Lessons from the front lines - - IDEA IN BRIEF THE QUESTION Silicon Valley reads about AI in emerging markets one headline at a time. What does the whole picture look like, and what does it mean for the Valley? THE INSIGHT Across China, India and the Gulf, AI is being rewritten for the front line: voice-first, frugal, physical and carried on state-built rails, at a speed and scale the Bay Area cannot match alone. THE IMPLICATION Silicon Valley wins by keeping innovation at it

Jevons Paradox, AI shopping agents, and the future of the physical store - - IDEA IN BRIEF THE QUESTION AI shopping agents such as Meta’s Muse can now search, compare and buy on a shopper’s behalf. If a machine does the shopping, does anyone still need a shop? THE INSIGHT In 1865 William Stanley Jevons showed that when a resource becomes cheaper to use, people often use more of it. Cheaper shopping means more shopping, and when information is everywhere, trust, touch and belo

-- The word engagement is something I have started hearing in the last 10-12 years. We didn’t have much of a hype on engagement in the 90s or in the early 2000s. In Unilever, we used to do a Global People survey once every two years, and most of it was pen and paper-based. The results used to take about 3-6 months, and by the time we cascaded and did team discussions, it was almost a year! We did not dissect or discuss the engagement levels of various teams. Attrition was low

As AI takes over Knowing and Doing, Being is the only edge for leaders. - - Every retail collapse of the past two decades was preceded by a failure no spreadsheet recorded. The assets were solid, the strategy credible, the leadership pipeline strong. What broke first was culture, and in the age of AI agents that failure turns fatal. This article looks at eighteen retailers to show where it hides, and what leaders can do about it. On 28 March 2007, Circuit City let go of

- - Mentoring isn't a single skill—it's a set of distinct approaches, and using the right one at the right time is key to success. Research from organizational psychology and decades of workplace practice point to four dominant mentoring styles: directive, non-directive (coaching-style), collaborative, and situational/adaptive. Knowing when to use each is what makes a great mentor who genuinely helps mentees grow to their full potential. Directive Mentoring: When Expertise G

Why Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining the Rules of Competition - - For thirty years, the rule was simple: advantage flowed to whoever owned the most. Artificial intelligence is rewriting it — shifting the edge to whoever learns fastest, because learning, unlike every asset that built the great retailers of the past, compounds. Yet a few outliers prove the old rule still has exceptions. Drawn from practice — case studies, store-level observation, and classroom work with re

From ethanol blending to data centres to power generation, we must wisely generate, store, and use water -- With India's major reservoirs holding less than one-third of their live storage capacity in the early weeks of the monsoon, the country is confronting a crisis that has been building for years. As the world's largest user of groundwater, India is depleting aquifers much faster than they can naturally recharge. Building long-term water resilience is, therefore, becoming

How AI, Robotics and Organisational Transformation are Redefining Employment - - Over the past few months, a series of seemingly unrelated developments kept drawing my attention: another round of tech restructuring, an automaker accelerating automation, unions alarmed over robots replacing production workers, companies withdrawing campus offers even as they compete fiercely for AI specialists. Taken individually, each seemed a separate business challenge. Taken together, they

Lessons from the World’s Next Retail Frontier - - The Gulf has produced some of the world’s most successful retailers, yet they appear to have won through entirely different strategies. Landmark built proprietary brands. Alshaya mastered franchising. Lulu focused on underserved customers. If opposite strategies can all succeed, what separates enduring winners from temporary winners? The answer offers valuable lessons for retailers seeking lasting advantage in the world’s next

-- Why accountability, leadership ownership, and culture—not just regulation—will define India’s safety outcomes India’s industrial accidents are not isolated operational failures—they are reflections of deeper gaps in accountability, culture, and leadership focus. As the country accelerates its manufacturing ambitions and positions itself as a global supply chain hub, one uncomfortable truth remains: workplace safety has not kept pace with industrial growth. Every industrial

-- SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, after pricing at $135 a share and a valuation of $1.77 trillion — roughly 94 times its 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion. That multiple has no precedent in the public markets. It exceeds Nvidia, dwarfs every cloud infrastructure company, and makes the dot-com era look conservative. Analysts will spend months debating whether the number is rational. But the number is not the point. The point is that SpaceX could not have been bui

Everyone talks about it, but very few understand it. - - The Customer-Centric Mirage Walk into any retail strategy meeting today and you’ll hear the same phrase repeated like a mantra: “We are a customer-centric company.” Executives declare it proudly on investor calls. Marketers print it on slides. Store managers nod in agreement. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a startling truth: most companies have no idea what customer centricity actually means. For the la

-- An architecture for Boards and CEOs when the operating environment refuses to settle. The diagnosis of the structural decade is by now widely shared: three categories of risk have moved from episodic shocks to defining features of the operating environment, and they converge on a single enterprise in a single quarter. The architecture for responding to them is far less settled. This perspective is an attempt at that architecture. On a single day in April 2026, the world’s

How Retail’s Best Leaders Structure Their Most Consequential Bets — and What Separates Disciplined Boldness from Reckless Conviction - - “The leaders who failed were not reckless. They were disciplined — about the wrong things. The discipline itself was the problem.” On the morning of March 28, 2007, Circuit City store managers across the United States assembled their teams and read from a corporate script. In a single coordinated action, 3,400 of the company’s most exper

-- A distillation from a mentoring conversation with a revenue leader in a sports-tech B2B business undergoing a full sales transformation. The Process Belief Problem Every sales transformation eventually faces the same test: a high-performing rep closes a significant deal without following the new process. They stand in front of you expecting a pat on the back. What you do in that moment determines everything. If you reward it fully, the transformation is over. Not because o

What Every Leadership Team Can Borrow from Private Equity - - PE funds are, by design, performance machines. Every rupee deployed carries a return profile, a timeline, a value thesis. But look more closely at how the best PE firms run their portfolio companies, and something more interesting emerges — a discipline that sits at the intersection of rigour and patience, accountability and genuine support. The more interesting question is not whether PE-backed businesses outperfo

-- What do I mean when I state the above? To me, it's about two different perspectives towards achieving organisational performance. War for Talent : Leaders and organisations believe that to win in the environment in which they compete, the key is to hire top talent by attracting the best and the brightest. The view is that the Talent pool is limited and that there is a “war for talent”. The phrase “ War for Talent” was coined by McKinsey in 1997, extolling business leaders

-- Gender marketing, at its simplest, is how brands design, position, and communicate products based on gender assumptions. For decades in India, this meant clear binaries: men in authority, women in kitchens; men as decision-makers, women as caregivers. Advertising narratives reflected the social order of their time, when economic and social roles were relatively rigid. That approach worked when those roles were predictable. But India is no longer that economy. Today, women

How leading retailers are redesigning customer experiences, supply chains, and stores around intelligence. -- Introduction A I is the most transformative technology shift that we’ve seen in our lifetime. Many jobs that we’ve thrown human beings at over the last 20 or 30 years, you won’t need as many human beings doing those same jobs.”- Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon The signals are no longer subtle. Jack Dorsey's Block announced plans to cut roughly 4,000 employees — nearly half it

-- The CMO role is evolving, from brand-only to growth and content leadership. Learn what’s changing, why storytelling matters, and what defines the modern CMO. Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing how quickly marketing is evolving. Today, more than $1 trillion is spent on marketing globally, and nearly 70% of that spend is now digital . Brands are investing more in digital channels, content has truly become king, and there are now countless free or low-cost ways to