About Ivona Aya Schuler — commercial strategist, Zurich

Sarajevobefore

I was born into two businesses.

My father had his. My mother had hers. That is not a detail — it is the water I grew up in. Family dinners were about margins and suppliers and who had not been paid. I understood cash flow before I understood grammar.

Everyone in the family worked in one of the two. That is what a family business is: not a company with relatives in it, but a household where the work and the love arrive through the same door.

The warand after

And then all of it was gone.

Not sold. Not lost slowly, the way businesses usually go. Gone, in the way things go when a country stops being a country.

I spent a year and a half in a camp on the island of Hvar, with my mother. Just the two of us. There was no money, and there were days there was not enough to eat. I was a child from a family that had employed people, and I was standing in a line.

Italystarting again

We lived, for a while, entirely on other people's kindness.

I have never forgotten what that costs a person to accept, and I have never forgotten a single one of the people who gave it.

My mother took the simplest work there was, and then slightly better work, and then better again — and years later she owned a bookshop. Her own. I have met a great many impressive people since. She is still the most impressive thing I have seen a human being do with love, stubbornness and work.

My father went back to Sarajevo and rebuilt what he had, and then more than he had. Twice in one lifetime. He never once described it as brave.

Torinothe foreigner

I learned to speak Italian better than people who were born to it.

That was not a gift. It was a decision made by a girl who had noticed exactly how a person's face changes when they place your accent.

I was the foreigner. In classrooms, in offices, in friendships, at the moment somebody asked where I was really from. So I removed every reason anyone could have to underestimate me — the language first, then the degree, then the next degree.

Switzerlandthe ladder

Then a PhD, and a long climb inside other people's companies.

Family firms mostly. I was good at it. I was promoted, and promoted again, and I did every kind of job on the way up, including the ones nobody puts on a CV.

And somewhere in the middle of being objectively successful, I noticed something I could not explain and was embarrassed to say out loud.

“I could not work with just anybody. Not would not — could not. And for years I was certain that made me difficult.”

Certain rooms took everything out of me and I could not say why. Certain people I worked well beside for years. Certain work I could do for eleven hours; other work, objectively easier, I could not make myself begin. I read all of that as a character defect and managed it the way you manage a defect — quietly, and by working harder.

It was not a defect. It was a specification. And the day I finally understood the mechanics of how I am actually built, almost everything that had confused me for twenty years resolved in an afternoon.

That is what a signature code is. Not a personality type and not a horoscope. The operating specification underneath how one particular person makes decisions, holds energy and creates value — and therefore the specification underneath their business, whether or not anybody ever wrote it down.

If I had had mine at twenty

What it would have saved me.

—The jobs I took to prove something. Three of them, and I could name the years. None of them were ever going to work, and it was structural, not personal.

—The partnerships I entered with people I should have admired from a distance. Good people. Wrong pairing. That distinction took me a decade.

—The years I spent trying to become consistent in a way my body was never going to sustain — and reading the failure as weak character.

—The prices I set to what I could say without flinching rather than to the work. That mistake alone has a number attached, and it is not small.

—The friendships I strained apologising for how I work instead of explaining it.

—And the first business I built. Had I known this beforehand, it would have made more money, taken less out of me, and been recognisably the same business — just shaped correctly.

Mine, since it is only fair

I am not going to ask you for something I would not show you.

Sarajevo, 21 November 1985, 16:20. This is what my own report says about me, and every word of it is true in a way I find slightly uncomfortable.

The Signature Code · IvonaExtract

My answer arrives in my body before it arrives in my head — and it is right. It took me thirty years to stop arguing with it, and every expensive mistake I have made lives in the gap between the two.

I am built to run several things at once, fast, and to skip the middle. The skipped step always arrives later as an invoice: the person I did not tell, the handover nobody could follow. Running four tracks is the specification. The finishing has to be staffed.

When I say a thing will happen, it happens. That is not discipline and I take no credit for it. It is the one part of me that has never needed managing, and it is how a girl in a camp ended up with a doctorate.

I take on other people's emotional weather as if it were my own. Which is exactly why I cannot work with just anybody — and why, for twenty years, I thought that made me difficult rather than accurately calibrated.

I learned everything the hard way, in public, for a long time. Then I stepped back and watched for a while. Now people come to me for the answer. That is not a career accident; it is the shape of the whole arc, and knowing it would have made the hard years far less lonely.

And the part of me that is genuinely good at this, I cannot fully explain. It only switches on when somebody calls me into it. Which is why I have never been able to advertise well, and why every good thing in my working life arrived because a person asked.

I built this because I needed it at fifteen.