Already Gone

She won Employee of the Year in January.
Resigned three weeks later. $430K to replace her.
The award cost $200.

The resignation letter was never the decision. It was the announcement of a decision made weeks or months earlier.

Your best engineer stopped pushing back last month. Your top salesperson hasn't mentioned career growth in weeks.

These aren't signs of progress. They're warnings you're not reading.

Most companies track turnover rate. Few track turnover cost. The real figure runs 4 to 7 times what's in the spreadsheet. The gap isn't in the math. It's in what nobody calculates until the desk is empty.

78 short entries. Each one stands alone. No frameworks. No worksheets. No jargon. Just patterns that show up in company after company.

Why exit interviews capture cover stories, not real reasons. What "finally maturing" and "easier to manage" really mean. Why managers own 70% of retention and get 0% of the tools. The six factors that determine whether someone stays or leaves, none of them compensation. What to do Monday morning to start seeing what you've been missing.

Clive Hays and Neil Hays kept having the same conversation with different companies. They wrote this book because nobody was connecting the patterns.

If you finish this and start paying attention to the quiet person in your next meeting, it worked.