Sridhar - I'd question the word "modern." The clothes have changed, the tools have changed, the job titles have changed - but the problems haven't. Neither have the dilemmas. A man deciding whether to protect his own or do what's right is not a new man.

Across my corporate career I dealt with problem statements in almost every function - sales, operations, distribution, technology, products. And I noticed something odd. Solutions would come to me, and when I traced where they came from, the trail led back again and again to our scriptures. I could see the characters there, facing that same problem, working it out. I wasn't applying the epics to my work; my work kept pointing me to the epics.

The second reason was more deliberate. If you're going to build a framework, its foundation cannot be flimsy or fashionable. Management thinking reinvents itself every few years - and anything that needs reinventing that often was never solid to begin with. I wanted a foundation where the context could change but the principle would not. Our Itihaas gave me exactly that: something already tested across millennia, across kingdoms, across every kind of human failure you can name.

That's the claim of the book, really. Not that the epics are old and therefore wise - but that they have already survived every stress test we could possibly put them through.

Frontlist - Can you walk us through the "Itihaas Performance Model" in plain terms? What does the journey from "understanding a situation" to "overcoming internal resistance" to "action" actually look like for someone sitting in a boardroom today?

Sridhar - It's a seven-step cycle, and it mirrors how decisions actually happen rather than how we pretend they happen.

Context - what is genuinely going on around you.

Perceived Reality - what you think is going on. These two are rarely the same, and most bad decisions are born here.

Sankalp - the resolve. Not a goal on a slide; a commitment you've made to yourself.

Manovighna - the internal obstacle. Fear, ego, attachment, the need to be liked.

Right Action - action aligned to your role and your duty, not to your comfort.

Results - which may or may not go your way.

Recommitment - you return to sankalp, sharper.

In a boardroom, it looks like this: the market data says one thing, your team's story says another. You separate the two. You decide what you will actually stand for. Then you name - honestly - what is stopping you. Usually it's not the market. It's that the hard call will upset someone you value. Once you name it, you can move.

Frontlist - You frame leadership failure as more psychological than skill-based. In your experience, what's the most common internal block you've seen derail otherwise capable leaders - and which epic character illustrates it best?

Sridhar - The Itihaas Performance Model isn't a skills model at all. It begins with Context and with your Perceived Reality - how the situation occurs to you. And that's where leadership is actually decided.

Here's the uncomfortable part: your experience and your skills don't loosen that perception. They harden it. Twenty years of doing something well makes your version of reality feel like reality itself.

Which is why I don't believe in "wrong decisions." Every leader I've ever met took the decision that was correct for the reality they were standing in. The failure isn't in the decision-making. It's upstream, in what they allowed themselves to see.

Dharma is the corrective. It creates a distinction we badly need - between the right action and the acceptable action. The action that fits the situation, versus the one that's popular, expected, or safe for you. Most leaders can tell the difference. Very few will say it out loud.

And the most common block I've seen? A fixed idea about the result. The leader has already decided how this must end - the number, the outcome, how it will look to the board - and from that point on, every solution is force-fitted backwards into that ending. The context is no longer being read; it's being bent.

Duryodhana is the clearest illustration. He was not incapable, and he was not short of counsel - Bhishma, Vidura, Krishna himself. But he had fixed the result: the kingdom, undivided, his. Every counsel after that was measured only by whether it served that ending. He wasn't solving the problem in front of him. He was defending a conclusion.

I meet that leader often. Very competent. Very sure. Working extremely hard in the wrong direction.

Frontlist - Arjuna's dilemma on the battlefield is probably the most-quoted leadership metaphor from the Gita. What's a less obvious moment from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, or another Itihaas that you think deserves more attention in business contexts?

Sridhar - Not one - there are countless. Our Itihaas is essentially a library of contexts. But let me pick two that I keep returning to, because they belong to the same family of failure.

i. Bhishma. He takes a vow of celibacy and a vow to protect the throne - whoever happens to be sitting on it - purely so his father could have what he wanted. Look at what that costs. The most capable man in the kingdom, the finest warrior of his generation, ends up defending a throne occupied by someone he knows to be in the wrong. His competence is never in question. His loyalty is never in question. And yet he is present at every single wrong turn, unable to stop any of it. He had bound himself to the post, not to the purpose the post existed for.

ii. Dasharatha. He is trapped by his own word. He must honour the boon, so Rama goes to exile. He is not a bad king or a weak man - he is a man who has decided that the promise matters more than the consequence, and he cannot bring himself to reopen it even as it destroys his house.

What both of them share is the oldest dilemma in our tradition: the letter versus the spirit. And let me be clear about what I mean by "letter." I don't mean rules and regulations - that's a Western framing, and a much smaller idea. I mean Dharma. The question isn't "did I comply?" The question is "did I serve what this was actually for?"

That distinction lives in every organisation. The manager who followed the process exactly and destroyed the customer relationship. The leader who honoured a commitment to one person and failed everyone else. The functionary who says, correctly, "I did what I was told" - and is still responsible for the outcome.

Bhishma and Dasharatha are the two most decent men in their respective epics. Both are complicit in catastrophe. That should unsettle every senior leader who reads it, because it's not a story about bad people. It's a story about good people holding on to the wrong thing.

Frontlist - You talk about aligning "structured effort" with "dharma" for success. How do you define dharma for a modern professional who isn't religious or doesn't relate to the spiritual framing - is there a secular version of this idea?

Sridhar - There has to be, and it's simpler than people expect. Nothing in what I'm proposing requires belief.

