The Practitioner Behind the Argument
Sharam Kohan has spent more than twenty-five years inside the organizational machinery that What Is Quietly Killing Your Company describes, not as a theorist studying it at a remove, but as a senior manager and executive who has built people functions, led them through crisis, and observed, at close range, the quiet failures the book identifies and prices. His conclusions are not drawn from the literature alone. They are drawn from direct organizational experience, confirmed by the literature.
His career spans senior management and executive human resources roles across the healthcare, technology, energy, hospitality, retail, and nonprofit sectors. That breadth is itself part of the book's evidence: the same misdiagnosis of the people function, the same unrecorded costs, and the same barrier at the top recur across industries that otherwise have nothing in common. A pattern that survives every change of sector is not an industry problem. It is a structural one.
"The financial statements record the smoke long after the fire, and by the time the numbers move enough to demand attention, the damage that moved them has been compounding for years."
An alumnus of Harvard University, he earned an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and completed graduate legal coursework at Temple University School of Law with a focus on employment law and employment discrimination. That legal formation runs throughout the book's treatment of disputes, separation, and the costs of getting it wrong, where people problems harden into liability long before any statement records them.
A SHRM-certified human resources professional, he advises organizations and executives through his own consultancy on HR strategy, organizational design, talent and succession planning, and the measurement discipline the book describes. He has worked with leaders in business, healthcare, nonprofit, and organized labor.
He is also the author of The Honest Organization, an examination of the behavioral mechanisms by which organizations suppress the diagnostic information they most need. The two books form a pair: The Honest Organization explains why companies cannot see what is happening to them, and What Is Quietly Killing Your Company explains what they are failing to see, what it costs, and what the remedy requires.