It occurred to me a few days ago that the most enduring lessons in leadership rarely arrive in boardrooms. They tend to appear in hotel lobbies, airport queues and the quiet in-between moments when leaders aren’t performing for anyone — or at least believe they aren’t. One such moment came back to me vividly as I was thinking about how easily a chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) choices ripple across an organisation, often far more powerfully than all-hands memos and PowerPoint ‘values statements’.
This particular memory is set in the West End Hotel in Bangalore, a place that, in the old days, had the comforting charm of an institution that hadn’t yet been redesigned into anonymity. I had returned from an early morning walk — early by my standards, which means somewhere around 8:30 or 9:00 — and wandered into the lounge before breakfast. There, in an armchair with a laptop quite literally on his lap, sat my friend Sharu Rangnekar, then the managing director (MD) of a pharmaceutical company called Searle India.
It was a surprising sight. Sharu was not one to loiter around hotel lobbies for the fun of it. Assuming something must have gone wrong with his reservation, I walked up to greet him.
“Is your room not ready?” I asked.
He smiled in that characteristically gentle way and said, “No, no. I haven’t booked a room. I am only here for the day. I arrived this morning and I leave early this evening. I have just come to give a talk at the conference of all the sales managers of South India.”
This explanation puzzled me further.
“But your marketing manager is here,” I said. “In fact, he is staying just two doors away from my room. Should I tell him you are here?”
“No, no, don’t tell him,” he said quickly. “I am waiting for him to get ready. I will just borrow his room to wash up before the conference. Then I will go straight after lunch to the airport.”
There was nothing dramatic about the exchange, and yet it stayed with me. Sharu could easily have justified a room — he was the MD, after all — but it hadn’t even occurred to him to spend the company’s money for a few hours of personal convenience. It wasn’t austerity. It wasn’t symbolic self-denial. It was simply the way he operated: Why incur an avoidable cost?
What struck me even more, (though I only understood it later) was that this was leadership in its purest form — unplanned, unpolished and utterly authentic. This is how a CEO casts a shadow across the organisation. Not through speeches or posters instructing people to be ‘cost-conscious’, but through quiet, consistent behaviour that demonstrates what is acceptable and what is not.
Two days later, I was still at the hotel, working on a consulting assignment. That morning, another MD arrived — this one heading the Indian operations of a well-known German pharmaceuticals company. He, too, had scheduled a couple of meetings in Bengaluru and would be flying out the same evening.
Unlike Sharu, he had booked a suite. Not a room — a suite. He needed it, he said, for 'a few meetings'. The meetings lasted a couple of hours; the bill, of course, ran for the entire day.
There was nothing morally wrong about this. It was perfectly permissible. But the contrast between the two MDs, separated by just two days and a few metres of the same hotel corridor, could not have been sharper. And it was impossible to ignore the implications.
In the first case, the leader was frugal because he saw no reason not to be. In the second, the leader was extravagant because he saw no reason not to be.
The remarkable part is that in both cases, their organisations would be shaped by these unseen decisions. Employees observe their leaders far more closely than leaders imagine. A CEO does not merely sign budgets; he or she signals what budgeting means. If the person at the top treats the company’s money as if it were his own, managers often adopt the same practice. If the person at the top treats company funds as an entitlement, the organisation soon mirrors that behaviour as well — sometimes with alarming creativity.
This is why leadership lessons often hide in these small, almost forgettable moments. A CEO’s frugality (or lack thereof) does not remain personal. It becomes cultural. And culture, once formed, has a long half-life.
It also explains why two companies in the same industry, with similar products and comparable market conditions, sometimes behave entirely differently. One might run on a discipline that feels almost intrinsic, while the other drifts into a series of ‘small indulgences’ that eventually add up to strategic drift. Employees may never consciously reference the moment their CEO booked (or did not book) a suite at the West End Hotel, but that moment becomes encoded in the organisation’s way of thinking.
Looking back, the two MDs I encountered that week represent more than a budgeting contrast. They represent two philosophies of leadership. One says: I am responsible for the organisation’s resources. The other implies, however subtly: The organisation’s resources are there to support my comfort.
One philosophy builds cultures that last. The other builds habits that leak.
And so the lesson I came away with — and the one that feels even more relevant today — is simple: frugality is not about saving money; it is about setting direction. People don’t follow instructions; they follow examples. Leadership casts a shadow and everyone else walks within it.
In an age where leadership advice is usually packaged in thick books and glossy frameworks, I’m reminded that some of the clearest guidance can still come from a hotel lounge, a laptop balanced on a knee, and a CEO who chose not to book a room.
(Walter Vieira is a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of India - FIMC. He was a successful corporate executive for 14 years, capping his career as Head of marketing for a Pharma multinational, for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka- and then pioneered marketing consulting in India in 1975. As a consultant, he has worked across four continents. He was the first Asian elected Chairman of ICMCI, the world apex body of consultants in 45 countries, in 1997. He is the author of 16 books, a business columnist, international conference speaker and has been visiting professor in Marketing in the US, Europe, and Asia for over 40 years. He was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award for Consulting in 2005, and for Marketing in 2009. He now spends much of his time in NGO work - Consumer Education and Research Centre, IDOBRO, and some others.)
