He did not set out to write a book. He set out, over the past decade, to be useful to a particular kind of person: the founder who has built something real, sitting across the table from him with a question they did not realise was a question until a particular event made it one.

This book is twelve patterns drawn from years of advisory work at Satyamaya & Partners LLP. None of the stories is any one client. All of them are composed from patterns observed repeatedly enough to be confident they are real. The names are invented. The truths underneath are not.

He wrote it because the most expensive failures he has seen in Indian businesses are rarely the dramatic ones. They are structural: the clause nobody read, the compliance lapse that quietly compounded, the succession conversation that never happened. Every chapter is the long-form version of a conversation he has already had, more times than he can count, in his office. This book is his attempt to bring that conversation forward, before the damage occurs.

— Mayank Vashishta