Leadership Under Load — Ego Lifts Get You Injured

Every gym has one.

The person who loads more weight than they can actually lift. A quick glance around, a slightly louder-than-necessary grunt, plates added to the bar with quiet theatre. The bar comes up halfway, the back bends, and someone rushes in to help.

In the gym I call this an ego lift — lifting to be seen, not to be strong.
In organisations, the same instinct shows up as well-intentioned leadership optimism.

In many ERP implementations — especially SAP Business One rollouts — a familiar moment appears early. A senior leader, often well-meaning and energetic, announces a timeline.

“We will go live in 90 days.”
“This will solve our reporting issues.”
“After this, decisions will be data-driven.”

The room becomes silent. Not because everyone agrees, but because nobody wants to be the person who says it cannot be done. The leader is not lifting a barbell. The leader is lifting expectations. And expectations are heavier than steel.

Ego lifts rarely come from arrogance. They come from pressure. Boards want speed. Customers want reliability. Teams want clarity. Investors want certainty. Leadership fills uncertainty with confidence.

But confidence is not capacity.

ERP implementation is not a motivational project. It is a structural one. Master data must be cleaned. Processes must be redesigned. Roles must become clear. Users must learn new behaviour. Old habits must fade slowly. Hero cultures skip this phase and go straight to the heavy weight.

What follows is predictable. Timelines shrink artificially. Training is rushed. Testing becomes symbolic. Exceptions multiply. Workarounds begin. The organisation technically goes live. Operationally, it does not.

Excel stays “just for safety.”
Approvals continue on WhatsApp.
Reports are distrusted.
Finance reconciles manually.

From the outside the lift looks successful. Inside the muscle, a tear has already begun.

This is the most dangerous ERP failure — not collapse, but partial adoption. The system exists, but behaviour does not change.

In the gym, ego lifting injures the back. In organisations, it injures trust.

After one strained implementation, employees stop believing timelines, managers stop committing to change, IT stops getting cooperation, and leadership stops receiving honest feedback. The next project becomes harder before it even begins. People do not resist technology. They resist pain they have experienced before.

I should admit this — I have done ego lifts too. Not dramatic ones. The polite corporate version. And occasionally, the literal gym version.

There are days when you feel unusually energetic. You slept well. The music is right. You want to progress faster than your body has negotiated for. So you say to the trainer, “Let’s increase the weight today.” Sometimes you don’t say it directly. You just repeat, “I think I can.”

My trainer does not argue. He just gives a look.

It is a calm, very firm no — the kind you immediately understand is not about authority. It is about consequence. A good trainer is not managing today’s lift. He is protecting tomorrow’s workout. Some days your muscles are strong but your stabilisers are tired. Some days your enthusiasm is ready but your joints are not. You do not always have the data to judge your own capacity.

Leadership works exactly like that.

Many times in ERP projects, leaders — including me — push timelines not out of ego, but optimism. We see benefits early and want momentum. We want progress to feel real. But organisations also have stabilisers: users learning new screens, finance closing cycles differently, managers trusting system reports, teams unlearning parallel processes.

When we push the organisation to lift more than its readiness, the system does not collapse immediately. It compensates. People work late. Excel returns quietly. Manual approvals restart. The project looks successful until months later adoption falls.

That is when you realise what the trainer already knew.

Capacity is not decided by motivation. It is decided by repeatability.

The strongest lifters in the gym are not the loudest. They warm up, start light, repeat movements correctly, and add weight slowly. They are not trying to impress the room. They are trying to survive repetition.

Good ERP leadership looks the same. Strong leaders say: we stabilise master data first, we pilot before scaling, finance closes one full cycle in the system before go-live, adoption matters more than date. It sounds cautious. It is actually courageous. The hardest leadership act is not making a promise. It is setting a boundary.

Hero culture says a strong leader solves problems personally. System culture says a strong leader builds a system where problems reduce over time.

ERP implementations succeed when leadership stops trying to be the strongest individual in the room and becomes the protector of process discipline. The goal is not a dramatic go-live. The goal is a boring month-end close.

If your ERP implementation feels exciting on launch day, be careful. In the gym, excitement during the lift usually means the weight is wrong. Organisations rarely fail on the day of the ego lift. They fail slowly — through workaround, fatigue, and quiet disengagement.

Strong leadership does not lift the heaviest weight.

