What does real leadership look like in a world obsessed with celebrity, conflict, and short-term wins? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Saji Madapat, a global transformation architect, author, and cultural myth-maker whose work spans Fortune 10 boardrooms, geopolitical strategy rooms, and ancient ritual traditions of Southern India. With more than 30 years of experience across 40+ countries, Saji brings a rare and provocative perspective on what leadership has become and what it must return to if we are to navigate the economic, social, and cultural disruptions of our time.

This episode is an invitation for founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and conscious leaders to rethink what they are building, who they are becoming, and how they are leading in the Creative Age.

What You Will Learn:

Why modern leadership has shifted toward celebrity and conflict, and how that shift is eroding trust, stability, and long-term impact.

How the core leadership qualities of charisma, confidence, and character have been diluted in today’s short-term, attention-driven culture.

What it truly means to lead from behind and why this approach is essential in knowledge-based and people-powered organizations.

How short-term “hunter” mindsets undermine organizational resilience during economic and cultural disruption.

Why building sustainable, values-driven organizations requires patience, foresight, and a long-term leadership horizon.

How historical leaders modeled strength without performative leadership or ego-driven authority.

What Eastern leadership philosophies reveal about endurance, diagnostics, and long-term nation and business building.

Why surrounding yourself with people who challenge your thinking is critical for innovation and conscious leadership.

How leaders can prepare their organizations to weather uncertainty, volatility, and systemic change.

Why character-based leadership outlasts charisma when markets shift and crises emerge.

Resource:

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Now here's your host, Anjel b Hartwell.

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world class examples of the kind of courage. Clarity and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

Who excels in ancient damn rituals. He's your strategic Virgil through the Digital Inferno part, myth Maker, part McKinsey All Maverick, and he is the author of a dozen best sellers, including the Gods of God's own country, and the Gods Must Be Crazy available in 20 languages. I'm so excited to have you here on the show today.

Welcome, Saji.

Anjel: Thank you so much. I appreciate having you here. I wanna ask you to begin with what you view the role of the leader right now and. While you're answering that question, I'd love to hear what in your background shapes your thoughts on the role of the leader right now?

Saji: The role of the leader. You know, if you look at it, what perspective you are asking, you know, from, you know, especially in, in, in the age we are living in, I put it in three, three Cs, you know, the way personally looking at from more from air.

Many of our, if you, if you take a look at it, the Theodore Roosevelt and, you know, they had the charisma, the confidence, and, you know, and, and the character. Unfortunately those elements are missing and you know, we, we are in the age of celebrity and conflict in that kind of world. We are in. This is where especially we need to look back our own history, whether it is from the, from the Western world, well, or you know, or FDR, that kind of leaders.

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. So let's talk about your own leadership journey, Saji. Mm-hmm. Were you as a child, a leader from behind? Mm-hmm. Or did you, or, you know, did you step into your own leadership role later along your life path?

Saji: The, the leadership is in, from my perspective, it is more of a journey. And again, from a leading from behind, you know, that, that, that kind of, you know, if I may give a little bit of his, my background.

Mm-hmm. I was born and brought up in a, uh, a country country called the gods of Gods own country. The state called Kerala. You know, that that is where the first time in the, uh, in the history, the world history, a communist government was democratically elected even before. Just giving a little bit of flavor of that, that is a place where we believe we have followers of St.

They converted that part of the state, you know. So as a result, it's a hundred percentage literate, that state. And along with the literacy, they brought the communism also to that part of the world. So, as a result. There is no industry over there. It's industrial desert. So after my engineering, I came out of that state, you know, for my jobs, you know, like many of us, you know, they, they live almost every other person in the, you know, in, in every house.

You know, they live in outside that state or outside the country. So I came to the, as a product of Y 2K, I came to this part of the world. So since then I had, you know, my fair share of tiger, right? In this part of the world, I've seen, especially in the, from the corporate perspective. I've seen some of those.

But when I look back from the leadership perspective, I realize the world is big way changing. The kind of leadership which we are following, as I mentioned, the celebrity kind of leadership. Looking at it from more of a more from a hundred kind of mindset. We are looking into it in a very short term kind of mindset.

We are looking into it versus the kind of leadership, you know, like the east is following, especially if I may put it in from China, is following. So more from a pharma kind of mindset, you know? Building the, from a, from a diagnostical point of view versus on, on this part of the world, a hundred kind of mindset.

This part of the world, in a way, we are looking at a very short term hunter kind of mindset, you know, leadership. Yeah. Yeah. I think we need to, we need to take a, we need to look at our own history, our own leaders, like whether it's a, or, you know, FTR, and we need to, we need to bring that kind of leadership back to this, you know, other, otherwise we are, we are in big way in trouble.

Anjel: Well, we're already in trouble. We're already in trouble In the current reality in a lot of ways, and I don't disagree with you, that the whole idea of the celebrity and, you know, poking, poking, poking, poking for more and more conflict is not getting us, you know, collectively where we really need to go.

Saji: Mm-hmm.

Anjel: And yet there, you know, the culture is rewarding. The, you know, the slash and burn leadership, the culture is rewarding. The hunter leadership, the culture and financial, especially financially is rewarding this conflict and celebrity type of leadership. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about this idea of leading from behind and what your thoughts are on how we can support the leaders.

Who want to be more charismatic, who want to be more confident, and who also want to have good character.

