Selected Essays
A few, at length.
July 2026 · Vikram Limsay
Skill and relationship: the two pivots of pricing power.
Everyone is a service provider. Over the past 25 years in our firm we have experienced that skill & relationship are the two imprtant pivots in any client engagement which drive our #pricingstrategy. I endeavor to keep us in the two right side quadrants. To achieve this my strategy has been to have a command over two aspects; strategic sectoral width & functional depth. But thats enough about us. Hope the below matrix helps in forming a perspective for your services.
#Strategy #ManagementConsulting #BeyondObvious Helicon Consulting #ClientEngagement
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July 2026 · Vikram Limsay
Innovation is the only strategy for greatness.
Is your organization thinking, conecptualising and creating something on its way to greatness or is it just busy trotting away on the QonQ treadmill?
Because innovation is the only strategy for greatness & which is all about what you do & not what you say.
I am pleasantly amazed each time i come across how great companies think, conceptualise & eventually crystallize an idea into a product.
#Nike has been inspirational in this regard. Its been at the forefront of innovation and thats why a leader perhaps. Their latest product #Hyperslide that is is crystalised out of a simple idea of a typical performance athletes behavior of kicking off the sneakers and getting into recovery mode is simply brilliant. And that too in collab with another innovative company #Hyperice which has smartly & so beautifully positioned itself in the recovery category.
Sure there will be copies made, cheap replicas launched by others but these companies will remain followers. Until they come up with an innovation themselves that other follow.
Examples like these must serve as inspiration for entrepreneurs. At its core any organization is the raw and native intellect to ideate, conceptualize and create. And thats what is the key ingredient to making a great #Brand. And not smart copywriting, attractive packaging, advertising or gimmicky events
#Strategy #BeyondObvious #ManagementConsulting Helicon Consulting
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July 2026 · Vikram Limsay
Think strategy, not just design.
Think strategy not just design !
A logo is a symbol that instantly identifies a unique brand in a sea of commodities. But in the era of Canva, Midjourney & Flux, logos themselves seem to be getting commoditised.
A logo is more about your corporate strategy & must reflect deep intellectual application about the overall business than just a creative design. It should be about representing your strategy, your purpose, you values & more. Not juts playing aroud with canva or prompting Recraft endlessly in search of a pleasing design.
The #Unilever logo is one of my favorite.
On a casual glance it is an innocuous blue "U" ! But look closely and you find that it is an integrated whole of 25 different icons. Spoon, bowl, icecream, fish, sauce, swirl, hand, hair lips, clothes, sun, leaf, palm tree, dove, bee, tree, bird, DNA, heart, spark, particle, recycle, packaging, wave, container. Smart !
Each of these 25 icon have a rich meaning at its core, representing some aspect of Unilevers business & its purpose. Its like the entire scope of the groups business is communicated just by the logo ! And there are other such great examples too. #FedEx, #Amazon, #Toyota.
So if you are creating a logo for your business or redesigning your existing one - think corporate strategy not just design !
#BeyondObvious #managementconsultng #Strategy Helicon Consulting
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July 2026 · Vikram Limsay
The pressure cooker: a leadership instrument.
Not just a kitchen utensil but a crucial leadership tool.
Operating a pressure cooker, checking for signs for a decaying gasket or a blocked auto air vent or watching out for the number of whistles or maintaining flame intensity or checking whether the regulator needs to manually operated is a skill that can not just help keep domestic peace but also assist in a high pressure, mission critical strategic leadership environment.
Strategic leadership after all is about managing a mix of disparate resource ingredients. Raw material, equipment, money, humans. The last one has unique complexity unlike the rest that have predictable characteristic & emperically established measuring standards & equipment.
This unique element has individually amorphous tendencies which can not be empirically measured. These tendencies react unpredictably inside a pressure cooker environment not often visible to the naked eye sometime generating disproportional energy characterized by entropy threatening to ruin the end result.
Managing this is less about science and more about your own skill and attitude. It is a subtle sense leaders develop over time. Kind of an organizational sixth sense.
A pressure cooker can be good reminder for leaders to acquire it.
#Strategy #BeyondObvious Helicon Consulting #leadership
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May 2026 · Vikram Limsay
A brand is built on the battlefield of business.
A Brand is built on the battlefield of business. Inside trenches. Crawling through barbed wire tunnels. Dodging competition fire. Not in Canva, Photoshop & Reels applications or by prompting AI to come up with flowery headlines & attractive copy or by buying keywords & definitely not by making logos.
BRAND PROFESSIONALS NEED TO BE FUNCTIONAL EXPERTS FIRST:
As branding, brand building & brand strategy becomes more important than ever before in our hyper competitive era, it may be prudent for its practitioners or those wanting to make a career to not remain isolated from the functional nitty-gritty of business.
Brand after all is the manifested sensory experience of all functional elements that go into building the promise that is a product or service. Elements that go into a brand are present inside the factory, in its pricing & profit models, inside supply chain, as components of terms of trade, cashflows, margins & stock turns, organization structure, sales .. In fact everywhere.
IT IS NOT ADVERTISING:
A common error is to misconstrue brand building as advertising. The latter is only the tail end of a long brand building pipeline that that begins some time as early as when the business blue print & its strategic plans are drawn up.
BRAND CUSTODIANSHIP IS A LEADERSHIP RESPONSIBILITY:
A brand is not just the most important but also a most delicate & brittle asset to be handled with extreme care. Hence its custodianship must be with those who are knowledgeable & have experience of every functional aspect of business. Getting into a brand career without direct functional experience can leave both its practitioner & the business shortchanged. In fact a brands custodianship is best with the strategic leadership. No less.
