This is The Hidden Game. My name is Jade.
Just Jade. Like the stone, which is worth a sentence because it turns out to be the most accurate thing about me.
Across much of the world jade means value, prosperity and good fortune. In China it has stood for integrity and moral character for three thousand years, which is the part I care about. And the fact most people do not know is this: jade is the toughest stone there is. Harder to break than steel. You can carve it, polish it, hold it up to the light and see straight through it.
You cannot shatter it.
I did not choose the name. I have simply spent twenty-five years earning it.
1. Why this, why me and why now.
My accomplishments speak for themselves. I am not here for accolades. Like you, I am here for revenue.
Why The Hidden Game? Well, quite frankly that's the title that tickled me the most. Because we all know it's there. There are many games people play in business, and in life. As you know, there are levels and then there are levels to the games we all play.
I am not here to play games with you. I am here to help you make a quantum leap for you and for your business. By revealing what is often hidden.
At every turn you will feel challenged by what I write. Opposed. Somewhat irritated. I quite dislike games that do not move the ball forward together. That is why this may be for you if you dislike the same.
You may want to stick around a bit, subscribe and be somewhat entertained by my various stories of what happens in the boardroom, behind the closed doors and the deals that get made behind the deals.
Why me? Well, I am pretty unvarnished. And the best thing in the world for you right now, as a founder, principal, investor or business leader, is to get genuinely comfortable with the uncomfortable truth.
You may not like me, not at first. You will think I am arrogant (I have been called that quite frequently by some of the most powerful people, all of whom were far more arrogant and often misguided). I really do not care. Your opinions do not pay me. Results pay me. However, over time, you will come to rely on me, because I am the only person capable of telling you the unvarnished truth.
So let me open with the thing that will annoy you most of all.
2. You have not yet realized you have been training your people to lie to you.
The reason nobody has told you what is actually wrong with your company is not that they are stupid, disloyal, or unable to see it. They can see it perfectly. They have discussed it with each other. Several of them have described it to me in a first conversation, each convinced they were telling me something confidential.
They have not told you because they did the arithmetic and the risk far outweighs any possible benefit. You see, they have decided that speaking up costs them far more than staying quiet. In terms of saving face, maintaining status quo, and more often than not, self-preservation.
You built that arithmetic. Not deliberately, and probably not consciously. But every organisation teaches its people what honesty is worth, continuously, in what it rewards and what it quietly punishes.
Somebody told you a hard thing once and it did not go well for them. Everyone observed the fallout and that harsh lesson was learned in a single afternoon.
So now you might be the most powerful person in the building, but you are working from the worst information in it. Those two facts are not in tension. The second is caused by the first. The law of causality, you see.
3. I am going to call it cowardice, and yes, I include myself in the standard.
The polite version of that entire issue blames the system. It is a design problem, not a character problem, nobody is at fault, incentives are simply misaligned.
That version is as comfortable as it is a lie.
Silence in the face of something you can plainly see is cowardice. I told you, you might not like how I am calling you out. It is in fact the reason I can face the biggest egos in the room with calm, and bring the room back together.
It is not a systems failure, not an unfortunate incentive structure. It is a cowardice problem. A choice, made repeatedly, by adults who knew better, to protect themselves at the expense of the people around them.
Honour, integrity and discernment are not conditions you meet when circumstances are favourable. They are what you are made of, and the only place that becomes visible is the moment they cost you something.
I hold myself to it. I once walked out of a room and out of a job in front of a man who could have ended my entire career, because he was screaming at my teams. I was frightened doing it and I did not know how it would end. I would not write a sentence about cowardice if I had never once been in a position to be a coward.
The price is real. It is still yours to pay.
4. Who am I?
I am a strategic advisor to principals. I get called when a company is in a breakdown and nobody can say why.
Twenty-five years. Eleven industries. Nearly 100 companies. $1.18 billion in value delivered and $3.5 billion in project value managed. I have been COO and then CEO, taking a surgical group's profit up 230 percent. I have sat on the investment side of a twenty-three company portfolio. Thirty-eight product plans and a three-year roadmap presented and approved.
I have also told clients to walk away from eight and nine figure investments. There is a reason they listen to me.
I have been the queen in rooms you have not yet been invited to enter. When I say queen, I mean queen of the chessboard. And that, my friend, is the hidden game.
The world is full of kings, titans, who can move all over the chessboard, but only one square at a time. They have a very clear single minded focus, and are very, very good at what they do. However, as queen, I have perhaps a more broad view of the chessboard. I can move anywhere, at any time.
I say that plainly because the alternative is false modesty, and false modesty is its own kind of dishonesty. I have sat where the actual decisions get made, in industries that share nothing with each other, for twenty-five years.
And what I learned there is that the same handful of things break every company, regardless of sector, and none of them are the things that get discussed.
5. The Hidden Game is the second game
Every company runs two games at once.
The stated one has objectives, reviews, a roadmap and a strategy deck. It is discussed openly, it is measured, and it is the one you were hired to win.
Underneath it runs the other one. Undeclared stakes. Private agendas. Betrayals that present as diligence. A truth everybody can see and nobody can afford to say. That second game, what I call the hidden game, decides what actually happens in your business, and it is the one no consultant will describe to you, largely because most of them are playing it.
That is what this publication is about. The hidden game, and the archetypes that run it.
You will recognise them.
