Category: Sandeep’s Desk

Behavioral Sciences, LeadershipLeave a comment

In Command, Out of Control: Why the Best Leaders Step Back

Sandeep Choudhari

Rajesh had four weeks to do a twelve-week job. And he solved it by disappearing. His consulting team had been engaged to migrate a client’s e-commerce platform to the cloud. The original timeline was twelve weeks — reasonable, well-planned, adequately resourced. Then, four days in, the client’s CIO called with news that changed everything: their biggest competitor had just launched a new app with same-day delivery integration. The client needed to move. Fast. He gathered his fifteen consultants and made his expectations crystal clear: zero downtime during cutover, platform live by March 15th, performance equal to or better than today. … Continue reading In Command, Out of Control: Why the Best Leaders Step Back

Leadership, AI, BoardsLeave a comment

The Command Nobody Typed: What Every Board Should Lose Sleep Over

Sandeep Choudhari

Two incidents in 2026 — one in a personal inbox, one in a company’s data centre — arrive at the same place. Autonomous AI agents don’t have to malfunction to do damage. They only have to work. And what they expose is a failure of oversight, not of engineering. Early in my career, as a rookie programmer, I learned the most durable lesson of my working life by destroying four days of my own work in a single stroke. The instrument was a Unix command: rm -rf. It deletes everything beneath a directory — every file, every sub-folder — with … Continue reading The Command Nobody Typed: What Every Board Should Lose Sleep Over

Behavioral Sciences, Boards, Leadership, NEuroscience, Sandeep's DeskLeave a comment
Sandeep Choudhari

And that is the most important leadership signal of 2026 There are few things rarer and harder than the courage to look at the thing that feeds you — the product, the model, the revenue engine that built your empire — and choose to rebuild it yourself, while it is still working better than ever, before anyone begins to disrupt you. Google just did exactly that. At Google IO 2026, the company announced a set of moves that, taken together, constitute a deliberate act of self-disruption at a scale rarely seen in corporate history. The headlines spoke about Gemini 3.5, … Continue reading

Behavioral Sciences, Leadership, Sandeep's Desk, Self ImprovementLeave a comment

Why Some Messages Get Instant Action — And Others Just Sit There

Sandeep Choudhari

Early in my career, I was working with a senior manager on an organisational initiative that required budget approval from a leader at our head office. The amount wasn’t large, but we needed the approval quickly. I drafted the email and sent it to my manager for review. He looked at it, smiled, and instead of hitting Send, asked me to pull up a chair beside him. Then he rewrote the email. Here’s roughly what happened. My subject line read something like “Request Budget Approval” — accurate, but it could have been any of a dozen emails sitting in his … Continue reading Why Some Messages Get Instant Action — And Others Just Sit There

AI, Boards, Leadership, LearningLeave a comment

What the dot-com era gets right — and dangerously wrong — about where AI is taking us

Sandeep Choudhari

In 1999, Pets.com exemplified the pitfalls of hype overshadowing infrastructure, resulting in rapid failure. Today, AI is creating a deeper disruption than the internet did, affecting the very essence of knowledge work. Leaders must address the evolving relationship between technology and human identity, preparing for ongoing transformation rather than temporary solutions. Continue reading What the dot-com era gets right — and dangerously wrong — about where AI is taking us

Behavioral Sciences, Leadership, MusicLeave a comment

You Can’t Wait for Serendipity. You Have to Engineer It.

Sandeep Choudhari

The content emphasizes that serendipity is not merely luck. It is something one can cultivate by expanding their “luck surface area” by showing up in rooms you don’t fully belong to, by sharing half-ideas before they are polished and other means covered in the article. Continue reading You Can’t Wait for Serendipity. You Have to Engineer It.

Emotional Intelligence, LeadershipLeave a comment

Designing Workplaces for Human Variability

Sandeep Choudhari

A Leadership Reflection for Women’s Day A friend recently told me about visiting a government office in Pune. When she needed to use the restroom, staff directed her down a corridor, past stacks of broken chairs and old filing cabinets, to a bathroom tucked away in a forgotten corner of the building. “I don’t know why anyone would even want to go there,” she said. The women working in that office had no choice. Most corporate workplaces are better than this. But not by as much as we’d like to think. The bathroom wasn’t hidden by accident—it was designed (or … Continue reading Designing Workplaces for Human Variability

LeadershipLeave a comment

Rewarding A While Hoping for B: Why Smart Organizations Make Predictably Poor Decisions

Sandeep Choudhari

Have you ever promoted a “star” performer who consistently hit the numbers—only to discover, a year later, that the culture had weakened and the strategy had drifted. Or, for that matter watched a sales team smash quarterly targets on legacy products while your supposedly strategic new offering struggled for oxygen? I spent a year maxing out the metric my organization said mattered. At review time, a completely different metric got rewarded. It took me a while to realize this wasn’t bad luck or a biased manager — it was a design flaw baked into how most organizations operate. Most of … Continue reading Rewarding A While Hoping for B: Why Smart Organizations Make Predictably Poor Decisions

Leadership, Self ImprovementLeave a comment

The Flow State: Unlocking Peak Performance

Sandeep Choudhari

If you went through Engineering in India, the name Ferdinand L Singer likely triggers a specific kind of trauma. I remember sitting with his “Engineering Mechanics” for days. I read the chapters. I looked at the diagrams. Nothing stuck. The internal exams were looming, and I was staring at a wall of incomprehensible vectors. Then, one Saturday before my internals I did the only thing I could: I shut the door and stayed in the chair. Thankfully mobile phones existed in the sci-fi world then. For five hours, the world disappeared. No distractions. Just the friction of the problems meeting … Continue reading The Flow State: Unlocking Peak Performance

Behavioral Sciences, Emotional Intelligence, LeadershipLeave a comment

Sunflower Bias in Leadership: Why Following Blindly Can Cost Your Organization

Sandeep Choudhari

The article discusses “sunflower bias,” where team members conform to a leader’s opinion, stifling genuine debate and diverse views. This bias leads to poor decision-making, reduced innovation, and employee disengagement. To combat it, leaders should foster psychological safety by encouraging dissent, using anonymous feedback, and modeling openness to challenges, ultimately seeking true engagement over mere agreement. Continue reading Sunflower Bias in Leadership: Why Following Blindly Can Cost Your Organization