A Career Across Businesses, Cultures and Continents

Beginning my professional journey as an electrical engineer, my career quickly moved beyond engineering into sales, marketing, business leadership, technology and entrepreneurship.

I have worked in environments ranging from large corporations to growing businesses and entrepreneurial ventures. My responsibilities have included sales and marketing, P&L management, business development, customer relationships, team building, strategy, technology, process improvement, organizational change as well as transformations during mergers and acqusitions.

The stints in different domains exposed me to enterprise and consumer markets, channel management, customer service, technology, government business, national operations and the complexities of managing growth in an industry changing almost by the month.

My career subsequently took me outside India.

In the Gulf, I worked in a senior leadership role covering technology products, services and turnkey IT solutions. Later, as Country Manager for another US based Software house, I was involved in business transformation, growth initiatives and change management within a software and technology environment. My stint in Africa, at the operating leadership level in technology, taught me to deal with the realities of building businesses, managing people and creating value in a very different economic and cultural environment.

These experiences gave me exposure to different countries, cultures, customers, employees, entrepreneurs, bosses, colleagues, technologies and ways of thinking. And exposure has a wonderful habit of disturbing certainty.

The longer I worked, the less convinced I became that there was one correct way of managing people, one perfect leadership model, one universal motivational technique or one management framework capable of explaining human behaviour.

People simply refuse to fit neatly into PowerPoint slides!

Empathy as a Business Capability

My interest in empathy has therefore grown not from theory alone, but from repeatedly seeing its absence—and its presence—in actual business situations.

Empathy is often misunderstood as softness. I see it differently.

Empathy is the ability to momentarily leave our own position and understand another person’s reality without necessarily agreeing with it. That is a formidable business capability.

A retailer who understands why a customer hesitates before purchasing is practising empathy. A manager who notices that an employee’s falling performance may have causes beyond laziness is practising empathy.  A leader who understands why employees are frightened by a restructuring programme has a better chance of implementing that restructuring successfully.

Even negotiation improves when we understand what the other person is protecting—not merely what he is demanding.

Retail, in particular, is a daily laboratory of human behaviour. Customers rarely walk into a store carrying a spreadsheet explaining their motivations. They arrive with expectations, budgets, aspirations, anxieties and perceptions of themselves.

Human beings purchase products. But very often, they are also purchasing feelings. The same is true inside organizations.

Why Think Inward?

After many years of observing business from sales floors, meeting rooms, corporate offices and entrepreneurial environments, I became increasingly interested in some basic questions:

Why do we seek status? Why are we frightened of uncertainty? Why do we compare ourselves constantly with others? Why do successful people continue seeking validation? Why do organizations celebrate innovation while quietly punishing failure? Why do managers ask employees to speak freely and then become uncomfortable when they actually do? Why does money provide security and simultaneously create anxiety about losing it? Why do we create elaborate systems to manage other people while remaining surprisingly unfamiliar with ourselves?

These questions lie at the heart of Think Inward.

Human nature changes much more slowly. That is why  understanding people remains one of the most enduring competitive advantages available to any business.

And perhaps the most difficult person we will ever have to understand is the one looking back at us from the mirror.

That is where Think Inward begins.