Leadership lessons from corporate veterans:
embrace accidents, stay restless, act
decisively, lead inclusively, keep learning.
It is never about you; It is about the issue at
hand.
Suresh Narayanan
Former Chairman & Managing Director | Nestle
India Ltd
Thank you for having me here and to MMA for organising this. If I were to share four essential learnings from my leadership journey, the first is: learn to accept accidents, because sometimes they can be pleasant. I never set out to be a corporate leader. I wanted to be an IAS officer — that three-letter credential that most people in the civil services carry. Instead, Hindustan Lever came to campus, made a pitch, and I found myself selling soap and dala under the supervision of Mr. R. Gopalakrishnan, who was my very first boss. Explaining how economics was relevant to selling da was its own kind of challenge. But that accident set off a remarkable saga. Crisis does not come with a calling card, and neither do the pivots that define a career.
The first real leadership lesson came in my early twenties when I was asked to shut down a factory in Ahmedabad. Most of the workers were in their fifties — as old as my father then. What I discovered was that when you treat people with dignity, honesty and transparency, something remarkable happens: instead of giving them a farewell, they give you one. That experience taught me the most fundamental truth of leadership — people do not write the balance sheets; they make the balance sheets. Whatever you achieve is not because of you the individual, but because of us the collective.
The second lesson is that failing to succeed sometimes helps you succeed. In my years in the Unilever group, one of the brand launches I was closely involved with was a significant disaster — it hit the Lipton P&L hard in the mid to late eighties. I could have been among those shown the door. Instead, the leader of the pack stood up and took the responsibility himself. That taught me something indelible: in a crisis, a leader must stand up and be counted. You do not delegate the difficult conversation to someone else in the department.
The third lesson came during my time in North Africa during the Arab Spring. You are in an alien culture, navigating a hostile environment in the middle of political upheaval. That is when I understood that leaders must look through the periscope rather than drive by looking in the rear-view mirror. When the environment is hazy and uncertain, your job is to direct your people toward a direction — not dictate every single action. And the fourth and perhaps most important lesson of all: it is never about you. It is about the issue at hand. We far too often ascribe personal ego to the problems we are asked to solve, and in doing so, we make decisions that are self-centric rather than centred around people and what is genuinely good for them. The ability to look beyond the immediate, emotional nature of a problem — to exercise better judgment even when instinct says otherwise — is what truly defines a leader. Culture, for me, has a simple definition: it is the language that is spoken when no one is watching. Courage is the foundation of that culture. Then comes compassion, collaboration, and confluence — the ability to get things done. Competence comes last. We are not required to know everything. We are orchestra conductors: we know the music, we know the instruments, but we do not make the sound. The sound is made by the orchestra.
Shyam Srinivasan
Former MD, Federal Bank; Sr. Advisor & Operating Partner | TVS Capital Funds
I did want an IIM — I worked very hard to get it. I have to tell you: my dear friend Mahalingam and I gave our entrance exams at the same time. We were both waitlisted; he was number 69, I was number 70. The cutoff stopped at 69. He got in. I said I would not give up, and I gave the exam again. The lesson held for the rest of my career: if you obsess about something and stay restless in pursuit of it, it tends to come. Manifestation is not mysticism — it is the energy that restlessness creates.
The concept I have come to call being happily dissatisfied has been the engine of everything I have done. I encourage teams to remove words like good, satisfied, and comfortable from their vocabulary altogether. Good is the enemy of great, as Jim Collins put it. The moment you say you are comfortable, you are beginning to build your own graveyard. This is not about personal greed or ambition — it is about a constructive anxiety, a positive restlessness, that keeps you moving one level above where you currently are. The biggest challenge for leaders today and tomorrow is decisiveness in an era of data deluge. We fall into analysis paralysis, waiting for one hundred percent of the information before making a call. My answer is this: at sixty to seventy percent of the information you need, if the time is right, make the decision. The leader who acts on broadly the right set of information outperforms the one who waits for perfect data while the moment passes. Jeff Bezos articulated this well — focus less on what is going to change and more on what is not. Customers will always want things faster, cheaper, more easily. In financial services, they want all of this and they want it safe. That constant truth is your anchor. Authenticity is the signature of everything. If you are not yourself, you have already lost. You need the guts to hold your course — not arrogantly, not stubbornly, but because you built something of genuine integrity and you owe it to the people around you to see it through.
