The Hidden Game of Taking Over

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 because the system is already stable in a strange, messy way.

Here’s the simplest metaphor I’ve found that fits almost every legacy MSME I’ve worked with:

It’s a traffic junction without signals.

No lights. No lanes that anyone respects. No strict right-of-way.

And yet… traffic moves.

Not smoothly. Not safely. Not efficiently. But it moves because everyone has learned the unwritten rules.

Now imagine you show up and decide to ‘fix’ the junction by painting lanes and putting up a signboard. Only you do it on one side.

What happens?

People don’t clap. They crash.

And then they blame you for “disturbing things.”

Which seat are you stepping into?

• Inherited seat: You have legitimacy by name. People still doubt your competence and patience.

• Hired seat: You have competence on paper. You have zero legitimacy in the room.

• Promoted seat: You have relationships and trust. You may not have permission to change the rules.

Different entry doors. Same junction.

The part nobody tells you: you’re entering an equilibrium

There’s a concept from game theory called Nash equilibrium. Don’t get scared by the term. It basically means this:

Everyone is doing what makes sense for them, given what everyone else is doing.

So if one person changes alone, they usually get punished.

Important: an equilibrium is not ‘good’. It’s just stable.

In a legacy MSME, stability often looks like this:

• The accounts team delays closing because they’ll be blamed for bad news.

• The sales team overpromises because “customer ko mana kaise karein.”

• The factory team hides defects because rejection will invite humiliation.

• Procurement keeps ‘flexible vendors’ because strict vendors expose internal planning weakness

• The owner plays firefighter because it’s the only role everyone accepts from them.

Each behaviour looks wrong in isolation.

Together, they form a working arrangement that helps people survive.

So when you walk in and say, “From Monday, everyone will update data daily”, the system hears something else:

“From Monday, the old protections are gone.”

And protections are precious in a junction with no signals.

A small confession from my own work

Early in my career, I walked into a 25+ year manufacturing business. The brief was classic: “Professionalise it. Make it modern.”

I did what smart people do. I asked for basic numbers: order pipeline, delivery performance, rework, vendor lead times.

They gave me a notebook. A few spreadsheets. And a lot of smiles.

Week one: polite compliance.Week two: patchy compliance.Week three: silence.

I remember thinking, “These guys don’t want to improve.”

That was my arrogance.

They didn’t fear improvement.

They feared exposure.

Because in that equilibrium, visibility wasn’t a neutral thing. Visibility was a weapon. If numbers surfaced, someone’s standing would fall. Someone would lose face. Someone would get blamed. Someone’s old power would shrink.

So the system did what systems do when threatened.

It protected itself.

The takeover mistake: confusing authority with permission

Most incoming leaders assume the biggest challenge is ‘execution’.

No. The first challenge is permission.

Not written permission. Social permission.

Permission comes when people believe:

1.      You understand how the junction currently functions, and

2.      You won’t use visibility to humiliate them, and

3.      You won’t take away their safety without offering new safety.

Until then, any unilateral ‘improvement’ behaves like someone suddenly changing the road rules mid-traffic.

Field Test (do this before you announce anything)

Write a Players + Payoffs map for your top 8 stakeholders.

This is not a corporate stakeholder matrix. This is a realism exercise.

For each person/group, write:

1.      What do they control? (not their title but what they actually control)

2.      What are they protecting? (status, autonomy, relationships, access, face)

3.      What do they fear losing if things become ‘system-driven’?

4.      What do they gain from the current mess? (speed, discretion, flexibility, blame-shifting)

5.      If you change X, what is their likely move? (delay, sabotage, passive resistance, escalation, quiet alliance)

Don’t judge the answers. Just write them.

Because once you see the payoffs, you stop moralising.

You start designing.

And when you start designing, you stop triggering immune responses.

Your takeaway this week

If you’re stepping into leadership, your first job isn’t to ‘fix’.

Your first job is to read the junction.

Because the fastest way to lose your first 90 days is to treat a stable (but flawed) equilibrium as if it’s an empty canvas.

Next week, we’ll talk about the single psychological truth that explains most resistance in MSMEs:

Loss aversion.

Why your good idea feels like a threat and how to reframe change so people can move without panic.

(The writer is Co-founder at PPS Consulting. He writes about the human mechanics of growth where systems evolve, and emotions learn to keep up. Views personal. Write to rahul@ppsconsulting.biz)