MEL #065 | From Technical Expertise to Meaningful Impact Through Strategic Thinking and Asking Why with Dr. Bharat Madan

MADAN (00:00)

What is it that we are trying to solve? Why are we solving it? That matters. Most of the people are able to say what and how. I come in and say, why do we want to do this?

And that helps us to decode few things, apply necessary tools which are needed for that specific scenario instead of applying everything that we know. Everything is simple if you keep on asking why.

ADAMS (00:47)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Bharat Madan founder and managing partner of D Journey Advisory, a decision stage advisory for leaders driving AI, transformation, and value creation in complex transitions. Barat describes growing up in India with a civil engineer father who inspired his love of mathematics and problem solving. That early exposure made engineering an obvious career choice, while his curiosity about computers led him toward information technology.

After graduation, he quickly discovered that engineering was about much more than programming. Early assignments in strategy and healthcare technology taught him that connecting ideas, understanding business problems, and applying engineering thinking across domains were just as valuable as technical expertise. In our leadership segment, Bharat shares the story of introducing innovation into a traditional manufacturing company.

Instead of relying on executive mandates, he built momentum from the shop floor by encouraging frontline employees to identify problems and develop solutions. His advice to engineers interested in leadership? Focus on becoming outstanding people and problem solvers rather than chasing leadership titles. Leadership grows naturally when engineers combine technical excellence, patience, empathy, and continuous learning. Explore the full episode summary, including guest bio.

Key takeaways, transcript, and recommended resources in the show notes at drangeliqueadams.com/slash podcast. Without further delay, here is my conversation with Dr. Bharat Madan

ADAMS (02:21)

Hi, Bharat Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

MADAN (02:24)

Hey, Angelique, thank you so much. So happy to be here. So glad that you gave me this opportunity.

ADAMS (02:30)

I’m thrilled to have you here. Thank you. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

MADAN (02:35)

So originally I’m from India, right? You know, Angelique, I’m based out of Luxembourg, but I grew up in India. And in India, there’s a saying that you first become an engineer and then you decide who you want to be.

ADAMS (02:47)

What?

MADAN (02:48)

Jokes apart, right? my dad is an engineer. He’s a civil engineer. And I think he instilled that passion of studying mathematics and solving.

problems, right? So he would always challenge us when we were growing up, asking different mathematical problems, taking us to the construction site, talking about how engineers create, you know, new things, applying knowledge, and how passionate he was because he grew up in a very difficult scenario. So he started himself and he worked hard to become an engineer. So it was obvious for me that one of the choices or foremost choices

for me would be engineering. And then I’ll decide who I want to be. But as an education, this was clear. So that’s how I got into engineering and I picked up information technology, computer sciences. Because while I was growing up in high school, I loved computer sciences. I loved algorithms. I loved how we could talk to the silly machine and make it do weird stuff.

So that got me into engineering and yeah, since then I just keep on learning new things about it.

ADAMS (03:51)

And can you talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve done with your engineering degree? And then I know you also went on to get additional education. So can you talk a little bit about that?

MADAN (03:59)

Yeah, I, especially in my case, right? So I did my engineering and in India, in engineering schools, while you’re already there, the companies, they would come and visit the campus and then they’ll recruit you. Right? So one of the largest Indian IT service providers, they were visiting the campus and they offered me a job. So after my engineering, I joined them as software engineer trainee and

And it’s one of the major learnings, right? So after four years of graduation, again, they asked us to go back and learn more stuff about engineering, right? So we were sent for an internal school for four months, all sponsored, so it was a job, but for four months, we were learning different programming languages, different data structures, applications for it, right? How do you apply what you have learned now in a professional scenario?

So in those four months, we learned different things. We were working on different applications from banking to insurance to healthcare. But at the end, I was asked to join corporate strategy. being an engineering conglomerate, this company was called, it’s still called Larson and Toubro. It’s a huge engineering conglomerate in India. They construct everything from nuclear plants to roads to bridges to information technology. So I started with them.

as a software engineer trainee, but within four months, I was in the corporate strategy department where we were working more on solving business issues. How this engineering company, which was into manufacturing domain, how can this become now a professional IT service and consulting organization? So I was working with McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group at that time, helping them to do the IPO preparedness program.

