"That's a blunt thing to say," she said. "You asked for honest, not polite. A silence, not uncomfortable, more like the kind of silence where something real is being absorbed. Am I wrong? Marcus asked.
A longer silence. No, she said quietly. You're not wrong. He He didn't press it. He just nodded.
So, what do you tell them? He said, "Not the numbers. What's the true thing? The specific true thing that they haven't heard yet." Olivia looked at her coffee. She was thinking genuinely not performing thought.
He could tell the difference by now. I knew James Okapor was burning out. She said James Okapor. She'd mentioned him before. The operations director who'd resigned 6 months ago.
I saw it. I watched it happening and I told myself it was temporary stress and he'd recover and I kept asking more of him because the work needed it. She paused. He was the best operations director I've ever worked with. He'd been with Bennett Global for 11 years.
He built half of what we're using to manage the expansion. A pause. And I let him burn because the market window was open and I didn't slow down long enough to She stopped. Marcus waited. He sent me a message when he resigned.
She said not an email, a message personal. She was looking at something that wasn't the property, wasn't the morning, wasn't anything Marcus could see. He said, "Olivia, I believed in this company because I believed you understood that the people were the company." He said he wasn't sure that was still true. Quiet. Tell them that, Marcus said.
She looked at him. Tell them James Okaffor sent you that message. And you've thought about it every day since. And he was right. And you know he was right.
And here is what you're doing differently. He held her gaze. Not the strategy. That part. That true part.
Then the strategy. Olivia was very still for a long time. I've never said that to anyone. She said, "I know. How do you know?
Because you just said it like it cost you something. Things you've said to other people don't cost that much anymore." She looked at him with an expression he couldn't entirely read. Not quite surprise. Not quite vulnerability. Something that was working out whether those two things were safe.