The call always came at night.

I started my career in the era when India’s entire value to the world could be captured in a single sound: a phone ringing after midnight in an office in Chennai or Bangalore, because a system had gone down in Ohio or Frankfurt. We picked up. We fixed it. And by the time the client’s office opened the next morning, the problem had quietly disappeared, along with any memory that we had been the ones to solve it.

I was proud of that work. I still am. But I remember noticing something in those years that stayed with me far longer than any single project. In room after room, the Indian team was the sharpest technical mind in the building and, somehow, never the voice that set the agenda. We were brilliant at answering the question. We were rarely asked to define it. The unspoken deal was simple: you are welcome here to serve the plan, not to shape it.

That image, of the most capable people in the room sitting one seat away from where the decisions were made, is the reason I do what I do today.

Because the room has changed. Some of the world’s most consequential companies, Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM, are led by CEOs of Indian origin. Global capital is allocated by Indian CFOs. Indian advisors are no longer filling in slides; they are driving the transformation the slides describe. The seat at the table is no longer borrowed.

The harder question, the one that keeps me up at night, is whether this is a permanent structural shift or simply a generation of exceptional individuals punching above their weight. My honest answer is that we are at a tipping point. India has earned its seat at the table. What we now have to decide is what we will say once we sit down.

Section 1: From Execution to Expertise

For decades, India’s pitch to the world was powerful but transactional: we could do more, for less, and more reliably than anyone else. The late-1990s Y2K scramble was our first global stress test, and we passed it. Tens of thousands of engineers worked through the night to patch legacy systems for companies that couldn’t have found our cities on a map. The work was real and the contribution was enormous. But the relationship was clear. We were the fixers, not the strategists.

That era built the modern Indian IT industry. Infosys, Wipro and TCS created world-class delivery engines and changed millions of lives in the process. I have deep respect for what that generation built. They laid the runway. The question is what we choose to fly on it.

So what does the shift from vendor to trusted partner actually look like? It is not a change of job title. In my experience it comes down to three things.

First, being in the room when the problem is defined, not just when the solution is delivered. A vendor receives a brief. A partner shapes it. The best advisory relationships I have seen don’t begin with a scope of work; they begin with a real diagnostic: what is actually broken here, what is leadership afraid to say out loud, and which second-order effects has no one modeled yet?

Second, being willing to take an intellectual risk. A vendor says “yes” and gets to work. A trusted partner, being paid by a client he disagrees with, is willing to say, “That’s the wrong question,” and reframe it. That takes courage. It is also exactly what separates expensive advice from cheap execution.

Third, real domain depth, not just process expertise. The world increasingly wants Indian advisors who understand private equity value creation, not just financial models; supply-chain geopolitics, not just logistics; how organizations actually behave under stress, not just how their org charts are drawn. The move from execution to expertise is, in the end, a move from knowing how to knowing why, and acting on it with conviction.

The signals are already here: the rise of Global Capability Centers that do far more than back-office work, the growth of Indian-led boutique advisory firms, the steady climb of Indian leaders into the top of the Big Four. The world is willing to pay for Indian expertise. Whether we are ready to deliver it consistently, at scale, and with accountability, is the open question.

Section 2: Strategy Is Worthless Without ROI

I have spent my whole career trying to operationalize one uncomfortable truth: advice is cheap, and ownership is rare.

I have sat across from a lot of very smart people who can tell you precisely what’s wrong with a business, why it broke, and what the textbook fix looks like. The frameworks are sound. The benchmarks are cited. The deck is beautiful. And then they leave. Six months later the organization is exactly where it was, only poorer, and a little more cynical about consultants.

An “Indian consulting renaissance” cannot just be the old delivery model wearing a more expensive suit. It has to mean owning outcomes, not deliverables. That is the operating model we hold ourselves to at Practus. We are not judged on whether the report shipped on time. We are judged on whether the business moved, whether revenue changed, whether the cost base is genuinely leaner rather than just rearranged on a slide, and whether the client’s own team can run faster without us than they could with us. We express our fee as a multiple of the ROI we commit to, and we tie part of what we earn to the impact we actually deliver. It concentrates the mind wonderfully.

That requires three things that are genuinely hard to build.

Accountability that traditional consulting quietly avoids. Most engagements are designed, intentionally or not, to protect the advisor from the result; a deliverable can be “complete” whether or not the underlying problem is solved. We need commercial models that move toward outcome-based fees and co-investment in results, and partnerships measured on real business metrics.

Strategy and implementation in the same team. At Practus, the people who design a growth strategy are the same people who stay to implement it, through the data gaps, the stakeholder resistance and the change fatigue. A strategy that can’t survive contact with execution is not a strategy. It’s fiction with good formatting.

And the humility to stay in the problem. Cricket taught me this, oddly. The players who matter are not the ones who hit one spectacular six; they are the ones who read the pitch, adjust, and stay at the crease when conditions turn. The engagements that create lasting value are the ones where the advisor stayed curious, stayed humble, and stayed presentlong after the opening excitement wore off. Real change doesn’t happen in boardrooms. It happens in the trenches.

From the Back Office to the Boardroom

What India has done in three decades is genuinely extraordinary: from a country the world phoned at midnight to fix its computers, to one whose people now shape the strategic direction of its most important organizations.

But let me say this plainly, without any triumphalism: we are not there yet. The institutions are only half-built. The talent pipelines still need redesigning. The commercial models that would truly align advisory incentives with client outcomes are still emerging. And the cultural confidence to look a global CEO in the eye and say “that is the wrong strategy,” and then back it up, is still being earned one engagement at a time.

Even so, I am deeply optimistic. Not because the path is easy, it isn’t, but because I have seen what happens when Indian talent combines strategic depth with implementation rigor and genuine ownership of the outcome. That combination, strategy plus execution plus accountability, is India’s real next export. Not expertise as a product, but expertise as a promise: that when we take on your problem, we will stay in the room, at the table, not along the wall, until it is actually solved.

I would love to hear from my network. Where do you see the clearest evidence of this shift from execution to true ownership? And where do you see the institutional gaps still holding India back from its full potential in the global expertise economy?

By Deepak Narayanan