Neither/Nor
The perceived design of corporate leadership is a fortress of materialist logic, a space where decisions are expected to be stripped of human messiness and reduced to the clean-cut calculus of one fileable balance sheet. Shreya Krishnan’s career is an unapologetic challenge to this template. Her public profile carries the familiar insignia of the corporate world, from the title of "corporate diva" to the process-driven certification of Six Sigma belt. Yet these markers exist alongside the identity plexus of a therapist, a spiritual practitioner, and a vocal author. In a binary world, these worlds collide if not carefully balanced. In Shreya’s world, they are inseparable components of a highly effective operating system.
Her spirituality is not a cryptonite repelling suit that offsets a public career cracking to implode. It is the core programming that confidently runs it. The principles of non-judgment and compassion are integral to the point where they are no longer treated as soft skills taught for compliance, but are hard-edged instruments for objective performance evaluation. The rejection of binary thinking becomes a method for uncovering more resilient and creative business solutions than a rigid, “either/or” framework could provide. Her model presents a simple, testable hypothesis: that the most effective leader today is not the one who splits their humanity into pieces big enough to cope with the responsibilities of work, but to embrace it entirely.
"I think my spirituality informs much of my leadership."
Resource Management
Corporate inefficiency often hides in plain sight, masked by tradition and prejudice. For years, hospitality, healthcare, and logistics businesses accepted flawed operational models and wasted manpower as unavoidable costs. Dr. Manish Jain saw something different. He identified a direct, quantifiable link between social exclusion and wasted revenue in these accepted inefficiencies. He saw a multi-million-dollar operational problem with a simple, elegant, and consistently overlooked solution: the strategic employment of transgender individuals. Jain's core insight was to stop treating the issue as a matter of social justice and to reframe it entirely as a critical failure in resource management, one that could be solved to benefit the bottom line.
This pragmatic framework is not the product of a business school case study. It results from a personal reckoning, a transformation that converted the raw energy of guilt from a single street-side encounter into a strategic tool for corporate adoption. This origin is crucial because it demonstrates the ability to translate a core human experience into a dispassionate, scalable business model. Jain did not aim to make leaders feel good about doing the right thing. He set out to build a system where doing the right thing was the most irresistible, intelligent, and profitable business decision a company could make.
"But more often than not, you don't take an action. It is a calling, and I should not be ignoring this voice."
Privilege of Defiance
The justice of any system can be measured by the line it draws between privilege and the accepted standard. In a society that may mourn the birth of a daughter, the simple act of being wanted is a privilege. To be the third daughter and be raised without perceived parental discrimination is an act of defiance. Dr. Deepa Sharma’s career is devoted to annihilating the gap between her privilege and a universal baseline of endearing acceptance. Her own upbringing, a product of her parental defiance, provided her with an advantage that she now seeks to dismantle.
This is the central anchor of her work. Sharma argues that labeling her empowering childhood a "privilege" is a dangerous misnomer, a symptom of a flawed but persevering system. Her mission is to redefine this called advantage as the absolute and minimum "baseline" for every child. An upbringing free from gender born discrimination and rooted in self-belief should not be the exception but the default. Yet, in a world where it is more profitable to pay the fine for injustice instead of funding its solution, how do we translate the defiant personal path of an individual into a universal doctrine?
"My sense is, while it was a privilege for me back then, it should not be seen as a privilege. It should be a given."
The Origin of the Architecture
The architecture of a belief system is often built on a foundation of silent observation. For Sachin Shah, the defining observations occurred during the five-year period he witnessed his mother’s struggle with depression and anxiety. He describes this as a silent, internal war, a state of being trapped by a pain that could not be spoken. Her hesitation to reveal her inner world became, in his analysis, the central feature of her suffering. This formative experience of watching a loved one confined by their own mind established the foundational postulates for his future work. It led him to the conclusion that the most significant battles are not fought against external circumstances, but are won or lost within the self. His mission became the attempt to give others the voice his mother could not find.
