For a year I sat in a room every week and waited.
The management meeting was scheduled for nine. The board member arrived at ten, sometimes eleven. In the meantime we made small talk, checked our mail, followed our own thoughts. Eight people with responsibility for staff, who felt like supplicants awaiting an audience with the king.
No one ever said that was the intention. Nor was it necessary. Anyone who keeps others waiting need say nothing further about rank. And when he did arrive, there was no agenda. He spoke, we listened, nothing was decided.
For a year I said nothing.
I had a high salary and a position that looked good from the outside. I let myself be humiliated because I was paid for it. That is the shortest honest sentence I can offer about that time. My way out was not objection but a plan: I engineered my transfer to headquarters in Milan. Getting it through took a while. I did not change the situation. I sidestepped it and gave myself credit for something that looked like strategy.
I tell this because I had lived through the same process from the other direction not long before.
I had taken over a project that had been under way for two years: a digital investment account, the first of its kind in Germany. What existed was a requirements catalog of twenty-five hundred pages. Carefully done, complete, correct in every respect. No one had read it. It was not made to be read. It was made so that no one could say later that something had not been considered.
That too was a form of waiting. Only here no one was waiting for a person, but for a document that could never be finished.
At some point we asked ourselves the only question that still helped: how do we finally produce a visible result? The answer was unreasonable. We took twenty people — marketing, the IT architect, the lawyers, the product managers, everyone who mattered — and disappeared with them for two weeks to the Hotel Post in Wallgau.
There are images from those two weeks that are lovely. The room with the fireplace, where we sat around the open fire every evening. The evenings when we argued and then ate together. And the mornings: every day we went running together, drawing the fresh early mist in through our noses, and every time it felt like a small departure. I told those images for a long time as though they had been the reason. They were not.
The reason was what we built there. We called it the storybook: every single page a customer would ever see, in the order in which they would see it. Not a catalog of requirements, but one human being's path through their own account. At the end of the two weeks, everyone signed it.
What set it apart from the twenty-five hundred pages was not the volume. It was the direction. The catalog described what the system must be able to do. The storybook described what a person experiences. The first is structure without purpose. The second is both, in a document you can understand in an hour.
I don't want to make the catalog look ridiculous. A bank has regulators, liability and auditors, and much of what stood on those pages had to stand somewhere. The mistake was not that it existed. The mistake was that it was the only document. Structure without purpose produces completeness — and completeness is something other than direction.
Four months later we went live. Shortly afterward we received the Kasina Award as one of the three best financial websites in Europe.
Ever since, I have found leadership teams distinguishable by two questions: is it clear what for? And is it clear how? Where both are missing, you are sitting in a king's waiting room. Where only the purpose is there, you have enthusiastic people who have shipped nothing for two years. Where only the structure is there, you have twenty-five hundred pages. Both together is rare, and when it happens it lasts a few months — which is usually long enough.
What follows from that is less comfortable than it sounds. I later led teams myself and often wondered whether I had kept someone waiting. Not by hours. By decisions I pushed ahead of me while eight people knew they were due.
The account, incidentally, was later carved out of the bank, moved into a company of its own and has changed hands several times since. Of what we built, probably nothing remains.
Years later I read the Agile Manifesto and recognized that we had done exactly that: start small, build along the experience, put everyone involved in one room. We had no name for it at the time. We only knew that the catalog was getting us nowhere.
What remains is not the product. What remains is that every one of us has known ever since how it feels when it comes together. You recognize it instantly afterward — and you notice instantly when it is missing.
Both rooms were full of competent people. It is almost never a matter of ability. It is a matter of whether someone makes sure the what for and the how arrive in the same room.