I didn't start out wanting to be in strategy. I started on the shop floor at Royal Enfield, trying to understand why a manufacturing line missed its numbers on a Tuesday and hit them on a Wednesday. That's a strange place to begin a career that eventually led to the Managing Director's office at a listed group — but looking back, it's probably the most useful place I could have started. Manufacturing teaches you that strategy without execution is just a PowerPoint. You can build the most elegant operating model in the world, but if the person on the floor doesn't understand why the process changed, none of it matters. I carried that lesson with me through Infosys, where I worked on digital transformation for clients who were trying to modernize decades-old ways of working — and then into consulting at Deloitte and KPMG, where I saw the same problem from the other side: brilliant recommendations that never survived contact with an actual organization. Consulting taught me something else — how to structure ambiguity. When a client says "help us grow," that's not a problem statement, it's a feeling. Part of the job is turning that feeling into a market assessment, a set of growth levers, a business case someone can actually fund. I've done that work across procurement and supply chain transformation, enterprise transformation programs spanning ₹750+ Cr in spend, and a due-diligence-driven growth strategy that supported a strategic acquisition north of USD 1B. I also had the chance to co-author a national manufacturing strategy roadmap with NITI Aayog's Frontier Tech Hub — a reminder that the same strategic thinking that works for a single company can, at a different scale, shape policy conversations. Today I sit in the Office of the Managing Director at Refex Group, working on corporate strategy and supporting executive decision-making directly. It's a different vantage point again — closer to the actual moment a decision gets made, and closer to watching how good analysis either lands or doesn't, depending on how it's communicated. If there's a thread running through all of this, it's that I've worked at almost every altitude a strategy career can involve — operations, IT-led transformation, external consulting, and now an internal CEO-office seat. Most people I mentor are trying to move between these altitudes: a procurement professional who wants to move into strategy, a consultant trying to break into a Chief of Staff role, an MBA student trying to figure out if strategy consulting is even what they think it is, or a founder who needs someone to pressure-test their growth thesis before they take it to a board. I enjoy that kind of problem — the "how do I actually get from here to there" problem — more than abstract strategic theory. I'm not going to hand you a framework and tell you to go figure it out. I'll ask you what you're actually trying to solve, tell you honestly whether your resume or your story supports it yet, and if it doesn't, tell you what would need to change. My mentoring philosophy is fairly unglamorous: most career and strategy problems are not solved by inspiration, they're solved by structure and honest feedback. I'd rather tell you your case study answer was disorganized in the first five minutes than let you walk into an interview and hear it from someone with your offer in their hands. I'm not interested in telling people what they want to hear — I've been on the other side of enough real transformation programs and real interview panels to know that flattery doesn't get anyone hired or promoted. If you're trying to figure out how to break into strategy, prepare for a Chief of Staff or CEO-office role, sharpen a resume that isn't landing interviews, or just want an honest outside read on a career decision — that's the conversation I'm good at having.