Ashish Wattal on Brain Box Podcast: Leadership, Sales and Taking Technology to Rural India | Ashish Wattal, Cisco India & SAARC
TL;DR: Episode 06 of Brain Box - The Leadership Podcast explores Ashish Wattal's approach to leadership, sales, customer trust and technology-led transformation. As Managing Director at Cisco for India and SAARC, Ashish argues that effective leaders must be human, disciplined and clear communicators, while great salespeople stay invested in customers long after a deal is lost.
Key Moments
00:00 - Intro: Kaushik introduces BrainBox podcast and Ashish Wattal
01:17 - Ashish's childhood in Kashmir: outdoor kid, sports, and early influences
02:00 - Schooling at Burn Hall School, Srinagar: teacher impact and competitive spirit
03:43 - "What do you want to be?": early dreams of athletics and football
04:39 - Shift to engineering & MBA in Pune: realizing sales was the right fit
06:15 - Leadership qualities: three core tenets (being human, discipline, communication)
09:13 - Keeping teams motivated: investing in team success and removing friction
10:22 - Hiring philosophy: why attitude always trumps skills
11:20 - Customer-first in sales: building long-term trust and staying engaged after losses
13:39 - Top career deals: GAIL SAP implementation at Wipro
15:24 - BSNL GSM deal (Phase 4 & 5) at Wipro: 8-9 months of work and 130+ application sizings
16:23 - HP SAP transformation deal: turning around an IBM-led opportunity
17:59 - Cisco: Snapdeal unicorn data center win
19:09 - Cisco: BharatNet program and connecting rural India
20:40 - Future of IT: smart cities, digital agriculture, AI, and analytics
22:51 - Personal habits: morning walks, weekends with kids, and blending youth with experience
24:04 - 10-year vision: taking technology deeper into rural India to impact lives
25:08 - Closing: Kaushik thanks Ashish; concluding remarks
Leadership Starts With Being Human
When Kaushik Bose opened the leadership series on Brain Box with Ashish Wattal, the question was simple: are leaders born or made? Ashish's answer is grounded in the way he has led teams and businesses for two decades. His leadership philosophy starts with three principles: be human, maintain discipline and communicate clearly.
For Ashish, being human means remembering that organizations are made up of people, not quarterly numbers. Leaders need empathy because not every quarter can be a great quarter. Teams will have highs and lows, and a leader who understands that can create an environment in which people are willing to follow rather than simply comply. He also sees leadership as a hands-on responsibility. Empowerment matters, but leaders still have to show the way when the team needs help.
The second element is discipline. Ashish connects discipline with honesty, integrity and fairness. It is not enough for a leader to appear fair. The systems and decisions within the team need to reinforce that fairness. The third element is communication. Leaders have to make decisions, including difficult ones, but the decision itself is only part of the job. People need to understand the vision, the end goal and the purpose behind the work.
Being human, moving with discipline and good communication skills, these are three triads I think any perfect or near perfect leader needs to possess.
Motivation Is a Leadership Responsibility
Ashish's view of motivation follows naturally from his leadership philosophy. A leader cannot simply tell a team to be motivated. The leader has to be invested in the team's success. That means being collaborative, helping remove obstacles and creating a strategy for dealing with friction and conflict.
When people see that their leader is actively helping them succeed, they have a reason to stay engaged. The leader's role is not to remove every difficulty, but to help the team navigate those difficulties and, when necessary, show them how an opportunity can be approached.
Why Attitude Matters More Than Skills When Hiring
The same philosophy shapes Ashish's approach to hiring. Asked for the single most important trait he looks for, his answer was attitude. Skills can be learned. Product knowledge can be developed. A person can become better at execution over time. What is harder to manufacture is the willingness to learn, the passion to work and the drive to take ownership.
That makes attitude a particularly important hiring filter in sales and leadership roles. A candidate does not need to arrive knowing everything. What matters is whether the person has the mindset to absorb knowledge, handle setbacks and keep improving.
The Best Salespeople Put the Customer First, Even After Losing
Ashish challenges the stereotype that sales is about persuading someone to buy something they do not need. His view is almost the opposite. The customer has to remain at the center of the sales process, and a lost opportunity should not automatically end the relationship.
Not every loss means the salesperson failed. A deal can be lost because a competitor arrived earlier, the product did not have the required feature set, or the customer had already formed its narrative before the salesperson entered the opportunity. Ashish describes repeatedly returning to customers after losing business and remaining engaged with their problems. In some cases, success came years later and produced a much larger opportunity.
As long as you are ensuring that the customer interest is paramount, I'm not worried about loss and gain.
The transaction may be over, but the relationship does not have to be. Staying close to the customer's evolving problems creates the possibility of becoming relevant when circumstances change. It turns sales from a sequence of isolated wins and losses into a long-term trust-building discipline.
