On the discipline of designing your own absence — even if you are not the CEO A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for Rediff on Aditya Puri — the banker who built HDFC Bank to function without him. Several of you who read it wrote back with the same question, in different words. The CEO’s discipline is admirable. But what does it mean for the rest of us, the ones who do not run banks, who cannot leave at 5:30 PM who do not have a Lonavala farmhouse waiting at the weekend? This ed

In June 2023, a courtroom in the Southern District of New York was packed beyond capacity. An overflow room had been opened. Judge P. Kevin Castel was about to deliver his opinion on what seemed like an ordinary personal injury case. It became something else. A lawyer had filed a brief citing multiple cases. The names sounded authoritative. The citations were formatted correctly. The reasoning read like real judicial language. There was only one difficulty. None of the cases

At 6 a.m., an email arrived. No conversation. No context. No call. Just this line: “Today is your last working day.” If you received that email from Oracle last week — this is for you. Not as a career coach. As someone who has sat with people in this exact moment and watched what happens next. Some take six months to find their footing. Others find it in six weeks. It’s tempting to say the difference is talent. It isn’t. It’s what they do in the first thirty days. ——— WHAT

It is time to stop viewing the recent waves of tech layoffs as isolated "bad news" cycles and start seeing them for what they actually are: a fundamental structural reset of the global economy. Denial is a luxury the market can no longer afford. In late March 2026, or early April, 26, Oracle — a company with approximately 162,000 employees and a contracted revenue pipeline worth over $553 billion — began notifying thousands of workers that their jobs were gone. The notificati

A 51% Surge in Tech Job Cuts. But Not Every Leader Read From the Same Script. In the first quarter of 2026, tech sector job cuts surged 51% compared to the same period last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas — one of the most authoritative trackers of US workforce reductions. AI was cited as a factor in roughly one in eight of those cuts, a proportion growing month by month. Two of those moves happened weeks apart, both in the name of AI. But look closely, and yo

Let me tell you about Marcus. Fourteen years at the same engineering company. The kind of person organisations quietly depend on — called when things are stuck, not because he is loud, but because he is reliably right. He redesigned a critical manufacturing component early in his career that saved the company eleven months of production time. His team stayed with him across market cycles. Not because they had to. Because they wanted to. Then a new boss arrived. Let's call him

There is a particular kind of organisational mistake that doesn't look like a mistake at all. It arrives dressed as a solution. It comes with a job offer, an onboarding plan, and a salary. Leadership feels decisive. The org chart looks cleaner. And the people who actually needed help quietly absorb the consequences — usually for much longer than anyone upstairs realises. I know this because I lived it. I Asked for Help. They Gave Me a Boss. Years ago, I was heading the financ

When oil prices rise during a conflict, the instinctive reaction is simple: Oil exporters must be winning. But the economics of war rarely obey simple logic. Yes, oil prices spike. Yes, exporting countries earn more per barrel. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the biggest beneficiaries are often countries nowhere near the war. The countries closest to the conflict frequently face damaged infrastructure, disrupted exports, insurance spikes, aviation shutdowns, and collaps

A common view circulating in commentary around the current conflict involving Iran is this: the war will end only when regime change occurs . It is an intuitive narrative. Wars escalate. Leaders fall. Systems collapse. History resets. But reality is rarely that linear. When conflicts intensify, a deeper question sits quietly beneath the headlines: Will the regime survive, or will it collapse from within? Many people instinctively start with a simple metric—military strength

I have been closely following the conversations at the India AI Impact Summit , particularly the session on AI and the Future of Skilling . Strip away the stage lights, the panels, the optimism. Here is the real takeaway from this session : AI will not automatically make India stronger. It will amplify whatever system we build around it. That is not hype. That is physics. The Core Outcome: Align AI with Human Capacity The strongest message that came through was simple — and

