It’s been a long time since the field of finance moved beyond numbers and textbooks. After gaining a vast repertoire of experience in it, Dr Bhaskar Roy—the former Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer aka COO at Globus Spirits Ltd—describes his hard-earned wisdom – the kind that never appears in numbers or textbooks but becomes the decisive factor at senior levels as:
The Most Critical Non-Textbook Skill
“The ability to read people and intentions—faster and more accurately than they can read you.”
This goes far beyond emotional intelligence, believes Dr Roy. He adds, “Veteran finance leaders will tell you that once you climb high enough, the hardest problems are not numbers, not models, not markets — they are people’s incentives, hidden agendas, and unspoken fears.”
Why This Skill Matters Most in Corporate Finance
- Deals don’t fall apart because of valuation — they fall apart because of people.
M&A negotiations, bank covenants, JV partnerships, board approvals — the stated numbers matter less than:
- who actually has veto power,
- what someone is afraid to reveal,
- whose career depends on what outcome.
- Market movements are predictable compared to internal politics.
Finance leaders spend enormous energy on:
- reading board dynamics,
- sensing shifting power centers,
- knowing when a “yes” is actually a “no in slow motion.”
- Early detection of trouble saves more value than forecasting ever does.
A sudden silence from a lender, a subtle change in a regulator’s tone, a business unit head avoiding detail — these micro-signals tell you everything before the P&L does.
Dr Roy believes that senior finance leaders like him typically acquire this skill
✔ By being blindsided early in their career.
A deal he and his team thought was solid collapsed for a reason no spreadsheet captured.
This teaches: “Numbers don’t move people — people move numbers.”
✔ By sitting in enough boardrooms to recognize patterns.
You start to see who influences whom, who freezes under pressure, and who negotiates indirectly.
✔ By managing crises.
Cash crunches, hostile lenders, regulatory scrutiny — these moments sharpen your ability to read intent because survival depends on it.
✔ By watching what people do, not what they say.
A CEO who postpones a meeting twice is telling you more than their strategy deck.
✔ By losing when they trusted words instead of incentives
Everyone learns this one the hard way.
The Distilled Wisdom
“In finance, your real edge isn’t numerical accuracy — it’s the accuracy of your judgment about people,” insists Dr Roy.
Dr Roy puts it this way: “A spreadsheet tells you what should happen. A person’s incentives tell you what will happen.”
Reflecting on the Crises Crucible
Dr Roy says that since he didn’t personally live through crises, he’s gained the wisdom of how other veterans managed capital through the Dot-com Bust, 2008 GFC, the Taper Tantrum, and the Pandemic Crash consistently. He describes it as the single strategic lesson that permanently reshaped the market philosophy.
Most Profound Strategic Lesson:
“Liquidity is not a metric — it is your oxygen, and you must already have it before you need it.”
Across every major crisis, the professionals who survived (and often emerged stronger) credit one insight:
Return on capital matters far less than return of capital —
and liquidity is the only thing that protects both.
Why This Lesson Changes Investment Philosophy
- Crises are not about losses — they are about the timing of losses.
You can hold good assets through drawdowns.
But you cannot hold anything if you’re forced to sell to meet:
- redemptions
- margin calls
- working capital deficits
- loan covenants
- vendor or payroll obligations
Veterans realized:
The market doesn’t kill you. Forced selling does.
- Liquidity evaporates exactly when you need it most.
This is the recurring pattern in 2000, 2008, and 2020:
- Buyers disappear.
- Bid–ask spreads explode.
- Funding windows shut.
- Banks tighten even for their best clients.
- Even AAA collateral is discounted.
The lesson:
If your plan depends on selling into a crisis, you don’t have a plan — you have a hope.
- Crises reward those who can play offense while others play defense.
Those with liquidity in 2008 bought distressed credit at 20–40 cents.
Those with liquidity in 2020 bought blue-chip equities at 30–50% discounts.
Those without liquidity sold the same assets at fire-sale prices.
Thus, the philosophical shift:
Liquidity isn’t just protection — it is the capacity to be greedy when the world is fearful.
How does this insight change capital allocation strategy?
Before crises
Most portfolios chase optimization — “efficient frontier”, maximum IRR, lowest idle cash.
After living through crises
Veterans adopt a different ruleset:
✔ Maintain redundant liquidity, not “optimal” liquidity
Two layers:
- Operating liquidity
- Strategic “crisis liquidity.”
✔ Duration mismatch kills faster than bad assets
Match funding to asset lives.
Short-term leverage on long-term assets = catastrophe in slow motion.
✔ Position sizing is a survival decision, not an optimization one
“You can’t blow up if you size positions small enough.”
✔ Always price in the cost of forced exits
The theoretical model of price ≠ crisis execution price.
✔ Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve measured everything
True tail risks are behavioral and systemic, not statistical.
The Real Learning
There is one sentence Dr Roy engraves into his investment philosophy:
“You don’t control returns; you only control your ability to stay in the game.”
Liquidity, conservative leverage, and disciplined sizing — these become the pillars of a strategy built to survive decades, not cycles.
Forward-looking Capital – The Core Philosophy:
Today, Dr Roy is actually advising firms and clients—not just to stay profitable, but to position capital to capture asymmetric upside in the next disruptive cycle (AI, climate tech, bio-manufacturing, robotics, energy systems, etc.).
“Don’t bet on technologies. Bet on the enablers and the bottlenecks that every disruptive wave must pass through.”
The biggest wealth generators in disruptive eras are rarely the front-line innovators.
They are the infrastructure layers, tooling layers, distribution layers, and regulatory choke points that become unavoidable as the new industry scales.
This reflects his guidance seen in forward-looking corporate finance, PE, and strategic capital allocation—not theory.
Dr Roy’s Current Advice to Firms/Clients (Strategic Capital Allocation)
- Overweight “Picks and Shovels,” Not Pure Innovators
Avoid the early-stage hype names.
Focus on the companies that make disruptive tech possible.
For AI:
- Compute infrastructure providers
- High-yield power producers
- Data center builders
- Semiconductor equipment suppliers
- Advanced cooling technologies
For Climate Tech:
- Grid upgrade contractors
- Battery materials & recycling
- Industrial heat pumps
- Green hydrogen infrastructure
For Bio-manufacturing:
- Lab automation
- Fermentation capacity
- Precision reagents
- Regulatory tech (GMP + QA platforms)
Rationale:
Innovators change every 12–24 months.
Enablers become monopolies.
- Build Capital Around the “3 I’s”:
Infrastructure → Interoperability →Integration
This is a consistent pattern across all disruptive sectors:
*Infrastructure:
Physical or digital backbone with long-duration returns
(e.g., power systems, data centers, bioreactors)
*Interoperability:
Companies providing standards, APIs, regulatory compliance, and safety layers
(e.g., model alignment tools, carbon accounting systems, bio-safety platforms)
*Integration:
Horizontal platforms that become the default operating system for an entire sector.
This is where the massive multiples emerge.
- Allocate to Assets with Long-Duration Optionality
Not speculative optionality — structural optionality.
Examples:
- Land near future industrial power clusters
- Long-life IP that compounds with every new product
- Regulatory licenses in constrained markets
- Power contracts (PPAs) in regions facing AI-driven electricity demand gaps
- Contract manufacturing in bio (as capacity gets scarce)
These assets behave like long-dated call options without the decay.
- Prepare Firms to Monetize Disruption, Not Just Survive It
Most companies react to disruption.
The winners pre-invest in capability gaps that competitors will face later.
Examples of forward investments, Dr Roy advises:
- Internal data infrastructure for AI-readiness
- Transitioning from capex-heavy to capex-light models
- Workforce reskilling ahead of the need
- Early partnerships with regulatory-forward players
- Establishing procurement lock-ins for scarce commodities (chips, power, rare materials)
- Keep 10–20% of capital in a “strategic bets bucket.”
