This is from my days working in an agency. A week after our company announced a restructuring, I sent Piyush, one of the strongest designers on my team, a message that read, “Can we talk tomorrow about the onboarding redesign? I expected more from the second half.” I typed it between meetings and sent it …
This was my first trip to the US, and it happened on day one. In the Washington town I was visiting, this gas station store called Tom Thumb does a great to-go breakfast buffet alongside the usual knick-knacks. Having forgotten my toothbrush, I stopped in to grab one, and my churning stomach clued me in …
A new strategy is announced on Monday. By Wednesday, budgets are being revisited, someone is worried about their role, and delivery is still expected to continue as planned. Almost none of that gets resolved by the strategy document. It gets ​uravels, or doesn’t, ​at one layer: ​that of the manager​s standing between the decision and …
I am a relatively new driver. An anxious one at that. Which means every time I get behind the wheel, my nervous system is already doing more work than it probably needs to. It also helps very little that I drive in Delhi. And yet, every day, I pull up to a traffic light and …
I am walking into a pitch meeting. The slides looked impeccable. The numbers were absolutely defensible. My team, on stand by with a rehearsed strategy. Under my blazer and the calm face however, my body is preparing for an unknown danger. The heart rate has shifted. Breathing has become shallower. The body, in its ancient …
There is a childhood memory that remains remarkably vivid for some of us: the first sighting of a lighthouse. Impossibly tall, unwavering, and reassuring, an absolute beacon of hope calling lost sailors home. For others, this perception may have been shaped by a steady diet of Enid Blyton’s adventure books. And then there is also …
(And Why That Wasn’t an Accident) You may have noticed we’ve been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks. No flurry of year-end posts.No reflective LinkedIn threads.No “here’s what’s coming in 2026” announcements. That pause was deliberate. Because December has a habit of doing something subtle but powerful to us. Even as calendars …
A simple truth we keep running into: every organisation wants to stretch, grow, and sometimes reshape—but none of that is easy if the middle is stuck. Unfortunately that’s where leadership capacity seems to run thin. Thriving organisations run on a leadership engine, leadership that’s visible across the organisation. Their real strength seems to lie in …
Everyone loves a reliable leader.The one who delivers, holds the line, and steps in before a problem becomes a crisis. The steady one. The go-to. But for many “star performers,” reliability slowly becomes a trap.The pressure, the solitude, the constant expectation, all add up. At first, you call it a phase. A busy quarter. A …
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica. The ship was called Endurance. Bold name. Didn’t quite live up to it. A few months in, the ice closed in. Slowly at first, then like a vice. The ship was trapped, then crushed. One moment they were explorers. The next? Castaways. Hundreds of miles from help, …