Let me explain why I use Dharma at all instead of the language we're all comfortable with - SOPs, rules, policy, compliance. It isn't sentiment. It's because Dharma is the more practical instrument. It's inclusive, and it's flexible - which is to say, far less rigid than a rulebook. And isn't that precisely what we're short of everywhere? In business, in geopolitics, in how belief systems deal with each other? A rule can only tell you what was anticipated. Life keeps producing what wasn't.

So what is Dharma, in working terms? It's the answer to a single question: what is the right thing for a person in my position to do - taking into account the context in front of me, the law of the land, my responsibility to those who depend on me, and plain humanity.

Notice what that question does. It doesn't hand you an answer. It gives you space. It gives you room to arrive at a decision that is correct and natural for that situation, rather than one that is merely popular, or expected, or the easiest to defend afterwards.

That's the whole distinction. A rule asks, "Did you comply?" Dharma asks, "Were you right?" Those are not the same question, and every professional knows of at least one occasion where the answers diverged.

And this is why it pairs with structured effort. Dharma without structure is just good intent - it goes nowhere. Structure without Dharma is efficiency in the wrong direction, which is the more dangerous of the two. You need both: the discipline to execute, and the clarity to know execution is aimed at something worth reaching.

Frontlist - Could you take us through one real (even if anonymized) case from your own career where applying this kind of thinking changed an outcome - what did the situation look like before and after?

Sridhar - Yes, and it's a deliberately unglamorous one - which is the point.

We distribute insurance through bank branches, and our own managers are mapped to those branches. Manpower is always scarce and costs are always being optimised, so while the ideal mapping might be one manager to three or four branches, we were running at one to six or seven.

The visible problem was this: customers walking into the branch wanted help with their insurance - understanding a product, a service issue, a claim query - and the bank staff found this an extra burden they hadn't signed up for. So pressure came up steadily from senior management: increase the manpower.

The conventional answer was already drafted. Nudge up branch targets, hire lower-cost managers to justify the expense, bring the ratio back to one to three or four. Perfectly defensible. Everybody would have signed it.

Then we ran a workshop where we forced ourselves to sit with the Context rather than the stated complaint. Not what was being expressed - what was actually happening. And remember, many of these were branches in smaller towns and rural areas.

What emerged was that the problem was never the volume of queries, and it was never the physical presence of a person. It was that the customer had no reliable way to voice the problem and get it resolved in a reasonable time. That's all. Presence was the assumed solution, not the actual need.

So the solution was almost embarrassingly simple: a customer query register at the branch, with the customer's details and the issue written clearly. When the manager visited, he cleared that register first, before anything else.

That was it. No hiring, no target inflation. Sharper, faster, and a far better use of a scarce manager's time.

Afterwards it got applauded as out-of-the-box thinking, design thinking, empathy with the customer. And it was all of those things. But we came to realise it hadn't come from a technique. It came from two things: clarity about the Context - refusing to accept the surface version of the problem - and clarity about the Dharma of an insurance manager. His duty was never to be physically present in a branch. His duty was to resolve the customer's problem. Once we saw that, the answer was obvious.

The conventional solution would have solved the pressure from senior management. It would not have solved the customer's problem. That distinction is what the framework is for.

Frontlist - Some readers might worry that drawing lessons from ancient kings and warriors doesn't translate cleanly to corporate hierarchies, startups, or remote teams. How do you respond to that skepticism?

Sridhar - I'd agree with the skeptics if I were teaching statecraft. I'm not. I'm not suggesting anyone run a company like Ayodhya.

What transfers isn't the structure - it's the human being. The epics are the most detailed record we have of decision-making under pressure, divided loyalty, and moral cost. Those don't change with the org chart. A founder deciding whether to fire a co-founder who is also a friend is standing in a very old place.

And in some ways it maps better now, not worse. Remote teams run on trust rather than supervision. Startups run on conviction rather than process. Those are exactly the things the epics are about.

Gantt charts they can't help you with.

Frontlist - You describe yourself as a "scriptural strategist" - a fairly unusual title. If a young manager reads only one chapter of Itihaas before a high-stakes week at work, which one should it be, and why?

Sridhar - The chapter on Manovighna - the internal obstacle.

Because in a high-stakes week, they already know what to do. They'll have the analysis, the deck, probably three people's advice. What they won't have is clarity about what's actually stopping them. Ninety percent of the time it isn't the problem. It's the fear of a specific conversation, or of one person's reaction. That chapter gives them the language to name it - and once it's named, it shrinks.

You cannot fight an obstacle you refuse to look at.

The clearest example I know is the first moon landing. In 1961 Kennedy stands before Congress and commits a nation to putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely, before the decade is out. Consider what he actually had at that moment. America had put a single astronaut into space for fifteen minutes. There was no rocket capable of it, no navigation for it, no way to land, no way to return. By any reasonable assessment it could not be done.

The technology gap was real, but it was not the real obstacle. The real obstacle was in the minds of thousands of engineers who had to work on something they privately believed was impossible. That is Manovighna - not incapability, but the internal conviction of incapability. And notice what the declaration did: it removed the option of debating whether it could be done, so all that energy had to go into how. The computers they eventually flew with had less power than the phone in your pocket. The people were the same people. What changed was the block.

That's the operating lesson. Sankalp first - a resolve that closes the exit. Then name what's actually in the way. The moment engineers stopped arguing about feasibility, they started solving.

A young manager should do the same with their week. Not "can this be done," but "I have committed to this - now, what is genuinely stopping me, and is it the situation or is it me?" Almost always, it's the second one. And that's the one you can do something about tonight.

Also, honestly - it's the shortest chapter. Someone with a high-stakes week doesn't have time for my longer ones.