I haven't had a career. I have done many things instead.

I spent the best part of four decades inside it. I trained as an accountant, and for a while I was an expert in modelling. Not the catwalk kind. I built computer models that measured risk, mostly financial, and a good deal of the work was testing what would happen if everything went wrong.

I finished that part of my life as a consulting Partner and COO at PwC in the Middle East. Along the way I built my own consulting business, and I have been an FD and a CEO in other industries.

When I left a career to write a book, no analysis on earth would have called it sensible. By the end I was selling furniture to buy food. And when the last full stop landed, I am not sure I had ever been happier.

That book was The Masterful Manipulation of George Cove. Others followed. There has been acting too, which taught me more about how people hear each other than any boardroom did.

The thread was never the job. It was watching how people decide, how quietly they hand over their own agency, and what it takes to reclaim it.

Somewhere in all of that, I stopped believing that what holds capable people back is capability itself. It almost never is. It is perspective, and permission. Permission to speak plainly, to lead in their own way, to change direction without calling it failure. Half a century of watching that becomes a way of seeing, and that way of seeing is really the only thing I have to offer.

Through conversation. Live, unscripted, and usually with intelligent professionals who already speak English reasonably well, many of them in Asia, from Taiwan and Hong Kong to mainland China. The conversation moves past vocabulary almost at once, into judgment, identity and possibility.

People rarely leave with what they came for. They arrive talking about a role that no longer fits, or a conversation they are avoiding. They often leave with a decision they had been postponing, and the understanding that there is more than one path.

These days much of my thinking finds its way into Letters, written late at night to Sasha, who lives in Kyiv and reads everything before the world does. If a thought cannot survive under her pressure, I do not trust it enough to send it out into the world.

Read enough of them and the same question keeps returning at a larger size, from one person's evening to a whole organisation's direction. Lately it has started to take a shape I am calling Liberation-Based Leadership. It is not a finished system. It is a book still arguing with itself.