Sujan Saha explores resilient leadership, trust, and strategic decision-making in an increasingly disruptive global business environment.
Mr Sujan Saha
Managing Director, India & Head of South East Asia, BASF Catalysts
I personally believe this topic, leading with trust, could not be more timely. Even as the ninety-day truce between Iran and the US holds on paper, they are still attacking each other. So what does trust in leadership actually mean, in a world this disruptive? That is what I want to unpack with you.
In the past, disruption used to be a temporary event. I am talking about the last twenty years of my own experience leading businesses across multiple geographies, in Asia and outside it. But today, disruption, uncertainty, crisis, whatever you want to call it, has become a completely regular phenomenon. From the pandemic in 2019-20, we thought we could move on to focusing purely on business, but then came geopolitical conflict, cyberattacks, and now the overuse of AI, one after another, simultaneously, and at a scale we have not seen before. ChatGPT reached two hundred million users in under two months; Instagram took more than two years to get there. SpaceX is going public with a revenue collection target of $1.75 trillion, even though it lost $5 billion last year and $4 billion in this year’s first quarter alone. For context, the largest IPO in India so far has been about $3.2 billion. Call it an opportunity, call it a disruption, call it a crisis, I leave that to you. But disruption of this scale creates two things: a significant challenge for the unprepared, and a significant opportunity for those who are ready.
Now, we finance people love data, and I love it too, but data alone can mislead you badly. Let me give you two countries, A and B, using 1975 figures. Country A had a per capita income of about $6,500, Country B close to $7,000. Country A’s current account balance was plus 7% of GDP, Country B’s was minus 10%. Country A had forex reserves of $9 billion against Country B’s $3 billion, a stronger democracy score, and significant oil reserves. If I asked you to bet purely on this data, you’d back Country A, and you’d be catastrophically wrong. Country A is Venezuela. Country B is Singapore. Today Singapore’s per capita income is $94,000, Venezuela’s is $3,000. What changed in thirty to forty years? One thing: leadership. I used to live in Singapore, and my friends there would say, we don’t have any natural resources. I’d tell them, you’re lucky, natural resources often just invite vested interests. The gap between those two countries came from nothing but a change in leadership.
And the world isn’t getting any calmer. Armed conflicts have been rising steadily since the Cold War. Military spending is climbing too, close to $2.5 trillion globally, with the US alone accounting for nearly $1 trillion, and France and Germany now choosing to invest more in defence rather than depend on the US. Humanitarian aid, meanwhile, is shrinking. We are not living in the world we were ten years ago, and the world ten years from now will look very different again. In my own organisation, when the Strait of Hormuz was compromised recently, I had to write to every one of my customers that I could not guarantee LPG supply. If we had failed, half of the automotive industry could have shut down. Inventory planning is no longer just-in-time, it is just-in-case. And there’s an irony here: the world is deeply interconnected, so everything happening anywhere affects you, yet at the same time it is becoming more fragmented, with rising trade barriers and populism. In trade and politics today we constantly fall into a prisoner’s dilemma: the enemy of my enemy is no longer automatically my friend, and the friend of my friend is not automatically mine either, because nobody fully trusts anyone.
I believe this is actually a very important moment for India. Global companies looking at a China-plus-one strategy aren’t just looking for scale or low cost anymore, they’re looking for a reliable partner, and we’re seeing that reflected in the number of global capability centres now setting up in India. But can we truly be that reliable, trustable partner over the long term? That depends on the clarity of our policy and positioning. Disruption does not destroy an industry, an organisation, or even a country. Weak leadership does. That is why I believe the role of the CEO has changed fundamentally: no longer just the head of growth or the custodian of cash flow, but a chief integrator, balancing strategy, people, risk, sustainability, and capital allocation all at once. And the CFO, similarly, is no longer just the custodian of numbers, but the strategic architect of resilience, answering hard questions daily: how do we allocate capital in uncertain times, how do we stay agile enough to not just adapt but emerge stronger, how do we manage geopolitical risk, and above all, how do we keep our stakeholders’ confidence through the volatility? This is exactly why institutions like the Institute of Internal Auditors will matter more, not less, in the years ahead. Internal audit is no longer about finding gaps after a crisis; it is becoming a strategic capability that helps organisations anticipate risk and strengthen governance, because reputational damage today can be devastating and instant, as we saw with the Adani episode in the US markets last year, a share price hit within a single week.
Which brings me to what I think is the real subject of today: trust. We talk about growth, strategy, ESG, digitalisation, but none of it is sustainable without trust. Without trust, governance becomes mechanical, communication turns into suspicion, and institutions lose credibility. During the recent supply crisis, I could have gone to my customers and charged them two, three, five times more for LPG since they had no alternative supplier. That would have maximised a quarter’s profit, but it would not have built trust for the medium or long term. What actually builds trust is keeping the customer at the centre of every decision, strengthening collaboration with your stakeholders, and choosing a mid-to-long-term view over short-term optimisation, because trust compounds over time.
From my own experience running a company with revenues over a billion dollars, I’d narrow this down to four things. First, clarity: you cannot wait for a perfect decision in a crisis, because that can be suicidal. During Covid, when one of my plant colleagues fell seriously ill even as customers pushed hard for continued supply, I had to take the bold decision to shut the plant down. The best example of clarity I know is Satya Nadella taking over a globally struggling Microsoft and giving it simple, clear direction on cloud and AI; look where Microsoft is today. Second, courage: the courage to act before a crisis becomes an emergency, rather than hyperacting once it already has. I think of MS Dhoni here, how calm his mind stayed under pressure, and how that calm helped his whole team manage the crisis before it escalated. Third, credibility, which comes only through consistency; think of Ratan Tata, consistent in his organisational direction and in his philanthropy, and that consistency is what built his credibility. And finally, humanity: you lead people, not just processes. Amid every disruption, people still look for empathy, integrity, and clarity from their leaders, more than they look for another SOP.
Let me close with this. We cannot choose whether the world becomes more complex or more disruptive, it already is, and it will likely stay that way. But what we can choose is how we lead: clarity over confusion, integrity over convenience, mid-to-long-term action over short-term wins, trust over suspicion, and resilience and agility as the true measure of an organisation’s strength. If we build companies, and a country, that are financially disciplined, technologically capable, and ethically grounded, we don’t just survive these disruptions, we can actually shift through them, if we choose to lead with trust.
