I want to be upfront about a few things before you read anything else here.
This is not an AI generated newsletter. Not frameworks dressed up as experience. And certainly not repurposed fancy LinkedIn posts.
Obviously, I use AI to improve readability but that’s about it. Because AI cannot generate my lived experiences, my thoughts and that’s what The Manager is.
I've been writing since the early 2000s before writing was easy. My first published piece on knowledge workers ran as a center page spread in The Japan Times. I've written parenting columns, company blogs, sustainability analysis published across four countries, and a circular economy blog that ran from 2010 to 2016 when almost nobody was writing about circular economy seriously. I started my first personal blog in the late 2000s, it's still live, but inactive, a record of a person figuring things out in public.
I am saying this so you know what kind of writing to expect: writing, not performing.
What You’ll Get Here
How I arrive at decisions
Real situations and lessons
Actionable ideas
Short Version of Who I Am
My early years were a mix of sales roles and a stint as a sub-editor at a business magazine. Then I moved to automotive design at Tata Elxsi, and spent eight years in Japan, posted at Suzuki Motorcycles. Japan was an experience unlike any other back in early 2000’s. Japan taught me precision, process, and humility - things that no business school can.
During those years I also completed an online MBA in Sustainable Management. When I returned to India, I came back different.
Then I moved to Jaguar Land Rover, UK and also did an MSc at Coventry University in partnership with JLR Research. At 41, I topped the program. My thesis on circular service models and remanufacturing won the best thesis award. During the time at JLR, I coordinated with a 30-member India-based JLR research team from the UK, my first real experience leading across distance and culture without direct authority.
In November 2016 returning to India, I joined JATO Dynamics in Nov 2016 - a global automotive data company that tracks every vehicle, every specification, every market shift across 50+ countries. I led the India research team. Then APAC. Then APAC, Middle East, and part of Europe. Ten years of building and leading teams across the fastest-moving automotive markets in the world, watching the automotive industry unfold in real data.
In May 2024 I was asked to build JATO's India-based Global Capability Centre from scratch. Like any new initiative, it started with an Excel sheet and a PowerPoint - no team, no office, no process. Today, it’s 80+ people across different functions. More than 200 candidates personally interviewed. A hiring process designed from zero. An operating model built and tweaked as the organization grew.
I've made career moves that didn't follow an obvious path. Each reinvention meant starting over - new skills, new context, new credibility. I've led people who didn't report to me. Managed teams across cultures that communicate completely differently. Made decisions late Friday nights in a super-complex matrix structure with incomplete information and real consequences for real people.
No template to follow. That’s why The Manager exists.
Why Now. Why The Manager
Like I said at the beginning, I started writing my first personal blog in late 2000s. Thoughts scribbled on the backs of notebooks and scraps of paper whenever they came tumbling down at furious speeds, then typed up before they disappeared. I wrote about it this way at the time and I haven't found a better description since:
"I am not a writer, well, not the literary types. But simply a thought writer framing the life situations. Words pull the brakes on the thought process that overflow in their most crude form. And that's where the truth lies - in raw, not decked up in fancy wordings."
That's still what this is. Twenty years later, different context, same impulse. Now I whatsapp myself.
A note on the name and logo: I considered many. Inflection. Vantage. Ground Truth. Names that sounded clever, names that sounded like a publication.
I went with The Manager because it's the only one that was simply true. Not a metaphor. Not a concept. Just the thing itself stated plainly, without decoration. That's what this is. And that's how I intend to write it.
Logo: Line cutting through a solid ball, where the line is the manager bringing clarity in ambiguity and chaos, often that’s how organizations operate, denoted by the solid ball.
There is no shortage of management writing. LinkedIn produces thousands of posts about it every day. Most of it follows the same format - a relatable situation, a numbered list of lessons, a closing line about growth. Or one pagers, cheat sheets. Clean, SEO optimized, and completely devoid of the human texture that makes experience actually transferable.
I think there's a difference between writing about management and writing from inside it. The first gives you frameworks. The second gives you reality: what it actually felt like when someone's career was hanging by the thread and you had to decide what to do without a set protocol.
This is the second kind. Written from inside real decisions utilizing years of built-up judgment.
It is written for the person who is building something, leading something, or trying to figure out what it actually takes to do either well. The manager who is in the middle of something hard and wants to know they're not alone in finding it hard.
It is grounded in right now. Because right now is the most useful place I can write from.
If these writings are worth your time, come back. If not, that’s fine too.
A note on privacy: the people and situations are real. Where needed, I change the details.
— Pankaj
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