“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a widely accepted saying in the business world, often attributed to Peter Drucker. This is as true for corporate India as it is for its consumers. Yet, we spend more time and money studying our consumers and their cultures than we do ourselves. We are consumers too and quite influential ones, given the aspirations associated with our lifestyles. Why do we not use the same market research tools that help us understand our consumers to arrive at a deeper understanding of ourselves?

We take pride in how hard we work and how much we are willing to sacrifice. We will take calls at odd hours, early morning and late night, because we know the Americans, Australians and Germans are more protective of their personal time. They don’t have our level of commitment, after all. We also want a personal life but not at the expense of career progress, given that our work designations are the ticket to better status in our competitive families and communities. Our personal biases find expression in office politics, in which we claim to not participate. We have our issues with our corporate culture as it is, but we deal with it in an Indian way, which is to complain how it impacts us in private and then shrug our shoulders, refraining from meaningful action in public.

The global pandemic has already triggered mass re-evaluation of our work and life choices. People are struggling to figure out their lives and businesses are struggling to reconfigure their work. Our work behaviour and corporate culture is bound to shift, but can we direct it towards a more humane, engaging and productive direction?

I've written this book to look beyond the glamour and jargon of the business world to individual stories that share real personal insights into the aspirations, vulnerabilities, pressures and possibilities of our corporate careers and lives. These are the urgent conversations we need to keep having as we reflect, review and decide where we can go from here.

I'm very grateful to the panel of experts who have contributed to this book: 

• Kalyani Capoor, practising psychotherapist, who also conducts mental health workshops for corporate setups

• Ashok Capoor, business consultant and former MD of Diageo-USL

• RR Nair, leadership consultant and former Director-HR of Unilever group companies

• Anjana Pillai and her team at Quantum Consumer Solutions: Insight & Design Strategy for their field work, insights and analysis 

• Rohit Krishan Gulati, expert on workplace design and architecture, Principal Architect at Incubis Architects & Founder Director at Incubis Consultants (India) Pvt Ltd

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