Part 1 of two. Not how to do talent management, but how to read the one you have joined. Two organisations. Both profitable, both leaders in their sector. The first promotes by grade and tenure. Nobody’s increment differs from anybody else’s by more than three percent. Development is open to everyone. People stay fifteen years.

You run a quarterly engagement survey. It says people do not feel heard. You and your boss sit down to make sense of it and the whiteboard fills up fast: no culture of listening, not enough channels to speak up, managers who need to listen better, a loop you never closed from last time, leadership that is not visible enough, a hybrid-workplace thing, low psychological safety. You pick the two…

What Ford’s turnaround really reveals about crisis, assumptions, and the limits of culture programs In 2006, Ford was close to collapse. It was about to report a loss of $12.7 billion, the worst single year in its history, and over the next three years it would lose more than $30 billion. The company had become a set of warring fiefdoms. Regional divisions ran their own strategies and products. Executives guarded…

It’s been 45 years since George T. Doran gave us the SMART framework. So why are we still struggling with the basics? Last month, a practice leader – someone responsible for a team of fifty – reached out to me with a familiar request. “We need an L&D intervention on SMART goals,” she said. “I’ve sent multiple reminders. I’ve flagged that the goals people are submitting aren’t SMART. They’re still…

Eight weeks without a job title made me question where meaning actually lives. I resigned five weeks ago. Three weeks remain. There is a role waiting on the other side, but right now, in the middle of this notice period, I am sitting on my couch with a show playing on my tablet and a laptop open that nobody has asked me to use.

Everyone in L&D knows the 70:20:10 model. Seventy per cent of professional development happens through on-the-job experience. Twenty per cent through social learning – mentoring, feedback, observation. Ten per cent through formal training (Lombardo & Eichinger). The profession has spent decades building ever-better interventions for the 10 per cent: workshops, e-learning, leadership programmes, competency frameworks, evaluation models. It has influenced the 20 per cent through coaching schemes and mentoring programmes.…

Part 2 of the Cracks in the Ladder series. Everyone’s investing in AI capability. Almost nobody is investing in protecting the human intelligence that AI is quietly replacing. Not because they don’t care – it’s because the skills most at risk are the ones hardest to identify. Not every routine task is just a routine task.

Part 6 of a series on what working across five radically different organizations taught me about the real competency behind HR effectiveness. I started this series with a story about an LMS that succeeded technically and failed politically. Over the five pieces that followed, I traced a pattern across five organizational archetypes: an offshore consulting firm, a Maharatna PSU, a central government ministry, a domestic consulting practice, and a PE-backed…

Part 5 of a series on contextual intelligence in HR leadership. Every organization I had worked in before this one had rewarded thoroughness. At the offshore consulting firm, thoroughness was the baseline expectation. At the PSU, thoroughness earned respect, even when I failed on other dimensions. At the government ministry, thoroughness was what made the policy drafts defensible. At the domestic consulting firm, thoroughness was what made clients trust me…

Part 4 of a series on contextual intelligence in HR leadership. At the offshore consulting firm where I started my career, I was visible. I knew this at the time, and I attributed it to the quality of my work. My deliverables were sharp, my timelines were reliable, my frameworks were well-received. The feedback loop between effort and recognition was tight. I produced good work, and people noticed.

Why most competency frameworks collapse – and why the fix isn’t what you think In twelve years of building competency frameworks across consulting, the public sector, and corporate environments, I have rarely seen one sustain cross-functional use. Frameworks get approved, socialised, and documented – but they do not get used. They exist as artefacts, not as operating systems.

Part 3 of a series on contextual intelligence in leadership. I didn’t apply for the ministry role. It came through a deputation while I was still at the PSU, which meant I occupied an unusual position from the start: an outsider embedded inside the system. Close enough to be handed substantive work. Distant enough to not be entangled in the ministry’s internal hierarchies.

Part 2 of a series on contextual intelligence in leadership. Early in my career, I spent a few years at an offshore consulting firm that served US clients. The operating model was straightforward: you worked with US colleagues on a daily basis, occasionally travelled to work directly with clients, and your reputation was built almost entirely on what you produced.

Part 1 of a series on what working across five radically different organizations taught me about the real competency behind leadership effectiveness. Within six months of joining a large Indian PSU, I designed and launched their first-ever learning management system. The organization had been trying to build one for years.

AI and Future of Work  March 31, 2026 7 min read How I built and deployed multilingual training simulations in hours, with zero coding experience, zero budget, and zero vendor dependency. Last week, I had never opened GitHub. I didn’t know what a repository was. I had never written a line of code, never “deployed” anything, and the phrase “vibe coding” would have drawn a blank stare. Today, I have…

AI and Future of Work 22 March, 2026, AI series – Part 3 18 min read This is Part 3 of a three-part series for professionals building AI tools without a deep technical background. Part 1 and Part 2 covered how LLMs work, how APIs connect systems, how to engineer prompts, and how RAG grounds AI in your company’s knowledge. This piece is about building – translating that foundation into…

AI and Future Of Work 21 March, 2026 AI series – Part 2   13 min read This is Part 2 of a three-part series for professionals building AI tools without a deep technical background. In Part 1, we covered what LLMs are, how they work, and why they hallucinate. This piece builds directly on that foundation. Knowing what an AI is turns out to be only half the battle. The…

AI and Future Of Work 20 March, 2026 AI series – part 1   12 min read This is the first in a three-part series for professionals who want to build with AI – without needing a computer science degree. By the end of this series, you’ll be able to design, build, and deploy AI-powered tools for your organisation. —————————————————————————————————————– There’s a question that most people are too embarrassed to ask…

Why senior hires end up doing the job they just left – and how to make sure it doesn’t happen to you You spend years building a career. You move up, earn the scars, develop judgment that only comes from being in the room when things go wrong. Then you get the call. VP. Director. Head of. The title that signals you’ve arrived at the level where you stop doing…

Over the past few weeks, I found myself working deeply on a problem that sits at the intersection of strategy, governance, and human capital: how does a large organization systematically build a leadership pipeline that can withstand uncertainty? I was whiteboarding a succession planning and leadership development policy for a heavy industries organization.