Two decades of independent consulting: A reflection

This month I completed two decades of independent consulting. When I left my job in September 2006, I was almost 37 years old. I had a decade of work experience, but I was uncertain of my offerings, unsure of my unique skills, and doubtful of my ability to make money. My primary source of encouragement was Gauri, my wife, who was a school teacher then, and the school had generously waived fees for our son, who was then in primary. My father did not discourage me, but he felt I wasn’t cut out to run a business. And he was right in being skeptical. I was quiet, an introvert, not street-smart, more of a rule-follower, and not ambitious about making money. How was the journey so far? And what has been my learning from this journey?

Did you meet your financial goals? This question comes in different varieties. For example, some people ask, "Would you have made more money if you had continued working? I really admire our ability to do counterfactual thinking. When Bill Gates gave $800 to purchase a nuclear power plant simulator from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2005, his plan was to simulate thousands of worst-case scenarios like earthquakes, tsunamis, etc., to make sure the nuclear plant is safe. I didn’t run any such “what-if” scenarios, and I didn’t set any financial goals. I was planning to do my best to earn enough to pay the bills and hopefully to save some for the rainy days. As I wrote in the blog “Story of plan B” in 2008, I had spent ten years working (2 years in the US and 8 years in India), and the employee phase was a very satisfying and productive phase of my life. But after a decade, I felt that the phase was over. And I was willing to put all my energy into trying to make the new phase work. I started blogging in December 2007, thanks to nudges from friends Ravi Aranke and Ramprasad Moudgalya (RamP). I wrote 56 blogs in 2008 and 83 in 2009. That means I had more energy, more time, and less work in those initial years. I think I got really lucky, and despite my effort, it could have easily not worked out. During the last two decades, I made significantly more money than the bills. But that reflects more on the size of the bills than the money made. I use a 15-year-old bicycle (Hercules), a 15-year-old Maruti Estilo (renewed the registration a couple of months ago), and I have been debt-free for the past 15 years. Thanks to Buffett, Munger, and Buffett’s guru Benjamin Graham, margin of safety got ingrained pretty early in this period, and later also became an important step of the 8-steps to innovation framework.

It was passion, wasn’t it? I decided to quit my job in 2005, a year before I actually quit. By then I had been a sceptic of the notion of progress for a decade. In contrast, the corporate world was fueled by personal and professional progress, expressed in the form of revenue/profit growth, valuation, net worth, career progression, etc. Not being a sucker for the corporate value system, or for that matter, any organized value system, be it social, religious, or political, was the primary motivation to leave my job. I was clueless about what to do as an independent consultant, let alone be passionate about something. But I still had to answer: where to focus my energy and what to offer?

A few areas were ruled out after mixed success – project management, knowledge management, and competency framework development. I realized that my exposure to R&D management in the US and in India was a strength, and I could relate to moving up the value chain easily. Thanks to Hari Iyer at Sasken (my ex-employer), I got initial projects on developing technical leadership, and thanks to Thiagarajan (Tiger) and Poovannan (Poo) at ADP, Hyderabad, I got an assignment on fostering a culture of technical excellence. Both these engagements lasted multiple years and provided a solid base. From these engagements, I realized I enjoyed building innovation stamina (capacity) the most. Conferences like India Innovation Summit, forums like Bangalore Innovation Forum, and products like Tata Nano created excitement and gave access to success and failure stories from a close distance. This led to the collaboration with Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan, eventually leading to the 8-steps to innovation book.

Why independent consulting? Why not a team? Any team brings with it a set of aspirations. A startup is not only building a product or a service and serving a set of customers, but is also fulfilling dreams of families associated with the employees. I felt that my experimentation with progress-as-a-questionable entity would not work in a team setting. I was fortunate to get advice from veteran independent consultants like Arun Joshi-kaka, Raja Chidambaram, and V N Bhattacharya. I also did the next best thing: read books. Ricardo Semler’s Seven-day weekend became a source of inspiration, and it continues to inspire two decades later. Alan Weiss’s books on value-based consulting were companions for the initial period. However, without the trust and sponsorship from people like Hari Iyer, Tiger-Poo, Naresh Tyagi, Zunder Lekshmanan, and Vijay Anand in the initial years, things wouldn’t have moved.

Of course, work is more fun with collaborators. And I got to work with a ton of them.  Collaboration with Rishi on innovation management and with Prof Ganesh Prabhu on Design Thinking lasted several years. Working with a diverse set of people like Pradeep Desai, Ramesh S, Gaurav Kataria, Raja Chidambaram, S Yegneshwar, Raghu Kolli, Prof Anand Kusre, K Ganesh, Madhav Manthri, Akkiraju, Deepa M, S Rajasekaran, and many more made the journey enjoyable.

