Everyone has one. A plan, paid for and put away. And we have learnt to call the not-starting prudence.
Some years ago a promoter I had advised for a long time called me to his office. He opened a drawer and took out a beautifully bound document — a growth roadmap from a well-known consulting firm. New markets, a second plant, a professional CEO, a family constitution. Crisp charts. Clear timelines. He had paid a great deal for it.
He told me it had been prepared three years earlier.
I asked what had been implemented.
He smiled and put it back in the drawer.
I have seen that drawer in more offices than I can count. Listed and closely held. Professionally managed and family managed.
Then I began noticing it elsewhere.
The litigator who has been meaning to build a transaction practice since 2016. The surgeon who still refers out a procedure he could have trained for in a fortnight. The architect whose last twelve buildings are the same building. The painter with a canvas primed and turned to face the wall.
Different lives. Same drawer.
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It does not look like sleeping
Inertia is not laziness. Let us be clear about that.
The people I am describing are among the hardest working I know. In by nine. Travelling constantly. Answering calls at midnight. Knowing the work down to the last detail.
That is precisely the problem.
Inertia in a working life does not look like rest. It looks like a full diary. Another hearing. Another review meeting. Another site visit. Another patient list. Another closing. The routine is demanding, consuming and — this is the trap — deeply satisfying. It quietly uses up the exact hours and nerve that change requires.
We mistake motion for movement.
A busy professional and a stalled professional can be the same person on the same day. Nothing in the calendar will tell you which one you are.
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It speaks in the voice of good judgement
Listen to what we actually say.
Let us wait for a little more clarity. Let this quarter close first. After Diwali we will take it up. Why disturb something that is working? Hum toh aise hi karte aaye hain.
Every one of those sounds like prudence. That is the genius of inertia — it borrows the vocabulary of experience. In a culture that respects age and continuity as deeply as ours does, the disguise is almost perfect.
Among professionals it wears an even better suit. It calls itself standards. It calls itself focus. I don’t chase trends. That is not the kind of practice I run. My clients come to me for something else. Some of that is genuine conviction. A good deal of it is fear, dressed for court.
Because the promoter who took a trading business to five hundred crores is not afraid of hard work. He is afraid of losing. Thirty years ago he had nothing, so risk cost him nothing. Today every new decision puts his life’s work on the table.
The bigger the achievement, the heavier the anchor.
The same is true of the lawyer with a name, the doctor with a waiting list, the artist with a style people recognise. Reputation is an asset. Assets make people careful.
In large organisations, inertia does not even need the fear. Process does the work for it. A proposal goes to a committee. The committee wants a study. The study needs a consultant. The consultant needs six months. The report goes to the board. The board wants a pilot. The pilot needs a budget. The budget is next financial year.
Nobody has refused anything. Everybody has behaved responsibly. Two years are gone.
And here is what makes it so expensive: the cost never appears anywhere.
A wrong decision shows up immediately. In the P&L, in a matter that goes badly, in a question somebody asks. You see it, and you correct it. A decision not taken shows up nowhere. Revenue is steady. The phone still rings. The bank is happy. Everything looks normal.
Meanwhile the market you did not enter is being taken. The technology you did not learn has become the baseline. The young talent you did not empower has joined someone who gave them something to run. The distributor’s son has started selling directly online, without you.
Kodak had invented digital imaging inside its own laboratory. Nokia did not lack scale. Neither lost for want of capability. Both lost the willingness to disturb a comfortable, profitable, working present for an uncertain future.
The chaiwala outside my office put up a UPI code in 2017. He moved faster than companies with strategy departments.
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What actually breaks it
Not a bigger plan. Not a better consultant. Not another offsite in Alibaug.
In thirty years I have watched a fair number of people come out of a long freeze, and it has almost never begun with a transformation. It has begun with one small, embarrassingly ordinary act.
One promoter finally hired a CFO from outside the family. That single appointment forced financial discipline, which forced reporting, which forced a real board, which eventually made the company investible. It started with one letter of appointment.
Another gave his daughter one small product line and told her it was hers to run and hers to fail at. Within two years it was their fastest growing business.
A third made one rule. Monday, nine to eleven, no operational meetings. Only the future. Two hours a week changed the direction of a forty-year-old company.
The first step does not have to be big. It has to be real. It needs a name attached to it, a date attached to it, and a consequence if the date passes.
Roadmaps do not create movement. Movement creates roadmaps.
– • –
Drucker said the danger in turbulent times is not the turbulence — it is acting with yesterday’s logic.
Yesterday’s logic is comfortable. It is proven. It built everything you have. And it carries an expiry date that nobody prints on the packet.
So my request is a small one, and it is not strategic.
Whatever your drawer holds — the roadmap, the second practice, the book, the appointment you keep postponing — open it this week. Do not read the whole thing. Take the smallest item in it. Give it to one person, even if that person is you. Give it a date.
Then go back to your routine.
Almost everyone reading this has a plan they have not started.
What is yours waiting for?
— Nitin
• • •
Connecting Dots
— every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply.