told to Priya Kumar.
I told the story. Priya, a far finer writer than I will ever be, turned thousands of conversations, memories and fragments into a manuscript that people could actually read. She brought the craft I didn’t have, just as so many brilliant colleagues had brought strengths I didn’t have throughout my career.
In many ways, I made the book exactly as I had led organisations.
Through partnership.
Through trust.
Through someone else’s expertise.
But somewhere along the way I realised there was one part of the process that nobody could do for me.
Priya could find the right words.
She could not decide whether those words would be true.
She could write beautifully about the hardest years of my life. She could not decide whether I would tell the whole story or the version that made me look a little wiser, a little braver, a little more certain than I had really been.
That decision belonged to me.
Every single day.
And I discovered something I had never expected.
The temptation to soften the truth doesn’t arrive looking like dishonesty.
It arrives sounding sensible.
Leave that out, it whispers. Nobody needs to know.
Round that edge off. It doesn’t really matter.
You can explain that failure differently.
You can make yourself sound slightly more in control than you actually were.
It is a calm, reasonable voice.
And if you’re not careful, it edits away the very thing that makes a story worth telling.
The real work of writing the book was never finding the words.
It was choosing the truer sentence when the easier one was sitting right beside it.
That was unfamiliar territory for me.
In an organisation, the hardest problems are rarely carried alone. They are debated, challenged and shared. The weight is spread across a team. That is exactly how it should be. Leadership is not about proving how much you can carry by yourself.
But there are some decisions that no committee can make.
No colleague can answer them.
No adviser can take responsibility for them.
The truth about your own life is one of them.
For the first time in a very long time, I found myself alone with a question that nobody else could answer for me.
Not whether a strategy was right.
Not whether a business decision would work.
Simply this:
Is this really what happened?
And perhaps even harder:
Is this really who I was?
Nobody could answer those questions on my behalf.
Nobody should.
Looking back, I realised I had spent years surrounded by exceptional people who made me better at almost everything I did. Together we solved problems I could never have solved alone.
But they had also, without anyone intending it, protected me from ever having to sit alone with that particular question.
The book closed that door behind me.
It reminded me that beneath the titles, the teams and the organisations, there is still only one person responsible for telling the truth about your own life.
That responsibility cannot be delegated.
For thirty years, I was the one people reported to.
Information moved towards me. Others gathered it, shaped it, brought it to my desk, and I decided what to do with it. That was the direction of my working life. Upwards, into my hands.
The book reversed it.
For the first time in decades, I was the one doing the reporting. I handed someone else the raw material of my own life and, harder still, I handed her the pen.
After a career spent holding the narrative, I had to give it away for it to be told.
I had expected authorship to feel like authority.
It felt like surrender.
Useful surrender, but surrender all the same.
You cannot manage a true story the way you manage a department. You can only tell it as honestly as you are able and trust the person across the table to carry it well.
My book is out now. It is called The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose.
The words on its pages are Priya Kumar’s craft.
The honesty underneath them had to be mine.
I tell you this for a reason that has very little to do with books.
At some point in your own career, if you’re fortunate, you’ll be surrounded by capable people. They’ll make you faster, sharper and better than you could ever be alone.
Build that team.
Trust those people.
Lean on them.
That is not weakness. It is how meaningful work gets done.
But every now and then, you’ll come across one part of the climb that nobody else can carry for you.
Not because it is the hardest task.
Because it demands the most honesty.
When you find that moment, don’t hand it away.
That part has your name on it.
Before I go, one question.
What is the one thing in your work today that you could delegate to almost anyone…
…except the part where you have to tell the truth about yourself?
Until next week,
Avinash