Leadership comes from the grassroots upward
Harish Bijoor
Brand & Strategy Expert | Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
My leadership lessons started at the very beginning, in a way that surprised me. Like Suresh, I had wanted to be an IAS officer. My rank was not quite good enough, and I was offered the Indian Audit and Accounts Service instead — one extra A that I decided not to take. I ended up, quite by accident, selling Red Label tea through the bylanes of Bengaluru. I would be out there with a van man who pulled the van by hand, working thirty-five shops a day minimum, collecting cash, hiding it in the depot. I was deeply embarrassed — my classmates were driving by in their smart cars while I was doing billing on the street. But that is exactly where the most profound lesson arrived: leadership comes from the grassroots upward. Inclusive leadership was taught to me not in a boardroom but on the pavement.
I observed early on the distinctions that organisations impose — separate restrooms for executives, rigid hierarchies, top-down discipline that is mostly western in character. I decided I would not replicate those distinctions wherever I had any influence. Today we call it inclusion and it is fashionable. Thirty years ago it was genuinely difficult to stand against the culture. That is why I say we are currently in the kalyug of leadership — a dark age in which toxic, convoluted leadership is not the exception but is widespread. Only a clutch of perhaps sixteen to eighteen companies in India practices genuinely decent, straightforward leadership. The rest is a long way from that ideal.
But I believe the kalki yug of leadership is ahead. When I read the Kalki Purana, I see something that maps precisely onto today: a leader riding a white horse, carrying a blazing sword of knowledge — which for me is intelligence. Today that horse is a unicorn, and that blazing sword is artificial intelligence. Leadership must be fair and unbiased. Human beings, frankly, are neither. Machines can be. AI-enabled leadership is the new leadership I talk about. In the startups I work with, HR is being reinvented altogether. AI began as an assistant, has become a colleague, and will soon enough be the boss. The machine resources manager is replacing the human resources manager — I said this at an MMA event eighteen years ago, and here we are.
The critical bridge between old and young leaders is the responsibility of the older generation to cross, not the younger. Young people think very differently. An older leader who insists on seventy-two-hour weeks and a younger person who refuses thirty hours are both right, in their own contexts. Making those worlds meet is the older person’s job. That means leaders must not age mentally. Leaders must think twenty years younger than their chronological age — and not pretend to do so, because people in your organisation assess and understand you within three days of meeting you. If you are double-speaking, they already know. Integrity means being you, fully and without performance. The cornerstones of this kalki yug of leadership are ample intelligence — not just artificial intelligence — combined with empathy, authenticity, and the moral courage to never talk behind anyone who has left the room.
The generational tension in organisations today is
real
Mangalam Maloo
Anchor & Deputy Editor | CNBC‐TV18
When you start out as a leader, you do not have a blueprint. You do not sit down and say, this is what my leadership style will be, or this is the legacy I intend to leave. All of that is constructed in hindsight. When you are in the middle of it, it is simply the quality of the decisions you make, consistently, over time — and how those decisions pan out — that separates one leader from another. The most interesting leaders I have interviewed are the ones who look back and identify pivots they did not recognise as pivots while they were happening.
Beyond the top sixteen to eighteen companies where leadership is genuinely healthy, there is a fair amount of toxicity in the system. We see it across generations — in the old-school babu who accumulated power through hierarchy, and equally in the new-age founder who believes they are the be-all and know-all of everything. The hard question is not how to celebrate good leadership; it is how to cultivate humility and build the next cohort of leaders who think beyond themselves. Leaders who take their work very seriously but do not take themselves very seriously are, in my experience covering corporate India, consistently the ones who rise above the noise.
The generational tension in organisations today is real and it is structural. A sixty-year-old speaking the same language as a twenty-year-old is what timeless leadership actually looks like in practice. The younger generation does not respect your badge — they respect your knowledge, if at all, and only as long as you are adding value. If you are not, they will tell you, and they will not be polite about it. So the question every leader must ask is: how do I stay relevant to that audience? The answer is not to perform youth. It is to learn from them genuinely, and give it back repackaged with wisdom. There is one line that has stayed with me from this conversation: if you are not at the table, you are the meal. A lot of young people convince themselves they are not at the table — and in doing so, they become exactly that. The illiterate of the future will not be those who cannot read or write. They will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. That is the real prompt for the leader of 2035.
