Never on different sides of the ledger

Three days in Goa at M-Pact 2026, with leaders from US public accounting firms, India GCCs and academia.

AI was in almost every conversation.

But the questions I came back with were mostly about people.

• A GCC team can be brilliant. What stops it from still feeling like the "other" office?
• At what point does a GCC stop taking instructions and start shaping decisions?
• If AI increasingly does the work, what exactly is a manager managing?
• And if we're training accountants for roles that may look fundamentally different in ten years, what are we really preparing them for?

These aren't an outsider's questions for me. My career began at EY GDS. I know what it is to do the work well and still wonder whether the other office sees you as part of the team. Hearing leaders debate that same question a decade later, from the other side of the table, stayed with me.

There were no tidy answers in the room. That was precisely what made the conversations valuable.

Because technology may be moving fastest, but talent, culture, leadership and careers are where some of the hardest choices are going to sit.

M-Pact also gave a first look at something I've spent the last few months building: The India GCC Playbook, our Blue Book.

Fourteen leaders who have built GCCs and firms, writing candidly about what worked, what didn't, and the tensions that rarely make it into a case study. The full launch is still ahead, and I'm looking forward to seeing it out in the world.

Building the Blue Book and M-Pact alongside it reinforced something I believe about brands.

The visible output is only the last mile.

Before that come the harder questions: What should this stand for? Which conversations are worth creating? What would make a leader genuinely want to give this three days of their time?

Most people never see those decisions.

But that is where the brand is built.

I trained as a Chartered Accountant and found my way into marketing. For years, those felt like two different chapters.

They don't anymore.

Accounting taught me to look for substance. Marketing taught me to find the story in it.

And increasingly, I think the best marketing requires both: understanding the business deeply enough to know not just what to say, but what is worth saying in the first place.

Turns out the two were never on different sides of the ledger.