Utsav Malhotra is a multi-award-winning marketer, brand storyteller and cultural observer who has spent two decades inside Indian corporate life—not observing it from a distance, but inside it, with the fluorescent lighting and the Sunday-evening dread and the particular fatigue of someone who has sat through one too many strategy offsites at a resort two hours outside the city in August. 

Evidently, his perspective isn’t from the ivory tower. It’s from the trenches: from dropping out of engineering and stumbling into design school to sitting in trial rooms on wobbly chairs, to navigating mergers, layoffs and boss paranoia. This side-gallery view of corporate India has given him what MBAs and LinkedIn gurus lack—a brutally honest, lived-in understanding of what it actually takes to survive and thrive in middle management. 

He is the COO of Noise, India’s leading smartwatch brand and one of the largest in the world—a company built on the unfashionable conviction that making good products reliably, for people who actually want them, is a sufficient ambition. Before Noise, he spent years across brands, categories and organizations, doing the kind of work that rarely makes headlines and quietly determines whether a business holds together or doesn’t. 

He went on to do an MBA, excelled at it, and has spent most of his career wondering why neither education prepared him for the thing the job actually required: understanding people—what they want, what they fear, and what they will and won't say in a room depending on who else is in it. 

This book is his first, and it is unapologetically built for the 90 per cent: the average middle managers who may never trend on LinkedIn but quietly keep India Inc. running. It was written in the margins of a full-time job, which felt appropriate given what it is about.  

He lives in Gurugram with his family, who read every draft and told him, with consistent honesty, which parts were not as good as he thought they were.