What 2025 Is Teaching India’s Senior Executives About Sustainable Personal Success
- Alok Mathur
- Nov 26
- 4 min read
November 2025. India is now minting more unicorn founders than any country except the United States, yet the median tenure of a listed-company CXO in India has fallen to 29 months. Private equity funds are sitting on record piles of unspent capital, family offices are rapidly bringing in professional management, and several global giants have quietly shifted their Asia-Pacific headquarters to Mumbai or Bangalore. For anyone earning above a crore, the range of possibilities has never been broader—and the penalty for a wrong turn has never been steeper.
Transitions have never mattered more, and opportunities have never been this promising.
Having worked closely with leaders at this level through ProExec, a handful of recurring truths have become impossible to ignore.
Truth 1: Most career blocks at this stage are identity blocks, not capability blocks
A manufacturing president I know spent two decades being the go-to “operations problem-solver.” Solid track record, respected internally. When we ran a proper diagnostic, it turned out the market now pays a massive premium for leaders who can talk about resilient, low-carbon supply chains in boardroom language. He already had the experience; he just hadn’t repackaged the story. He was still telling stories of old accomplishments that the new employers now took for granted. Once he changed that, he was able to attract a new role at 1.6x the compensation.
A VP Marketing at a leading automotive firm had deep experience and a stellar CV, yet his narrative dwelt only on past wins. Interviewers were impressed but couldn’t visualise how he would steer their marketing function or drive their specific agenda. Hiring him felt like betting on reputation alone, not on a clear transformation story. He repeatedly lost at the final stage. The few offers that came were modest increases he turned down.
Both of these examples had nothing to do with the individuals’ capabilities – rather they were examples of how a lack of clear brand and identity can lead to a lack of coherent narrative, which in turn makes it harder for promising opportunities to be squandered.
Truth 2: Outdated assumptions quietly shrink the opportunity set
In almost every first conversation, ambitions, motivators, and value drivers come up only after considerable prodding. After all, people change as their career grows, and their family circumstances change with changing financial circumstances and growing children. When they finally sit with us for a structured discussion, roughly one leader in three realises their personal option set has been capped for years by agreements that were never explicitly made, or on old assumptions that were never updated.
Those who carve out focused time with us ended up with significantly better opportunities, because they were able to carve personalised, updated strategic career plans and therefore target specific roles and companies rather than take stabs in the dark with randomised CV distribution.
Truth 3: The best moves are engineered long before the head-hunter calls
By the time a search firm rings, the role is usually 60-70% pre-sold on someone else. The leaders who consistently land the outlier outcomes have been running a disciplined, low-key preparation process for the previous many months: building a solid narrative that relies on the promise of future accomplishments, creating a personal brand that not only stands out but that makes it easier for the hirer to take a decision, planting evidence of the narrative in the right circles, shortlisting specific roles regardless of whether there are current vacancies, and pressure testing their blind spots in simulated boardroom conditions.
In the most recent group of placements we tracked (all current packages above ₹1 Crore), median total cash compensation rose 68% and long-term wealth components rose 3.4×. Those numbers weren’t negotiated in the final week; they were built, brick by brick, months earlier, typically with a coach, mentor, and sounding board leading the way.
Truth 4: “Success” is being redefined in real time
An increasing number of leaders are walking away from the obvious next rung. Some return to their family businesses armed with new governance structures or establish their own start-up business. Others deliberately step sideways or even slightly down in title to join larger platforms where the equity upside and pace of learning are dramatically higher. A few have quietly raised their own micro-funds or backed climate-tech ventures with capital that only became visible once they clarified what they actually wanted.
What every one of them had in common was an upfront investment in understanding their own motives, derailers, and non-negotiables. In most cases we found that this was not happening automatically, no matter how savvy and clued-in the individual was. It took sustained, planned effort to dig deep into their personal and unique motivators, values, circumstances, and ambitions.
A simple sequence that keeps working
No two journeys are identical, but the sequence that reliably widens real choice is remarkably consistent:
Map the gap between how you currently see yourself and how the market is actually buying talent right now.
Turn that insight into a crisp, evidence-backed story that feels authentic and future-facing, and a personal brand that sells itself.
Create an updated career strategy based on your own up to date variables, along with your skill sets, strengths, and ambitions.
Run a controlled, multi-option process that protects your current relationships while maximising future leverage.
Leaders who do this stop reacting to the market. They start shaping how the market reacts to them.
India’s current economic surge is creating a generational wealth-transfer moment for its top talent. The difference between capturing it fully and merely surviving it is no longer about pedigree or even network depth. It is about willingness to examine—and when necessary, update—the assumptions you have been running on.
In a volatile, fast-growing market, the biggest risk is rarely the volatility itself. It is remaining unexamined, unseen, and unplanned inside it.
EM Consulting | Notes from time spent close to India’s senior executive transitions
Comments