Memento Homo

Over the years I have met and dealt with a number of newly appointed GLC CEOs. Some were coworkers before the appointment. Some worked in the same industry as me. Some appointed their own family members as directors, brought friends into management, before they had even settled into the chair themselves.

One case stands out more than the rest. I will not identify gender here. Gender has nothing to do with the lesson and everything to do with bias creeping into how it gets read.

The path I actually took

I came up as ordinary staff. Line-level work first, then management, then senior leadership, before I quit to start my own company. Quitting was not clean. I did not burn bridges on the way out, but I lost pieces of my personal life along the way, relationships, time, stability, the things nobody puts in a LinkedIn post.

That is the path I took. So when I meet someone who skipped every rung of it, I notice.

Someone I know

Someone I know inherited a leadership seat because a family member appointed them. A head start, a salary, a directorship, handed over before day one. A foundation business already built and running underneath them. A team already in place. An office already paid for. The bills covered before they walked in.

All they had to do was build something new. An idea, even. One was handed to them too.

They kept office hours like any established GLC would. Structured, private, quiet. Somewhere in there, a piece of software has been in development for years. It has never shipped. Not released, not marketed, not even a proper webpage built for it. Plenty of chances along the way to explore new business ideas, apply for licences, build on what was already sitting there. They even sat through the same training I did, the training my company later turned into an HRD-certified programme. They could build the same certification path too, if they wanted it.

To us, that would be the easiest scale-up in the world, resources like that in the hands of someone who started from zero. But growth depends on the person steering, not the fuel sitting in the tank.

Given the chance to switch positions, I would turn that company large. The network alone, the authorities it already answers to, the doors that open just from the name attached to it, I know what I would do with all of that. But it is not my place to say it out loud to them, let alone do it for them. Easy for me does not mean easy for someone else.

What I keep wondering

I have wondered about it more than once. What if I had started with everything that leader started with. Would my business be five times the size by now. Or would I be exactly where they are, sitting on an unreleased product, mistaking activity for progress.

I do not actually know the answer. That is the honest part.

But then again, you need to go through hell to appreciate heaven.

The whisperer

There is an old story about Marcus Aurelius during a triumph. A slave called an auriga rode behind him in the chariot, and while the crowd cheered, the auriga’s only job was to lean in and repeat one line. Memento homo. Remember, you are only a man. The story is told more often than it is documented, but the point survives the fact check either way. Whisper it or not, someone always needs that reminder eventually.