This external observation ran parallel to his own internal conflict. Coming from a middle-class Indian family without a formal degree, Shah was surrounded by a societal narrative that equated education with worth. Family and community consistently reinforced the message that his future was limited to labor work, a verdict he once internalized as a core belief. This created a sense of inadequacy that defined his early career, trapping him in a cycle of aimless job-switching and failure that only confirmed the external narrative. His own life became a personal proof point for the theory he was forming while observing his mother: an internal belief system, whether self-generated or adopted from society, is the force that dictates one's trajectory and results.
The turning point was not an epiphany, but a deliberate search for a new anchor set. Trapped by the seemingly immutable law that his lack of education was an insurmountable barrier, he began studying the lives of successful individuals who shared his circumstances. He found decisive counterexamples in figures like Indian industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, who achieved immense success without extensive formal education. This discovery was a moment of intellectual rupture. It provided external, empirical evidence that his core limiting belief was not a fact, but a narrative. It was not a law of nature, but merely a "program" that could be questioned and rewritten.
This realization became the proof of concept for Sachin’s entire methodology. If a deeply ingrained belief like "I am not good enough" could be dismantled by new data, then any limiting belief could be similarly deconstructed. He concluded that the subconscious operates on the given logic because it does not distinguish between a "true" and "false" premise. By consciously choosing new role models and a new narrative, he had, in effect, performed his first mind hack on himself. The experience of breaking free from his limitations, combined with the painful memory of his mother’s struggle, solidified into a singular purpose: to become an architect for others. And in choosing to focus this work specifically on women, he brought his journey full circle, attempting to win for them the battle he felt retroactively had been lost with his mother.
"My biggest belief was, I am not good enough.
That was my biggest belief. It was holding me everywhere."
The Death of Vanity
The first idea of a founder is often their most beloved. It is an extension of their ego, a "vanity product" built not for a market, but for their own sense of what is cool, innovative, or disruptive. The first, and perhaps most difficult, test an entrepreneur encounters is their willingness to kill this beloved idea when the market inevitably rejects it. This act of intellectual unsentimentality, of sacrificing the "cool" idea for a useful one, often marks the beginning of a viable business.
Ashish Chaturvedi's journey flourished the moment his ego died. His first ventures were the products of what he calls a “young man's ambition”: a voice-based social network, then a location-based messaging app. They seemed clever, technically brilliant, and they "bombed." Ashish’s turning point was a mundane moment of parental frustration at his son's bus stop over a missed note about a chart paper. This seemingly trivial, real-world problem led Ashish to pivot, abandoning his "cool" ideas to design a practical, painpoint-solving communication tool. It became the first idea the market was willing to pay for and raises the question: what is the essential mark of a founder: the genius of their idea, or the clarity required to abandon it for one that works?
"Every entrepreneur does that, right? The first product everybody builds is for their vanity, something they thought would work, something not for the market."
An Impatient World
The world celebrates the finished product. We celebrate the vaccine, the software, the elegant device in our hands. We are, however, deeply impatient with the slow, methodical, and often uncertain process required to create it. Science is supposedly a world defined by the integrity of its process, its methodology. Entrepreneurship is a world judged by the timely delivery of a viable product. Dr. Deepti Saini’s career is a case study in the immense friction between these two domains. As a scientist, her identity is rooted in the exacting rigor of the scientific method. As an "accidental entrepreneur," her survival depends on delivering a valuable product to a market that has little patience for the nuances of discovery.
Saini did not bring a specific, pre-defined product to market. Instead, her "product" became the scientific process, offered as a service to other innovators. This model places her directly at the intersection of two conflicting value systems. She must satisfy clients who demand a product's speed and functional certainty while upholding the scientific process's methodical sharpness, bound by unapologetic standards. This raises a question for any technical leader or innovator. How does one maintain the integrity of a process that demands patience and rigor when the world only rewards the speed and certainty of an accomplished product?
"But eventually. Whatever has to go to humans will have to be lab tested. You can't just predict this will work. And you know, go ahead.
Our Interviewees on the Record.
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