Why I wrote Cards on the Table

Twenty years of European boardrooms taught me one thing: every meeting has the same cast. The person who cannot stop worrying. The one who already knows the answer before anyone else has spoken. The quiet strategist who says nothing until the follow-up email. The facilitator, trying to turn all that energy into a decision.

I trained as an electronic engineer. Code either works or it does not. Boardrooms are different: people debate, resist, persuade, delay. That gap between the two worlds became the raw material for this book.

Cards on the Table names eight recurring meeting personas, from the Skeptic to the Disruptor. For each one, it explains what they are protecting, how meetings derail because of it, and the exact move that brings the room back to its purpose. It opens with something that happened to me in a meeting room in the United States. A culture clash, and a good one to learn from.

It started as a card game, tested with association executives who sit through exactly these meetings every week. The book followed.

If you have sat in one of these rooms, you already know which persona you are. I will let you work that out for yourself.