A seat on a board, and coaching for the people who already hold one. They carry different obligations, different confidentiality, and different reasons to say no — so this page does not blur them into a single “board practice”.
Certified, empanelled, and open to nomination. The credentials below are matters of public record and can be verified before any conversation begins.
One prior seat, not a portfolio. Savari Systems is the only board on which this has been the role, and saying so is more useful to a nominating committee than an implied track record. What comes with it is twenty-two years of operating leadership across pharma, knowledge services and global IT — P&L ownership, delivery turnaround, and the rebuilding of an account from twenty-five million dollars at the edge of pullback — alongside nine years spent reading how senior leaders actually behave under pressure. That operating record is not only self-reported. Colleagues and managers from those years wrote about it publicly at the time — including the Senior President Sudhakar reported to at Raptakos, and a TCS colleague who records the pharma-domain rescue. Their recommendations are collected at what leaders wrote.
A confidential one-to-one engagement with someone who already sits on a board — the same room, the same discipline, and the same rule as every other coaching engagement: no client is named, anywhere, ever.
This is deliberately not the same service as the one above, and the two are never run into the same company at the same time. Coaching a director creates a private obligation to that person. Holding a seat creates a fiduciary obligation to the company. Those two things do not belong in one engagement.
The engagement structure, phases and measurement are the same as the flagship practice, described in full at Executive Coaching.
Retained board advisory is not part of this practice. There are two engagements here — an appointment, or coaching an individual director. A request for standing advisory work to a board, as a service distinct from a seat, is one to decline rather than stretch to fit.
Two other engagements sit nearby and are described elsewhere: fractional CLO work for organisations, and keynotes and leadership workshops. Neither is a board service, and neither should be read as one.
There is no sector bar, no revenue floor and no standing conflict list. Two things decide whether a nomination goes further:
Conflicts are checked against current commitments at the point of nomination rather than screened in advance, because the answer depends on the company in front of you.
Enough to answer the two questions above. No confidential board material at first contact.
A free seventeen-page reckoner for newly certified independent directors in India — the law, the liability, the fees, and how boards actually hire. Written for the other side of this conversation, and the clearest picture of how the subject is thought about here.
Read the reckonerMost writing about independent directors in India is addressed to people who want a seat. These are addressed to the other two parties — the board deciding whom to appoint, and the director already sitting on one. Written from both sides of that table.
Four facts let a candidate answer you. A brochure does not — and confidential board material at first contact tells them something you did not intend to say.
read →A seat that produces compliance and no governance. It carries the same liability as a real one, and by design it leaves no record that you were diligent.
read →You have one advantage that expires: nobody expects you to know anything yet. Most new directors spend it trying to look competent.
read →Communication for a director is not delivery. It is extraction, and record — against the curated pack, the buried agenda item and the non-answer.
read →They differ in who the obligation runs to. Confusing them produces conflicts that cannot be unwound — which is why one of the three is declined here.
read →Four things. Most programmes cover two, gesture at the third, and skip the fourth — which is why certified directors finish a programme and find that nothing happens.
read →Nomination enquiries and director-coaching enquiries both begin the same way — a thirty-minute conversation, no agenda and no slides. Say which of the two you are asking about.