Shadows of Purpose: A Novel

There is a second thing that successful people know.Alan Royce is thirty-four, freelance, extremely good at his job and completely invisible - because when a systems consultant does his work properly, nothing happens, and a career built on things not happening is one nobody can see.Then a man he shared a house with at university buys him a coffee and says the thing nobody says out loud: that being good is table stakes, that there is a second skill, and that it can be learned.Six sessions. Eleven thousand dollars. Six principles on a card, and a simulation that can put him inside a situation his career would take eleven years to produce.He learns all six. Every one of them works. Every one costs him something he did not price - a junior analyst's name, a sister who stops telling him her ideas, a man he liked.And in the sixth session he finds out the programme was never teaching him anything.It was measuring whether he would use it on the man who recruited him.