FOUNDER & AUTHOR
Three decades inside organisations, watching careers advance, stall and change, shaped the questions that became The Relevance Trap.
My perspective comes from more than three decades working inside organisations — much of it in global logistics and supply-chain environments, with responsibilities spanning operations, people, risk and organisational life.
The observations that follow were not formed at a distance. They accumulated slowly, across years of everyday work.
THE OBSERVATION
An organisation is rarely linear. I have worked inside organisations long enough to recognise their discipline, their demands and, sometimes, their distortions.
But when you are consumed by the demands of daily work, it is difficult to place yourself above the organisation and find the vantage point from which to see what is really happening.
What you do see, however, are people.
Capable people. Competent by every reasonable measure. People who continue to work hard, deliver results and remain dependable — yet slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, begin to lose momentum and growth.
It is a phenomenon that is difficult to see and even harder to name. And when something has no name, it is easy to experience it simply as personal failure.
I felt it needed a name. I called it The Relevance Trap.
THE RELEVANCE TRAP
Giving the phenomenon a name was one thing. Understanding what lay beneath it was another.
Those questions became The Relevance Trap: Why Reliable People Get Stuck at Work.
But writing the book did not close the inquiry. It widened it — into a continuing exploration of how professionals build, lose and rebuild relevance over a working life.
AUTHORSHIP
Lives at the Edge of Work and Home
My first book was Nine Lives: Lives at the Edge of Work and Home, a work of fiction. It is concerned with human lives and experiences around work and home — ambition, relationships, caregiving, disappointment and endurance.
Why Reliable People Get Stuck at Work
My second book was The Relevance Trap: Why Reliable People Get Stuck at Work. It was a very different book. It emerged from my years inside organisational life, and from the questions described earlier on this page — about capable, dependable professionals who continue to perform while momentum and opportunity begin to narrow.
Venkatachalam Viswanathan lives in Chennai, India.
View LinkedIn profileTHE CONTINUING INQUIRY
Professional Relevance looks beyond performance alone. It asks how judgement is valued, how influence forms, how opportunity opens or narrows, and how these things change over the course of a working life.
The inquiry now extends beyond the book into an evolving body of work — including the Professional Relevance Diagnostic, designed to help professionals examine where they stand today and what may be shaping what comes next.
Explore Professional Relevance Take the Professional Relevance DiagnosticCONTINUE EXPLORING