Last Call at the Mandarin
How one resignation sharpened my sense of what steady leadership is worth
Imminent loss, whether of a skyline view or a trusted colleague, can sharpen our sense of value; economists attribute that jolt to the endowment effect.
Oleta River State Park
A recent Sunday in Brickell arrived without much structure. It was the kind of open space that lets low‑grade irritation bloom. I grabbed a water bottle and a cheap sandwich, took a car twenty minutes to a state park, slid a rented kayak into brackish water, and let the mangroves fold overhead until the branches stitched a green ceiling above the bow. Heron calls replaced traffic noise. An occasional airplane stitched a distant line across the sky, but otherwise the world contracted to ripples, salt, and the creak of fiberglass. In that narrow corridor the city felt remote enough to miss, and the absence reset my senses in a way no rooftop bar had managed in years.
Only after the kayak glided back onto its sandy berth did I admit why I needed the escape in the first place. When I first arrived in Brickell in my late twenties the neighborhood felt inexhaustible, every night carried the charge of a Friday, and the small apartment with its uninterrupted view of Biscayne Bay convinced me I couldn’t have it any better. Five short years have a way of rewriting affection: construction cranes multiplied, jackhammers roughened the afternoon rhythm, and one ordinary day a new tower snapped the bay from view as casually as drawing a curtain. I still travel to Miami often—our office sits just across the bridge in South Beach—yet somewhere along the way the Brickell layover turned from something welcomed into something endured. The kayak had given me an hour of quiet and, more usefully, a reminder that attention can be coaxed back to what familiarity dulls. It was a preview of the sharper lesson the endowment effect would soon press upon me.
I crossed to Brickell Key for a late lunch at the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel I once revered for its lobby orchids and cheeseburger sliders but had lately bypassed for newer joints. While we talked, the bartender mentioned the property would close within a month. Forgoing a renovation, the hotel would instead be demolished. In that instant the room went double‑exposed, every detail sharpening as if my mind were downloading an environment before the server shut down. The slider tasted like a relic, the skyline suddenly felt worth memorizing, even the faint citrus of the air diffuser seemed archival.
Walking back across the bridge I finally noticed what had been there all along: a jazz trio rehearsing behind a window I had filed as vacant, a coffee bar releasing a roast so rich it felt medicinal, sunset gilding the very tower that blocked my view that morning. The cranes still groaned, yet the scene felt layered instead of loud. Nothing in Brickell had changed since dawn; only my willingness to look had.
The Steady Hand Lets Go
Two days later the same lesson arrived inside the boardroom. Our portfolio company’s CFO asked for a private call and, with an uneven apology, explained that a family circumstance would force her resignation before quarter‑end. In a business wrestling with patchy data and profits that arrived in bursts, her presence was the closest thing we had to certainty. Each Friday she closed the week with a “no‑surprises” huddle—crisp points, questions invited, collective blood pressure eased before coffee cooled. Consultants can rebuild dashboards and recruiters can forward résumés, yet no hourly rate purchases the calm that settles when a trusted steward says, here is what matters, here is what can wait, here is how we stay afloat.
The trust was never abstract. Six months into her tenure she convened teams from service delivery, sales ops, and finance—groups that had never shared a spreadsheet—and produced the company’s first bottoms‑up sales forecast. That model has guided many hard decisions since.
Her resignation cracked that calm and triggered the same endowment effect: value registered fully only at the edge of loss. We sketched a succession plan, called two interim CFO options on standby, and mapped a timeline in case the search for a full-time replacement dragged, yet the loss remained stubbornly personal. I found myself grieving less for the spreadsheet mastery than for the steadiness itself, the confidence she lent simply by occupying the chair. Much like the Mandarin’s pending demolition, her departure reignited details I had allowed to fade: the Sunday‑evening email flagging a soft metric, the habit of pairing every risk with two practicable fixes, the seldom acknowledged progress she made professionalizing the finance stack.
But still, the truth remains that Brickell will keep climbing, the Mandarin will come down and rise again, and we will appoint another finance leader. Movement is a city’s native language and the market’s resting pulse. What lingers is a more subtle message: attention often waits for an ending before it widens enough to honor what has been standing in plain sight.