Thirty years of being accountable for transformation.

I started in sales. Times of India, Sterling Holiday Resorts — learning how to read people, how to close, and how revenue actually gets made. That ground-level commercial discipline has never left me. It shapes how I read organisations today.

The pivot came at Magus Customer Dialog. I was Key Relationship Manager, selling outsourced contact centre engagements to major clients. I sold the engagement to Airtel. Then, instead of moving on, I stayed to build what I had sold. Two years in Delhi, constructing the first outsourced contact centre for Airtel from the ground up. No blueprint. Full accountability. Systems, infrastructure, and people capability built simultaneously under real pressure.

Then I moved to Chandigarh and did it again — setting up and running the contact centre for Spice Telecom Punjab, this time with full P&L responsibility. That posting is where the thing I now do for a living became clear to me: what people report upward and what is actually happening on the ground are rarely the same thing. The leader sees the summary. The problem lives in the detail.

HSBC and Deloitte followed — senior leadership across banking operations, HR, customer service, and training. Teams of over 1,200 people. Budgets up to USD 100 million. Executive committees. Strategic transformation at scale. And always the same instinct: get to the ground truth before deciding what needs to change.

I am also a Teach For India Fellow. Teaching in under-resourced classrooms, no positional authority, limited infrastructure, outcomes entirely dependent on the ability to meet people where they are. That posting tested everything I thought I knew about leadership. The practice it built is the foundation of every coaching engagement I run now.