“Solitude”
There is a light that stays on longest in every organisation, the corner office, well past nine.
Everyone else has gone home. The CEO is still there, staring at a decision no one else can make for him. His phone is full of contacts. His calendar is full of meetings. And yet, in this one hour, he is entirely alone.
Most leaders call this loneliness. They are wrong.
Loneliness is what happens when you are cut off from people. Solitude is what happens when you are finally alone with your own judgement, undiluted by opinion, unhurried by consensus, unclouded by the need to be liked.
The best decisions in boardrooms are rarely made in boardrooms. They are made in this quieter room first, the one inside the leader, where clarity has space to arrive.
The question was never “why am I alone at the top?”
The real question is: “What has my solitude been trying to teach me, that my meetings never could?”