It lifts the weight the organisation can repeat tomorrow. 

And sometimes the most responsible leadership decision is simply this: Not yet. We build strength first.

Leadership Under Load — Episode 3 The Warm-Up Is Not Optional

The warm-up is that part of the workout where your body negotiates with you to go back home.

It begins almost immediately. The intention is sincere, the schedule has been blocked, you have worn the right shoes, carried the water bottle, and declared to yourself that today you will be disciplined — and within five minutes your hamstrings file objections, your shoulders remember old grievances, and your knees suddenly develop a philosophical opposition to effort. Nothing heavy has started yet. No serious work has begun. And still, this is when resistance is at its peak.

Not during the lift. Before it.

My trainer has this habit of telling me stuff that I just don’t like, especially at that specific moment when he is — the warm-up isn’t conditioning your muscles, it’s testing your commitment. Your body is quietly asking whether you truly intend to do what you confidently declared at the entrance. And some days I strongly dislike my trainer. It’s a very particular irritation reserved for the person who is absolutely right, sees what you are avoiding, refuses to indulge your explanations — and is also the person you are literally paying to make you uncomfortable.

And this is exactly what the client begins to feel about us when we start Business Process Mapping.

The project has already had a confident beginning. Leadership has attended the kick-off. Timelines have been discussed. Everyone agrees the organisation needs structure. The vendor presentation was clear. There is relief that “a system” is finally coming. Then the first real working session happens.

Business Process Mapping.

And suddenly enthusiasm develops a calendar conflict.

“Do we need all departments present?”
“Can we shorten these workshops?”
“Can you just configure the system and show us?”
“Users will learn once they see the screens.”
“We will clean up processes after go-live.”

This is not resistance to software. This is the organisation negotiating to go back home.

Because BPM is the moment the project stops being about technology and starts being about behaviour.

During BPM sessions no one is learning SAP, or any ERP for that matter. Instead something far more uncomfortable happens. Sales realises delivery commitments are made without checking capacity. Production explains plans change depending on who escalates the loudest. Finance quietly admits reports are manually corrected before management sees them. Operations discovers three different departments maintain the same master data in three different spreadsheets and each one believes theirs is the correct version. Leadership notices decisions depend on individuals, not processes.

This is why BPM feels exhausting. It is not documentation. It is organisational self-awareness.

In the gym the warm-up exposes stiffness you didn’t know you had. In organisations BPM exposes dependencies you didn’t know you relied on. And in both places the instinct is identical — skip it and get to the “real work.”

Companies often want training quickly. “Let users see the screens, they will understand.” But training without process clarity creates a predictable outcome. Users learn transactions but not flow. Approvals continue on calls. Updates continue on WhatsApp. Spreadsheets quietly survive in the background. Data is entered at the end of the month just before review meetings. And then leadership concludes the software is good but adoption is poor.

Adoption is not poor. Preparation was skipped.

We assume change management begins after the system arrives. It does not. Change management begins when people participate in deciding how work will happen. A warehouse supervisor who helps design the goods receipt process rarely resists the system later, because the system is no longer management’s imposition — it is his workflow. People do not resist change as much as they resist loss of control.

A kick-off meeting therefore is not the beginning of implementation. It is the beginning of alignment. If the first question after kick-off is “when is go-live,” the project is already in danger. The more important question is quieter — “how do we actually work right now, truthfully?”

ERP systems rarely fail because the software cannot handle complexity. They fail because organisations try to automate assumptions. BPM is where those assumptions surface. And just like a warm-up, it feels unnecessary only until the consequences of skipping it arrive.

In the gym, the warm-up feels like delay. In reality, it is what allows you to train tomorrow.

In organisations, BPM feels like lost time. In reality, it is what allows the system to survive go-live.

The strongest lifters respect the warm-up the most. The most successful implementations respect the beginning the most.

Because speed without preparation is not efficiency.

It is damage… simply scheduled in advance.

 

Form Fails Before Strength Does: What the Gym Taught Me About ERP Implementations

My trainer has been trying to teach me this for years. Every time a lift felt difficult, I drew the same conclusion: I’m not strong enough yet.

Every time, he stopped me. “Strength shows up fast. Form shows up when you’re tired.”

It took me a long time to understand what he meant.

In strength training, Form and Technique are not the same thing.

