Hope the weekend was kind to you. Mine involved a tennis match I refused to lose even after it was obvious I already had. More on that in a minute. This newsletter isn't a productivity guide, and it's definitely not going to tell you to "never give up." If anything, it's the opposite. Today I want to talk about a difference we've all blurred at some point, at work, with people we love, and in our own heads at 11 PM when we really should've stopped two hours ago. Exhibit A, B,

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

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

The worst customer experience in Bengaluru built a 1,000-outlet empire. A man removed chairs from his restaurant in 1983. Bengaluru called him crazy. Municipal corporations eventually created a license category named after him. R. Prabhakar was a businessman from Basavanagudi who'd just returned from abroad. He'd watched McDonald's and fast-food chains operate at a scale that felt almost unfair - fast, cheap, packed, profitable. But he didn't want to sell burgers. He wondered

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 funny thing about truly elite people is that they're the last ones who think they've figured it out. The ones who are genuinely the best at what they do - the top 1%, the top 0.1%, they're always hungry to learn more. They're the most restless people in the room. Always convinced there's another level they haven't reached yet. And they're right. So here's the question I had to answer recently - what do I actually give someone like that? It's not talent. Everyone at that l

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

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

If your reviews are split between people who love you and people who hate you, your problem is not your product. It is that you are selling it to the wrong people. Polarised reviews are not a reputation problem. They are a targeting problem wearing a reputation problem's clothes. What that split tells you: Somewhere inside your customer base there are two completely different personas. One of them finds your product obvious, intuitive, exactly what they needed. The other find

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

The deal closed. The founder thinks they are the best salesperson. They might actually be the bottleneck. Here's what usually happens: The sales team made a decision they weren't allowed to make. A discount. A trade-off. A call on where to hold firm. So they did the only thing the process lets them do; they said, "let me get back to you." Went back to the founder. Went back to the customer. By then, the deal had cooled. The founder jumped on a call. Made the decision live. It

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

Martin Brundle has a phrase he deploys with surgical precision during Formula 1 broadcasts: "a day late and a dollar short." He uses it when a driver attempts a defensive move too late, or commits to an overtake half-heartedly. The gap has closed. The opportunity has passed. And worse, the hesitation has telegraphed weakness to every other driver on the grid. Business is no different. The difference is that instead of losing a position on lap 34, we lose teams, opportunities,

The teacher was screaming from backstage, ”Linish, don't be an idiot. Do not invite the dignitaries back on stage. They're already on stage." I was in seventh grade, president of the Interact Club, a division of the Rotary Club. It was tradition for the president to deliver what was essentially a state of the club address. The entire high school would be in attendance, along with dignitaries from the local Rotary Club. The protocol was: the dignitaries would be seated in the

Leadership problems often disguise themselves in different ways. Too often, it’s a question of focal length. But, hardly anyone sees it that way. Get too close and you start solving problems your team should be solving. You add control, meetings, check-ins. You become to bottleneck for everything. Get too far and you rely on vision decks and town halls. You don’t find the right focal length by reading about it. You find it by testing the edges. Step in closer than feels comfo

A year ago, I wrote my first post on my website. I had no sense of where it would lead. I was simply trying to get thoughts out of my head and onto the page. It was not natural, I had to force it out. Why? I still don't understand why at that moment I thought this was something worth doing. Surprising still, I dont know how I stuck with it. What forcing myself to write and publish has since taught me is that many of my ideas stand tall when they live in my mind, but the momen