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

- - Two employee-related developments have dominated headlines in recent days—the situation at Nashik and labour protests across Manesar, Gurugram, and Noida. While the specifics may differ, both point to a deeper, systemic concern: gaps in compliance and the failure to uphold minimum workplace standards. Investigations are underway, and remedial actions are being discussed. But before we move into reactive mode, it is worth asking three fundamental questions: Should manageme

-- 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

India’s Midsummer Reckoning with Climate -- On 27 April 2026, something happened that should have rattled every boardroom in Mumbai and every desk in North Block. Every single one of the planet’s top 50 hottest cities was in one country: India. Average peak temperatures across those 50 cities hit 112.5°F. Banda, in Uttar Pradesh, touched 115.16°F — the hottest spot on Earth that day. The air-quality platform that compiled the data put it plainly: “no modern precedent.” This i