Years ago, I had a standing one-on-one every quarter with Brad, the President of our division. I was fairly junior, so I never took it for granted. I would walk through his executive assistant’s office, wait until she told me he was ready, then head into this enormous office with a large table in the middle. Brad would get up from behind his desk and come sit with me there. Our small talk was terrible. He loved sports, baseball, and motorbikes (I think). I knew almost nothing about any of them. I was always relieved when he finally said, “Okay, what’s on your mind?” Then I had plenty to say. One of those meetings happened while I was preparing my Executive MBA thesis. I wanted to use it to solve a real problem inside the company, and I had several ideas. Brad knew the business far better than I did, so I assumed I would talk him through them, he would tell me which one was worth pursuing, and off I would go. But that is not what happened. I explained the first idea and Brad had a slew of questions for me. Why did I think that was the problem? Why did it matter? What would we actually do about it? Was I sure I had found the problem, or had I found one part of it? He never cut these meetings short. We took the full forty five minutes, and he always made me think a lot in those one-on-ones. At the end of one of these conversations, Brad told me it had been a great discussion, but he now needed thirty minutes and a strong coffee before he could continue with his day. I had no idea whether that was a compliment or a warning. What I did not appreciate then was how easy it would have been for Brad to simply give me an answer. He had the bigger title, he had far more experience, and he knew the company better than I did. If he had told me which problem to work on, there was a very good chance I would have taken his advice. Instead, he kept pulling me back to the problem. I think about that a lot now because I spend time in rooms where very experienced people are trying to solve very expensive problems. Someone on the board asks, “Why is the pipeline weak? We need more leads.” That sounds reasonable, right? By Monday, marketing has a new target. Campaigns get built. Money gets spent. Everyone gets busy. Everyone gets busy generating more leads. Except nobody has checked whether the company actually needs them. Maybe plenty of good leads are already sitting untouched; maybe deals are getting all the way to proposal and dying; maybe the company is attracting the wrong customers; or maybe sales is having plenty of conversations, but customers do not understand why they should buy. “We need more leads” might be exactly right. It might also have almost nothing to do with the real problem. The same thing happens with bigger decisions. We might see growth is behind plan and think, “We need a new CRO.” Well, maybe that is true. The company could spend months finding one, pay a recruiter, lose another quarter while the new person gets settled, and discover that the new CRO has inherited the same problems as the old one. Nobody agrees on the best customer; the product offering is weak, the pipeline is full of rubbish and sales and marketing are working from completely different definitions of a good opportunity. The problem is not that board members, operating partners, CEOs or advisers give bad advice. Often they see things other people don’t. Someone who has done fifty deals has patterns in their head that a first-time CEO simply does not have. An operating partner can recognize a problem they have already watched play out three times. A banker knows what buyers will question long before the management team gets into the room with them. That experience is incredibly useful, yet it also makes the advice harder to question. A capable CEO can know the customers, the people, and the business inside out, then sit across from someone who has done this fifty times before and think, Well, they have probably seen something I haven’t. They probably have, but that does not mean their answer is the answer. The company they saw last time had different customers, different people, different data, different products, and different problems. The pattern may look familiar while the reason behind it is completely different. That is where companies can waste months. The run to an answer before anyone has spent enough time on the diagnosis. Then people get hired, budgets are moved around, campaigns get launched, teams reorganize and priorities change. Six months later, everyone has done a lot of work, and the original problem is still there. There is a simple way to slow that down without turning every board meeting into a debate. When someone gives you an answer, ask: What would have to be true for that answer to make sense? “We need more leads.” Okay, we would expect to see too few good opportunities entering the funnel. Now look deeper. Are there actually too few? Or are good leads sitting untouched? Are deals getting stuck later? Are you losing the same type of customer for the same reason? “We need a new CRO.” Okay, what would have to be true for the CRO to be the problem? What are they responsible for that is not working? What evidence tells us changing the person will change the result? What problems would the next CRO inherit on day one? “We need to go upmarket.” Okay, what would have to be true? Do those customers have the problem we solve? Will they pay enough to solve it? Can we reach them? Have we won any already? What happened when we tried? Now you have something useful to investigate. This is not an argument for moving slowly, quite the opposite. You do not need three months of analysis, another consultant or a seventy two slide deck. Look at what you already have. Customer conversations, win-loss data, pipeline, sales activity, and what has already been tried. Work out what you would expect to see if the advice is right, then go see whether it is there. If it is, make those changes. If you do not know, test before you turn the idea into six months of work. That is the part Brad got right. He could have given me the answer. Instead, he kept pulling me back to the problem until I understood it well enough to make my own call. The next time someone says, “You need more leads,” do not waste time arguing about whether they are right. Ask what would have to be true for more leads to solve the problem. Then look at your business. You may end up doing exactly what was suggested. You may also save the company six months of solving the wrong problem. Until the next room, Archita Read the full note on readysetbold.com →