Form is structure—posture, positioning, alignment. It is how the body holds itself under load. A stable spine in a deadlift. Balanced knees in a squat. Form protects joints and prevents injury. Its goal is longevity.

Technique is execution — the sequence of movement: breathing, tempo, bar path, muscle activation. The technique helps you move the weight efficiently and perform at your best.

Technique is about performance. Form is about safety and structure.

You can learn the technique relatively quickly. Form takes much longer because it must be built into the body.

And here is the subtle part my trainer kept repeating: Good form does NOT look identical for everyone.

Two lifters can both squat safely with excellent form, yet the movement can look different. Their height, limb length, hip structure — their physical build — changes how alignment appears. The structure is sound, even if the posture is not identical.

Good form creates stability. Uniformity is not the same as stability.

It took me years to understand why that matters.

Because ERP implementations often make the same mistake.

ERP programs are excellent at teaching technique:

• which transaction to use
• which fields to fill
• which steps to follow

Users learn the screens. Training is completed. UAT is signed off. But what determines whether the system survives scale is not technique. It is form!!

A user once told us, “The system tells me what to do. It doesn’t tell me who is allowed to decide.”

That is not a training gap. That is structural misalignment. In an organisation, ERP form is:

• clear process ownership
• stable decision rights
• governance that resolves exceptions
• shared rules that apply consistently

Here is where organisations struggle.

They interpret “standardisation” as identical processes everywhere — across roles, locations, and realities. But just as different bodies lift safely in different ways, different parts of a business may legitimately execute a process differently while still respecting the same structure.

Technique must be consistent.
Form must be stable.
Execution need not be identical.

A sponsor later observed: “The system works, but people keep going around it.”

Often, that happens not because users resist discipline, but because the organisation enforces uniformity rather than building structure. When processes ignore context, people create workarounds to get their jobs done.

Just like lifting, poor form does not fail immediately.
It fails under repetition.
Under pressure.
Under growth.

ERP systems rarely break at go-live.
They break at scale — when volume rises, exceptions increase, and decisions need clarity.

That is why strong implementations focus on form before force:
They stabilise decision rights before enforcing compliance.
They define ownership before automation.
They align governance before scale.

Technique can be trained in weeks. Form must be designed.

It took my trainer years to get me to understand this: strength is never the starting point. Structure is.

Strong ERP programs scale on form, not force.
Processes, governance, and culture carry the load.
When form fails, strength gets blamed — but unfairly.

 

Sit With Control. Stand With Speed. A Leadership Lesson from the Gym for ERP Implementations

I’m not a technologist by training. My grounding has always been in learning, leadership, and people development. Today I lead teams that implement ERP systems for SMEs, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this: when work gets complex, analogies help. They cut through jargon. They make patterns visible. They help teams align faster than frameworks sometimes do.

One of my most useful leadership lessons came not from a strategy meeting, but from the gym.

I was doing squats, and as I lowered myself, I did what most of us instinctively do — I bounced slightly at the bottom. It feels efficient. You drop, rebound, and come up. My trainer stopped me immediately and said, “No bounce. Sit with control. Stand with speed.”

He explained that the bounce gives the illusion of power, but it’s actually a loss of control. You’re not holding structure — you’re borrowing momentum. And then he added something even more interesting: once you are stable at the bottom, don’t rise slowly. Stand with speed. If you try to come up too slowly under load, you actually spend more energy and increase fatigue.

That stayed with me — because I see the same pattern play out in ERP implementations all the time.

In the gym, the bounce looks energetic but signals instability. In ERP programs, there’s a similar illusion. Things move fast. Files circulate. Workshops conclude quickly. Reports get generated in multiple versions. Approvals happen early. Everyone feels busy. It looks like progress. But sometimes it’s just motion without control.

I believe there’s even a practitioner term for one version of this — data bouncing. It’s when the same data keeps moving back and forth between teams, between functions, between validation stages. Nobody fully rejects it, nobody fully owns it, nobody fully closes it. So it travels. Again and again. Each cycle takes time, drains attention, and quietly erodes confidence.

From where I sit as a leader, data bouncing is rarely just a data problem. It is usually a decision problem in disguise. A definition is unclear. Ownership is fuzzy. A trade-off hasn’t been accepted. A call hasn’t been made. The sheet keeps moving because the decision doesn’t.

