What Gets You Here, Won’t Get You There. -- At some point on the climb — and if it has not happened yet, it will — you will discover that the most important information about your organization is being held by people who have stopped trying to give it to you. Not because they are disloyal. Because experience has taught them that no one in authority is really asking. You will discover this not in a strategy review or a leadership offsite but in a conversation you did not expec

-- Most negotiators walk into a room with a map. They know what they want. They know what the other side wants. They aim, with the precision of a chess player, to find the intersection — the famous win-win. Stephen Covey made this the gospel of effective leadership. Think Win-Win, he said. A noble idea. A necessary corrective to the zero-sum thinking that dominates most deal rooms. But here is what I have come to believe after decades at the negotiating table — in boardrooms,

Part 2 of Built to Hold — the mindsets that determine whether any framework actually runs. -- E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y The context. Part 1 of this perspective laid out the seven-move framework for Boards and CEOs navigating the Structural Decade. Two enterprises with the same playbook and the same capital end up in different places when the environment turns structural. The variable that explains most of the variance is not the framework. It is the character of the l

-- After a career break of nearly ten years, my friend Radha decided to return to work. I was genuinely happy for her. She had given up her career soon after her marriage and had long resented that decision. Once her son moved to higher classes, she felt it was time to reclaim her professional life and rejoin her former employer. A couple of weeks later, I checked in on her. She mentioned there was just one problem. Her husband, Muthukumar, returned home by 6 p.m., while she

-- Life is a war; some days, it is merely a battle. As we navigate through professions, relationships, friends, and foes, we suit up each day—armouring our hearts and masking our fears with a brave face. We march forward, sometimes with steady steps, sometimes staggering. Some battles are fought within, silent and unseen, while others are waged against the world. We fight to claim what is rightfully ours, to protect what we have painstakingly earned, to stand against injustic

In today’s digital world, traditional resumes are slowly losing their power. While hiring for a role not long ago, I came across a...

A friend of mine was chatting the other day, and we had an interesting debate on authentic leadership. His point was- what is authentic...

Making your Journey Meaningful The writer Kurt Vonnegut said “ You’re always going to be in the process of becoming who you want to be,...