I spent the first few years of my career getting very good at solving problems I increasingly wished we had found earlier. I was a quality engineer in Quebec, and when something went wrong with a product, there was no shortage of urgency. The product was already being used, a customer had a real problem, the business needed answers, and we needed to understand exactly what had happened and make sure it did not happen again. Give me a complicated problem where the first explanation did not quite make sense, and I could happily disappear into it. I wanted the data, the engineering, the process, the customer experience, all the different versions of what people thought had happened, and somewhere inside all of that was usually the actual answer. There was something incredibly satisfying about finally finding it. But after doing this for a while, I started having one fairly irritating thought. Why are we learning this now? By the time we were asking some of our best questions, the product had already been designed, built, launched, and put into a customer’s hands. Now we were intensely interested in what the customer had experienced, what they had expected, how they were actually using the product, what had gone wrong, and why our assumptions didn’t match reality. I kept wondering… What would happen if we put some of that energy into understanding those things earlier? What if we spent more time with customers before we built the product? What if we understood how they worked, what frustrated them, what mattered to them, and what problem they really needed us to solve before we got terribly attached to our answer? Around the same time, I gave a presentation on a fairly complicated quality situation we were navigating. A VP of Marketing named Kevin happened to be in the audience, and afterward he came up to me and said, “If you ever want a job in marketing, give me a call.” This was not an obvious career suggestion at the time. I was an electrical engineer working in quality. I had never worked in marketing and had no grand plan to become a marketer. I remember being pleased that he thought I might be good at it, and then I went back to my actual job. Four to six months later, my assignment in Quebec was coming to an end, and the company offered me a promotion to Senior Quality Engineer. I had worked hard for it. I was doing well, and it made complete sense, but I remember thinking about the new role and feeling bored. Not because I was bored with solving problems; I loved that part. I was bored by the thought of spending the next few years getting even better at solving them after the product was already out there. I wanted to be closer to the customer before we built something. I wanted to understand what they needed, what we should build and why, and whether the thing we were excited about inside the company actually solved something useful outside it. So on a random Friday afternoon I picked up the phone to Kevin and said, “Hey Kevin, you told me that if I ever wanted a job in marketing I should give you a call. This is that call.” That was how I ended up in marketing. When I tell people this story now, they usually stop me at the same place. “Wait, you were an engineer?” The move from engineering into marketing tends to become the interesting part of the story. Looking backward, I can certainly make it sound very intentional. I moved into product marketing, launched products around the world, worked through acquisitions, built and led global teams, and spent much of the next two decades getting closer to customers and the commercial side of businesses. Careers become remarkably easy to explain once you already know how they turned out. What interests me much more now is the question that was already bothering me before I had any idea where my career was going. Why are we learning this now? I see versions of it in businesses all the time. A product launches and customers do not respond the way everyone expected, and suddenly we get very interested in talking to them. The sales team misses the number, and now we want to understand whether customers actually care about what we are selling, whether sales believes the story they have been asked to tell, and whether the pipeline was ever as healthy as everyone thought it was. An acquisition closes, and months later people start asking very specific questions about how the two businesses are supposed to work together, who owns what, where customers overlap and what exactly “integration” was meant to look like. A senior hire does not work out, and suddenly everyone can describe, in remarkable detail, what the role actually needed. None of this means those decisions were bad or that we could have predicted every problem. Markets move, customers surprise us, and people behave differently than we expected. Strategies that looked sensible with the information available at the time sometimes simply do not work. Sometimes you genuinely could not have known. What I find more interesting are the times when