And that was my first application of what I learned as an engineer, which did not involve programming, but it involved connecting the dots. It involves solving the issues. And this I did for about six months to one year. And immediately after that, I moved to business unit strategy. That’s where I started to apply engineering fundamentals. I joined a group called healthcare within the large company. were setting up healthcare IT organization for the American market.

HIPAA compliant electronic health records and personal health records. So very quickly, I had to learn the agile programming, agile management and the product management to develop a product. So I worked more towards the aspects of identifying the business problems, right? Doing the market study and converting them into product specifications and then working with the architects to develop those solutions. So essentially I did not get

too much of hands-on in the early days in programming. But that’s where I keep on, even with my son, I keep on talking about, it does not mean that that’s not engineering. Applying different things in a different way is engineering, specifically for the current context, when now you can wipe code. People who have not learned by heart the programming aspects, which we did for four years, now you can do it on day one. So if you have logic,

you can start to apply things and get the results. So that’s how I started to apply what I learned. And one of the other most important things, at least from the college where I was coming in from the engineering school that I learned was how do you prepare yourself at a very, you know, within the constraints and solve the problem, right? So in the engineering school, we had so many topics we were bombarded on, right? So the applications

time was limited. But at the same time, we didn’t know. We had to find different ways to solve those aspects and then very quickly turn out the results. Similarly, in the current context, when I was working, we had to work on different problems, identifying, searching on different things, researching on it, and then trying to just connect the dots together and solve it. Yeah, the hardening part.

really helped from the school.

ADAMS (07:48)

So one of the things that comes to mind on what you’re talking about, you know, you’ve you’ve done work in various different domains. So you talked about healthcare records, and then of course you and I met while we were both at Aperam which is a heavy manufacturing environment, and now you’re you have your your own advisory business in in AI. And so you have, and I’m sure there are probably other stops along the way, but you have been in situations where you’re devising the strategy and implementation in very different domains. And I’m just curious.

How you go about educating yourself and coming up the learning curve on these different domains such that you can, you know, help advise on strategy.

MADAN (08:25)

Yeah, the curiosity. That’s I’ve always been curious, right? So I started to program when I was in high school, when we were not offered this as a text, you know, as a subject. So this is one of the issues with me. If you tell me that this is the textbook, then I’m not interested. I’m always venturing around. And that that curiosity has always helped me and that put me in this specific

unique position where not many people are fitting and not many people are needed at the same time, right? People who can work at the intersection of different things. Those, know, the Venn diagram where there’s a strategy, there’s technology, and then there’s change management. How do you find yourself within those intersections is where I enjoy being in that position to be able to predict what might happen in different business models by studying, you know,

different books, you know, following I’m a voracious reader, not so much now because of internet and everything that I keep on exposing myself with. So I always expose myself, whatever is coming in the market, studying it, and then trying to apply it, even if it fails, right? When we met in upper arm, I was applying one of the books I was inspired during that time before you joined, which was leading startup book by Eric Rees, right? So I was basically implementing the entire

startup way of thinking in the manufacturing domain because I was inspired by a book and I thought this will work and I experimented it worked fine. the ability to understand what is happening in the market, then what are the problem statements and asking the right questions and then solving it gives me different kinds of happiness. I love to pause, reframe and reflect every single.

And that has helped me to move my business from one domain to the other. And I keep on after 20 years into this, you know, industry of being in corporate, being in manufacturing, being in entrepreneurship and strategy consulting. I see same patterns keep on repeating. We were just talking before we start, right? So you saw how the lean manufacturing started and then there was, you know, WW website, internet connectivity bomb.

