The fall of 2008 didn't announce itself. It arrived the way most crises do, quietly at first and then all at once. I was deep in the credit markets at the time, watching spreads blow out in ways the models hadn't anticipated, and most people hadn't allowed themselves to imagine. The phone calls came constantly. The data was incomplete, contradictory, changing by the hour. And somewhere in the middle of it all, decisions still had to be made.

There is something nobody tells you about reaching the senior levels of an organization: the higher you go, the fewer people you can actually be honest with. Not because the people around you are untrustworthy. But because the role itself changes the nature of every relationship in it.

Early in my time at UBS, we brought in outside consultants to help us think through a significant technology infrastructure challenge. They were credible, experienced, and they came prepared. What they proposed was bring in third-party software vendors, start from scratch, purchase premade platforms and customize them to fit our needs. On paper it had a certain logic to it. In practice it missed something so fundamental that it was almost impossible to explain to people who hadn't run a business like ours from the inside.

There is a moment in wilderness photography that experienced photographers come to recognize and beginners almost universally mishandle. It's the moment just before the shot, when the animal is in the viewfinder, the light is close to right, and the elements are arranged nicely in the frame. Everything in you wants to press the shutter but the real shot is still a few seconds away.

There is a transition that happens inside most firms that rarely gets the attention it deserves. It's the moment when the person who was exceptional at their work is asked, or decides, or is essentially pushed, to lead the organization. And the skills that made them exceptional become, in certain important ways, liabilities.

My father repaired watches in Brooklyn to put himself through college. It was common in the 1950s for local jewelry stores to have watchmakers as part of their service offering for clients. I always enjoyed hearing the stories he shared about those times. Decades later, having spent my own time studying the mechanics of watches and carrying those years alongside whatever he passed down, I think I understand what he was actually doing.

Over the course of my career I have been involved in many infrastructure projects and business building exercises. Each time we were constructing the infrastructure that would allow us to do more work, which would require more infrastructure, in a cycle that seemed to have no natural endpoint. Somewhere in the middle of that expansion, I started asking a question I didn't have a fully formed answer to at the time: what happens to all of this when I'm not here? The answer that allows for the best outcome for everyone is simple: I shouldn't need to be here.

There is a line in Wayne Dyer's book on intention that has stayed with me since I first encountered it, not because it was comfortable but because I recognized it immediately from decades of watching organizations from the inside. Dyer wrote that you don't attract what you want. You attract what you are.