From boardrooms to life lessons: Inside Harit Nagpal’s 'Pivot'

After aspiring to a career in medicine throughout his childhood, Neel opted for engineering, albeit late; after all, the entrance exams for top colleges were over. He knew he would have to settle for institutions that weren’t highly ranked, but he was convinced it was better to make a choice than live with lifelong regret.

Later in his career, while working for a brand trying to transform a commodity product into a strong market player, a fierce rival entered the scene.

Neel was worried, but he kept his composure. After brainstorming with his team, he decided to block the dealer’s stocks with three months’ worth of products, a move that reflected his instinct for taking calculated risks.

After nearly two decades in business, Neel joined a small, untested retail firm and relocated to a new city. Things didn’t unfold as he envisioned.

Eighteen months later, he faced stagnant growth and eventually lost his job. Yet he took the outcome in stride and waited patiently. Just eight weeks later, two promising leads materialised.

Through these and other anecdotes, Harit Nagpal’s latest book, Pivot, demonstrates how the ability to pivot can turn challenging situations into opportunities.

In an interview with afaqs!, Nagpal, MD and CEO of Tata Play, explains that when he began writing Pivot, he wasn’t setting out to coin a philosophy.

He was simply telling a story. Halfway through, a pattern revealed itself: Neel repeatedly faced two obvious options and each time chose a third, riskier, unconventional path. Only then did the theme of pivoting emerge.

“Sometimes you don’t see the pattern of your life while you’re living it,” Nagpal says. “But when you sit down and reflect, you realise it’s always been there.”

Though the book is fictional, 80% of it is drawn from Nagpal’s own life. He also wanted to be a doctor, but finally chose engineering. Events are camouflaged, names are changed, and situations dramatised, giving him the creative freedom to tell the story while preserving the emotional truth.

Even Neel’s name was chosen for universality. His publisher suggested, "Neel works anywhere," and this name was retained.

From columns to long-form writing

Nagpal’s journey to long-form writing was gradual. For years, he wrote short columns for newspapers and journals. Long-form writing felt unfamiliar, until the COVID lockdowns provided unexpected time for reflection. That period gave birth to his first book, Adapt.

Initially, he approached it like a textbook, outlining seven or eight core pillars of business. But the draft felt like a textbook. “And I thought, I wouldn’t read this myself, so why would anyone else?” he recalls. 

He scrapped it and turned to storytelling. The principles remained, but they were lived through characters, imagined scenarios, and real-life contexts.

“Storytelling gives you many more options,” Nagpal says. “You can play with imagination, context, and emotion.” The experiment became a habit, and writing evolved into a way to understand his beliefs.

“Writing forces clarity,” he explains. “It turns instinctive choices into conscious principles.” Just as Adapt helped him frame years of business experience into defined verticals, Pivot helped articulate his instinct for choosing the uncommon path, a habit that had quietly guided him throughout life.

Life lessons beyond business

While the book’s core audience is young professionals, its lessons extend far beyond the boardroom. “These are life learnings,” Nagpal says. “They work in business, but they work just as well outside it.”

The book’s structure reinforces this philosophy.

Pivotresists the neat categorisation of conventional business books. It doesn’t offer a how-to manual or bullet-pointed advice. Instead, it follows Neel’s life from birth to old age, pausing at different stages to explore the small and large decisions that quietly shape who we become.

Questions followed by blank lines invite readers to pause and reflect on their choices. These are not only dramatic inflection points but also everyday decisions that compound over time.

“Pivoting isn’t about one dramatic change in a lifetime,” Nagpal notes. “It happens every day, in small decisions as much as big ones. The life journey captured in the book is full of small, medium, and large pivot points that exist in everyone’s life. The pauses help readers recognise them in their own context.”

Nagpal designed the interactive format to suit today’s readers. “The questions break the book into bite-sized portions, consistent with times when Instagram reels, TikTok, and T20 cricket are reducing attention spans,” he writes in the introduction.

“If the book itself doesn’t pivot, how can it teach people about pivoting?” he adds. “Books must adapt to the times, not just to survive, but with an aim to thrive,” he writes in his introduction.

Nagpal challenges the notion that people have stopped reading. “People haven’t stopped reading,” he says.

“Authors have stopped writing books people want to read.” Many writers continue using outdated formats, even as audiences and storytelling mediums have evolved. Films, television, and digital content have all pivoted, but books often have not.

Nagpal remains a traditional reader. He prefers physical books over a Kindle, drawn to the comfort of paper, a habit from childhood.

Nagpal’s mother introduced him to reading as a small boy. His mother would ask him to imagine alternate endings after he finished reading a story. “I guess it was ingrained early,” he says, “even if it took years to come out.”

What comes next

As for his next book, Nagpal is cautious. He knows the time commitment. With a busy work life at Tata Play, it would mean another six months of late nights and weekends. For now, he resists the pull, though he admits the truth: “Writing is an addiction.”

Given his track record, it’s only a matter of time before he pivots back to it.