Then we talked about digital transformation. Before that, was cloud strategy. And now everybody wants to talk about AI strategy. And every single time, the buzzword is different. But fundamentally, how do we fix the process? How do we ask right questions? What is it that we are trying to solve? Why are we solving it? That matters. Most of the people are able to say what and how. I come in and say, why do we want to do this?

And that helps us to decode few things, apply necessary tools which are needed for that specific scenario instead of applying everything that we know. Just try to solve. Everything is simple if you keep on asking why. So we try to find problems for solutions that we have created as engineers or as technologists. So somebody would come up and

come up and say, I have a patent, you might have seen it much more than me. You know, being R &D leader. So the innovation guys, they will come up and say, okay, we have found a wonderful technology or a solution. This is a patented technology. Let’s find a problem that it can solve. I hate that scenario. Although I, with all full respect to the scientists, it should be the other way around. Try it. Let’s try to ask what is the problem and then see what are the tools available that can solve this problem.

That’s engineering, you do not try to create something new, you apply what you know. yeah, since then, I’ve been doing this and it works so far because I’m able to connect those things by being empathetic with the senior leaders who are trying to say, okay, Bharat, we tried to implement AI strategy. We caught expensive, smart guys who developed this AI strategy for us. Now things are not materializing. We have wasted millions of dollars.

What is the issue? And we come and start to ask those questions. Did you find the right use case? Are these use case scalable? Did you think about the future? If the AI in this scenario is going to take over, who will take the governance aspect of it? Who will make the decision? If your processes are broken, the AI agents will be broken also, right? Because you’re replicating what you know. So asking those questions are helping us to…

get those leaders, go back to the fundamentals of process engineering, process management, governance aspects. Because at the end, all those golden books that we have read is much more useful, right? All the things that we have read from high school to graduation, those are the holy grail of everything that we do instead of jumping the guns.

ADAMS (13:14)

All right, Bharat, can you give us an example of how you use leadership skills in your work?

MADAN (13:18)

Yeah, so that’s a very broad topic. You need to use leadership skills in everything that you do. That’s my personal belief. But let me pick up one of the examples. And since we are talking, I’ll talk about one of the manufacturing companies example where I was heading digital transformation and digital innovation practice for a very traditional company, which is, you know,

company where a lot of blue-collared workers are working. So there, the objective for me was to bring in innovative technologies being used. And I’m talking about a few years ago, so in 2016, 10 years ago or so. So when AI was still not a buzzword, so we wanted to bring AI, drones technology, vision analytics. And my agenda was to try and bring this forward because I totally believed in

And in the beginning, I started with a very traditional way, trying to convince one of the plant leaders, picking up one of the examples, can we do it? But then the support was never there. So the top down in presentations and then going through this cycle of manufacturing industry, which is quite slow, did not materialize. So I was reading and have been practicing lean startup methodology, which is build, measure, and learn. So you build something

MVP, minimum viable product, which is very useful concept for any engineers then should know it, right? And then measure, so you deploy your product and you measure the results, then you learn from it, right? So instead of building the entire Ferrari, how can you build, you know, a simple bicycle to go from point A to B and then learn from the experiences. So designing the hypothesis, then running the experiments.

So instead of going top down, I developed that innovation process, which was about setting up the, I called it learning labs. And in between there was experimental labs and then the design lab so that you can push things forward. using this particular cycle, start, instead of going top down, right? This is where the leadership principles are very deep. I started to go bottom up.

I started to launch small innovation days in the plants to motivate blue-collared workers. So I would rather, instead of taking permissions, I asked for forgiveness from the plant because I was not doing anything harmful. So in the scenarios, before I reached to the end, there was an innovation day that we established in one of the plants, and I knew vision analytics for one of the use cases would work, where we wanted to use

the cameras and the data analytics to predict and to find out the flaws on the surface of steel. How can you do that? And I knew the solution would work, but we were not able to deploy it from top down or different aspects. So instead of that, we showed them the videos of Pizza Hut or Domino’s, I forgot which one was that, where they were showing how they use the vision analytics to confirm the quality of pizza.

