Leading Divergence: A Field Guide to Neurodivergent Leadership by Tanmaya Kumar
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Leading Divergence

A Field Guide to Neurodivergent Leadership

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Kindle ($9.99), paperback ($19.99), and hardcover ($32.99)

Read the first chapter

Want to see how it reads? Chapter 1, The Divergence Advantage (and the Cost), is available as a free PDF.

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Published by Buggy OS Press.

You are not broken. You certainly have a buggy OS, and you are using up too much RAM to run those superpowers. Actually, let me take that back. They're not superpowers. Superpowers are fantasy. What you have are skills, forged in wars fought inside your own head and your day-to-day.

What This Book Is

Leading Divergence is a book about what it actually looks like to lead as a neurodivergent person in technology, and what it looks like to lead neurodivergent people on your team. Written from personal experience managing neurodivergent engineers and leading as a neurodivergent executive in healthcare technology.

The first half looks inward: your operating system, your stability, your decision-making under noise, your communication architecture, your career. The second half looks outward: building teams, giving feedback that actually lands, creating environments where people with different wiring can do their best work.

What This Book Is Not

This is not the superpower narrative. The superpower narrative hides the harder side of things under a rug and doesn't face it. This book is not going to tell you that your ADHD is a gift or that you think differently and it's beautiful. It's going to tell you the truth, which is messier and more useful.

This is also not a prescription or a promise. There are no guarantees. If you are truly, deeply struggling in a way that a book can't reach, please go see a therapist. This book can walk with you. It cannot carry you.

A note from me

This is my first book. I started writing it about a year ago. I finished it because the thing I was writing about — sustained commitment in a brain wired against it — became the thing I was practicing while writing.

If anything in here is useful to you, I'm glad. If anything is uncomfortably accurate, I understand. If you want to tell me what landed and what didn't, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

Part One: Leading as a Divergent Leader

  1. 01 The Divergence Advantage (and the Cost)
  2. 02 Your Operating System: Energy, Attention, Executive Function
  3. 03 The Stability Stack
  4. 04 Decision-Making Under Noise
  5. 05 Communication as Architecture
  6. 06 Building Your Career as a Divergent Leader

Part Two: Leading Divergent People

  1. 07 Psychological Safety Without Chaos
  2. 08 Communication Protocols for Spiky Brains
  3. 09 Performance Without Shame
  4. 10 Execution Systems That Actually Work
  5. 11 Stepping Into Leadership
  6. 12 Clinical Reality Check

The book is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Use the format selector on the product page if you want a different edition than the link above opens by default.

If you read it and want to talk about any of it, find me on LinkedIn.