This is not VC-style risk-taking.
It’s a small, structured exposure to technologies that will be mainstream in 10 years but not investable today.
Typical instruments:
- Joint development agreements
- Convertible facilities
- Revenue-sharing models
- Minority strategic stakes
- Pilot projects with option rights
This gives a firm first rights on disruptive opportunities without risking the balance sheet.
What Dr Roy Tells Leaders About the Timing of the Next Cycle
The next 10–15 years will be dominated by three constraints:
~Compute
AI demand is growing faster than chips or power supply.
~Energy
AI, manufacturing, and electrification will create multi-decade power shortages.
~Biology
Bio-manufacturing capacity will be fully booked like semiconductor fabs.
“So the question I push firms to ask: Are you positioned on the side of the bottleneck or the side crushed by it?”
The Core Advice
“Own the bottlenecks. Lease the innovation. Compound the infrastructure.”
That’s the strategy used by:
- sovereign funds
- top PE firms
- corporate strategists
- generational family offices
Because it’s the only repeatable way to capture upside across multiple disruptive cycles.
Dr Roy’s Leadership Philosophy:
“Clarity, Trust, and Ownership — engineered through systems, not slogans.”
A high-performing finance team doesn’t emerge from motivational language; it emerges from deliberate design of incentives, communication norms, talent pathways, and decision rights.
He anchors his philosophy on three pillars:
- Build Trust by Making Expectations Frictionless and Transparent
High trust is not about being “nice”; it’s about removing ambiguity.
✔ Radical clarity of roles
Every person must know:
- What decisions do they own
- What decisions do they influence
- What decisions are they simply accountable for executing
- What success looks like in objective terms
Ambiguity destroys trust faster than underperformance.
✔ Information symmetry
Finance becomes political when information is hoarded.
“My rule: Everyone gets the same context I have unless restricted by governance.”
When the team sees that data and decisions aren’t manipulated, trust compounds.
✔ “No surprises” culture
“We build trust by ensuring issues surface early — before they metastasize into crises.”
“I reward early escalation, never punish it.”
- Drive Accountability Through Empowerment, Not Surveillance
Accountability only thrives when people actually own something.
✔ Decisions sit with the person closest to the information
Controllers own controls.
FP&A owns forecasting assumptions.
Treasury owns cash decisions.
Business finance owns performance narratives.
Leaders intervene only when risks exceed thresholds.
✔ Scorecards, not supervision
Every role has a 3–5 metric scorecard:
- measurable
- quarterly
- tied to business outcomes, not activities
Accountability becomes objective — not emotional.
✔ Post-mortems without blame
Failures are analyzed systemically:
“What broke in process, training, or assumptions?”
—not “Who can we fault?”
This encourages ownership instead of defensiveness.
- Develop Next-Gen Financial Leaders for a Digitally Transformed Industry
The finance leaders of the next decade will need three capabilities:
Capability A: Digital Fluency (not coding, but comprehension)
Dr Roy requires emerging leaders to understand:
- data architecture
- automation workflows
- AI-augmented analytics
- digital controls
- cloud ERP logic
- real-time dashboards
They don’t need to write Python — they must know what’s possible.
How he develops this:
- Rotations through data & analytics teams
- Shadowing system-implementation sprints (ERP, RPA, AI projects)
- Monthly deep-dives on one new tech capability (“chatbots for controls”, etc.)
- Mandatory literacy in SQL-lite and PowerBI/Looker/Tableau
This creates tech-aware finance leaders, not back-office accountants.
Capability B: Strategic Framing & Storytelling
The best future finance leaders are those who can explain:
- “What the numbers mean.”
- “Why it matters now.”
- “What we must change next.”
How he develops this:
- Weekly “narrative reviews” of rolling forecasts
- Rewriting business reviews as 1-page strategy memos
- Exposing high-potential talent to board-prep and investor-relations projects
- Coaching on communication models (pyramid principle, structured insights)
Numbers matter.
Narratives move organizations.