we could have known or at least known enough to ask a better question. Because something changes once the problem becomes expensive. We find the time to call the customers. We pull apart the pipeline instead of discussing the number at the top of it. We put sales, marketing, and product in the same room and make everyone explain what they are actually seeing. We talk to the people closest to the work. We go back to assumptions that sailed through three previous meetings and ask whether they were ever true. The questions were available before, but the urgency around answering them wasn’t. I recognize that because I spent years on the other end of it. As a quality engineer, I was trained to go into a problem once reality had told us something was wrong and understand exactly what had happened. I still love doing that; I have just become much more interested in whether we can ask some of those questions while there is still time to change the decision. That starts with looking at what you are scrambling to understand now. If a product is struggling and you are suddenly spending hours talking to customers, what are they telling you that would have been useful six months ago? If the pipeline has fallen apart and you are finally examining every opportunity, what are you discovering that the headline number kept you from seeing? If an integration is stuck and everyone is now arguing about ownership, what did you assume would somehow sort itself out after the deal closed? Then there is a second question, and I think this is the one that matters more. Where else are we making a decision today without that information? Because fixing the immediate problem is only part of the value of learning something late. A weak product launch can teach you how well your company understands customers before it decides what to build. A missed quarter can tell you something about how easily a room can accept a pipeline number without understanding what sits underneath it. A difficult integration can expose assumptions that are probably sitting inside the next acquisition plan too. The useful part is not writing those things into a lessons-learned document six months later. It is getting them into a decision that has not been made yet. So the next time everyone in a room is working furiously to understand what went wrong, stay there a few more minutes before fixing it and moving on. Ask: What do we know now that we wish we had known earlier? What made us finally go looking for it? Where else would knowing this now change a decision we have not made yet? You cannot change when you learned it the first time. You can make sure you don’t learn it late twice. Until the next room, Archita Read the full note on readysetbold.com →

At 23, I once became convinced that my ability to work globally was about to be exposed by a pair of chopsticks. Yes, chopsticks. I was in Shenzhen, China, traveling with a group of senior leaders to explore the manufacturing opportunity in China for one of our divisions. I was by far the youngest person there, not just in age, but in years of experience. These were people who had been running businesses for years. I was a few years out of university and still at that stage of my career where being invited into a room with senior executives felt exciting and slightly terrifying in equal measure. We had spent hours looking at the opportunity in China, what we could manufacture there, what the economics looked like, where the risks were, what would need to change, and what the potential could be for the business. We had challenged assumptions, worked through the details, and made our case. By the end of the day, everyone was feeling pretty good. I was feeling REALLY good. I had contributed, and I had held my own. People had asked what I thought and, rather importantly to 23-year-old me, actually listened to the answer. I remember walking into dinner feeling ridiculously proud of myself. Then the food arrived. I was seated next to the president of the division, which was already doing wonders for my ability to behave normally. Everyone started eating, and I looked down. Chopsticks. And I realized, with absolute horror, that I did not know how to use them. Not, “I’m a bit rusty.” Not, “I can get through dinner if nobody watches too closely.” I had absolutely no bloody clue what to do with them. I’d grown up in India and moved to the US at 17. Nobody had ever taught me how to use chopsticks; I had never taught myself, and until that exact evening it had somehow not appeared as a major gap in my professional development. My brain, however, decided this was now VERY important. I looked around the table, and everyone else had simply started eating. Nobody appeared to be thinking about how the chopsticks worked, nobody was examining hand placement, and nobody seemed to be running a small engineering study on the optimal angle required to pick up dinner. It was just me! I remember sitting there making what felt like eighty decisions in about ten seconds. Could I watch the person across from me and copy him? Could I just pick the easy things? Could I talk a lot and avoid eating altogether? And then I got to the obvious answer: I could just tell them. That was when the problem became something completely different. Is this one of those things I am supposed to know? And almost immediately after that: What are they going to think of me? What if they think I am inexperienced? What if they think I am not worldly enough? What if they wonder how someone who wants an international career does not know something this basic? What if they think I should not be here? We had spent the entire day discussing manufacturing strategy in China and, within about thirty seconds, I had managed to convince myself that my professional credibility might now