A bunch of very, very, very, from a very short term perspective, so they're looking for a next skill or they're trying to sell, you know, like the company to a Google or the Amazon or that kind of, you know, the big place. They're looking for the exit, very short term mentality. You know, the VCs and the, all the typical investors, they have very short term horizon.

With all the short term, some, whether it's a quarterly profit or with, we are looking at a very short term. We are looking, the China is trying to build a camel over here. We are, we, we, we are trying to build a very short term, you know, organizations. Mm-hmm. And especially when the tide goes out.

Anjel: Mm.

Saji: And we, you know, with all the AI data centers, you know, like the trillions dollars, dollars, you know, like if we, if you're looking at this, if you're watching the stock market, you can see the fluctuations every week happen.

And to do that kind of, you know, to build that kind of leadership. So you need to have a, you need. The leaders need to fo lead from behind because there is no way in the, especially many of your entrepreneurs, and they're living in the knowledge, knowledge economy. Am I right? Many of them are. Mm-hmm. You, you need, if you want to get things done through, you need to, at the end of the day, you need to get things done through your team.

You need to be a role model. You need to motivate them. You need to lead from behind and. So otherwise, and if you are a show business, you know, if you are a showman, that can only take you, you know. Short term success.

Anjel: Yeah, it can only take you so far. I love the idea of who is swimming naked. We're gonna see who is swimming naked.

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Tell us a little bit more about that and also what are listeners can find when they go to your website.

Saji: Yeah. Again, thank you again for the appreciate the opportunity. The theum, you know, the, I'm, as I mentioned earlier, I'm from the. The goats of Gods own countries. Southwestern part of India, it is a 5,000 year old civilization, especially some of those in the southern part of the world in that, you know, the, the Gods own country about there are about 800 different indigen gods in that part of the world.

About 800 of those courts visit. In between October and April, may timeframe, and this amazingly I've been to around 20 plus different countries with my camera. There's no other place on the world you can do the pilgrimage of visiting, you know, 800 different goats and in, in one season at least. And this is a ritualistic festival from the ritual from a 5,000 year old civilization.

rebels

Saji: in front of the community. Yeah.

Anjel: Okay, so tell us about your website. What are people gonna find when they get there? They're gonna find your books, they're gonna find, what else are they gonna find when they get there?

Saji: I'm a multimedia person, so they visit my website. Of course they can, in the book section, they can see about a dozen of my books, which I published know most of out of dozen roundabouts. Eight or nine of them are on the three, you know, various stories. And two of them are on the, on the business side and know that's actually what I'm practicing.

In addition to that one, if you look at especially the item section, particularly a that, that, that festivity, the 3M festivity happened 87 years. It is, um, I don't think that I'm going to get going to live that long. Right. To see that another festival of, you know, even that festival was blessed by the Prime Minister of India, Miranda Modi.

Yeah.

Anjel: Beautiful. Talk to us a little bit about how you blend your incredible success at being able to. Lead and serve in very high, high echelons of the world, you know, fortune 10 boardrooms.

Saji: Mm-hmm.

Anjel: And, and this, this ritual, this festival, this dancing with the gods that you do. Mm-hmm. How do those two go together?

We need to. Instead of reading some of those wrong, the worshiping some of the wrong gods, we need to look at our own field, read through the obituaries of some of our own, for example, the FDR or the theater, or in this part of the world, we, we can learn much more than what we learned from the typical management institutes.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Saji: Here, or Yeah. This is, you know, again, the world is big way changing. So we are, we are worshiping the unicorns, especially from the. Entrepreneurial perspective, very short term perspective. We are, we are, we are trying to build the unicorns which last, which don't last for the desert and the storms and especially in the today's economic tsunami world and in the new normal we are living in.

Instead, we need to try to build a, came. Which can sustain all the, all the storms and the desert, desert and all those stuff. You know, especially, and this is where we need to look, this is where, you know, we need to look at our own history. We need to look at our own who, who built this country, you know, especially mm-hmm.

The, the, especially the Theodore Roosevelt, you know?

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Anjel: Mm. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, in the last couple of minutes that we have mm-hmm. I'm curious of the, you know, the people who are listening, like who are the people who actually you want to work with?

Are you like hired as a consultant or do you, you know, do you want, are employed by somebody or how does that work? Who are the people that you most want to influence and impact and work with?

Saji: The people I've been to around. I did a lot of juries in my life, you know, starting as a, a, a industrial engineer and working in India and through the y time scene and from my perspective, the biggest blonde brand in the, in the business history.

As we discussed earlier, you know, we started worshiping the unicorns and the very short term people, very short term minded. We are looking for the yes boss kind of, you know, the people around us, if I'm the, the boss, rather work with the people, those who don't agree with me in a healthy way.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Saji: So if the people, the people, those who are reporting to me, if they agree with me.

Taking the best out of, you know, uh, from do, from from those people. And especially if you look at it, especially the most of the growth is happening over here. Let me put it, this is all the stock market, the whole economies right now propped up by the AI data center investment. The rest of the secure, like entrepreneurial, the business people they may be experiencing, you know, the, they know how the economy is doing.

They farm for the, for the generations. Yeah. Farming. So that can farming, that can build a, the, the core, you know, organizational dynasty, you know, that, that's what I primarily look for. Yeah.

Anjel: Beautiful. We love the farmers who are building the for the generations and for the dynasty. Well, thank you so much for coming today, Saji.

I've really appreciated having this conversation with you and listeners. We love feedback. Please let us know what you think of today's show by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions. You can weave your visionary thread into our fabric by opting in on our website at.

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