Andrew O’Brien hadn’t been the last person to leave the offices of Trinity Systems for the past five years. In fact, he hadn’t stayed past midnight since taking the job of CEO.

As he stared out the picture window from his office above San Francisco, he wondered how it had come to this.

Tomorrow would be the one-year anniversary of Andrew’s promotion. It would also be the first board meeting in which he would be accountable for the results of an entire fiscal year. Those results, as he had grown accustomed to saying, were “unspectacular at best.”

But the results didn’t bother Andrew as much as his state of mind did. Lately, he wasn’t comfortable walking the halls of his company. He didn’t feel at ease leading his own executive staff meetings. And certainly he wasn’t looking forward to meeting with the board tomorrow. They probably wouldn’t be too tough on him, he thought, but they wouldn’t be patting him on the back either.

Andrew O’Brien could not deny that he was at a low point in his tenure as CEO, a point he never expected to reach so soon.

And then things got worse.