Building as a Response to a Place

I grew up in Kalahandi, one of the poorest districts in Odisha, in one of the poorest states in India. This is usually where a founder's origin story becomes a vehicle for establishing adversity overcome: the bootstrap narrative, the against-all-odds frame.

That is not the frame I'm interested in. The frame I'm interested in is more specific: Kalahandi taught me something about institutions.

The district had resources. It had people, many of them educated, capable, ambitious in the right ways. What it did not have was the institutional infrastructure to convert those inputs into the outcomes they could produce. And watching that gap operate, watching capable people leave because the structures that would have kept them and given them room didn't exist, left me with a question I have never fully put down.

Is that gap closeable?

What the gap actually looked like

In Kalahandi in the 1990s, the institutions that existed were mostly government bodies. They were not absent. They were present in the specific way that organisations without good institutional architecture are present: buildings, names, staff, and the persistent failure to do the thing they were supposed to do.

The schools existed. The teachers often didn't come. When good administrators arrived, things worked temporarily. When they left, the office reverted. The institutional architecture, the systems that would have made the school work regardless of who was in the district officer's seat, was never built.

This is different from poverty as a resource problem. You can add money to a system with broken institutional architecture and mostly what you get is more money inside a broken system. The resource scarcity and the institutional scarcity are separate problems. Both were real in Kalahandi. The institutional one was deeper.

Research by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, studying why some nations fail while others with similar resources succeed, found that the quality of institutions, the rules and norms that govern how power is exercised and how resources are allocated, was the primary explanatory variable. Resource availability was far less predictive than institutional quality. Kalahandi had resources, in various forms. It had institutional failure. The Acemoglu and Robinson framework explains what I was watching, in district-level form, before I had language for it.

What building is a response to

I did not start building Majhi Group with a clear theory of institutional design. I started because I had seen enough failed executive searches, and the damage those failures caused to the organisations they were supposed to help, to believe that the process was broken in a specific, fixable way.

The institutional infrastructure for the decision, the quality standards, the observability, the accountability for whether the hire actually worked, was almost never present. The search concluded with a hire. The question of whether the hire was right was left to the organisation to discover, usually at significant cost.

That gap, between the importance of the decision and the quality of the infrastructure supporting it, was the same structural observation I had made in Kalahandi at a different scale. High-stakes outcome, inadequate institutional support. The response was to build the institutional infrastructure.

Majhi Group is the retained search model applied to the problem: a quality gate, an accountability structure, a guarantee that extends beyond placement to outcome. Majhi OS is the operational infrastructure applied to the same problem at scale: real-time mandate health, automated recovery, attribution of outcomes.

Both are institutional responses to institutional failure.

The mission of an institution is shaped by the problem it came from. Building has been my answer to a specific gap I watched for years: the gap between what capable people and places could produce and what the absence of institutional infrastructure was allowing them to produce.

The Kalahandi office

Several years into building Majhi Group and Majhi OS, we opened a ten-seat office in Kalahandi.

This was not a sentimental decision. It was an institutional design decision: if the gap between what Kalahandi's people could produce and what the local economy offered them was partly an infrastructure gap, then building professional infrastructure there, however small, was a direct intervention in the problem.

The ten seats don't change the district. They change the calculus for ten people who would otherwise have had to leave to find professional work. That is a small intervention. It is also the only kind of intervention that compounds if you build it right: because an office that functions well attracts more talent, generates more capability, and makes a larger intervention possible.

This is what institutional thinking actually looks like in practice: not grand gestures but designed interventions that have the architecture to compound. The Jesuits didn't change the world through a single act. They built a formation system that produced consistently capable people across five centuries in hundreds of countries. The compounding came from the institutional design, not from the individual interventions.

What building from a place produces

Building from Kalahandi, and from Odisha more broadly, has shaped the institutional architecture of what I've built in ways I didn't fully anticipate.

Without an ecosystem to carry professional norms by osmosis, I had to make the norms explicit. Without a peer network to validate decisions, I had to be more certain of my own reasoning. Without the density of similar firms to set competitive standards, I had to define the standards myself.

These constraints produced specific institutional habits: decision criteria written down rather than carried as intuition, quality standards defined as processes rather than as personal taste, culture documented as operating principles rather than transmitted by proximity. The architecture that emerged from necessity is, I think, more durable than the architecture I would have built if the environment had been doing more of the work.

The gap I watched in Kalahandi as a child is not fully closed. It is not close to fully closed. But it is smaller than it was, because some people who would have had to leave didn't have to. And the institutional architecture that is being built, here, in this firm, in this system, is designed to keep closing it after I am no longer the person closing it personally.

That is what building as a response to a place actually requires. Not presence. Infrastructure.

See also: The Advantage of Building Outside the Metro, The Question Founders Avoid: What Kind of Institution Are You Building?, Building Through Uncertainty

Sources

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Harvard Business Review, Building Your Company's Vision (Collins and Porras, 1996)

McKinsey Global Institute, India's Turning Point: An Economic Agenda for the Decade (2020)