Good Strategy Is Not Merely About Winning

You spent over a decade in core R&D and product development at Tata Motors before moving into academia via IIM Lucknow. How did living through real-world strategic decisions on the shop floor alter the way you view textbook management frameworks?

It changed my understanding of strategy quite fundamentally. In a textbook, strategy can appear very sequential — you analyse the environment, choose a strategy and then implement it. In an organisation, particularly in product development, it is rarely that neat.

At Tata Motors, I saw that strategic decisions eventually have to confront very practical constraints: technology, cost, timelines, people, supplier capabilities and customer requirements. A decision that appears perfectly logical at the corporate level can become considerably more complicated when it reaches implementation.

That experience is something I carry into my classroom today. I tell students that frameworks are extremely useful because they help us structure a complex problem, but a framework should begin the conversation, not end it. Good managers need to know when the assumptions behind a framework no longer match the reality they are facing.

My engineering background probably reinforces that approach. I tend to look at strategy not just as choosing a direction, but also as understanding whether the organisation has the capability to actually execute that choice.

Is there a particular project from your Tata Motors years that continues to influence how you teach strategy today?

One project that stands out was designing and implementing a multiplex wiring system for the first time at Tata Motors. What it taught me was that innovation is not simply about whether a technology works; it must also make sense in terms of cost, reliability, organisational capabilities and customer value.

I use that experience to remind students that a good strategic choice is only the beginning. The equally important question is: does the organisation have the capabilities to make that choice work?

Your research explores whether cross-border acquisitions substitute or complement a firm’s internal R&D. When should an Indian firm build capabilities internally versus buying them abroad?

I would be cautious about presenting this as a simple build-versus-buy decision. Increasingly, firms need to do both.

I would build internally when the capability is central to what differentiates the organisation, when knowledge is highly tacit, or when the firm needs to keep learning in that area over many years. You cannot outsource the development of every strategically important capability.

An acquisition becomes attractive when speed matters, perhaps a technological window is closing, or when another firm possesses a capability, intellectual property, talent or market position that would take many years to replicate internally.

But there is an important qualification. Buying a capability is not the same as possessing it. An Indian company can acquire a sophisticated technology firm overseas, but unless it has sufficient internal knowledge to understand, absorb and integrate what it has purchased, a large part of the expected value may disappear.

So my preferred formulation is: acquisitions can accelerate capability development, but they cannot substitute indefinitely for organisational learning. The most successful acquirers are often those that already possess enough internal capability to recognise and absorb what they are buying.

Your work highlights how board interlocks influence market entry choices. How can emerging-market firms ensure they are not blindly copying peer boards at the expense of their own ground realities?

We studied board networks in our research, but the broader idea is really about the importance of networks and how firms and individuals learn through them. Today, networks have become even more important because no individual or organisation can possess all the knowledge it needs internally.

At an individual level, we learn from colleagues, mentors, professional contacts and people working in different organisations and industries. Firms similarly learn from customers, partners, competitors and other organisations in their ecosystem. These networks expose us to new ideas, experiences and ways of solving problems.

The important thing, however, is to learn from networks without simply copying others. What works for one person or organisation may not work in a different context. So networks should expand our knowledge and help us see new possibilities, but we still need to apply our own judgement.

In simple terms, networks help us learn faster, but good judgement tells us what to do with that learning.

You have argued that rigid five-year strategic plans are increasingly unrealistic because market realities move quickly. How do you teach future leaders to distinguish agile strategic pivoting from reactionary panic?

I distinguish between changing the destination and changing the route. Organisations need a relatively stable sense of where they want to go, but they must remain flexible about how they get there.

A strategic pivot is justified when new evidence challenges the fundamental assumptions behind the strategy. Reacting to every competitor move or short-term market fluctuation, however, is not agility. Strategic agility is disciplined adaptation, not continuous movement.

As Placement Convenor for XLRI Delhi-NCR, you sit at the intersection of industry demand and student ambition. Beyond domain expertise, what non-negotiable strategic skill are recruiters looking for today that wasn’t as critical five years ago?

I would call it judgement under ambiguity. Organisations now have access to enormous amounts of data and increasingly powerful AI tools, so simply finding and analysing information is becoming less distinctive.

Recruiters value people who can structure an unfamiliar problem, identify what really matters, make decisions with incomplete information and communicate the reasoning clearly. The premium today is increasingly on structured thinking, judgement and communication.

As automated analytics and GenAI streamline basic market research and data synthesis, how are you preparing XLRI students to step into high-level strategy roles that can’t be easily automated?

I actually think GenAI makes strategy education more interesting, because it forces us to ask what we really mean by managerial capability.

If I give students a straightforward industry-analysis problem today, an AI tool can generate a reasonable Five Forces analysis in seconds. There is limited value in training a student simply to reproduce what the machine can already produce.

The classroom therefore has to move one level higher. I want students to ask: Is the analysis correct? What assumptions is it making? What has it missed? Which of these forces actually matters for this particular company? And what should management do about it?

I also increasingly see value in problems where there is no perfect answer — cases involving competing objectives, incomplete information, organisational politics or ethical trade-offs.

AI is very good at generating alternatives and synthesising information. The manager remains responsible for framing the problem, exercising judgement and accepting accountability for the decision.

So I would not tell students to compete with AI. I would tell them to become very good at doing what AI makes more valuable: asking better questions, challenging assumptions and making responsible decisions.

Corporate strategy is often framed purely around competitive advantage and market dominance. How do you guide students to reconcile cold competitive strategy with the responsible, human-centric leadership ethos that defines XLRI?

I don’t actually see competitive advantage and responsible leadership as opposites.

Strategy is fundamentally about choices — where a firm competes, how it creates value and how it distributes the consequences of those choices. Once you look at strategy that way, questions about employees, communities, customers and the environment are not peripheral ethical issues. They are part of the strategic decision itself.

At XLRI, I think there is a particular responsibility to ask students one additional question. After asking, “Can the firm do this?” and “Will this create competitive advantage?”, we should also ask, “Should it do this, and what are the consequences for the different stakeholders involved?”

That doesn’t mean ignoring profitability. A company that is economically unsustainable cannot serve any stakeholder for very long. But neither should profitability become an excuse for ignoring the longer-term consequences of managerial choices.

And increasingly, the distinction is artificial anyway. Reputation, employee commitment, legitimacy, environmental responsibility and trust can themselves become important sources of long-term competitive advantage.

So I would like students leaving my strategy classroom to understand that good strategy is not merely about winning; it is about creating an organisation worth winning with.

Frameworks are extremely useful because they help us structure a complex problem, but a framework should begin the conversation, not end it

Buying a capability is not the same as possessing it. Unless a firm can absorb and integrate what it has purchased, much of the value may disappear