Why Catalign Innovation Consulting? What kind of consulting should I do? Should I do some specialized work like a designer, a scientist, a programmer, or an accountant? Should I do a document as a deliverable, like a research report or a strategy recommendation for management? Should I drive a change initiative inside an organization? I didn’t do any of this, mostly. I became a fan of Edgar Schein’s process consulting approach, which he later called humble consulting, and decided that I would be a catalyst. I believed that, for an intervention to work, it has to be based on the organization’s strengths (bright spots), be culture-friendly, need a simple dashboard, and be championed from within. I facilitated workshops, asked questions, co-created dashboards, pointed to the internal bright spots, suggested process tweaks, and co-led challenge campaigns. However, in our innovation council meetings, a lot of good ideas came from other members. All I had to do was champion them, be it creating a virtual lab, running a campaign, or building a sandbox. Hence, a catalyst in alignment and innovation – Catalign Innovation Consulting turned out to be an apt banner. Initially, I thought the alignment would be to a given strategy; later I realized my work involves aligning to changing market forces and changing capability dynamics. I remember an ophthalmologist and an eye-hospital leader came to me after a workshop in Raipur and said, “I can do this exercise myself in my hospital.”

Thanks to Akki calling the workshops Innovathons, the metaphor of innovation stamina emerged. It means the capacity to solve complex challenges, preparedness to respond to forces of creative destruction, to borrow Schumpeter’s language. For most of my engagements “Moving Up The Value Chain” was a common aspiration. “Invest in preparedness, not prediction,” I latched on to Nassim Taleb’s Antifragility wisdom.

My collaborator S Ramesh gave me a mini-sermon quite early, saying that teaching would be complementary to consulting activity. It took me a couple of years to get convinced. He was right, teaching nudged me to learn new topics, to apply the frameworks to new situations, and learn from the students. Prof Ganapathy Lakshman (Jain University), Prof Satyajit Majumdar (TISS), and Swami Krishnan (IFIM) provided the initial teaching opportunities. Later, IIM Bangalore, thanks to Rishi, and IIT Bombay, thanks to Prof Kusre and Prof Milind Atrey, became my teaching platforms, and I am grateful to these institutions. However, in my mind, I am a consultant first, and teacher next.

How did I turn to design thinking and mindfulness? Prof Satyajit Majumdar invited me to TISS in 2011 to conduct workshops for his students of the Master of Social Entrepreneurship before they embarked on their month-long field visits. That is how design thinking workshops started. Prof Ganesh Prabhu and I did design thinking programs at IIM Bangalore for almost a decade. Given how poor we are at designing the citizenship revision SIR process, and at managing crowds in public spaces, especially around temples, I am convinced design thinking carries a lot of potential.

It was my friend Zunder Lekshmanan, who was then the CTO of Mahindra Comviva, who suggested that I conduct a mindfulness workshop for his team. That was in 2015. I was hesitant. By then, I had spent two decades experimenting in that domain. But I was not associated with any tradition, religious or otherwise. The workshop was appreciated, and I decided to offer it to the public. I consciously decided not to market it to the corporate world. Mindfulness is learning to see that the process of becoming is an illusion. On what basis do I guarantee that employees will become more productive and profits will increase after insights like these? Some of them might leave their jobs. I do run the workshop at home once a quarter, and a few sessions happen at IIMB’s executive education, thanks to encouragement from Prof. Vasanthi Srinivasan.

Way forward? How do I see my next decade? As I mentioned, I am a fan of preparedness, not prediction. However, there are always a few ideas in the air; with luck, one or two click; most don’t. I have been fascinated by strategy as a subject lately. It began as a matter of curiosity when our son spent the past five years in Israel. Why do countries fight so much? How come a country like Israel, with world-class intelligence machinery, is fooled on the same day twice after fifty years? How come a country like Iran can fight the mighty US? How is Saudi with more than 20 times the defense budget of Houthis is struggling with low-cost drone attacks? I am curious, and it is likely to influence my work on strategic innovation, especially on the capacity to respond to creative destruction.

When I look at India’s innovation ecosystem radar after two decades, I see that a lot has changed, and a lot that needs to be done. Particularly, the lack of capacity for deep tech innovation is striking. I wrote last year that India woke up in 2025 while China could confidently say, “We have been preparing for the trade war for a decade.” I am curious about what is enabling deep tech innovation in India.

Thanks to Prof. Mukta Kulkarni, I will be teaching a Critical Thinking course at IIM Bangalore’s undergraduate program next semester. It will cover three forms of reasoning (deductive, inductive, and abductive), cognitive biases, and metacognition (awareness of the thinking process). It will also briefly introduce two critical thinkers of ancient India, Dignaga (5^th Century) and Nagarjuna (2^nd Century). Will critical thinking gain currency in the next few years? Who knows? But given the level of thinking demonstrated by various world leaders today, I won’t be surprised if it does.

Journey-centric mindfulness suggests that the journey is more important than the destination. How much has it sunk into my brain, blood, and bones? I don’t know.