Archives 2026

“Made in India: A Titan Story” is a new series on Amazon about the rise of the legendary Indian watch brand, Titan.

The first episode, “The Watch Project” was enjoyable, but there was much shown about effective business entrepreneurship that didn’t resonate with my experience.

The episode opens with the protagonist arguing with his fellow managers that blue-collar workers should be treated better. While the respect he shows for the workers is endearing, what I found notable was that he didn’t treat his management colleagues with the same esteem.

The protagonist first asks management to allow the labourers to sleep in the managers’ onsite corporate apartments. When management disagrees, the protagonist takes them to a spare building and convinces the team to build apartments for the workers there, revealing he already had permission from senior leadership to do so.

We later learn that the protagonist went through the drama of asking the managers to surrender their own apartments first because “जब तक मैं उन्हें करेला नहीं दिखाता, तब तक वो भिंडी खाने के लिए थोड़ी मानते।“ (Translation: if I hadn’t shown them the bitter gourd first, they wouldn’t have agreed to eat the okra).

The film shows this as a singular moment of genius by the protagonist, where he outshines all those around him.

This goes against my own management instincts. Instead of using tricks to convince my team members to pursue a particular course of action I’d much rather have an open and transparent discussion with them outlining my vision and arguments and honestly engaging with their responses. My management colleagues deserve that respect.

Indeed, that’s the only way to ensure there’s alignment on a vision within an organization. Later, we learn that this is the protagonist’s last day on the project and my immediate thought was: what happens next? The singular genius is gone. And while the singular genius might have solved that one problem, he didn’t equip his team members with the skills to address future problems. Debate and discussion would have helped refine and strengthen the vision – and also meant that the managers would have a framework to use to solve future problems.

My ideal version of a corporate environment was reflected by the American series “The Newsroom”.

In it we see talented people argue about the right course of action to take in complicated environments. Sometimes the pathway articulated by the protagonist of The Newsroom wins out…and sometimes it doesn’t. The organization often fails either way. But an organization full of passionate capable individuals is far more exciting to build than an organization where people are in awe of, and follow the direction of, some singular genius.

I’m glad my organization is one where I can feel my own floor being raised, rather than one where I am the ceiling.

Later we see the showrunners echo an earlier message when the character of J.R.D Tata, played by the incredible Naseeruddin Shah, tells skeptics on his team that a wireless mobile phone is the future of telecommunications.

Watching it in 2026 we obviously know he’s correct, and the scene successfully (and accurately!) paints him as a visionary of his time.

What I think anyone considering entrepreneurship should know though is that, at least from my experience, for every instance where you end up being proven right, there are many more where you’ll be proven wrong. That doesn’t make you a business failure – there is a large body of corporate folk wisdom discussing how you typically learn more from your mistakes than from your successes.

It’s a particular shame because the first episode comes tantalizingly close to showing that there’s no dishonor in business failures. During the course of the episode the protagonist in unsuccessful in turning around the fortunes of a struggling printing press. But alas we’re told that the task was impossible and no one could succeed.

I’m very careful about dismissing things as impossible. I’m absolutely willing to believe that I, personally, am not capable enough for a particular task or challenge. But that doesn’t mean that the task was impossible in the first place. I like to think that someone more talented, skilled, or creative than I could have figured it out.

This article, for example, explains how Delta Airlines’ leadership team solved a seemingly impossible problem in the airline industry.

There are a lot of things I wasn’t able to figure out, that someone else ended up succeeding at. When that happens I find that person’s success intellectually stimulating. I’m excited to learn something new; that someone had a way of thinking that was more successful than mine. It’s an opportunity to grow.

To be clear none of this is a criticism of either the protagonist, Xerxes Desai, played by the very capable Jim Sarbh, or, of course, of J.R.D. Tata. I hate being so presumptuous but I like to believe they’d agree with large parts of what I’ve written.

I don’t think, for example, they could have built the legendary business icons that they did without able lieutenants who didn’t rely on a singular genius for success. I’m picking apart individual scenes which almost certainly never happened in real life. This is historical fiction, not a documentary. My article here is more an analysis of the stories we tell about what it takes to be successful in business.

Nor is this a criticism of the storytellers. It’s an excellent show and I’m looking forward to the next episode. They’ve opened my eyes to a business story that I knew very little about. The things I’ve written here probably wouldn’t be very cinematic if they were shown on screen. Amazon should know that this one individual, at least, re-activated his Prime account specifically so he could watch this show. I imagine the showrunners would be glad that their art provoked commentary and discussion.

I’m often proven wrong by my colleagues in my organization. I find that a lot more thrilling than the times that I’m proven right. It means I’ve helped build an organization that’s better than me. Isn’t that the dream?

In the past six years I’ve co-founded a couple companies in India. Collectively, as of this writing, they employ about 12 people. According to Copilot 50% of companies fail by year five, so while it’d probably be a bit much to call my entrepreneurial attempts “successful” they at the very least haven’t yet been “failures”.

I’m writing this blog to document my experiences and perspectives. Writing, I’ve found, helps me reflect, learn, and remember. I like to think of myself as a writer which, somewhat ironically, has meant that I haven’t published much because I keep wanting to further polish and perfect my words. But in the age of AI, it’s a lot easier to write and research and so it’s time to put up something like this.

You’ll often find me analyzing and criticizing business leaders who are global legends. It’s laughable to suggest that I am in any way comparable to them. To be clear, even in my idle imaginations I don’t think of them as peers. Rather I’ll write about them because they’ll often be the most salient business examples, and the ones that a broad readership would be familiar with.

The views I express are my own. My team would disagree with many of the things I write.

Anyone reading this blog will probably end up with a more positive image of me as a businessperson than what my reality is. I’ll be talking about ideals and theories, and the truth is I don’t always live up to them. I imagine that colleagues reading these posts, for example, will look at what I’ve written and think about times I unjustly didn’t follow my own rhetoric.

I’m going to get a lot of things wrong. As the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote of the Ashoka Chakra that adorns the logo of this blog, “The wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change”. One of the things that excites me about this blog is the opportunity to see the evolution of my own thinking and perspectives. My companies have pivoted at least four times in the past six years, and I expect more pivots to come.  

These are, after all, experiments.