Politicians and CJP protestors sharing a single brain cell and failing basic negotiation 101 is honestly peak comedy. Stop fighting over positions: Arresting leaders or blocking roads is just a muscle flex (position). If they actually looked at why youth are screaming about jobs and paper leaks (interests), we wouldn't have a permanent deadlock.  The "Meet in the Middle" trap: Splitting the difference between a brutal police crackdown and a total street shutdown satisfies literally zero people.  Power vs. Legitimacy: Throwing batons at crowds just spawns bigger crowds. Real resolution needs actual constitutional legitimacy, not state intimidation.  Zero-sum street wars leave everyone bleeding out.  Are our leaders allergic to a win-win, or is modern governance just a joke?

Customer Behavior 101: If you reward bad behavior, you scale bad behavior. I just spent 70 minutes stuck in the Indian airport immigration line. The reason? Half the passengers in front of me didn’t bother filling out their mandatory eArrival / eSuvidha forms in advance. But here’s the real sales & operations failure: Instead of sending non-compliant passengers to the back of the line to fill it out, officers stood there helping them complete forms at the counter. In negotiation and behavioral design, what you tolerate, you endorse. By prioritizing the unprepared, you end up penalizing your most compliant, high-value customers (the ones who prepared in advance). Compare this to Changi/Singapore: 1. Clear boundary (No form = No entry to queue). 2. Zero friction for compliant users (1-minute processing). 3. Zero incentive to cheat the system. We export world-class IT and operational strategy globally, yet our internal systems constantly subsidize bad behavior at the expense of efficiency. Frictionless systems don’t rely on people “being nice.” They rely on enforcing tight feedback loops.

Switzerland is proof that society entered a terrible negotiation. You visit, marvel at the pristine streets and silent trains, and realize you just accepted a harsh trade-off: you completely sacrificed the relationship dimension with humanity just to lock in the ultimate BATNA, admiring the Alps entirely by yourself. :((

Traveling through the Swiss countryside, the most striking thing isn't the landscape. It’s the silence. We live in a world that heavily rewards volume and constant output. But clarity rarely comes from adding more inputs; it comes from creating enough space to process what’s already there.

I had a trip to Switzerland and honestly, it completely changes how you look at the world. 🇨🇭 Beyond the scenery, what really struck me is the country's neutrality and obsessive punctuality and service. Sitting down with my class notes, I realized it's literally a live-action masterclass in Negotiation 101: Neutrality = Legitimacy & Standards: In negotiations, relying on external, respected standards creates objective fairness and cuts down resistance. Switzerland's entire posture is the ultimate external anchor.  Punctuality = Managing Commitments & Relationships: Great negotiations aren't just about a single deal; they account for the "shadow of the future" and building long-term trust. Swiss punctuality is just bulletproof commitment, delivering on details so the other side knows agreements will be upheld.  Turns out top-tier diplomacy and high-stakes business strategy share the exact same playbook.

Trading screen time for green time. 🌿 Took a trail hike near Zurich today, classic Swiss views, historic trail markers (Pilgerweg), and met some furry locals along the way. 🐄🇨🇭

Every country I’ve worked in has taught me something about time. Americans want it fast. Germans want it exact. Japanese want it right. Indians want it to be flexible. You can't sell, or even talk to people, the same way across all four.

I once spent a fortune getting my hair done at the same salon as a prospect, just to get 30 minutes with her. People called it ridiculous. It closed a 300K deal. It was no different from a client dinner, we just don't think of it that way.

Everyone online keeps telling young people to skip the 9-to-5 and build their own thing. Most of that advice comes from people who've never run payroll. Being broke and unskilled at 30 is a prison, not a job.

Ask what I'm proudest of after 20 years in sales and it won't be a number. More than the deals, the revenue, the logos. It's the people. - The manager who bet on me when I had no business asking for the role. - The client in Tokyo who taught me more over one dinner than any classroom. - The reps I coached who now run their own teams and text me on the hard days. None of it shows up on a resume, but it's the whole reason the career worked. I've had deals come back a decade later just because I stayed a decent human the first time. That's the only part that lasts.

Checked into a 5-star UK hotel paying £550 a night, and they don't even have the basic decency to put drinking water in the room. They actually told me to walk down a couple of floors with my own empty bottle to use a public refilling station. Absolutely pathetic service standards.  If this is what modern business looks like, they won a tiny battle on overhead costs while completely destroying the relationship. When you nickel-and-dime a guest paying top dollar just to pad your margins, you aren't doing smart business, you're just proving that greed matters more than basic hospitality.  At the end of the day, negotiation 101 is about creating a win-win: satisfying both parties' interests and building long-term value instead of squeezing every last drop out of a single transaction.

I teach negotiation at INSEAD, and I watch smart people fall for this trap every single day.  "Let’s just split the difference" sounds mature. In reality, it’s just a math trick set by whoever spoke first.  When you split the difference, you aren't being fair. You’re being lazy, destroying joint value and leaving real money on the table.  Real negotiators don't split the pie. They expand it.  Stop meeting in the middle. Start trading on priorities.

