Roads do not touch. People do. No company has ever connected to another company directly — every crossing runs through human beings.
A director sitting on two boards at once, hearing both sets of secrets. A regulator who used to work in the industry he now oversees. A banker who worked both sides of a deal. The people are the real map, and the lines between companies are drawn from them.
Every crossing happens on a particular day, which lets us ask an honest question — who had shaken hands by March of that year? — and get an answer that does not cheat by using what we learned later.
A crossing has a life after the handshake
The supply contract still binding four years on. The board seat still occupied. The customer who is still a quarter of all revenue — and could walk. The road remembers, and a finished crossing is a very different thing from a live one.
And crossings are not only with companies. Regulators, lenders, unions, a state government, one customer big enough to end you, a fund that quietly bought nine percent last spring. Some of the most consequential meetings a company ever has are with something that has no shares of its own at all.