Chief Strategy Officer / India
What the enterprise must use, own and postpone
- Strategy function
- 27 colleagues
- Four heads coordinating enterprise planning and research
- Annual function expense
- ₹6.7 crore
- Includes ₹1.2 crore research; project capital separately approved
- Commercial and strategy career
- 32 years
- Research practice through enterprise choice and capital prioritisation
Decisions & consequences
01The collected lot could not support the expansion premise I endorsed
In 2018 I supported a ₹6.8 crore expansion proposal using a selected collection account of 2400 casings. The premise did not adequately allow for qualified eligibility assessment. Of that selected lot, 1500 were accepted and 900 were excluded from the proposed process. The arrival count was therefore not the usable-input count on which the investment case depended.
Asha and the qualified technical owners supplied the assessment. I did not have authority to alter their decision to make the growth model work. The weakness was in the premise I had endorsed, not in a technical team failing to provide the volume strategy wanted. We needed to withdraw the unsupported case before further repetition made the collection figure appear to be an established production assumption.
We spent ₹28 lakh over six weeks reviewing the evidence and rebuilding the proposal’s basis. The work distinguished collected material, eligible input and the further assumptions needed to support an expansion. The selected 1500 and 900 counts stayed attached to that lot. We did not extrapolate them into a universal acceptance rate or treat the review as proof that no future expansion could be justified. A different case would need its own supported input and commercial conditions.
The outcome was withdrawal of the unsupported premise and a clearer requirement for the next investment discussion. I did not claim that the ₹6.8 crore proposal had become an avoided loss, or that strategy had certified any casing for use. The study expense was the cost of correcting the evidence and decision account. Qualified owners retained the technical process and release responsibility.
The case changed how I ask for growth evidence. A number can be accurate at the point of collection and still be inappropriate as the basis for capacity. My responsibility is to preserve the transformation between those meanings, including the judgement of people who can legitimately say that some of the apparent opportunity cannot enter the process at all.
The smaller fee model carried a different ownership commitment
The 2023 comparison examined two illustrative ways to serve a customer need. A customer-retained-casing service showed ₹1.9 crore fees and ₹1.3 crore direct costs, leaving ₹0.6 crore direct contribution. A buy-process-sell model showed ₹4.8 crore revenue and ₹4.1 crore direct costs, leaving ₹0.7 crore. The respective working-capital assumptions were ₹0.4 crore and ₹2.2 crore. The larger revenue model asked the enterprise to own a materially different commitment for a relatively small modelled contribution difference.
I recommended the service option. That was not a universal rule against trading or ownership. It was a judgement about the conditions in these proposed models and the enterprise’s priorities. Manoj needed to understand the changed inventory and funding exposure rather than choose between top-line figures as though the options were simply larger and smaller versions of the same activity. Finance and relevant professional owners contributed their assessments.
We funded ₹46 lakh over nine weeks to examine the alternatives and their assumptions. The direct-contribution figures excluded central costs and the study expense. They were planning values, not realised profit or a complete return calculation. Customer ownership also required appropriate agreements and operating arrangements; the strategic preference did not itself settle every legal or technical question involved in delivering the service.
The outcome was a recommendation to pursue the customer-retained-casing model under its stated conditions. The ₹0.1 crore difference between the illustrative contributions did not become a claim of foregone profit, and the working-capital comparison did not mean the lower figure would remain sufficient in every future circumstance. Those limits mattered because a precise table can make a proposal look more certain than the evidence warrants.
I learned to make the ownership question part of the first comparison. Revenue can grow because the enterprise has taken on a different role, not simply because it has become better at the role it already performs. Directors should see that change before they are asked to celebrate the larger number.
The district expansion remained visible after the envelope was allocated
In 2025 three proposed initiatives totalled ₹10.2 crore. A process project required ₹3.8 crore, a customer-traceability project ₹2.6 crore and a district expansion another ₹3.8 crore. The capital envelope was ₹6.4 crore. The board could not fund all three within that constraint, and presenting each case separately would have concealed the choice between them.
My team coordinated a ten-week strategy programme costing ₹62 lakh, accounted for separately from the proposed project capital. Operating, financial and technical owners supplied evidence for their cases. I recommended the process and customer-traceability projects, whose combined ₹6.4 crore fitted the envelope, and deferred the district expansion. The recommendation did not rest on arithmetic alone. It also needed an explanation of the enterprise priorities served and the consequence of waiting on geographic growth.
I kept the deferred ₹3.8 crore option in the decision account. It was not an initiative that disappeared because it failed to fit the selected presentation. Directors needed to understand what management would postpone, which assumptions could change and when a revised expansion case should return. The owners of the selected projects also needed to retain responsibility for delivery and benefit review rather than treat allocation as evidence that the intended results were already achieved.
The outcome was a bounded capital recommendation and an explicit deferral. This fictional account does not claim realised benefits, universal superiority of the chosen projects or a permanent rejection of district expansion. The ₹10.2 crore proposal total and ₹6.4 crore envelope describe the options considered at that point. The strategy programme’s separate cost remained visible rather than being omitted from the account of the decision work.
The lesson was that prioritisation has an unselected side. A board should be able to recognise the opportunity it has chosen to delay and the conditions that could justify reconsideration. My role is to make that tradeoff understandable, not to present a full-looking capital plan as though the enterprise had somehow escaped the need to choose.