come down to whether I could successfully get dinner into my mouth using two wooden sticks. Eventually, I just blurted out, “I’m sorry, I really don’t know how to use chopsticks.” The entire table went silent. I mean SILENT! Everyone looked up. If my goal had been to deal with this discreetly, I had executed that beautifully. Then the president of the division, sitting beside me, said, “That’s okay. Can somebody get her some cutlery?” And then he started telling me about the first time he had learned to use chopsticks. Someone brought me a fork, everyone went back to eating, and that was it. Nobody reconsidered the work we had done that day. Nobody decided I was incapable of working internationally. Nobody called my manager the next morning and said, “We need to talk about Archita; dinner raised some concerns.” My career continued, and yes, eventually I learned how to use chopsticks. Decades later, I continue to remember that dinner, because twenty-three-year-old me had spent an entire day discussing manufacturing strategy in China and then nearly came undone because I could not work out what to do with two sticks. But the part I find interesting now is not that I worried about what everyone thought of me; it is what happened just before that. I had started with a fact: I did not know how to use chopsticks. That part was true. Then, somewhere between looking down at my plate and opening my mouth, I added something else. I decided there must be a rule. Someone who works internationally should already know how to use chopsticks. Nobody had said that, nobody had explained it, nobody had even hinted at it. I had simply decided that this must be one of the rules, and once I had accepted the rule, the rest of the story almost wrote itself. If this is something I am supposed to know, and I do not know it, then maybe I am not experienced enough. Maybe I am not worldly enough; maybe I am not as ready for this as everyone thinks I am; maybe I should not be here. The story only worked because I had accepted the rule first, and I wonder how often we still do this as adults. We walk into rooms with all sorts of ideas about what someone like us is supposed to know, say, or already understand. A CEO should have the answer. A board member should not need the basic concept explained. Someone at my level should understand this financial model. A senior executive should not have to ask what that acronym means. If I am really ready for this job, surely I should already know how this works. If everyone else seems comfortable with it, surely I should be too. Some of those rules are real. There are things you genuinely need to know to do your job well. There are cultural norms worth learning, skills you need to build, context you need to understand, and times when “I should know this” is absolutely correct. But some of the rules are much harder to trace. Nobody told us, and nobody wrote them down. We just absorbed them somewhere along the way, or, occasionally, made them up completely on our own, and then we start judging ourselves against them. Once you believe the rule, you rarely stop to ask whether the rule itself is true. Instead, you start behaving as though it is. You do not ask the question because you have already decided that someone at your level should know the answer. You sit through the meeting pretending to understand because everybody else seems to. You overprepare for a conversation because you have decided that good leaders should never be caught without an answer. You do not put yourself forward because you have already decided that people with your background do not usually get picked for that room. You answer the objection nobody raised. You defend the thing nobody attacked. You can end up spending an enormous amount of energy trying to pass an exam that nobody else even knows you are taking. And that is different from simply worrying about what people think. Sometimes we should care what people think. Judgment matters, reputation matters, the opinions of your boss, your board, your customers, and the people making decisions about you can have very real consequences. But there is a difference between responding to an expectation that actually exists and trying to satisfy one you created yourself. These days, when I catch myself heading down that road, I try to separate three things. The fact. The rule. And the story I have built from it. The fact is usually the easiest part. I do not understand this number; I have never worked in this industry; I do not know what that acronym means; I cannot use the bloody chopsticks. Then I try to find the rule underneath it. What have I decided someone like me is supposed to know here? Sometimes the rule is real. Then fine, learn it. Ask the question, do the work, close the gap. But sometimes, when you actually look at it, the rule gets much harder to defend. Who said a CEO cannot ask that? Who said a board member needs to know every acronym? Who said entering a new industry means pretending you have spent twenty years in it? Who said one thing you do not know cancels out everything you were actually invited into the room to contribute? So perhaps that is the question worth asking the next time you find yourself thinking, Shoot, I should know this. Is this actually one of the rules, or have I just decided that it is? At 23, I had a chopsticks problem. I did not have a credibility problem; I had invented that one. The chopsticks problem was much easier to solve. I asked for a fork. Until the next room, Archita Read the full note on readysetbold.com →