That’s where the first half of my trainer’s instruction becomes a leadership discipline. Sit with control. In ERP terms, that would mean staying with the data and the process truth long enough for it to stabilise. Not rushing to closure just to keep momentum alive, not mistaking early agreement for real alignment, and not holding the position long enough for reality to surface.

But the lesson is incomplete if it stops there — because the second half matters just as much.

Stand with speed.

This is where many programs — and many leaders — get uncomfortable. We assume that if we have been careful in thinking, we must now be slow in execution. But that’s not how energy works under load. In strength training, once you are stable at the bottom of a squat, rising slowly is inefficient. Your muscles stay under strain longer. Fatigue builds. Form starts to shake. The instruction is to drive up with intent.

Execution in ERP is similar. Once decisions are made and definitions are settled, slow execution becomes costly. The longer the gap between decision and action, the more second-guessing creeps in. People reopen questions. The memory of why a choice was made starts fading. Exceptions begin to appear. Old habits quietly return. What was settled starts becoming “open for discussion” again.

I see this especially in SME implementations, where energy is not unlimited. The same people running the business are also supporting the transformation. If we drag execution out after clarity has been achieved, we don’t become safer—we become more tired. And tired organisations do not adopt systems well.

Standing with speed doesn’t mean being reckless. It means converting clarity into action while alignment is still fresh. It means moving from decision to configuration, from configuration to usage, without unnecessary delay. It means not hovering in that dangerous middle zone where we are no longer thinking deeply, but not yet executing decisively either.

What I’ve taken from the gym into my leadership work is a simple sequencing rule. Control first—speed second. Not mixed and not reversed.

Sit with the ambiguity. Sit with the disagreement. Sit with the data. Let it settle. Let truth show itself. That’s leadership patience.

Then stand with commitment. Stand with pace. Stand with a visible direction. That’s leadership energy.

No bounce on the way down. No hesitation on the way up.

I may not be a technocrat. But I’ve learned that whether it’s muscle or management, stability first and speed next is a pattern that holds remarkably well.

 

What the Gym Teaches You That Leadership Books Don’t

Episode 1: Recovery Is Designed, Not Accidental

The gym has a way of correcting lazy thinking.

For years, I assumed recovery meant rest—doing less, stepping away, hoping soreness would fade on its own. The gym disabused me of that notion very quickly.

Recovery is not passive. It is an active, deliberate process.

When you train, muscle fibres are stressed and microscopically damaged. Recovery is the phase in which the body repairs the damage, adapts, and becomes stronger. This happens through sleep, nutrition, circulation, lighter movement—and, critically, time. Without recovery, effort does not compound. It deteriorates.

The gym is unapologetically honest about this. Ignore recovery, and progress stalls. Injuries appear. Motivation evaporates. The body simply stops cooperating.

Workplaces, unfortunately, are far more optimistic.

At work, recovery is often mistaken for disengagement—slowing down, switching off, or stepping away. In reality, workplace recovery is also active. It is the phase where people process change, rebuild confidence, and integrate new ways of working after sustained cognitive strain.

Workplace recovery looks like:

• Time to think after intense execution
• Safe spaces to ask repetitive or “obvious” questions
• Permission to make mistakes without penalty
• Opportunities to integrate learning into daily routines

Without this, effort fragments. People comply without understanding, adopt without confidence, and eventually revert.

This misunderstanding becomes especially costly during ERP implementations.

ERP programs place intense demands on organisations. They disrupt routines, vocabulary, decision rights, and identity. People are asked to unlearn years of muscle memory and replace it with unfamiliar workflows—often under pressure to perform immediately.

The recovery phase of an ERP implementation is the change management phase.

Not training calendars.
Not user manuals.
Not go-live announcements.

Change management is the period where users figure out how the system fits into their working lives—how it helps, where it slows them down, and what needs to be rethought. This is where frustration carries information, productivity dips are expected, and adoption becomes possible.

When this recovery phase is rushed or under-designed, organisations misread the symptoms. Fatigue is labelled as resistance. Confusion becomes incompetence. Shadow systems appear quietly, and spreadsheets return with remarkable loyalty.

In the gym, muscles grow during recovery.
In ERP programs, capability grows during change management.

The strongest implementations move in rhythm, not rush.
They treat go-live as a beginning, not a victory lap.
What isn’t designed for recovery returns as resistance.

