Nitin Paranjpe shares life lessons from failure and leadership at PS26

Nitin Paranjpe, non-executive chairman of Hindustan Unilever, opened his presentation by launching into three defining experiences, “a glorious failure,” an “extreme adversity,” and “a chance encounter with a professor,” that have shaped his life and leadership.

On failure and recovery, Paranjpe was candid about the toll of missed targets and the corrosive effects of denial. After more than a decade of consistent success, he described a painful two-year stretch when results would not come. “There were moments when I would go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what else I could do?” The turning point, he said, came in a moment of release. “I surrendered, not in the sense of giving up, but in the sense of not caring or worrying about the outcome.” That surrender, he explained, unburdened him. “I went into the office after a couple of years, feeling lighter than I ever felt.”

From that low point, Paranjpe distilled four lessons for leaders and professionals. “Always do the right thing,” act early because “however expensive a solution might seem, the cheapest it will ever be is now,” “never externalise a problem,” and remember “you are not your example, either good or bad”. He drove home the urgency of ownership. “Never be a victim.”

His address was built into a vivid account of leadership under crisis. Recounting his unexpected appointment as CEO amid the 2008 to 2009 global financial crisis, Paranjpe credited the lessons of earlier failure and, crucially, a committed team. “A team whose heart bled for the company, just like mine did.” But the spark that revived growth was a memory from 1999, an exchange with the late Prof CK Prahalad about ambition and resources.

Paranjpe relayed Prahalad’s simple but radical formula. The difference between a manager and an entrepreneur is the relationship between ambition and resources. “When A is equal to R, that is a managerial mindset,” he said. “When A is substantially greater than R, that is an entrepreneurial mindset.” The mismatch, he argued, is catalytic because it “generates creativity and innovation”.

Testing that theory in practice, Paranjpe set an audacious goal: to add 500,000 retail outlets, at a time when annual additions were measured in the tens of thousands. Initially dismissed as unrealistic, the target transformed the organisation’s energy and thinking. “When you have no other option, when you have your back to the wall, you do stupid things.” The culture shifted from negotiating limits to imagining possibilities. He explained the psychological mechanics. For a plausible but challenging target, people negotiate down and fear failure, but for a wildly audacious target, “there is no fear of failure. The fear of failure can be replaced by the joy of working on something that nobody in the world has attempted before”.

The result was dramatic. In successive years, the company added 5,00,000, then 6,00,000, and ultimately grew distribution by millions of outlets, achievements he credited to the liberating power of ambition coupled with the right conditions. The lesson was clear. “Every person wants to be a hero, do heroic things, but it is a fear of failure which prevents us from even trying.”

Paranjpe emphasised that ambition alone is not enough. Three conditions must align to unlock collective potential. A genuinely inspiring and personally meaningful vision, deep trust between leader and team, and the deliberate creation of that ambition resource mismatch. “People must want that outcome,” he said. Vision must be “collectively inspiring, but must be individually related”. Trust must assure people that “the leader has their back” and that it is “okay to take a swing, and occasionally you will miss”.

Summing up his leadership credo, Paranjpe offered a challenge and encouragement to leaders. “The role of a leader has to be to help his team maximise their potential. It is the obligation of the leader to create a mismatch between ambition and resource.” When those elements come together, he reflected, “magic has always happened.”

Paranjpe’s keynote was at once personal and prescriptive, a testimony that failure can seed the clearest lessons, that audacity can unlock latent capability, and that leaders who create the right soil, vision, trust, and a bold mismatch can cultivate breakthroughs.

His closing message resonated with a summit audience hungry for practical inspiration. Do the right thing, own your problems, and dare to set goals that make no one comfortable, because it is in that discomfort that greatness is often found.