My work life spans twenty years, and it hasn't been a linear graph. Early on, I was part of the investment team at a venture capital firm managing an INR 6 billion corpus, working directly on INR 1.3 billion of it. It is here I first learned to ask the questions an investor asks, long before I started asking them in client sessions. From there, I spent a year and a half heading western India operations for a 35-year-old metrology and industrial robotics company, my one stretch inside manufacturing, rather than services.

Since 2012, I've worked as an independent innovation and growth strategist, across India, and with enterprising young companies based in Hong Kong, Singapore, Oman, Abu Dhabi and the US; mostly with services companies, from improving hospital patient experience to hospitality tech, to publishing, operating at the point where design thinking, behavioural science and strategy meet.

None of that, though, has been inside a large multinational.
What I bring instead: a way of thinking that doesn't depend on having seen your exact industry before. Humility about what I don't know going in. Empathy for the people actually living the problem. And a first-principles habit of stripping a challenge down to what's actually true, rather than what is assumed to be. Those three; humility, empathy, intent, are the foundation of how I work, regardless of the client or company size.

The clearest proof I can offer: many years ago in case-study interviews for senior innovation roles, at a few large global organizations, I have been asked to assess real client challenges in half a day. In the hours I had, I arrived at directions that have surprised interviewers, because their own teams had spent months getting there. That speed doesn't come from having done it before. It comes from a working method built on fundamentals, the one I bring to every session, whatever the size of the company across the table.

I am selective about the work I take on. Fourteen years in, I have learned that the value of this practice isn't in how much of it there is, but rather how right each piece of it is. And while I am serious about deliverables (be it root causes or broad solution directions or in deeper engagements, specific features and functions that are useful, memorable and delightful for users), deadlines and client confidentiality, I do have fun and do not take myself too seriously while I'm on the task. And in these years, I have come to learn that institutions and individuals rarely question their own habits from the inside. And often what is needed isn't another framework, but someone willing to say so plainly, and make you smile while he does it.