This is a specific type of book, it is a guidebook; and a guidebook serves two purposes. First, it helps you get somewhere you want to go. Second, it makes you aware of historic events, art, architecture, cuisine, culture, and people of the places you go through. It is unlikely you would find construction details of a building, or the recipe for the dishes you enjoy during your travels in a guidebook. Instead, it succinctly describes how all these elements have come together and combined themselves in the experience of a place.

This guide is the same, but in our case that somewhere is a better place to work. And to understand such a place better, this book focuses on what happens at the intersection of design, management, leadership, and ‘humanness’.

Crucially, I wrote this guide as a pilgrim and not a walker. You will read about the lessons that came out of the mind – the place where a pilgrimage happens – and not an account of physical feats of the distance covered by the legs.

I invite you to come along as a fellow pilgrim on a thinking journey to incubate ideas about the workplace.

But why stop at ideas? I will venture a guess that this book may do for you what it has done for me: it changed not only the way I think about the workplace, but also what I do about it.

To mark our pilgrimage and help us navigate the road ahead, I have created signposts that summarise key points. The big black arrow tells us the direction they are pointing to and makes them hard to miss.

Our first signpost is:

figure a

Some signposts, like this one, may seem counterintuitive because they point in the opposite direction of where we think we want to go. These contrasting ideas require deeper discussion, but in the interest of maintaining the pace and continuity of our pilgrimage I have deferred an in-depth discussion of these tricky signposts to Part V.