Howard Chambers's Blog
September 3, 2026
Why I Wrote MISREAD
I spent forty years sitting across from people the system had already failed.
Not failed dramatically. Quietly. Performance reviews that described the cost of the environment as a character flaw. Promotions that went to the person who filled the room rather than the one who delivered the work. Adjustments declined in thirty seconds by a manager preparing for a board call.
Most of those managers weren't bad people. They were untrained people making decisions every day with tools they were never given.
MISREAD is the book I couldn't not write.
It follows Alex — a Senior Technical Delivery Lead whose cognitive profile makes him exceptional at his job and largely invisible to the people assessing it. And Marcus — his manager, conscientious and well-intentioned, who has been writing his reviews for two years without the tools to read what he is actually seeing.
Neither of them is the villain. The system is.
The book is a hybrid — fiction and research in the same chapters. The fiction earns the research. The research proves what the fiction already knew.
Forty years of other people's stories went into it. I hope it does them justice.
MISREAD is available now on Amazon.
Not failed dramatically. Quietly. Performance reviews that described the cost of the environment as a character flaw. Promotions that went to the person who filled the room rather than the one who delivered the work. Adjustments declined in thirty seconds by a manager preparing for a board call.
Most of those managers weren't bad people. They were untrained people making decisions every day with tools they were never given.
MISREAD is the book I couldn't not write.
It follows Alex — a Senior Technical Delivery Lead whose cognitive profile makes him exceptional at his job and largely invisible to the people assessing it. And Marcus — his manager, conscientious and well-intentioned, who has been writing his reviews for two years without the tools to read what he is actually seeing.
Neither of them is the villain. The system is.
The book is a hybrid — fiction and research in the same chapters. The fiction earns the research. The research proves what the fiction already knew.
Forty years of other people's stories went into it. I hope it does them justice.
MISREAD is available now on Amazon.