What Large Enterprise Deals Teach About Sales
Ashish's career provides concrete examples of what persistence and customer understanding look like at scale. At Wipro, one of the deals he remembers most strongly was the Gas Authority of India SAP implementation. Wipro initially faced serious competition and technical challenges, but the work done around ROI, total cost of ownership and the SAP environment built capabilities that could be applied to other customers. The opportunity eventually became a platform for further expansion.
The BSNL GSM Phase 4 and Phase 5 opportunity required a different kind of endurance. Ashish describes eight to nine months of sustained work, repeated tendering and a team that at one point was sizing more than 130 applications. The scale and complexity made the opportunity a significant learning experience, but the deeper lesson was that enterprise sales often rewards people willing to stay engaged through long and uncertain cycles.
At HP, Ashish entered an SAP transformation opportunity where IBM already had the account, the implementation and the products. Instead of accepting that the opportunity was effectively decided, the team requested an independent review. That review identified gaps in the existing design. The team used its prior SAP experience to demonstrate those issues to senior stakeholders, helping turn an opportunity that appeared headed toward IBM into an end-to-end HP win. The project also involved a brownfield environment and an online migration that had to be completed within four hours.
At Cisco, the Snapdeal opportunity demonstrated another dimension of enterprise selling. Cisco was not initially positioned as a traditional data center player, and the opportunity included established infrastructure competitors. The team had to convince a fast-growing digital company that Cisco could compete against both established players and cloud alternatives. The eventual win followed a long gestation period and a successful installation.
From Enterprise Deals to BharatNet: Technology as an Impact Tool
The most expansive part of Ashish's current leadership perspective is his view of connectivity beyond India's major cities. His work around the BharatNet program, which extends service provider networks into rural India, connects technology sales with a broader question: what happens when digital infrastructure reaches people who previously had limited access to it?
Ashish points to applications across health, education, agriculture and local government. Connectivity can help link gram panchayats with districts, enable digital citizen services and create the infrastructure needed for other technology-led programs. For him, the significance of these opportunities is not simply the size of the contract. It is the number of lives that the resulting network can eventually touch.
Whatever we get in urban areas goes to rural, create a big canvas then what we have today.
The Next Wave: Smart Cities, Digital Agriculture, AI and Analytics
Ashish sees the next phase of India's technology journey moving beyond traditional digitization. He points to smart cities, digital agriculture, smart irrigation, power transmission and digital intervention in water management as areas where technology can solve problems that were difficult to address even a few years ago.
He also sees AI and analytics becoming more useful as the volume of data generated across these systems increases. His point is straightforward: AI needs data. Once sufficiently large and useful datasets exist, organizations can move from reacting to problems toward predicting them. That can have applications in education, health, disaster management and agriculture, where identifying a problem before it reaches a citizen can materially change the response.
A Leadership Career Shaped by Sport and Continuous Learning
Ashish's leadership style also reflects his early years in Kashmir. He describes himself as an outdoor child who played cricket, football and basketball and later competed in athletics, including 200- and 400-meter events. His schooling at Burn Hall School in Srinagar exposed him to teachers who pushed students toward excellence across academics, sports and extracurricular activities.
That competitive environment appears again in his approach to teams. He believes in blending experience with young talent because newer team members can introduce perspectives that experienced leaders may not have considered. His own routine reflects a similar balance. Morning walks give him time to reset, while weekends with his children provide a different kind of learning and perspective.
The Long-Term Vision: Taking Technology Deeper Into India
Ashish is deliberately cautious about making rigid predictions about the future. His experience through the pandemic reinforced the point that major changes can arrive unexpectedly. Instead of trying to predict every development, he wants to keep building toward a larger objective: taking technology deeper into rural India and using it to improve lives at ground level.
That vision brings together the different threads of his career. Sales is about understanding the customer. Leadership is about helping people succeed. Technology is valuable when it solves real problems. And the largest opportunities are often created when these three ideas come together at scale.
For anyone studying Ashish Wattal on Brain Box Podcast, that is the central lesson from the conversation. A leadership career is not defined only by titles or the size of deals closed. It is also defined by how a leader develops people, stays close to customers, handles long sales cycles and uses business success to create broader impact.
Key Takeaways from Ashish Wattal in Episode 06 of Brain Box Podcast
1. Leadership begins with people.
Ashish's three-part leadership framework is simple: be human, be disciplined and communicate clearly. Empathy and fairness shape whether people trust a leader enough to follow.
2. Invest in the success of your team.
Motivation grows when leaders actively remove obstacles, collaborate with their teams and help people become successful.
3. Hire for attitude and build the skills.
Skills and product knowledge can be developed. A willingness to learn, take ownership and keep improving is much harder to teach.
4. Never confuse a lost deal with a lost relationship.
Enterprise sales is a long game. Staying engaged with a customer after a loss can create opportunities years later, often on a much larger scale.
5. Technology has its greatest value when it reaches real people.
Ashish's focus on BharatNet and rural connectivity shows how enterprise technology can become an enabler for health, education, agriculture and citizen services.
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