CONTEXT

The India arm of a century-old global conglomerate had a clear market opportunity in front of it. Globally, the organisation enjoyed a 30 to 40 percent market share. In India, despite strong potential, market share was only 2 to 3 percent.

The business had grown rapidly through acquisitions. Most leaders and teams had come either from acquired entities or from direct competitors. This created a structurally different starting point from the global organisation. Unlike the global business, which had grown organically with a strong foundation built over decades, the India business had scaled without a single, cohesive operating foundation.

For the last five years, the India business had been given aggressive targets, including a repeated aspiration to cross 100 million Euro in revenue. The business grew year-on-year, but the stretch target was never met. Over time, missing the goal became normalised.

A leadership transition created the opportunity to re-examine what was required to meet the 2026 growth ambition and what would need to change in order to get there.

OUR MANDATE

We were engaged to help the India leadership team diagnose why the business was consistently falling short of its growth ambition and to define what needed to change to unlock the next stage of scale.
The initial narrative within the organisation and from global stakeholders focused on symptoms such as:

• Attrition and inability to retain talent

• Targets that were seen as unrealistic for India

• Weakness in the local team

• Lack of technology, tools, or operational support

The mandate was to go deeper, separate symptoms from root causes, and create a practical path forward that could bridge ambition and execution.

WHAT WE DELIVERED

The engagement was structured as a deep diagnostic followed by alignment, operating model recommendations, and scale enablement priorities.

Industry and market immersion

Conducted targeted industry research to understand how growth works in this sector, the implications of acquisition-led scale, and what it takes to grow organically after acquisitions.

Organisation-wide diagnostic and triangulation

Engaged the leadership team up to the third level and a wide cross-section of the organisation through interviews and structured questionnaires. Responses were synthesised and triangulated to identify patterns, contradictions, and root causes.

Root cause diagnosis: the alignment gap

Identified that the primary constraint was not pace, capability, or targets. The real issue was misalignment at the top and the absence of a bridge between ambition on paper and execution on the ground.

While leadership could describe what the business needed to achieve, teams did not believe in the goal, did not understand what it meant for them, and did not see a practical path for how their actions connected to the outcome.

Operating model and leadership capability gaps

Identified structural gaps in leadership and capability.

• Leaders hired from stable competitors were strong operators, but the India business required leaders who could build under constraints.

• Technical managers had been promoted into leadership roles without enterprise leadership capability.

• Collaboration was weak, with individual hero culture and fragmented ownership

Culture and execution behaviour diagnosis

Identified that the India business was operating with a culture shaped by its early stage hustle.

• Collective decision-making with no single ownership

• Joint accountability in theory, but blame in practice

• Conflict avoidance and weak retrospection

• High visible busyness without coordinated execution

This culture had helped in early scale, but was now limiting growth beyond the current revenue ceiling.

Scale path and priorities

Created a practical bridge between aspiration and action. The recommendation was to focus on a small set of foundational shifts that would unlock growth, including:

• Building the right operating structure and accountability pockets

• Strengthening leadership capability through upskilling and targeted hiring

• Creating a clear succession pipeline and internal growth pathways

• Defining workflows, decision rights, and execution governance

The work reframed the growth ambition from a single-year number to a realistic multi-year trajectory, with a credible path to reach 150 million Euro by mid-2027 through foundational fixes.

OUTCOME AND BUSINESS IMPACT

The engagement helped shift the organisation from a narrative of constraints to a clear diagnosis and actionable path.

• Global and India leadership gained clarity on what was actually limiting growth.

• The organisation moved from symptom-led explanations to root-cause alignment.

• Leadership capability and operating structure gaps were clearly identified, enabling targeted action.

• The growth conversation shifted from unrealistic top-down targets to a credible execution roadmap.

• The work created the foundation to move the India business from stable incremental growth to
  coordinated scale.

Overall, the engagement created a shared understanding of what it would take for the India business to win in its market and scale sustainably.

LEADERSHIP REFLECTION