Roberto Giannicola

My second book is coming out in June 2026.

It's called:

A Letter to My Exes
How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant

People have been asking me if this book is about relationships.

It's not. It's about leadership.

But it starts with the end of a relationship, or I should say, many relationships, and the grief that follows. A grief that pushed me to face something I'd spent years avoiding: the traits I thought made me a strong leader were the same ones that had pushed people away, whether in conference rooms at work or at the dinner table at home.

I had always been decisive and efficient, someone in control, but I couldn’t control my way out of this one. I had to approach it without my usual armor. I had to become a different kind of leader, one who could be inspiring at work and fully present at home. I knew it wasn’t them. It was me.

We're watching authoritarian patterns play out everywhere right now; in organizations, institutions, across society. They don't start at scale; they start small: in the brief moments when you can feel the energy shift as you walk through the door; in the way people learn to phrase things extra carefully around you; in the fleeting looks of resignation, and in the silence where ideas used to be.

This book comes from years of working with brilliant but difficult, dominant leaders in all of whom I could recognize myself: the same intensity and drive, the same blind spot, and the same question they'd eventually ask: Why do people keep leaving? 

I knew the answer because I'd lived it.

This book is a letter to my exes, to the women who loved me but couldn't survive the old version of me; to the teams I exhausted because they had to tiptoe around me, to the person I used to be, the one who thought being right mattered more than being connected, who mistook control for strength and compliance for connection.

This book is also a letter to you.

Maybe someone you loved told you you are too controlling, too intense, and you dismissed it as their problem. Maybe you are told that you are an intimidating, authoritarian leader, and you wonder why leadership can feel so lonely and relationships so distant, even when you are doing everything "right."

The transformation I went through changed everything, not because I became less intense or lowered my standards, but because I learned what I'd been refusing to see: control doesn't scale, connection does.
You can lead without leaving a wreckage. But that requires facing the tyrant in the mirror with strength and ruthless honesty.

A Letter to My Exes, How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, will be published in June 2026.

This book is about building influence without fear, intensity without intimidation, and leadership without losing the people around you.

More soon.

P.S. Share this with a leader who needs to read it.