Capability C: Judgment Under Ambiguity
Digital transformation increases uncertainty, not reduces it.
How he develops this:
- Simulated crisis scenarios (liquidity shock, system outage, pricing collapse)
- Delegating small but critical decisions early
- Rotations between controllership → FP&A → treasury → business finance
- Teaching “decision principles” rather than “rules.”
“I want leaders who can make the call when there is no data, not just when data is perfect.”
The Operating System Behind the Philosophy
Dr Roy’s approach relies on building systems, not heroic leadership:
✔ Weekly “decision forums” where analysts present options, not findings.
✔ A talent acceleration map for high-potential finance staff (18–24 month cycles).
✔ Automation of low-value work so analysts do not spend nights cleaning spreadsheets.
✔ AI tools built into forecasting, reconciliations, and reporting pipelines.
✔ A culture where finance is a strategic partner, not a historical record keeper.
The goal:
Turn finance into a digitally empowered, strategic nerve centre of the organization.
The Crucial Point
“Trust comes from clarity. Accountability comes from ownership. Leadership comes from judgment. Digital readiness comes from design, not luck.”
The Future of Trust
Over the next five years, Dr Roy believes trust, transparency, and liquidity in global financial markets will be re-architected around three converging themes: programmable trust, institutional-grade infrastructure, and the tokenization of real-world assets.
- Trust Will Become Embedded — Not Assumed
Historically, trust has been conferred through institutions—exchanges, custodians, clearing houses, and auditors. What blockchains introduce is embedded trust: guarantees enforced by code, not intermediaries.
- On-chain settlement finality will reduce counterparty risk in ways traditional T+1/T+2 systems cannot.
- Programmable compliance (KYC/AML baked into smart contracts) will allow regulators visibility without compromising market integrity.
- Verifiable audit trails will shift trust from “believe us” to “verify yourself.”
As a result, the trust premium associated with large incumbent institutions will compress. The competitive differentiator will move from trust to execution quality, scale, and interoperability.
- Transparency Will Become Selective, Not Absolute
Blockchain is often framed as “radically transparent,” but institutions require controlled transparency. “We will see.”
- Permissioned and hybrid chains enabling granular access to transaction data.
- Zero-knowledge proofs allowing verification without disclosure—critical for trade secrets, positions, and client identities.
- Standardized on-chain reporting frameworks that regulators will increasingly mandate.
Transparency becomes programmable, tiered, and data-minimized—a large shift from today’s binary public-private model.
- Liquidity Will Fragment… Then Re-aggregate
In the early phase, liquidity across digital asset venues will remain fragmented due to regulatory silos and inconsistent standards. But by the end of the five-year horizon:
- Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs)—bonds, funds, trade finance, carbon credits—will reach meaningful scale.
- 24/7 markets will become the new liquidity norm.
- Interoperability protocols will allow liquidity to pool across chains the way it currently pools across exchanges.
- Automated market-making (AMM) principles will bleed into traditional finance for illiquid assets.
Liquidity becomes more continuous, more global, and less constrained by jurisdictional frictions.
- Trust Shifts from Institutions to Infrastructure
The real inflection point is psychological: In the next cycle, market participants won’t trust institutions that use blockchain—they will trust the infrastructure itself.
- Clearing and settlement functions will compress into near-instant workflows.
- Custody risk will diminish as private key management becomes abstracted.
- Market integrity will be enforced algorithmically rather than procedurally.
This does not eliminate institutions—it elevates those that can offer governance, compliance, risk frameworks, and ecosystem orchestration above the protocol layer.
- The Winners Will Be Those Who Build at the Intersection
The leading players in this future will be those who:
- Bridge regulated and permissioned systems with open blockchain networks.
- Integrate digital identity and compliance directly into market rails.
- Offer blockchain-agnostic liquidity venues.
- Build data and risk analytics for programmable assets.
In many ways, this is not a crypto story—it’s a capital markets modernization story.