There's no such thing as a self-made millionaire. I've had a good run. IIM Calcutta, INSEAD, led teams across SF, APAC, EMEA. And I've never once called myself self-made. Because none of it happens without my parents funding an education they couldn't really afford. Or a manager who promoted me before I'd earned it. Or mentors who pulled me up early. Hustle culture loves the lone-wolf story because it sells courses. Real success is built on privilege, luck, and people quietly carrying you. And I never shy away from admitting that.

13 countries. An INSEAD faculty role. Deals closed from SF to Singapore. Looks like a dream for many and I’m very grateful for it, but that's just the highlight reel. What it gave me: financial freedom, a network across three continents, and the ability to read people across any culture. What it cost me: birthdays I'll never get back, years living out of a suitcase, and the quiet hum of next quarter's number that never fully switches off. I wouldn't change a thing. But it was never a cakewalk. To anyone chasing this life: go for it. Just decide early what you're willing to pay. The career takes that payment either way. Are you happy with where your career is right now?

My one and only regret about my INSEAD MBA: it taught me nothing about how to actually sell. No class on reading a buyer, nothing on what to do when a deal goes silent, and nobody to explain why a pitch that kills it in New York dies in Tokyo. Strange thing to pay a fortune for, right? But what it taught me instead was worth more. Two years in rooms with people from 80 countries, all sharp, all accomplished. They questioned everything I believed. I learned to hold my ground against people smarter than me. To read a room and spot who actually held the power. I didn't know it then, but that's selling. So INSEAD gave me judgment and after 20 years, I can tell you judgment closes more deals than any framework ever will.

Georgia has been making wine for 8,000 years, and some historians think it's where wine was invented, but almost nobody outside Eastern Europe knows this. Was there last week for work. Tasted the wine and it was unlike anything I'd had, from a tradition older than most civilisations. They don't even use barrels the way the rest of the world does, instead they ferment it underground in clay vessels, the same way they have been doing for thousands of years. Yet, a country sitting on the oldest wine tradition on earth, and it's almost invisible in global markets. Meanwhile brands with a fraction of that history charge a premium everywhere. They have something the world would pay for, they just need to spread the story across the globe.

I was an introverted nerd in school. Leading global sales teams was the last place I expected to end up. First ten years of my career were all in finance. Equity research, hedge funds, international investments. Loved it, never planned to leave. Then a senior told me, "Ankit, you'd do even better in sales. The way you communicate and handle difficult clients, at least give it a try." Sales wasn't a job I looked up to back then. But gave it a shot, went all in, made a ton of mistakes, and learned from each one. Now I can say that was the best call I've made. When people tell me "I'm not built for sales, it doesn't come naturally," I tell them it doesn't need to. The willingness to keep learning long after it stopped being new is more than enough.

Dubai has people from 200+ nationalities in one city, and 80% aren't originally from there. Spent a month there and three things stood out. - Walk into any meeting and it's an Indian, a Brit, a Lebanese, and an Emirati building together. Almost nobody is local. Everyone chose to come, and you feel that hunger in every room. - Decisions move fast, but only after trust. Rush it and you get nothing. - And everyone talks big, no matter how small they’re starting. Half the richer countries I’ve worked in don’t have that. Low taxes and easy company setup help, but the real reason to build here is the people. When everyone around you thinks big, you stop playing small without noticing.

At just 23, Anjali Sardana built Pronto, a Bengaluru-based 10-minute home services startup now valued at ₹800 crore. Having a father with a net worth of $2 billion gives you a huge push to start something. You have access to capital, networks, and the freedom to take risks most people can’t. But that’s not the point. Look at the Indian startup ecosystem today. We keep seeing the same patterns: Quick commerce. Food delivery. Home services. Logistics. Hyperlocal delivery. Basically, businesses where cheap labour, large populations, and convenience can create scale. Meanwhile, India needs entrepreneurs building in manufacturing, semiconductors, aerospace, nuclear power, defence, energy, industrial technology and other hard-tech sectors. Problem isn’t that delivery or home-service startups shouldn’t exist but the problem is that our entrepreneurial ambition heavily concentrated in a few familiar categories, and VC money often follows the same patterns.

I spend half my time outside India, and one thing I used to boast about was UPI and digital payment. Even a coconut seller can take a UPI payment. You go to a salon, eat at a roadside stall, or buy something from a small shop, almost everyone accepts UPI. Now, with MDR charges applying to merchant transactions above ₹2,000, those payments will have an additional cost for merchants. And obviously, in a country where brands don’t even give you a free carry bag, expecting merchants to simply absorb that cost doesn’t make much sense. They’ll either pass it on to the customer or stop accepting UPI for larger payments to protect their margins. Either way, something that made India great at digital payments could slowly start dying. Sad, but true.