I'm Shirisha Nagendran. Most people call me Siri.
I spent the first five years of my career being competent. That is not a small thing. It means building credibility from scratch, delivering under pressure, earning trust across teams and cultures, developing judgment about what matters and what does not, and doing all of this consistently enough that people begin to rely on you. It took time, and it took real effort. Eventually, I got there.
I grew up and was educated in India, and then came to the UK to do my MBA at Cranfield School of Management. That is where my understanding of organisations changed.
Until then, I had been working hard and performing well without fully understanding the system I was operating in. At Cranfield, for the first time, I was being taught how organisations and people actually work: the political styles that shape how decisions get made, the games being played in any room you walk into, and how to read them. I was also taught how culture works, including Hofstede's cultural dimensions model, power distance, and what those differences actually mean when you are working across geographies and teams. For the first time, what I had been living through had a name.
I carried that understanding into Deutsche Bank and HSBC, and every role within those organisations, working across two continents in environments that were large, complex, politically intricate, and deeply multicultural, progressing to senior leadership in my early thirties, at a time when that was not common, especially for women.
I was doing all of this as a woman with unconventional personal circumstances, at least by the standards of the time. There was no playbook for the combination I was carrying. I had to work things out from scratch, in real time, and I did. That experience shaped the questions I learned to ask, and it is part of why I take organisational systems seriously rather than assuming they are neutral.