The Entrepreneurial Shift
Dr Roy’s most pivotal career shift happened when he realized that his work in traditional finance—while intellectually rigorous—had him operating primarily as a steward of capital rather than a creator of value. The inflection point came when he began partnering closely with early-stage companies and PE-backed businesses. He found himself increasingly motivated not just by optimizing returns but by shaping strategy, building teams, and influencing the long-term trajectory of businesses.
“What ultimately pushed me to transition into an entrepreneurial, investment-focused role was the desire for direct ownership of outcomes.” In large financial institutions, impact is often distributed across layers of governance. In private equity or venture environments, the connection between decision, risk, and consequence is immediate and deeply personal—and that intensity appealed to Dr Roy. He wanted to put his own conviction, reputation, and capital on the line.
This shift also broadened—and recalibrated—his definition of success:
- Success was no longer measured solely in financial performance, but in the durability, scalability, and integrity of the businesses he helped build.
- Impact moved from reporting metrics to shaping them, from analyzing growth to architecting it.
- Leadership changed from managing institutions to empowering founders, operators, and teams to make decisions that compound long after their involvement.
In short, the move wasn’t just a career change—it was a mindset pivot:
from protecting value to creating value,
from optimizing systems to building them,
from success as performance to success as legacy.
Leadership Under Scrutiny
Operating as a public figure in finance means living in an environment where every decision is dissected—often faster than it can be explained. Over time, Dr Roy learned that managing scrutiny isn’t about avoiding pressure; it’s about creating a leadership architecture that keeps pressure from distorting long-term thinking.
First, he built a disciplined communication framework. With regulators, shareholders, and the media, consistency is currency. He made it a point to articulate the same strategic narrative, with the same rationale and the same data foundation, regardless of the audience. That discipline reduced noise and reinforced credibility even during periods of volatility.
Second, he separated signal from sentiment. Not every headline warrants a response, and not every regulatory question indicates a structural issue. He developed a habit of stress-testing concerns through objective dashboards—risk metrics, capital buffers, conduct indicators—so his decisions were anchored in facts, not reactions.
Third, Dr Roy invested heavily in internal transparency. A team that understands the strategic horizon is far less likely to be swayed by external turbulence. “By ensuring alignment across leadership and empowering mid-level managers with context, we turned scrutiny into a unifying force rather than a destabilizing one.”
Finally, he set clear boundaries between leadership visibility and leadership volatility. Being accessible and proactive with stakeholders is essential, but allowing external pressures to dictate priorities is not. The long-term strategy remained the north star—every public interaction was measured against whether it helped reinforce or detract from that vision.
In essence, scrutiny didn’t change how Dr Roy led; it sharpened it. It forced him to communicate with precision, govern with discipline, and think with conviction—ensuring that short-term noise never diluted long-term value creation.
The Non-Financial Legacy
“If my professional obituary could highlight only one achievement beyond financial metrics, I would want it to say that I built leaders who built institutions. The most enduring value any executive can create isn’t balance-sheet strength or market share—it’s the next generation of thinkers, operators, and stewards who continue the mission long after we’re gone.”
Dr Roy always believed that influence compounds far more powerfully through people than through performance statistics. His legacy, therefore, would be cultivating a culture where integrity, curiosity, and accountability are non-negotiable; where individuals are encouraged to challenge assumptions; and where leadership is defined not by authority, but by the ability to elevate others.
He works toward this in three deliberate ways:
- Operationalizing Mentorship
- He treats talent development with the same rigor as capital allocation—structured, data-driven, and intentional. He maintains a rotating cohort of high-potential individuals whom he mentors not just on skills, but on judgment, ethical grounding, and strategic thinking.
- Building Decision-Making Frameworks, Not Dependencies
- Instead of being the final answer, Dr Roy focuses on designing principles-based models that help teams make complex decisions independently. “My goal is that when I step out of the room, the quality of decisions stays the same—or improves.”
- Creating Psychological Safety for Dissent
- Dr Roy has worked hard to normalize questioning, debate, and upward feedback. In finance, courage often takes the form of a junior analyst flagging a risk others have overlooked. A culture that empowers such voices can outlast any single leader.
