Rahul Kulkarni

“You’re not competing with other ideas. You’re competing with “leave me alone”. You’ve seen this happen. You call a meeting. You explain the logic. People nod. Some even say, “Yes, correct.” And then… nothing changes. Not a fight. Not a refusal. Not drama. Just a slow, polite slide back to the old way. Most leaders call this laziness. I don’t. I think it’s something more precise: The status quo is doing its job. Quick recap if you’re joining mid-series Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium,...

You think you’re walking into a company. What you’re actually walking into is a deal. Not the legal deal. The real one. The one that says, “This is how things work here. This is what we tolerate. This is what we pretend not to see. This is who gets protected when something goes wrong.” Most incoming leaders miss this because they arrive with a very reasonable belief:“If I improve things, people will thank me.” In Indian MSMEs, that belief gets you hurt. Not because people are evil. But...

Multipliers don’t create direction. They amplify what already exists Over the last two weeks, we’ve done something most AI conversations avoid. We’ve slowed down. First we acknowledged the truth founders don’t usually say aloud: AI isn’t a cure. It’s a diagnostic. In Week 2, Rashmi took us inside real operations and showed where AI breaks first: SOP gaps, unclear inputs, broken handoffs. This week, I want to address the question that quietly follows both pieces: If AI is not the engine of...