Culture That Carries: Leadership Lessons From India's Living Tapestry

Forbes

3 days ago

Organizations often treat alignment like a strategy. Get people to believe in the vision. Get teams to live the values. Build a culture where purpose sits at the center and everyone moves in the same direction.
But in many companies, what looks like unity is just a performance — a tightly managed choreography of sameness.
When culture starts performing alignment instead of living it, most companies reach for fixes: tighter messaging, new values, more playbooks.
Yet real culture isn't smooth. It isn't clean. The best ones aren't flawless — they're tapestries, woven from memory, contradiction, and the messy grace of how people actually work together.
The inspiration for that might not come from another framework. Maybe it comes from something older. More lived-in. Less built, more endured.
Ideas, Not Edifices
While classical civilizations like Greece and Rome left behind cathedrals of stone, ancient India left behind cathedrals of thought. Her legacy isn't monuments. It's metaphors. Not walls but worldviews.
Concepts like zero, karma, ahimsa, non-duality, and moksha shaped not just her identity but how the world understands selfhood, suffering, time, and truth. India didn't export uniformity. She exported inquiry. Ideas traveled along trade routes and storylines. They were debated, retold, absorbed.
That influence spread far. I spent a large part of my career living in Thailand and Singapore. In Thailand, I watched a traditional puppet show based on the Ramakien — the local retelling of the Ramayana. In Yogyakarta, I stood before ninth-century temples filled with Indian deities carved into stone. Their names and faces were different. Yet their stories followed a familiar arc.
Culture doesn't ask for permission. It travels when invited. And once it arrives, it adapts. It blends. It stays. That kind of transmission isn't accidental. It happens when culture leaves space for others to bring their own color.
A company's purpose should work the same way. Vision statements and culture values aren't diktats. They are invitations. The more people can interpret them personally, the more powerfully they hold.
The Exile's Clarity
Even though I'm Indian, I've lived outside the country for more years than within. That distance hasn't dulled my connection. It has sharpened it. You begin to see with two lenses — one that remembers, one that reconsiders.
This is what I've come to think of as the Exile's Clarity — the insight that comes not in immersion, but in separation. When you are both of a place and away from it, you see it more completely. You become a third-person witness to your own origin story. You notice what it permits, protects, and quietly overlooks.
James Baldwin, the renowned writer and civil rights activist, captured this feeling from Paris when he wrote, 'It comes as a great shock… to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance… has not pledged allegiance to you.'
From afar, contradictions become clearer. And so does love. Not blind love but one anchored in truth.
So this isn't a celebration of India's perfection. Far from it. My home country is messy, contradictory, evolving. But maybe that's the point. What holds isn't a finished structure but a space that allows others to begin. That might be the truest form of inclusion — not a fixed identity but an unfinished one.
As leaders, try seeing your organization from the outside in — free from the constraints and barriers you notice when looking from the inside out. View it through the eyes of your customers, your suppliers, your partners, the common man. That perspective doesn't narrow your purpose. It broadens it.
A Place For Contradictions
India has never been one thing. She's been shaped by migrations, conquests, philosophies, and rebellions. And yet, she held. Not by force but by absorption.
As historian William Dalrymple wrote, 'India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.' The Mughals came as invaders and left behind poetry, cuisine, architecture. The British arrived as colonizers and left behind bureaucracy, cricket, and a parliament. Of course, they also took back her food and made it their own — national dish no less.
Nothing remained untouched. But nothing stayed untouched for long. Even the sacred stories bend. The Ramayana has hundreds of versions — across states, dialects, castes. The gods change shape. The villains shift motive. But the deeper truth stays.
India's cultural resilience wasn't crafted by elites alone. It was shaped in kitchens, temples, street corners, songs. By people who lived it, carried it, changed it. That's what made it hold.
You might believe your organization is unified. But urging people to 'embrace your values,' while important, can't succeed until you acknowledge the contradictions that shape most organizations. There are microcultures, tribes, and groups defined (and inspired) by their own identities. Your task as a leader isn't to stamp your identity over them, but to honor and uphold these distinct values and contradictions — even as you work to unite the organization around a shared purpose and core values.
Culture That Carries
That idea of multiplicity isn't just old — it's alive. You see it in modern India's multilingual film culture. Blockbusters are released in five or six languages at once. Each version carries a different rhythm, accent, and sensibility but tells the same story. It's not about one dominant language. It's about honoring many voices.
The same applies to organizational culture. When inclusion is real, people don't just hear the message — they hear themselves in it.
Let's say a large, globally dispersed company notices a gap between its stated values and how people behave day-to-day. Instead of issuing a uniform rollout, leaders ask each region to define what those values look like in practice. In one market, 'ownership' might mean transparent escalation. In another, it might mean peer coaching. The words change. The intent deepens. What emerges isn't uniform. It's shared understanding.
Performative Culture Vs. Lived Culture
In India, rituals matter. But the meaning behind them matters more.
Years ago, in a small town in Tamil Nadu, I stood in the middle of a festival where processions from different temples wound through the same streets. Each honored a different god. The drumming clashed, the chants overlapped, the air hung heavy with incense — and yet no one was confused. They weren't reciting the same line. They were singing the same truth.
In organizations, the same principle applies. Real culture doesn't require everyone to use the same words. It asks that the meaning behind them be clear. Without that, ceremonies risk becoming empty.
Now imagine a mid-sized organization in the healthcare space. Each year, it holds an 'Integrity Day.' Leaders give speeches. Employees receive awards. There's a sense of ceremony and pride. But when someone raises concerns about questionable billing practices, the issue is quietly set aside and the person is moved to another role. The celebration and the culture are two different things. Employees don't believe what's said. They believe what's backed.
Clarity In Crisis
Real unity doesn't come from asking everyone to play the same role. It comes from letting them define meaning for themselves.
Let's say a fast-growing startup uncovers toxic behavior in one of its most critical teams. Instead of repeating slogans, the CEO pauses expansion plans and calls a company-wide session to rework the values with employee input. 'Respect' shifts from being a poster word to a set of concrete, observable actions.
The culture doesn't harden. It matures.
This is where Indian history offers a parallel. In times of rupture — war, reform, famine — India turned to clarity. But it never held that clarity too tightly. It set direction, then left space for people to adapt.
Culture should do the same. Hold when it matters. Flex when it must.
Let Go Of The Perfect
India's culture — ancient, old, and new — isn't neat. It improvises. It adapts. It survives. It rarely moves in straight lines. It makes room for the pothole, the workaround, the side route.
This isn't dysfunction. It's reality. What doesn't work is reimagined. What isn't available is recreated. Jugaad — improvisation or frugal innovation— has been studied in Ivy League schools and published in the Harvard Business Review.
It's the same resourcefulness that powered India's Mars Orbiter Mission — a feat accomplished on a fraction of the budget of many space programs, even at a lower budget than the Hollywood movie 'Gravity'. The point isn't frugality. It's adaptability. A culture endures not by asking people to erase themselves, but by leaving room for them to expand into it.
That's the shift leaders must embrace. Culture is fabric — and must be woven, rewoven, stretched. When we design for perfect culture, we flatten what makes it human. But when we invite people to make meaning inside it, culture becomes a place, not a policy. A tapestry, not a uniform.
Lasting Cultures Are Carried
A final thought. Nalanda — one of the world's first residential universities — drew scholars from Tibet, China, and Central Asia. They didn't come to be told what to think. They came to be invited to think with others.
That's the leader's role now. Not to recite values, but to create the space where others can live them. India shows us this — contradiction doesn't dissolve identity. It deepens it. Culture that holds isn't the one most loudly declared. It's the one most quietly carried.