There's a moment most leaders don't notice. It happens dozens of times a day. A prompt is entered. A confident answer appears. A paragraph looks polished. A slide sounds sharp. And then — SEND. No pause. No second look. No verification. Just velocity. We think we're being efficient. What we're actually doing is outsourcing judgment. The Quiet Rise of "Workslop" AI didn't introduce bad thinking. It accelerated it. Recent workplace research shows that a significant percentage o

Trust reveals itself under pressure. Leaders feel it first. Here's what many miss: Trust does not carry the same risk in both directions. When I give you authority and say "I trust you to lead this," my risk is manageable. If things fail, I have buffers — reputation, options, time to recover. When you believe my strategy and trust me to be right, you are betting much more. Your role. Your credibility. Sometimes your family's financial security. Same word. Different stakes. T

I often say, "The past is not equal to the future." In my workshops, I've shared examples of iconic brands like Walkman, Kodak, and BlackBerry — companies that were once leaders in their industries but failed to adapt to changing times. For years, I included Nokia in this list. They, too, seemed to be a classic case of a company immersed in the success of their past, unprepared for disruption. But Nokia's story is different. Unlike others who faded into obscurity, Nokia chart

I've seen this pattern three times now, and each time it plays out the same way. A leadership team invests months building a transformation roadmap — new systems, redesigned processes, ambitious timelines. Beautiful strategy decks. Compelling business cases. Every stakeholder meeting carefully choreographed. Then, somewhere between launch and execution, momentum dies. The conversation usually happens over video call: "We're going to pause this initiative. Let's revisit when c

I watched it happen in a quarterly business review recently. The usual setup: numbers on screens, dashboards flickering, everyone trying to project confidence. But something was different. A small black cylinder sat in the middle of the conference table, connected to a cloud dashboard. Not Alexa ordering lunch — this was the company's first experiment with an AI decision-copilot. Midway through, the CFO asked a question that used to mean "someone's staying late tonight": "Com

A few years ago, "transformation" meant something big — a bold pivot, a fundamental rethink. Now it's become the corporate equivalent of yoga at offsites — everyone says it's transformative, no one remembers a single pose. Every boardroom I walk into has the same slide: Digital Transformation — Phase 2. (Phase 1, by the way, was mostly committee meetings and dashboards.) The word has lost its edge. It's used to describe everything from a rebrand to a new SAP module. Somewhe

What a herd of sheep taught me about corporate life. I recently came across a video that stopped me cold — hundreds of sheep moving in a perfect circle around a small fire. No chaos, no bleating, just silent, hypnotic motion. Round and round. At first, it was mesmerising. Then unsettling. Because those sheep weren't going anywhere. And suddenly, I was looking at every stalled project, every endless meeting cycle, every "strategic initiative" I'd ever witnessed. Most organisat

What Adam Grant taught me about ego, rethinking, and the competitive advantage of doubt. Several years ago, I watched a CEO kill his own company on an ego trip. He built the business from scratch — a pioneer who created a category that didn't exist. The brand was the product. Customers loved him. Competitors feared him. Then the market shifted. Instead of diversifying, he doubled down. Acquired more companies in the same declining space. I sat across from him with data — cha

We've all been there — rejected, overlooked, or told we're not good enough. In those moments, it's easy to believe the world's verdict. But sometimes, what looks like the end is actually a beginning in disguise. Here are four powerful stories that remind us what can happen when we push forward — despite the "no." 1. The Sleeping Student Who Solved the Impossible At Columbia University, a math student dozed off during a lecture. When he woke up, he saw two problems on the boar

When we think of leadership, most of us imagine the same script: the person with the title, the one in control of every detail, the hero who swoops in to fix the fire. I know this because I lived it. For years, I defined myself by how well I could rescue situations. My calendar was filled with crises I dived into, problems I solved, bottlenecks I cleared. Every time I "saved the day," the applause rolled in. It felt good — addictive, even. Until one day, a compliment landed d