GLOBAL BUSINESS OWNERS UNDERSTAND BRAND LEVERAGE:
It is not surprising that entrepreneurs behind some of the biggest business's in the world of the world take custodianship of the brand themselves. They know that brand after all is the direct multiplier of his business on the stock market.
BRAND OPPRTUNITIES AS INDIA MARCHES TO TOP 3
As India begins its ride to the top 3 economies in the world its business owners need to get serious about building not just great business' but also great brands. The financial leverage a brand offers cannot be understated.
But one thing is certain. Business owners & enterprise leadership need to take direct functional ownership & responsibility of their brand & not outsource it or relegate it or delegate it.
#BeyondObvious
#BrandStrategy #MangementConsulting #BusinessConsulting #StrategyConsulting #IndianEconomy #PublicPolicy #Brand #BrandBuilding
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May 2026 · Vikram Limsay
Sales: the forgotten profession.
SALES - The forgotten profession?
Or the most ignored perhaps. But surely the least chosen.
Whenever business graduates or young professionals discuss their career paths, I'm intrigued that almost no one considers a formal career in sales. I wonder why?
Back in the day, sales was a default career option. You hit the road. You hustled for appointments, presented your products, handled objections, negotiated deals - and saw the money hit your bank. Then you built a lifetime relationship with your customer.
The entire experience was exhilarating. You could be a nervous wreck on your first call. Weak kneed. Afraid of being thrown out. But you sharpened your skills, over time gained confidence & gradually transformed your personality.
#NetworkTypewriters, #ModiXerox, #AlcatelFax, #TataYellowPages, #ParleProducts, #HCL, #Bosch, #SriramFinance & the many #pharma companies - all had legendary sales teams.
You made 25 calls a day. Hot sun or dripping rain. Another 10 in the evening if you had a side hustle. I remember making nearly 30 everyday. Selling agarbattis to thermometers to yellow pages.
But things seem different now. Perhaps the world has become a softer place. And sales is a hard profession. Maybe that's why it's no longer a choice. A gritty, grinding hustle that nobody aspires to anymore.
Sales now happens from behind a screen. Through digital marketing. Technology fills the funnel. Conversions hover at a lazy 4%. Unthinkable earlier. Everyone now wants to be a digital marketeer or a brand manager. Without sales experience these professions have little meaning
Back then, you owned both responsibilities: fill the funnel and convert. And your strike rate better be above 30% or invite the wrath of your territory manager.
Sales doesn't just build businesses. It shapes you as a human being. It forges resilience. It hardens your personality. It teaches you to bounce back from rejection, to adapt, to persist. These aren't just sales skill - they're life skills.
And if you want to be an entrepreneur - sales skill is non-negotiable. The ultimate character-building profession.
Hope sales as a function gets its sheen back. I don't see why it shouldnt.
#BeyondObvious
#SalesManagement #ManagementConsulting #StrategyConsulting #FunctionalConsulting
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March 2026 · Vikram Limsay
Complex problems have no predetermined solution.
A personal experience.
#Hormuz may be a current bottleneck, yet global commerce routinely encounters impediments like geopolitical tensions, natural disasters, conflicts, & beyond. These pose severe risks to enterprises & sometimes even threaten their existence.
I classify such bottlenecks as #ComplexProblems with no predetermined solution. Addressing them requires #CriticalThinking which is the essence of #StrategicDecisionMaking.
While in our consulting engagements, we routinely engage with clients on their mission critical complex problems, I also get firsthand experiences in encountering them in another venture of mine where we import & distribute leading European brands in India. Allow me to recount one such recent sequence of events:
August 2020: #COVID19 had delivered a devastating blow. Factories were restarting amid choked supply chains. We had already forfeited the Diwali-NewYear sale season anticipating delayed shipments & faced #Cashflow strain. Yet we went ahead & placed orders to kickstart our post covid crawl back.
March 2021: The consignment departed a European port but was trapped in the Mediterranean because the blockage in #SuezCanal increasing shipping time a month over usual. The disruption exhausted our supplier credit, exhausted #OD limits, escalated #InterestCosts, eroded margins & prompted order cancellations & shattered any hope of a smooth post COVID comeback.
Anyway, we managed to optimize our cash cycle and placed a follow up order.
February 2022: Dispatch this time coincided with the #Ukraine conflict. The vessel on which our part load had to be loaded in a West European port had originally embarked from a #Russian Baltic port. Trust deficit was high & the former forced a quarantine midway. Entire cargo was offloaded, inspected & reloaded. Much delay ensued.
May 2022: The vessel finally arrived in Sri Lanka at the #Hambantota transshipment port but bang in the middle of their #EconomicCrisis when all port operations were at a standstill. Transit time by now had had extended from 25 to 90 days with on sea #FreightHikes, #InsuranceHikes,
#DollarHikes complicating matters further.
We managed once again a low margin year, crunched the cash cycle & placed another order. Business after all had to go on !
November 2023: This time just as the vessel with the consignment was departing, #Houthi threats in #BabElMandab prompted rerouting all the way around the #CapeOfGoodHope instead..
Surviving complex problem is less about skill & more about resilience, intuition, foresight, thinking on your feet & relationship with suppliers, buyers, bankers, port authorities, customs & your team. This after all is the essence of #CriticalThinking.
If you have navigated such bottlenecks in your business please share. It'd be great to know & learn
#CorporateStrategy #BusinessStrategy #IndianEconomy #PublicPolicy #FunctionalStrategy
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