The Seat and the Voice — 3 of 6
For about a year, a company was building me into a public figure, and I mistook it for becoming one.
I was the CFO, but somewhere in there the role widened. There was an Office of the President, and I was in it, and a plan formed to put a face on the brand. The face was going to be mine. There were going to be talks, essays, interviews. There was a thought-leadership platform with its own name and its own deck, built to carry a set of ideas into the world with me as the voice that carried them.
Here is the part that made it work on me: I believed the ideas. They were about attention and presence, about the difference between reacting to your life and actually choosing it, about the cost of living one step removed from your own experience. I had been thinking about those things privately for years. To have a company say “this is valuable, let’s build it out, and you’re the one who says it” was not a small thing. It felt like recognition. It felt like the private part of me and the working part of me were finally going to occupy the same room.
I want to be fair to it. The work was real, the deck was good, and the strategy was sound. If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you I was building my platform.
I was not building my platform. I was being installed on theirs.
It took me a while to see the difference, because the two things look identical from the inside while they are happening. You are writing, speaking, putting your name on ideas you believe. The audience is real. So is the momentum. What is not visible in the moment is the ownership question, the same question that had already taught me one hard lesson in the same building: who does this actually belong to? The platform was built around me, but it was an asset of the company. The voice was a position, and positions get filled and vacated. The ideas had my name on them, but the structure that amplified them, the budget that funded them, the title that gave them weight, none of that was mine. I was the talent. I was not the owner.
You learn what something really was by what happens when you leave. When I left, the platform did not come with me, because there was nothing to bring. It was never a person. It was a seat with my name temporarily on it, and the seat stayed behind. The themes I had believed, the ones I had actually lived, were still mine, because thoughts are the one thing a company cannot keep in the divorce. But the apparatus that had made me a public voice simply switched off, the way a stage goes dark when the production closes. The lights were never mine. I had been standing in them.
There is no villain in this. A company building a public platform around an executive is doing a reasonable thing. The voice serves the brand; that is the deal, whether or not anyone says it out loud. The mistake was mine, and it was the same mistake I had made about authority a year earlier, wearing different clothes. I had confused being given a thing with owning a thing. A mandate is not authority. A platform handed to you inside someone else’s structure is not your platform. It is a loan, and loans get called.
I think about this now whenever I watch someone get elevated inside a company as its voice. The conference keynotes, the bylined pieces, the personal brand the employer is quietly underwriting. It is a real opportunity and it is worth taking. But it is borrowed, and the borrower should know it is borrowed. The audience that gathers around a company-built platform is gathering around the company, with you as the current face. The day you leave, you find out how much of that audience was ever actually yours, and for most people the honest answer is less than it felt like, because the thing they were standing in belonged to someone else.
The only durable voice is one you own. Not one you are given room to use, not one an employer is generous enough to amplify while it serves their purposes. One where you own the surface it lives on, the relationship with the people who listen, and the right to keep speaking when the production closes. That is a slower and far less flattering thing to build. Nobody hands it to you in an Office of the President. There is no deck for it, because the whole point is that it is not a position anyone can fill or vacate. It is yours the way the growth levers were not mine, the way the platform was not mine: by ownership, not by permission.
I did not understand any of this while it was happening. I thought the recognition was the thing. I thought being chosen as the voice was the same as having one. They are not the same, and the gap between them is exactly the gap between renting and building, which is a gap I would spend the next part of my life learning to close.
The themes were always mine. The voice was always mine. What was never mine was the platform. The difference turned out to be the whole difference.