 

Oru Murai and the End of the Language Argument

Some songs you hear once and move on. Others? They sink in, loop around your head, and before you know it, they’ve set up camp in your chest. Oru Murai, sung as a duet by Sandeep Narayanan and Kaushiki Chakravarty at the Isha Foundation’s 2023 music festival, belongs firmly in the second category. I’ve had it on repeat for the last two days, and honestly, it hasn’t worn out one bit.

The pairing itself was exceptional. Sandeep Narayanan, with his deep Carnatic grounding, has a voice that feels almost architectural—solid, rooted, like the kind of foundation you could build a temple on. Kaushiki Chakravarty, on the other hand, brings the agility and soaring fluidity of Hindustani tradition. Put them together, and you don’t get a tug-of-war between two schools of music. You get a duet that feels like an actual conversation, the kind you don’t want to end.

What makes it even more striking is Kaushiki’s switch between Tamil and Hindi. In a country where language sparks endless debates, here was a performance where words didn’t divide but dissolved. And the audience’s reaction was telling. The applause that broke out when Kaushiki sang a few lines in Tamil was warm and enthusiastic. It’s a strange irony: in a land where people often hesitate to learn their neighbour’s tongue, even a small attempt at crossing linguistic boundaries feels like a revolution. The applause was commendable, yes—but it also spoke volumes about our collective hesitation. Why should singing a handful of lines in Tamil feel like an act of bravery? And yet, in that moment, it did.

At some point, though, just listening wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know what those Tamil lines meant, so I dug into their essence. And what I found was humbling. The lyrics are not lofty philosophical pronouncements but intimate appeals, a call from the devotee to the divine: a plea for grace, for guidance, for just “one chance” (Oru Murai) to surrender fully. When Kaushiki echoed those lines in Hindi, the simplicity of the sentiment shone even more clearly—faith doesn’t need ornamentation, and devotion doesn’t belong to any single language. The meaning itself felt larger than the vessel carrying it.

And here’s what made the song even closer to my heart: it is set in Hamsadhwani. That raga has always been one of my favourites—bright, uplifting, brimming with optimism. Born in Carnatic music but also embraced in Hindustani circles, Hamsadhwani is, in a way, the perfect metaphor for what this performance achieved. It belongs everywhere and refuses to be claimed by a single tradition. Hearing Sandeep and Kaushiki bring it alive, each colouring it differently, was like watching a familiar place under two kinds of light. Same space, different magic.

The atmosphere wasn’t flashy either. No theatrical overkill, no “look at me” gestures. Just two musicians pouring out devotion. Sandeep’s voice carried a sense of gravity, as though each note had been carefully weighed before being released. Kaushiki matched him with an ease that felt effortless but never careless—you could tell she was anchored in bhakti, but also enjoying the playfulness of it. Together, they weren’t performing for us so much as offering something bigger, and we just happened to overhear.

 Now, you could analyse the performance technically—the ragas, the phrasing, the balance of Carnatic precision with Hindustani fluidity. But doing that would miss the point. The real magic wasn’t in the math of the music, but in how it broke free of the math. It lived in the space where form turns into feeling, where the rules of tradition stop mattering because you’re too busy being moved.

Here’s the thing about songs you play on loop: after a while, you’re not chasing novelty. You’re returning to a particular feeling, like revisiting an old street because it smells familiar. That’s what Oru Murai does. Every replay pulls back another layer. It doesn’t grow stale; it deepens, like listening to your own heartbeat more closely each time.

And maybe that’s why this performance lingers. It wasn’t just a concert; it was a small argument in favour of something we already know but keep forgetting: music does what politics can’t. It unifies without lecturing. Sandeep and Kaushiki didn’t set out to make a statement, but in singing together, they showed us a version of harmony we spend years debating and drafting policies over. A simple ten-minute song accomplished what entire committees often fail to do. That’s both funny and a little humbling.

When the last note fell into silence, the applause came, loud and inevitable. But the truer applause had already happened inside each listener—the kind that doesn’t make noise, the type that simply lets you sit still for a moment because you’ve been reminded of something essential.

So, why do I keep replaying 'Oru Murai'? I could say it’s technically brilliant, culturally relevant, and emotionally rich. All of that is true. But the more straightforward truth is this: it makes me feel human. And in a country where people still argue about whose language deserves primacy, maybe the real punchline is this—music already solved the problem, and we were too busy clapping to notice.