After 20+ years advising Fortune 500 leadership teams at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Roche and the Bay Area startup ecosystem—plus my Harvard education and Berkeley MBA—I've decoded the hidden games that determine who rises to the top and who gets stuck.

But here's what's changed: The old corporate ladder is crumbling. Geopolitical upheaval, AI disruption, and institutional breakdown mean the leaders who thrive in the next decade won't be those who play by yesterday's rules.

They'll learn from the past for sure, but they have different goals for our future. Whether you're a startup founder navigating investor dynamics, a corporate executive watching your industry transform overnight, or an entrepreneur building something entirely new—you need to understand how power actually works, not how we pretend it works.

The results speak for themselves: Leaders I work with typically achieve career-defining breakthroughs within 12 months. One recent founder client used these insights to completely reframe conversations with his co-founder team and move the needle on trust throughout their growing organization. Another client went from being the newest executive on his leadership team to being considered for a Board seat at a public company—in less than a year.

How is this newsletter different from reading HBR or McKinsey Quarterly?

You might also wonder: why subscribe to this when I could read Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Quarterly?

Those are excellent publications. I've read them for years and learned a great deal. But here's what I've noticed: aside from the down side of the digital reading experience I mentioned above, these publications write about leadership from 30,000 feet. They analyze trends, synthesize research, and offer frameworks designed to apply to any leader, anywhere, in any context.

That's useful. But it's not what I do.

I write for a specific leader: the one who is different somehow. The first or only. The immigrant, the woman in a male-dominated field, the person from a working-class background navigating rooms full of inherited wealth and ease. The leader who followed the conventional advice——work hard, wait your turn, prove yourself——and still hit a ceiling they couldn't name.

The ideas in HBR assume you're already fluent in the unspoken rules of power. I write for the leader who was never handed that playbook.

I also write from the inside. Not as a journalist or researcher observing leadership from a distance, but as a coach and consultant who has spent 20+ years in the room with executives making real decisions under real pressure. I've seen what actually trips people up——and it's rarely what the business press talks about.

The Meghna Majmudar Monthly is personal, specific, and written for leaders navigating complexity without a map. It's the conversation I wish someone had offered me when I was finding my way.

Here's what I've learned: The gap between middle management and true influence isn't about working harder or being smarter. It's about understanding the unspoken rules of organizational power—especially as those rules are being rewritten in real time.

If you're building something that matters... if you're tired of watching less qualified leaders advance while institutions fail their stakeholders... if you recognize that the next generation of leaders must operate differently—then you need the inside track on how power really works.