From a plantation shack in Jamaica to Bay Street, by way of arriving in Canada at sixteen.
The early chapters are harder than the business-memoir framing prepares you for. The poverty and the abuse are not set dressing for a comeback story, and the book is better for refusing to rush past them.
The title is doing the real argument. The bootstrap story requires boots. What follows, including the BlackNorth Initiative and the push to get more Black executives into Canadian boardrooms, is the author declining to treat his own success as proof the system works.
Worth reading alongside any Canadian corporate diversity commitment you have been asked to sign.
Read October 2022.