Leadership

Unpopular Opinion: Having a Plan B might be working against your Plan A. Behavioral science has long studied a concept sometimes called the "burning the boats" effect. When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and burned his ships, his soldiers had one option left: fight and win. No retreat meant no mental bandwidth wasted on retreat. Researchers studying commitment devices have found something similar in modern decision-making: when an escape route exists, the brain quietly keeps

Your best customers are gathering evidence against you. They are doing it out of habit. They ask for something, get told no, and instead of arguing, they go test your organization somewhere else - a different rep, a different department, a different level of seniority. If they get a yes the second time, they now know something you don't: that your "no" was never really a company policy. It was just one person's answer. They won't tell you this. But they'll remember it. Here's

Your customers are lying to you. They don't even know they're doing it. They ask for a feature. What they mean is "make my pain go away." They ask for a discount. What they mean is "I don't feel like this is worth it." They ask for a policy change. What they mean is "something in this experience broke my trust." Most companies fulfill the request. The best companies decode the intent underneath it. The average businesses and great ones split by their ability to decode custome

Try this thought experiment with me for a minute. You're on a hiring panel. There's a candidate sitting across from you. Smart, sharp, clearly capable. But something's off. They don't laugh at the right moments. They challenge an assumption you didn't even know was an assumption. They don't feel like "one of us." So you pass. You tell yourself it's instinct. You call it culture fit. Now imagine the opposite scenario. Every single hire from here on out feels effortless. They g

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza. In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment. Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got. Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave. Dom

Chasing fairness in an unfair world is stupidity. Life doesn't distribute talent, opportunity, or circumstance equally. It never has, and never will. Yet we've built entire systems - political, social, institutional, around the pursuit of fairness. Why? Because the human mind cannot tolerate randomness. Psychologists call this the "just-world hypothesis", our deep cognitive need to believe that outcomes are deserved. That if we work hard enough, follow the right rules, and fi

We've been solving the wrong problem in customer experience for decades. Customers said they hated waiting. So we took their word for it. We threw technology at the wait time. Self-help. Automated responses. Chatbots. Then AI arrived and gave us exactly what we thought customers wanted instant everything, and customers still asked for a human. Were customers being dishonest? Well, not really. What customers actually hated waiting for was not resolution, but reassurance. The a

The last time someone on your team brought you bad news, what did you do in the next ten seconds? That reaction matters more than the open-door policy you've put in place. It's the moment your team learns what honesty actually costs in your organisation. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson uncovered this almost by accident while studying medical teams in the 1990s. She expected the best-performing teams to report fewer errors. Instead, she found the opposite: the higher-performi

13 MILLION SELLERS in 2021. ₹0 STARTING CAPITAL. How Two IIT Graduates Built a Business Model So Hard to Copy, Shopsy by Flipkart Failed Trying. In 2015, Amazon and Flipkart were at war for urban India. But these two IIT graduates, Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal went the other direction. They went to the housewife in Nagpur reselling sarees on WhatsApp. The boutique owner in Surat with no supply chain access. The first-generation entrepreneur in Patna who wanted to start a

The wrong people will convince you that wanting more is something to be ashamed of. Here’s why I say this: In college, after scoring among the highest in my semester, a group I used to call friends walked into my hostel room and spent an hour calling me a nerd and laughing at me. I don't call them friends anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to them since I graduated college. I've had the pleasure of genuinely great company and the displeasure of really poor ones. The d

I've worked across Fintech, Healthcare, HR Tech and SaaS. A poorly handled customer query costs you differently in every single one. They all underestimate the emotional weight of the problem they're solving. The fundamentals of great CX never change, regardless of where you are: - Clear communication - Predictable response times - Fair resolutions - Keeping your word - Consistency - across product, operations, communications, and support Simple in theory. Brutally hard in pr

Every hiring manager has said it. "Skills can be trained. Hire for attitude." I've hired for attitude. It works - until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not a small problem. Here's something experience taught me that no hiring framework will: Attitude gets you in the door. But attitude without the foundational skill to back it - creates a very specific kind of mess. The person works hard. Wants it badly. But can't execute. And because they care so much, feedback becomes

Team A doubles their customer base in 12 months. They celebrate. Hires more sales reps. Team B doubles their customer base in 12 months. Then asks - can our experience handle this? One of these teams will be fighting churn in Q3. You already know which one. Here's what ends up getting skipped in all the celebrations: Growth exposes you. Every crack in your process, every gap in your handoff, every promise your sales team made that your ops team can't keep - scale just makes i

What if you could just... ask? Just open WhatsApp and type - "I left my charger at the office, can you get it?" and someone would do that for you? In CX, we talk endlessly about reducing friction. Dunzo, in 2014, had eliminated it entirely. I've spent years studying what makes customers come back, what makes an experience stick and what Dunzo had built, almost accidentally, was the answer. They just didn't have a name for it yet! It should have been called a conversational co

Founders hire their first CX leader in one of two moments. Either the reviews are bad, the churn is visible, and the founder is getting tagged in angry tweets - meaning the damage is already done and whoever walks in is inheriting a fire. Or the product is still finding its feet, the customer base is too small to generate real signal, and the hire ends up building processes for problems that do not exist yet. Both are expensive mistakes. One costs you money. The other costs

The most confident decision I ever watched a leader make was a coin flip. Not literally, but from the outside, it looked exactly like one. He had two options on the table. No data clearly favouring either one and a room full of people who needed someone to just pick a direction and mean it. He picked one and when he did, he said it like he had known all along. The team heard it, believed it, and got to work. What nobody in that room knew was that he had spent the previous th

A founder once told me their CX team was slow and unresponsive. Customers were complaining. Support tickets were piling up. The team looked unmotivated. I asked how long it took the team to resolve a refund request. She said three days. I asked why. She said the ops lead had to approve it, then finance had to sign off, then she had to review anything above a certain amount. The support team had been hired to help customers. But they could not actually help anyone. They could

Dependency looks like value in the short term. Over time, it is just a very polite career ceiling.

2002 Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman said "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential." And then I thought about NPS. And I laughed. Then felt sad. It was hilarious and all too real at the same time. Nobody woke up one day and decided CSAT and NPS were the twin pillars of customer

Being known for great customer experience is fantastic. But, if it isn't adding revenue, then what’s the point? You can make the same argument for great branding, great marketing, also, great leadership. If it doesn't connect to a commercial outcome at some point, it's just an expensive hobby with a (maybe) good-looking dashboard. In one of my discovery calls for a consulting assignment, I was asked to come in and track a metric that would look good on paper and make the earl