There is one thing that has been driving me completely bonkers lately. I keep introducing genuinely brilliant executives to people I know. Founders, CEOs, Board Chairs, Private equity partners. People I would happily bet my own reputation on. Then, a few days later, I get the same message from these executives. “I’m not sure I’m the right person.” “I’ve never worked in private equity.” “I don’t really know that industry.” Every single time. And I find myself thinking exactly the same thing. You’re answering a question nobody has asked you. Last weekend it happened again. My phone buzzed. “Architaaaaa...” More than five a’s usually means one of two things. My friend who sent it either had something absolutely spectacular happen, or she was quietly unraveling. This time it was the second. A few days earlier I had introduced her to Mike, a private equity partner carrying out commercial diligence on a business. I thought she would be fantastic, because she has decades of experience, was commercially sharp, and had actually used the product. Her message continued, “What do you think Mike is going to ask me?” I read the message, then I read it again, and my brain (like it does often) wandered somewhere completely different. I had been exactly where she was, and it had taken me “just” four meetings to realize it. A couple of years ago, someone kept asking me one painfully simple question. “So... what exactly do you do?” Now, in fairness to me, she had the patience of a saint. Four meetings. Who gives someone four meetings when they still cannot explain what they do? Honestly, I am incredibly grateful she did, because by meeting three I had thrown absolutely everything at her. Commercial strategy, go-to-market, transformation, global leadership, boards, growth. I honestly cannot remember what else I said. I probably squeezed “value creation” in there somewhere because apparently that is what PE advisors are contractually obliged to do. And she nodded, wrote a bunch of notes, and booked another meeting. At this point I was questioning my entire existence. Maybe I needed a new website, maybe I needed a new business, maybe nobody actually understood what fractional advisors do. The fourth meeting was different, because I was just getting tired of listening to myself talk about myself, and most probably had simply run out of executive nouns. So I stopped talking about my career, and instead I told her what happens inside my head when I walk into a business. The first numbers I do not trust, the assumptions I start pulling on without even realizing I am doing it, and the things that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because I have seen that movie before, and I know how it ends. She stopped me. “Ok Archita, there, now I finally understand.” I walked away thinking I had finally figured out how to explain my business. Turns out, that was not the lesson at all. A few days after my friend’s WhatsApp, I was reading executive assessments for two people, both extraordinary, whom I had introduced to another private equity firm. One was running a €300 million business, and another had spent decades leading internationally. The recommendation said, and I quote, “Better suited to advisory work, not a private equity board.” I remember screaming into my computer, “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” I was irrationally annoyed, not at the assessment team, which had not got it wrong. They answered exactly the question they had been asked. What bothered me was something else. I had seen the notes from the conversations. I knew how those executives had introduced themselves. The businesses they managed, the geographies, the P&Ls, the future aspirations. Everything they said was true. But it was also answering a different question. That is when those four meetings finally made sense. That woman had not spent four meetings trying to understand my business. She had been trying to understand what would happen if she dropped me into one of hers. And suddenly my friend’s WhatsApp made perfect sense. I did not reply with, “Here is what Mike is probably going to ask.” Instead, I left her a voice note. I told her to stop preparing answers about her CV and start preparing observations. If this business became hers this quarter: What would you want to understand first? What would make you uncomfortable? What assumptions would you test before everyone else in the room decided they were true? What have 20+ years of running businesses taught you that this business might need next week? Because friends, that is the conversation. Not “tell me everything you have done.” They already have your CV, they already know your title, they already know the size of the business you ran. The only thing they cannot read on a piece of paper is how those twenty five years changed the way you think. That is the part I completely missed in those four meetings. It is also the part I now spend the most time preparing for. So here is something to try. The next time someone asks you to introduce yourself, do not change your experience. Change the story your experience is trying to tell. Do not leave them with a better understanding of your career. Leave them with a better understanding of how you will help them think. The room is rarely asking, “What have you done?” It is usually trying to answer a much harder question. What happens if we let this person help us think? Once you notice that, you start hearing conversations very differently. I know I do. Until the next room, Archita Join me in two Sundays in the next room. See you there. Read the full note on readysetbold.com →

Ask a room of leaders what problem you are actually solving, and you will get a different answer from every single person. That is not a disaster. That is the answer.

How the gap between the room where strategy is announced and the room where it has to become real is costing you more than you think.

How rooms full of smart, capable people mistake speed for judgment, and what it costs when we stop looking.