And after showing this, we asked that question from the blue collared workers, quality leads, how would you use this if you had to use this, right? Because they were very excited. What would be your idea from that? And proactively, all of them or many of them started to give the same example that we wanted to. And then we said, that’s a wonderful example. Why don’t you apply it? Right. We will support you. And that helped us to build a business case. So using that,

As one of my first success, I went back to the board and we got the support. And together with other leaders, we were able to launch the entire innovation cycle for the entire company, where we were able to gamify this identifying of problem statements from the blue collared workers, asking them how would they solve it, bringing them into one team following the three processes, right? That I talked about in the beginning.

and then giving them an opportunity to show their POCs or their, I call them pretotypes, not prototypes, right? So a wireframe, things that people can see, right? If it’s not deployed. And we let people vote for it, right? As if they were venture capitalists, right? So this created a lot of excitement across the company. And at the end, there were 10 groups that were selected and the entire leadership team was there to

to listen to those pitches. So we trained the leadership team to act like shark tanks, judges, and all the participants, were there. We made the entire campaign around it. So the couple of the, first of all, all 10 were successful. They were able to go back to the plants. They were able to launch those initiatives. The top two were supported by the management team and the first winner, I think it became a spin-off from the company. So it’s now a successful company independently itself. So that,

For me, not just me, everybody who was involved in that activity, every single person from blue collar to white collar workers who came together and worked together, they fought against the flow. When nobody was believing in them, people thought the manufacturing companies, they’re elephants and they move slow. These guys were able to show how they can move in a controlled environment.

and they all use new tools that we were able to train them. So the business model canvas, the blue ocean strategy, all those things that a management consulting company would bring in, these guys were using it. So they were able to use it, deploy it, because they wanted to be entrepreneur. wanted to show that I matter. And that for me was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. After that, so many people reached out to me.

some people who were very emotional that they got an opportunity to present their idea to the CEO was very exciting while they were talking about things that they did for 20 years and they are the right people who can make change, right? that, you know, enabling those guys to use the tools, to use the things that they already knew and then letting them show what they can actually show.

I see myself not doing anything at the same time. This was something that they needed. And I always keep on going back to my students and the people that I coach to talk about that leadership is not about just going inside the room and announcing that this is what I need to do. It’s the bottom up initiatives, enabling people who know the most and giving them the confidence that they need and let them shine. So you need to sit in the background and then smile.

and look at those ads. That’s the leadership I want to continue, hopefully, to continue to live for and be brave. So I was challenged. even after that, I was challenged a lot about the fundamentals of those things. Why do you want to do this? What are the other things that are useful? Why are you not following traditional project management principles? Sometimes you need to just challenge the status quo as the leader and stay firm for it. Live by your values.

And that’s your character. So whatever is your character, live by it and make sure that you follow until the end is the correct leadership style according to me.

ADAMS (20:10)

That’s a great example. There’s there’s a lot of important pieces to that that I want to touch on. I think the first thing that comes to mind is kind of what you were talking about towards the end, is I’m sure it was challenging, right? So you are going against sort of the traditional dogma in a traditional company. because you have a vision and you want to bring something new and you wanna you wanna do this bottoms up.

Can you talk just a little bit about some of the strategies that you personally use to kind of persevere through those initial stages, right? I’m sure it was really tough in the beginning, but then once you actually had a success or two, it sounds like it probably really snowballed from there and you got a lot of momentum.

MADAN (20:48)

Yeah, so it was hard, right? And it was hard even to continue to, you know, even after the success to continue to make sure that you go to the success 2.0, it’s not easy. But in the beginning, it was really, really difficult. And I think the boring part and the things that you don’t see are the most important things, right? Because when I was developing this, you…

as an individual or as a team, you would go with your own assumptions that I am passionate about this technique, this tool, this process, and I think leadership team should pay money for that. And then you start to feel very upset because when you go in present, you do not get any reaction. And then you start to believe the other guys do not understand. But I think what changed us as the team during that time, once we started to receive all those feedback that this will not materialize,

