Rise To Lead: Lakshamanan Chidambaram's Leadership Journey

The most important career decisions rarely come with certainty. They usually come with a choice: stay where you are comfortable or take a chance on what could be possible. I have faced that choice several times in my career. I grew up in a business family, so the expected path was fairly simple: finish your graduation, join the family business and take it forward. But when I started college, I found myself asking a different question: Who am I going to become? I wanted to build my own identity. So instead of joining the family business, I joined HCL in sales in Ahmedabad.

I was from Chennai. Ahmedabad was a very different world for me, and I was very much outside my comfort zone. The message when I joined was also quite blunt: crack sales, or leave. Those four years turned out to be some of the most formative years of my career. Looking back, I realise that sometimes the experience that pushes you furthest outside your comfort zone is the one that shapes you the most.

Years later, in 2010, I found myself facing another such moment. Tech Mahindra was in the process of acquiring Satyam, and I was asked to take on the Americas business. It was a difficult situation. Trust had to be rebuilt with employees, customers and the market, and there were plenty of reasons to say no. But I said yes. What followed taught me a lot about leadership. In difficult times, people do not need more management. They need more belief. We communicated constantly, listened, reassured people, and gave them reasons to believe in the future. We moved people into new roles and asked them to take on challenges they had not faced before. Slowly, the organisation began to believe again.

One experience from that period has stayed with me. We needed an introduction to the senior leadership of an important customer, but had no obvious way in. I reached out to Mr. Anand Mahindra. M&M had once had a partnership with this company, although circumstances had subsequently changed. Yet Anand still had a relationship with their leadership. He wrote an email, and that simple act opened a door. When I met them, they spoke not just about business, but about the values they associated with Mahindra. That stayed with me. Relationships built on values can outlast circumstances. Competitors can copy products, technology and processes. They cannot copy culture. That belief has stayed with me.

So, when Dr. Anish Shah later spoke to me about Bristlecone, he described a company with deep capabilities and an important position at the heart of global supply chains. His message was simple: take it where it belongs. He also gave me something equally important: the freedom to figure out how. I spent time understanding the business and came away thinking: why not make it much bigger? The world was changing rapidly. Supply chain disruption, tariffs, wars and geopolitical uncertainty were creating both challenges and opportunities. Bristlecone was sitting right in the middle of all of it.

Within my first two months, we launched Project Unicorn, with an ambition to build a billion-dollar valuation company by FY31. We have just closed a year where revenue grew 24 % year on year and profitability grew 41%. But the number I am most proud of is not that. It is the change I see in the organisation. The team has reenergised. People are beginning to believe that bigger things are possible. That, to me, is what leadership is about. Set a big, clear vision. Find the right people. Give them the resources and freedom to succeed. And then get out of the way. Trust them. Businesses change. Markets change. Technology changes. People change. Culture is what stays. Culture is not a poster on the wall, it is character. And as I lead Bristlecone into its next chapter, one of my most important responsibilities is to keep that culture alive, while continuing to challenge ourselves to do new things.