“Ultimately, if the only enduring line written about my career is that I left behind leaders who built resilient, ethical, high-performance organisations, that would be more meaningful to me than any P&L achievement.”
The Message
“Honestly, the piece of advice I heard all the time early on—‘Keep your head down, do great work, and the right people will notice’—feels completely outdated now.”
Back then, it sounded noble. Today it’s borderline dangerous.
In modern finance, keeping your head down is exactly how you get invisible. The industry moves too fast, talent markets are too fluid, and decision cycles are too compressed. If you’re not actively shaping your narrative, building relationships, and making your thinking visible, you’re basically leaving your trajectory to chance.
“What I’ve learned instead is this:”
- Visibility isn’t vanity; it’s strategy.
- Upward communication matters as much as upward performance.
- Opportunities flow to people who signal readiness—not just competence.
“So now I tell younger professionals the opposite:
Keep your head up. Speak up. Show your work. Make people understand how you think.”
~Great performance is the baseline.
~Great visibility is the multiplier.
That’s the part nobody said out loud when he was starting—but it’s absolutely how the game works today.
Over the next decade, he believes the primary benchmark for judging a financial institution’s health will shift from traditional performance metrics to what he calls:
“Trust Velocity.”
Trust Velocity is the institution’s ability to maintain, regain, and compound trust at a pace faster than the environment erodes it.
It is not a single metric—it’s a composite of:
- Data integrity and cyber resilience (the probability of remaining uncompromised in a digital-first world),
- Regulatory alignment and transparency speed (how quickly the institution can explain, disclose, and remediate issues),
- Customer signal stability (churn, engagement, digital behavior patterns that reflect real-time trust),
- Ethical model governance (AI/ML fairness, explainability, and control frameworks),
- Leadership credibility (stakeholder confidence during stress events).
Why does this become the benchmark:
- Digital assets, AI-driven finance, and global regulatory fragmentation will make traditional balance-sheet metrics too slow and too narrow.
- Institutions will win or lose not on yield spreads or AUM growth alone, but on how reliably they preserve trust amid constant technological and social volatility.
- Trust will become quantified, monitored, and stress-tested the same way liquidity and capital buffers are today.
Ten years from now, a strong institution won’t just be capital-adequate—it will be trust-adequate.
Message to the Next Generation of Finance Professionals
If he could leave you with one message—part inspiration, part caution—it would be this:
Don’t confuse speed with wisdom.
You’re entering a financial world that moves faster than any generation before you: markets react in milliseconds, narratives shift overnight, and your reputation can be shaped—or damaged—in a single screenshot. But the careers that endure are built on judgment, not velocity.
The greatest edge you can cultivate isn’t technical brilliance or perfect timing; it’s the ability to stay grounded when everything around you accelerates. Learn to pause. Learn to think in decades, not quarters.
A few truths worth carrying with you:
- Curiosity compounds faster than capital.
- Tools will change, industries will transform, but people who keep asking better questions will always outpace those who don’t.
- Your ethics will be tested quietly, not loudly.
- Rarely will you face obvious “right vs wrong” dilemmas. Instead, you’ll face small shortcuts that seem harmless. That’s where reputations are truly made—or lost.
- Mastery is not built on visibility, but on discipline.
- In a world obsessed with hyper-communication and instant recognition, the most successful professionals are still the ones who show up prepared, read deeply, and execute consistently.
- Relationships are your real currency.
- AI, automation, and analytics will dominate workflows—but trust, empathy, and credibility will dominate outcomes.
- Choose environments that stretch you, not ones that validate you.
- High-growth careers rarely happen in comfort; they happen where you are challenged intellectually, ethically, and emotionally.
Finally, remember this:
Finance rewards intelligence, but it follows character.
Build the latter with the same ambition you apply to the former, and you will not just succeed—you will endure.
For further assistance or consultation, call Dr Bhaskar Roy at +919818286455 or email him at broyglobus@gmail.com.