“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was sitting in a wood-panelled boardroom in South Mumbai in early December, the kind of room where the air feels heavy with the history of old industry and the nervous energy of new money. Across from me sat a candidate for a CEO role; a brilliant man in his late forties, with a resume that read like a map of global successes.
I had spent the previous evening reading his LinkedIn articles and his published white papers. On screen, he was a marvel of modern corporate precision. His prose was lean, his metaphors were “global,” and his thoughts were packaged into perfectly digestible, algorithm-friendly insights. He sounded, for lack of a better word, like a high-end brochure printed in Palo Alto.
And then, he started to speak!
As we moved past the initial pleasantries and into the thick of his leadership philosophy, the “brochure” began to crack, and something far more interesting emerged. He spoke with a rhythmic, educated Indian cadence. He used metaphors involving local train commutes and the specific chaos of Indian monsoons to explain resilience. He had a way of pronouncing certain words – data, schedule, record, attitude – that carried the unmistakable ghost of a schoolteacher from a small town in Karnataka. He was sharp, he was funny, and he was deeply, authentically himself.
I found myself wondering why the man in front of me had so little in common with the man I had read the night before. Why had he felt the need to scrub his written voice until it was as sterile as a hospital corridor?
In my experience in leadership search and consulting, I have seen many trends come and go, but this quiet homogenisation of the Indian professional voice is perhaps the most tragic. We are witnessing a strange, voluntary erasure of personality. It usually begins with a well-intentioned desire for “polish.” A leader drafts a thought, perhaps something deeply felt about the challenges of scaling a business in a Tier-2 city. But then, that thought is handed over, possibly, to a digital assistant, an AI tool, or a communications team trained on Western templates.
The software looks at the raw, textured prose of an Indian leader and sees “errors” to be corrected. It sees “organise” and suggests “organize.” It sees a long, winding sentence that captures the complexity of a local negotiation and suggests three short, punchy bullets instead. It takes the warmth, the wit, and the wryness of our natural way of speaking and runs it through a linguistic car wash. What comes out the other side is perfectly clean, undeniably professional, and entirely anonymous.
I call it the “Sanitised Default.” It is the sound of a leader who has outsourced their conscience to a Silicon Valley spellchecker.
The irony is that we do this in the name of sounding “global.” We believe that by adopting a neutral, Americanised corporate dialect, we are making ourselves more palatable to the world. But in my experience, the world is looking for something more authentic!
Boards of directors, global investors, and talented candidates are not looking for leaders who can mimic a generic template. They are looking for people who possess a distinct, recognisable point of view. They are looking for the “fingerprints” on the words.
When I read a leadership post that talks about “leveraging synergies to drive impactful outcomes,” I learn nothing about the person behind the text. I only learn that they know how to use a dictionary of clichés. But when I read a leader who writes the way they actually talk; who allows the cadence of Indian English to breathe, who isn’t afraid of a culturally specific reference, and who keeps the “u” in “honour” because that is how they were taught to respect the language, I feel a connection. I feel the presence of a human being who is comfortable in their own skin.
There is a particular texture to the way we speak in this country. It is a language shaped by the heat, the crowds, and the incredible diversity of our experiences. It is an English that has been seasoned by a dozen other mother tongues. It is sophisticated, it is layered, and it is ours. To abandon it for a “correct” version dictated by an algorithm is not just lazy; it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what leadership requires. Leadership, at its core, is about trust. And trust is very hard to build when you sound like a content mill in Seattle.
I often tell my young colleagues that the most valuable thing a candidate can bring to an interview is their “original frequency.” You can teach a smart person how to read a P&L or how to manage a board. You cannot teach them how to have a soul.
That soul is expressed through their voice. If you allow a machine to decide how you sound, you are essentially telling the world that you have nothing original to say.
Even after three decades in executive search, I am still fascinated by the power of a single, authentic voice to change the direction of a company. I have sat in meetings where a single sentence, delivered with the right local inflection and the right personal conviction, has settled a multi-million dollar dispute. That power doesn’t come from being “grammatically compliant” with a software update. It comes from being rooted.
We need to stop being so afraid of our own linguistic anchors. Whether you are writing from a high-rise in Mumbai, a campus in Bengaluru, or a home office in Gurgaon, let your writing reflect where you stand. Use the tools, by all means – I am not a Luddite – but treat them as servants, not masters. Let them catch your typos, but do not let them rewrite your identity.
The next time you sit down to write a message to your team or a post for the world to see, I invite you to do a simple test. Read it aloud. If it sounds like a stranger, or worse, if it sounds like a machine, delete it. Start again. Write it as if you were speaking to an old friend over a cup of filter coffee. Keep the “u” in “flavour.” Keep the long, descriptive sentences if they feel right. Keep the “chatpata” energy that makes our business culture so vibrant.
In a world that is rapidly becoming a sea of algorithmically optimised sameness, the most sophisticated thing you can be is yourself. Your voice is your signature. Don’t let a spellchecker forge it.
Happy New Year to all of you! May 2026 help you to reclaim the original “you”.