The Trusted Advisor

He never skips the stakeholder. He is, by any visible measure, the finest practitioner of the eighth commandment in the organization.

He knows what she reads. He knows which of her peers she is quietly competing with and what the board asked her in March that she is still smarting from. He knows that she will not act on anything presented after four o’clock. Three years of standing meetings and hallway conversations and one dinner where something honest got said, and he has built the most accurate model of a decision maker anyone in that building possesses.