The one quietly holding the fix at the bottom of the hill.
Not a villain. A reasonable person raising reasonable concerns, repeatedly, at exactly the moments momentum builds. I have watched a founder fight for weeks against the cheapest and fastest way to save his own company, because a broken company was worth less and he wanted to buy it cheap.
The displaced leader who needs to still matter.
Stripped of a role in a restructure, keeping every relationship it gave him, and routing work through himself because being needed is the only thing left. Two divisions failed to hand work to each other for years over this, and every single person routing through him was being kind.
The court that watches the emperor walk out with nothing on.
Everyone can see. Nobody speaks. Each of them has calculated that saying it costs more than his humiliation will, and they call the silence loyalty. That is the betrayal that lands hardest when the illusion finally drops. Not the con. The silence of everyone who knew.
The principal who has never once said "that was mine."
The market, the last leadership team, the engineers, the economy. Always outward, always plausible. This one I screen for, and when I find it I decline the engagement, because nothing I do works with someone who cannot hold a hard truth about himself.
6. What I actually do
The politeness is costing you money every single quarter.
I carry zero political debt. So I find the leak, find the root cause, hand the solution to your team and ensure they can implement it their way.
That is the whole of it. Everyone else in your building is carrying debt of some kind. A seat to defend. A board to appease. A relationship that will outlast this conversation.
A career that has to survive the next reorganisation. None of them are stupid and none of them are cowards by nature. They are trapped inside the incentives of self-preservation. And you know it. It is likely you might actually enjoy wielding that power over someone's future. Some do.
I do not. That is not a virtue and I will not claim it as one. It is a structural position, and it is the only reason I can say the thing everyone already knows and nobody can afford to put into words.
I do not arrive with a deck, a framework or a bunch of automations that will not be adopted. I will not grant you a bunch of useless templates, and I never will. Not because frameworks are worthless, but because a framework is by definition somebody else's rhythm, and the only cadence that holds in your company is the one that comes out of your own people doing their own work.
I go to the people carrying the work, every level and every function, and the outside parties nobody thinks to ask. I listen for hours before I say anything substantial. Then I bridge the gap between the people involved, and I do it in a way that leaves everyone able to stay in the room afterwards.
I do not placate egos, including yours. I am kind but I am surgical. The surgery I do is aimed at the problem, which is the only reason a room can hear it.
The solutions belong to the people who have to run them and improve them after I am gone. I am less a consultant, and more of a strategic advisor.
And no, you will not see me running around with a hammer thinking everything is a nail. That is not strategic, nor does it get people out of the hidden game and back on the same chessboard playing the real game, together.
Because as far as I am concerned, life is far too short and energy far too precious to waste it playing hidden games. It is also quite boring.
7. I do not have the time to play games. However, I do understand the games.
That distinction is the whole of it.
I have no seat to defend, no relationship to preserve and nothing to sell you afterwards. That is not a virtue I am claiming. It is arithmetic, and it is the entire reason I can say what the people on your payroll cannot.
Think of the board. The queen is the strongest piece, moves in every direction, crosses every square, and exists to protect the king. She is also the one piece that can never become the king.
I am not playing for your position. I would not take it even if I wanted it. Which is precisely why I can tell you the truth about it.
8. What you will receive here.
Diagnostics and a bit of advisory intermingled with storytelling for principals, founders, boards and investors. If you enjoy this, like, comment, share.
You will receive diagnostic cases, disguised enough to be publishable and specific enough to be useful. The company that spent hundreds of millions reorganising every quarter and never let anyone settle long enough to actually do the work. The software business losing thirty nine percent of its customers to an architecture nobody would reopen, because reopening it meant admitting someone deliberately failed to see the depth of their own closed-mindedness. The $2M monthly revenue leak that vanished when somebody finally asked the question everyone was afraid to ask in front of the board.
I am also neurodivergent, which means I take in far more of a room than I am supposed to and cannot switch it off. It costs me something real and it is the single most valuable thing I bring. I stopped apologising for it a long time ago.
9. What I will solve for you if you retain me
If I decide you are solvable, that is. I turn down more than I accept.
I am diplomatic, strategic and highly aware. I am selective, because my work does not function otherwise.
Retainment is by inquiry application only.
I do the hard research before we ever speak. Every leader in post, the board and who seated them, the public record, the customer voice nobody is managing, and the gap between your stated values and the flat facts. By the time we talk I know what I am walking into.
You will be contacted within two business days of applying. I always reply.
A few things worth knowing before you do.
Your urgency is not my emergency.
I work fast. However, speed is a discipline rather than panic. Nothing good has ever come out of a room where the loudest anxiety set the pace.
Your details and your depth matter.
A vague description of your situation is useless to me. Bring me the thing you have not said out loud.
Your privacy is protected. Always, and under every circumstance.
Nothing is sacred, not even your ego, but everything is protected. What is said reaches the people who need it directly, unvarnished, detailed. That is not a policy. It is the reason anyone tells me the truth in the first place.
And I can only advise you if you are open, honest and transparent. Not with me. With yourself, in front of me, which is harder and is the actual work. That means you must come face to face with the truth. And trust the process. Place your trust and faith. Yes, people let us down, disappoint us, often. However, there are a few of us who go above and beyond. We are very, very good at what we do.
For now, read what is here.
You landed here for a reason. I do not believe in coincidences.