John Maynard Keynes once wrote that "it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." I wish someone had pinned that quote to my desk twenty years ago, because it would have saved me from signing a contract I didn't know existed.
I'm not talking about an employment contract. Those I read carefully, every clause, every non-compete, every notice period. I'm talking about the other contract, the invisible one that comes attached to every promotion you accept. The one nobody prints, nobody signs, and nobody discusses until the terms have already reshaped your life.
I signed it dozens of times across thirty years in corporate. At IBM, at Qantas Airways, at S&P Global, at Standard Chartered Bank. Each time I moved up, I told myself I was moving forward. More money, bigger scope, better title, wider remit. All the signals that said: you're winning.
What I never tracked was what I was handing over in return, and the terms got steeper with every level.
The contract nobody talks about
William Reilly wrote a book back in 1949 called How To Avoid Work. In it, he describes the old analogy of a frog sitting in a pot of water. If you drop the frog into boiling water, it jumps out immediately. But if you place it in cool water and raise the temperature gradually, the frog never notices the change. It stays put until it's too late.
That is exactly how the invisible promotion contract works. The temperature rises so slowly that you adjust to each new normal without questioning it. The first few promotions feel like genuine progress, and in many ways they are. You're learning, growing, building skills and credibility that will serve you for decades. I would not trade my corporate career for anything, because it built the expertise and leadership instincts that made everything I've done since possible.
But somewhere along the way, the contract starts extracting more than it delivers. And because the increments are small, you don't feel each one. You just wake up one morning and realise the terms have changed dramatically from when you started.
The invisible promotion contract has three clauses. I'll walk you through each one, because I lived all three, and I suspect you will recognise them too.
Clause one: your time is no longer yours
The first thing the contract takes is your time, and it does it so gradually that you barely notice.
Early in your career, you have clear boundaries. You work your hours, you go home, you have evenings and weekends that belong to you. But each promotion chips away at those edges. The first senior role adds a few evening calls. The next one adds weekend prep for Monday board papers. The one after that puts you on a plane every other week.
I remember sitting on a flight over the Bay of Bengal, somewhere between Singapore and London, staring out the window at nothing but ocean. My phone had no signal, my laptop was closed, and for the first time in months I had a quiet moment to think. What struck me wasn't some grand revelation. It was a simple question: when was the last time I'd had dinner with Kazzie on a weeknight without checking my phone?
I couldn't remember, and that was the problem.
The contract doesn't take your time in one dramatic move. It takes it in five-minute increments across years. A Sunday afternoon reviewing a deck. A 6am call with London. A "quick check" of email at 10pm that turns into forty-five minutes of responses. Each one feels minor in isolation. Added together, they represent a complete transfer of your discretionary time to your employer.
By the time you're a Group CISO or a C-suite executive, the expectation of total availability isn't even stated anymore. It's just understood. You've internalised it so completely that you police yourself. Nobody needs to tell you to check email on a Saturday morning. You do it automatically, because the contract trained you to.
Clause two: your identity becomes the role
The second clause is subtler and, in my experience, far more dangerous than the first.
When someone asked me what I did at a dinner party, I didn't say "I work in cybersecurity." I said "I'm the Group CISO at Standard Chartered Bank." The role wasn't something I did. It was something I was. My identity and my job title had merged so completely that I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
This happens to almost every senior executive I work with. The higher you climb, the more your sense of self becomes entangled with your position. Your professional network knows you as "the CISO" or "the CFO" or "the MD." Your social standing, your dinner-party introduction, your LinkedIn headline, your self-concept when you look in the mirror: all of it points back to the role.
The problem isn't pride or ego. The problem is dependency. When your identity is that tightly fused to a position that someone else controls, you have a single point of failure. If the role disappears through restructuring, a board decision, or simply the passage of time, what's left?
I've watched former colleagues go through this. Executives who were sharp, confident, and decisive while they had the title, and who became visibly lost within months of leaving. Not because they lacked capability, but because they had no answer to the question "who am I without this role?"
The invisible contract encourages this merger. Every promotion reinforces it. The bigger the title, the more your world organises itself around it, and the harder it becomes to imagine functioning without it.
Clause three: your options narrow
The third clause is the one that locks the other two in place.
With each promotion, your options don't expand. They narrow. This sounds counterintuitive, because a bigger role should mean more doors opening. But in practice, the opposite happens. Your compensation rises to a level that very few alternative paths can match. Your skills become increasingly specialised and organisation-specific. Your network, while impressive, is concentrated in one industry or one function. And your financial commitments, the mortgage, the school fees, the lifestyle, have all been calibrated to a salary that only a handful of employers will pay.
You end up in what I call a spacious cage. It's comfortable, well-furnished, and you chose to walk into it. But the door only opens from the outside, and the number of people willing to open it for you shrinks every year.
This is where the golden handcuffs conversation usually starts, but most people misunderstand what the handcuffs are actually made of. Everyone assumes the trap is the money: the compensation package, the equity, the annual bonus, the pension contributions. I thought so too, for years. I looked at those numbers and saw proof that the system valued me.
But the salary is not the trap. The trap is what the salary has done to your dependency structure. It has made you completely reliant on a single income source that you don't control, while giving you no time to build anything else and no identity outside the role that pays you.
The P&L trap
There's a useful way to think about this that I wish someone had explained to me in my thirties.
Most executives think about their finances like a P&L statement. Revenue comes in (your salary), expenses go out (your life), and if the gap is positive, you're doing well. The entire focus is on income.
But wealth isn't built on the P&L. Wealth is built on the balance sheet: the assets you own that generate value whether you show up to work or not. Property, intellectual property, a business, a course, a book, a brand, an audience. These are things that sit on your balance sheet and compound over time.
The invisible promotion contract keeps you fixated on the P&L. It rewards you with higher income for deeper commitment, while consuming exactly the time and energy you'd need to build balance-sheet assets. It's a brilliant design, if you're the employer. Every promotion makes the executive more productive and more trapped simultaneously.
After thirty years in corporate, I had an impressive P&L. My income was substantial by any measure. But my balance sheet, the assets I owned independently of any employer, was thin. I'd spent three decades optimising the wrong line.
What the contract doesn't tell you
None of this means the corporate career was a mistake. I need to be clear about that, because the message here is not "corporate is bad." Thirty years in corporate gave me world-class expertise, leadership under genuine pressure, a global network, and the credibility that makes everything I do today possible. I would recommend a corporate career to anyone with the talent and drive to pursue one.
But I would also recommend reading the invisible contract before you sign it. Understand what each promotion is actually asking for, not just the upside, but the full cost. Track what you're trading as carefully as you track what you're earning.
And most importantly, start building your balance sheet while you still have the income, the energy, and the options to do it. The best time is before the contract has fully closed around you. The second-best time is now.
AI is accelerating this conversation. Roles that felt permanent two years ago are being restructured, automated, or eliminated. The assumption that a senior title equals job security is weaker today than at any point in the last fifty years. The invisible contract was always a bad deal on the dependency front, but in an era where entire functions can be reshaped in a quarter, the urgency of building independent assets is no longer theoretical.
So what do you do about it?
The first step is honest assessment. Where are you in the contract right now? How much of your time is genuinely yours? How entangled is your identity with your current role? And how many realistic options do you have if that role disappeared tomorrow?
I've built a free assessment that scores exactly this. It takes about ten minutes, covers the areas that matter most, and gives you a clear picture of where you stand. No sales pitch, no obligation, just an honest look at your current position.