This is a letter I wish someone had written to me before I made that decision. Not a warning. Not a prediction. Just an honest account of what that decision actually costs and what it takes to rebuild what it broke. I am writing that letter now. The story is fiction. The situations are based on real events. If you have worked inside a large organisation, you will recognise much of it. If you are building one, you need to read all of it. The decision I made seemed obvious at the time. It always does.

Before the decision there was something else. There was a company. There were people in it. There was the specific texture of a place that was becoming something before anyone knew what it was becoming. There were small celebrations in cramped rooms and difficult conversations that nobody wanted to have and two people who kept almost saying something to each other across three years of shared desks and late evenings and the particular closeness of people who are building something together and who do not quite know what to do with that closeness. There was a manager in his early sixties who knew more than almost anyone above him and who was never moved because he was too good where he was. There was a friendship that became something more complicated and an investigation that found nothing and changed everything. There was a person on the provider side who saw exactly what was broken and tried from inside a structure that was not built for the trying.

End of Chapter 0

Writer's Thought:

What to decide. What will it cost? What will happen?

Here is What is Broken. The CEO. Prologue.

MarvinPro | March 2026

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