And then we went through this phase of feeling upset about the leadership team that they don’t understand the kind of vision that we are offering. challenged ourselves that because we talked about design thinking workshops a lot, right? We did a lot of design thinking workshops in the company itself. Then we realized as a team that are we implementing what we are teaching to the other people, which is empathy. When you’re designing a solution,

you treat your customer, you think about your customer, you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and then you design and engineer a solution. In our case, we were not doing it. So then when we started to think about each and every four or five leadership team member we were supposed to get approval from, we started to think about what are their challenges. As a CEO, you are managing a very difficult scenario.

a company that is dealing in a very difficult situation, the market is going down, it’s not easy to change a manufacturing company in, you know, like a technology company, you cannot deploy another solution and start to test, they have to be very careful, right? And the profitability is not very high, etc, etc. So you need to get your attention in that format. So I started to win the trust from the guy who showed more interest in innovation, I will not name that person, of course.

and started to show the early results first. So as I said, the couple of examples where I asked for forgiveness, I told them this is something that I should not be doing. But hey, look at this particular scenario. We were able to move things forward. The thing that took us six months, now we were able to do it in six weeks or four weeks. So this is the money at stake and things at stake we were able to prove from that scenario. So give me an opportunity because we are

deploying a lean startup based work. So we will not ask for huge money or any budget. So all I need is your approval. And that helped me a lot because I did not ask for budget. I gave them outcome first. Once the outcome was delivered, they started to put in their effort and trust because they were obviously right. Nobody should burn their budget like that. Otherwise it becomes an innovation later. What we see in other companies.

This manufacturing company was very useful because it made me very humble, made me understand the value of patience, made me understand the value of alignment. Because if you’re not aligned as humans, at the end, we all are humans. So if I was not aligned with all the other leadership team members, things will not fly. And that was what I got a coach from the leadership team. And I was coached by in that particular format that before I would go and present the entire business case.

I would go to each and every single leadership team member, have an alignment first, understand, empathize, and then make sure that all those points are validated in the final discussion. And that helped me to push things forward.

ADAMS (24:30)

All right. As we wrap up, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

MADAN (24:36)

Yeah, so I can talk about it for next couple of hours and not stop. It’s very difficult to summarize in few words, but I would definitely say that all engineers or whoever wants to be a leader should carve themselves out, should work on themselves during the early days. They should not try to fix

the processes in the early days, they should try to learn from each and everything that is happening around them. Perseverance is very important for early starters in the, know, once you start your career, at least from my experiences, right? So as a young person, I wanted to be, or I still want to be ruthless sometimes. I want to move fast, move fast. Pace is very important, but for leadership style, sometimes patience is the most important.

aspect. So how do you develop the sense of maturity to pause, as I repeated earlier. So you need to pause at a scenario, then reframe how you see things. As an engineer, as a person, as a leader, I always challenge myself. How would I do it differently? What is it that is missing?

when the engineers are joining any kind of company, technology or manufacturing company, they’re given a project, they should ask themselves first that how would I do it differently? What is it that other people are missing? Can I add more value? And then after they have reframed it, try to implement it because becoming a leader should not be a destination, right? It should naturally come according to me, right? So I would not…

see myself, being leader should not be a goal according to me. It should just come naturally. They should be a good engineer. They should be a good human being. They should be a good problem solver. Whatever is their value deep inside, just nurture those values and make sure that they use those values, look at things differently, offer those things, be open to change in the early days. And also later on, of course.

and then see how the results would be delivered because people who just want to be leader, they will end up becoming team leaders, not the human leaders. So maybe I’m wrong, but that would be my suggestion that please work on your human aspects. Please make sure that those values are seen by everyone else. Find a mentor. That’s very, very, very important. Find a mentor, a coach,

who is sitting besides you, right? So who is cheering for you, somebody who you can talk to and then take it from there. Yeah.

ADAMS (27:05)

Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

MADAN (27:08)

Thank you so much, Angelique. Love talking to you today.