Vihaan Initiatives

When something goes wrong, the question usually asked: who made the mistake? The army asks: who was responsible? The first question is looking for someone to blame. The second one is looking for someone to own the situation, understand what happened, fix it, and make sure it does not happen again. I absorbed this distinction growing up in an army household and spending five years at RIMC. It has stayed with me through 37 years of corporate and consulting work. Blame closes th

During a job interview the person across the table described the role and then asked me: "Do you think you can do this?" I said it was not the right question to ask. Two questions mattered: Would I enjoy doing what was being asked of me? Did he trust me enough to want me on his team? If the answer to both was yes, we had something to talk about. I have shared this with many people I have mentored. The reaction is usually the same: how does one develop the confidence to say so

I have interacted with enough small and mid-sized businesses to recognise the pattern within the first conversation. The founder is the most capable person in the room. Everyone in the organisation knows it. So, every decision of consequence finds its way back to them. Pricing. Hiring. A vendor dispute. A client escalation. An operations call that should have been made by someone three levels below. The business stops growing at the speed the founder can personally process de

"Mr. Karan, you are an electrical engineer, no? The forklift is not starting." This was my second day as a graduate engineer trainee in the Central Maintenance Department at the Siemens plant in Navi Mumbai. I was 22. Responsible along with the team to ensure uninterrupted utility operations across three factories - power supply, compressed air, air-conditioning, water supply and some other areas. I had no idea what I had to do. The forklift got fixed that day. But that was n

I have seen contracts where the work was done well, the relationship was good, and the payment still did not come on time. Not because the client was unwilling. Because nobody had written down what "done" meant. The invoice was raised. The client's team said the work was not complete as per their understanding. Both sides were right according to what they remembered from a conversation six months earlier. The dispute took months to resolve. The cash sat frozen through all of

The vendor payment process in most MSMEs tells you almost everything about why working capital is tight. When a promoter tells me about a working capital crunch, I do not ask about his overdraft limit or his banker relationship. I ask him to walk me through how a vendor gets paid. That conversation is usually enough to identify where the problem actually lies. In the telecom infrastructure work I was part of, we were running monthly billing cycles across multiple vendors in t

In 1989, I joined Siemens as a graduate engineer trainee in the design department. The salary was not what I had in mind. The work in the first weeks was photocopying drawings. Nobody told me what to do with that. So I started asking questions about what the drawings were for. Understanding how the department worked came from those conversations, not from any instruction. Three months later, I had developed a software package that cut query response time from over a week to h

In August 2023, after 34 years in the corporate sector, I started Vihaan Initiatives. I had a clear picture of what consulting would look like. I would bring my experience in operations, commercial, business transformation, and P&L to companies that needed it. Clients would recognise the value. Work would follow. Some of that picture was accurate. Most of it was not. Here is what I had wrong. My initial understanding of the client's problem is not the actual problem. In consu

Jo dikta hai, wo bikta hai. What is seen, sells. This is what we're told today. Earlier, it was simpler: your work will speak for itself. One of the first things I learnt as a trainee engineer at the Siemens Navi Mumbai plant in 1989 was that what you do will be known. Not because you told anyone, but because good work travels. I saw this play out consistently across organisations and over three decades. There were people who did draw attention to themselves, but they were th

I grew up in an army household. My father was an army officer. I went to the Rashtriya Indian Military College, Dehra Dun (RIMC). I lived in the armed forces environment for over 20 years. In the army, when something goes wrong, the question asked is not "who made the mistake?" The question asked is "who was responsible?" These are very different questions. The first question looks for someone to blame. The second looks for someone to own the situation, fix it, and ensure it

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Me: Culture in an organization is what you make it to be. Him: Don’t make clichéd statements. This discussion took place with a senior...

“Do you think you can do this?” Many years ago, this was a question asked to me during a job interview after I was informed about the...

“Mr. Karan, you’re an electrical engineer, no; the forklift is not starting!”. This was the moment we were told to dread whilst students...

“Hey trainee, get me a photocopy of this”. From my second day as a graduate engineer trainee in the technical department of motor...

“It’s not the plane. It is the pilot”. I remind my mentees of this dialogue from Top Gun Maverick when I’m asked how they should tailor...

My manager called me and asked which business I’d like to move to; he also mentioned the two businesses which had expressed the desire to...

As an army kid, the only life I’d seen growing up was in army establishments, in Pune, Rajauri, Tezpur (Assam), and Mumbai (then,...