An Act of Kindness.

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My NoSmalltalk session with Simran Oberoi

by Albert Schiller

On Paper

Corporate culture is obsessed with the fiction of policy. We are told that a healthy, supportive environment is the product of well-written manuals and comprehensive HR mandates. These documents function as a form of plausible deniability, a convenient shield that allows a system to claim it is humane while its day-to-day reality remains brutal. Simran Oberoi’s expulsion occurred within a system that had policies on the books to support working mothers. Her analysis is that the "larger problem is the mindset," not the manual. The written rules are inert, but unwritten concepts define culture.

The more than “Nice Gesture”

The textbook for Oberoi’s leadership philosophy was not written in a boardroom or a business school. It was written in a single, discretionary act of kindness. At a critical moment in time of vulnerability, a manager chose to deviate from the prevailing culture of rigidity and offered her the flexibility she needed. This was more than a "nice gesture." In an otherwise hostile system, this single act of humanity became an influential and formative stepping stone. It was a proof of concept. It demonstrated that an individual leader’s choice could override the system’s default programming. This one event became what she calls a "marker," a "thumb rule" for her entire professional life..

The Sum of Choices 

This is the core of her model of influence that bypasses inert policy to focus on individual decisions' potent, cascading impact. The logic is simple and meaningful. A system is not an abstract set of rules but the sum of the choices made by its leaders over time. One leader's choice to operate with empathy does not just solve one person's problem. It sends a new cultural signal. It creates a precedent. It becomes a story that others can tell and replicate, initiating a "ripple effect" that organically overwrites the latent rules of the culture from within. This model change is patient, decentralized, and immune to the cynicism of top-down corporate initiatives.

Off-Script

Oberoi’s model is a consequent reframing of leadership. It is a shift from a systems-centric view, where leaders are process managers, to a human-centric one, where leaders are initiators and agents of culture. It suggests that the most strategic, high-leverage action a leader can take is not to write a new policy, but to make a single, compassionate decision that demonstrates a way of kindness and understanding are possible. It is a doctrine that understands that you do not change a culture by rewriting the HR or DEIB manual. You change it by providing an alternative, a better story, one thumb rule at a time.

5 Lessons with practical values-

Open Questions

1. If a system's culture is truly just the sum of individual actions, is a toxic culture the result of a few powerful "bad actors" or the collective failure of many to perform the "single act" of decency?

2. Can the "ripple effect" of individual kindness truly scale to change a massive, deeply entrenched corporate culture, or is it inevitably crushed by the weight of the existing systemic mindset?