India’s global capability centers
Every center is built for a moment.
Someone decided its size, what it could decide, what work it would hold, how it would be counted, and who would carry it. Five decisions, made at the start, and all of them right. They had to be: the center worked, earned trust, and grew.
Growth is where the story turns. It quietly changes what a center is while leaving in place the way it was built.
A few years in, the center wakes up inside the build of day one.
Decisions that used to be quick start climbing for approval.
Strong people leave without quite saying why.
Delivery still holds, but on effort more than on design.
Everything still works.
It works until two or three specific people leave.
These read as separate problems, or worse, as people problems. They are one problem, surfacing in five places:
The center has outgrown the way it was built.
That is what this practice works on. The thinking is in six parts, and the diagnostic of your own center takes about ten minutes.
Five surfaces of one problem
Where the strain shows
I · Structure
The shape that carried the center up is now the thing it is carrying.
II · Authority
The work moved to the center. The authority to run it stayed where it began.
III · Ownership
The center delivers the pieces. The whole is owned somewhere else.
Where it starts
IV · Standing
The center does the work of a capability, and is still counted as a cost.
Why it stays hidden
V · Continuity
What the center cannot afford to lose sits with too few people.
Each surface opens into one of the six parts. Read in order, beginning with Built for a moment, the six tell one story, in about an hour.
The work
Every engagement starts with a problem the center wants solved: a restructure, a case for authority, a renewal, a succession, a founding. Its shape is settled in conversation with the center leader, and the fifteen statements are answered again as the work runs, so progress is read rather than assumed.
The diagnostic. Where everything starts. Fifteen statements about how your center is built, answered alone, in about ten minutes.
The conversation. Where an engagement takes shape: manish@manishsinha.com.
Background
Manish Sinha was on the founding leadership team that built Koch's Global Capability Center in India, from its first employee to more than twenty-five hundred people. He served on its India board from 2021 to 2025. Koch is a $125 billion privately held enterprise.
Before that, he led organization redesign through Lenovo's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and held HR leadership roles at SAP, Oracle, Aviva, and Panasonic. A Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, his work keeps finding that the problem is rarely the people. Today he works with a small number of centers, from those being founded to those being redrawn, on how they are built.