The Dark Night of the CEO

When they dare to call

I do not bring you a vision. I bring you contact with what you have been kept away from, and I do not leave.

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Strategy · Part VIII · CEO-Strategy.nl

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The call never opens with the real sentence.

It opens with a project that has stalled, a board that has gone quiet, a number that will not come back, a leadership team that agrees in the room and does nothing after it. Somewhere in the second half of the conversation the actual sentence arrives, and it is almost always a version of the same one.

I can see something is wrong and I cannot find it.

That is not a strategy problem. That is a specific condition, it has a shape, and both the traditions I work from describe it precisely.

Why the call takes years

You did not call earlier because the company kept working.

Somebody in your organisation has been absorbing the fractures. An escalation manager, a country lead, a technical director, someone with the view and without the position. Every time a customer was about to be lost, that person went, and the loss did not happen, and the signal that would have told you where the structure was broken never reached you.

They were the anaesthetic. It was not their choice and it was not a favour to you. A man cannot locate pain he does not feel.

So your information about your own company has been arriving as resolved items. Green status. Customer retained. Note of thanks. You have every name for what happened in your business and almost no contact with it, and you have started to notice the difference without being able to say what the difference is.

That noticing is the beginning of the passage. It is not a breakdown. It is the first accurate perception you have had in a while.

Where you actually are

The I Ching puts this at hexagram 3, 屯, and the placement is the whole point. Hexagram 1 is Heaven. Hexagram 2 is Earth. Hexagram 3 is the first thing that has to live. The Sequence commentary says it plainly: after heaven and earth exist, the ten thousand things are born, and 屯者物之始生也, Zhun is the first birth of things.

The image is water above and thunder below. A sprout under the soil, in the dark, under pressure, with the movement already in it and no light to move by.

Two things about that hexagram matter to you specifically.

First, 屯 carries 元亨利貞. All four. The same four that Heaven itself carries. The first mortal thing has the complete pattern in it from the beginning. Nothing is missing from you. Nothing has to be installed, acquired, or trained in. You are not short of a capability.

Second, the judgement then says 勿用有攸往, do not undertake anything yet, and 利建侯, it furthers to appoint helpers.

Complete pattern, no light, do not move, get the right company. That is the instruction, and it is the opposite of what your instinct is telling you to do, which is to launch something.

The Image of hexagram 3 gives the verb: 雲雷屯，君子以經綸. 經綸 is the work of sorting and drawing out tangled silk threads. Untangling. Not cutting, not replacing, not restructuring. Separating what has become knotted until the threads run again.

What the tradition calls this

John of the Cross named the same passage in the sixteenth century and his description is worth having, because it stops you treating this as failure.

The dark night is not the absence of what you are looking for. It is the withdrawal of the usual consolations, and the specific mark of it is that the methods that always worked have stopped working. You cannot think your way through it, which is exactly the complaint, and the inability is the sign rather than the symptom.

He gives signs for recognising it, and the sharpest thing in his writing is not about the night at all. It is his anger at the guides who mishandle it. The director who does not recognise the passage pushes the person back into the old methods, harder, and does real damage. More analysis. More frameworks. Another offsite. Another consultant with a deck.

That is the state most chief executives are in when they finally call, and it is usually the fourth or fifth attempt, after several people were paid well to hammer.

What I do not do

I cannot hand you the answer, and anyone who says they can is selling you a description of a colour.

Frank Jackson's Mary knew every physical fact about colour vision and had never seen red. Zhuangzi's wheelwright was seventy years old and could not transmit his skill to his own son, and told a duke that the books he was reading were the dregs of dead men. Whatever the thing is that you need, it does not travel as content. It is not in a document. If it were, you would already have it, because you have bought a great many documents.

So I do not bring a framework, a methodology, a maturity model, or a vision that descends on a sufficiently open leader. That last one is the most expensive error available to a man in your condition, and Chapter 38 names it: 前識者，道之華而愚之始. Foreknowledge is the flower and the beginning of ignorance.

I also do not go in your place. That is the one thing I will not do, and it is the whole difference between this and everything else you have tried.

What I do

Two things, and they are the two trigrams that hold the axis.

Water. I bring you into contact with what you have been protected from. The customer who is leaving and the reason why, in the room, in person, felt rather than reported. The conversation your leadership team has in the corridor instead of the meeting. The thing your best people know and have stopped saying because nothing came of saying it. This is uncomfortable and it is the entire mechanism. The gap between describing a business and running one closes through contact and through nothing else.

Fire. Clarity, held while you look. Not my clarity handed to you. Yours, kept lit long enough to see by, which is the part nobody can do alone in the dark.

Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, has an instruction attached to it that reads like a job description for this: 君子以議獄緩死. The superior man deliberates the case and delays the execution. You arrive at the point where judgement is about to fall, on a business unit, on a person, on yourself, and the work is to hold it open long enough for something true to become visible. Not to prevent the decision. To stop it being made in the dark.

One-to-one. No group. Nobody from your organisation in the room. No notes circulated.

What you leave with

Not an insight. Insights evaporate by the following Tuesday and you have had several.

Hexagram 30 is doubled fire, the summit of the first canon, maximum brightness, and the Book attaches to it the most domestic instruction it contains: 畜牝牛，吉. Raise the cow. Good fortune. The Image says 繼明, continue the brightness. Not seize it. Not possess it. Continue it, the way you feed an animal, daily, or it goes out.

Clarity is husbandry. What you leave with is the practice of staying in contact with your own business, and the discovery of which specific arrangements in your company exist to keep you out of it.

Why me

I spent my career as the person described at the top of this page. Corporate escalation. The one with the view and without the position, sent again and again to the customer to save the company and, more often than anybody admitted, the reputation of the man who sent me.

I was the anaesthetic. I know precisely where it gets applied, in what dose, and what it conceals, because I administered it for years and was formally thanked for it in a way that guaranteed nothing would change.

Sun Tzu has a line for that job, in the same chapter where he says a slack army is the commander's fault and not heaven's: 進不求名，退不避罪，唯人是保. He advances without seeking the name, withdraws without avoiding the blame, his only concern to protect the people.

I am not looking for your chair. I have never wanted it. I want it occupied.

The boundary

This is strategic work with a person under load. It is not therapy and it does not replace it. If what is happening to you is clinical, that belongs with a doctor, and saying so is not a way of getting rid of you. Both can be true at once and often are.

The entry condition

Part VII named Qi and Shen as the chief executive's real portfolio and left out the term that precedes both.

精. Jing. Substance. The Neijing states it without decoration: 夫精者，身之本也. Essence is the root of the body. The commentary on that line is more exact still: 神氣血脈，皆生於精. Spirit, energy, blood and vessel all arise from essence. Qi is refined out of jing, shen out of qi. Take away the first term and the other two have no source.

That decides who this work is for, and willingness is not the deciding factor.

If openness of this kind is intolerable to you, that is not a preference and not a difference in style. It is a reading. There is nothing there to be open with. Door gebrek aan gewicht komen ze boven drijven. For lack of weight they floated to the top, and a man who arrived that way has no jing to convert. You cannot regulate a company's circulation or hold its attention using substance you do not have.

The classic gives the practitioner the matching rule, in the same chapter as the line about essence: 非其人勿教，非其真勿授，是謂得道. Do not teach one who is not the person. Do not transmit to one who is not genuine. That is called attaining the Way.

So some calls end in the first conversation. Not because the situation is too hard, and not as a verdict on your career. Because the material is not there, and contact converts nothing where there is nothing to convert.

The call

You already know something is wrong. That is not the question.

The question is whether you are willing to look at what you know, with someone in the room who will not look on your behalf.