Every Great Leader Is Secretly Powered by Three Ancient Forces

Every leadership book gives you the same two ingredients: vision and decisions. Have a vision. Make good decisions. Repeat until IPO.

Fine. But I've spent twenty years around people who actually lead, in delivery war rooms at Sapient, in a product org in upstate New York, in three startups of my own, and none of them survived on vision. Vision is what goes on the slide. What they ran on was three older, scrappier forces that don't get names in business school.

So I gave them names. Kurmi. Nermi. Orimi. If they sound like they came out of an old Telugu grandmother's vocabulary, that's roughly the energy I'm going for.

Kurmi, grit

Kurmi is the voice that says "we've got this" when the Wi-Fi is dead, the scope has changed (again) and the coffee has stopped working.

It's the willingness to roll up sleeves without a committee. Kurmi doesn't over-think; it starts. It's the program manager who, when a Tesco release was wobbling at midnight, didn't write an email, she opened the log files. It's the founder who fixes the demo laptop with the investor already in the lobby.

Kurmi on its own is dangerous, by the way. Grit without direction is just a very determined way of walking into a wall. But no team has ever shipped anything hard without someone in the room who simply refused to let it not happen.

Nermi, calm

Nermi is the one smiling in chaos, nodding through nonsense, not flipping tables during calls that should have been emails.

This is the emotional buffer of a team. When stress peaks, everyone unconsciously looks at one person to check how bad it is. If that person is calm, the team is calm, not because the problem got smaller, but because panic stopped multiplying. Nermi is the CTO who, when the payment gateway goes down on launch day, says "okay, what do we know?" instead of "who did this?"

You cannot fake Nermi for long. It comes from having been through worse and remembering that you came out the other side. Which is a good argument for keeping a few scars on the leadership team.

Orimi, the fixer's instinct

Orimi is what kicks in when a critical system fails eleven minutes before launch and the answer is: reroute everything through Plan Z, which did not exist until this exact moment.

It's improvisation with a straight face. Jugaad, but with taste. Orimi doesn't wait for the perfect fix; it finds the fix that gets you to tomorrow, and it knows the difference between a bridge and a foundation. Every Orimi I've worked with has the same tell, they get quieter as things get worse, because they've already started building.

Orimi is also the force most likely to be punished in large organisations, because it routes around process. Protect your Orimis. They're the reason the launch happened.

Why you need all three

Here's the trap: most leaders are naturally strong in one force and hire people who share it.

A team of pure Kurmi runs itself into the ground by month three. A team of pure Nermi is very pleasant and ships nothing. A team of pure Orimi is a beautiful pile of clever workarounds with no architecture underneath.

The leaders I'd follow anywhere have all three on call, grit to start, calm to hold, instinct to fix, and, crucially, they know which one the moment needs. Sunday night outage: Orimi. Tuesday board meeting after a bad quarter: Nermi. Month two of a launch nobody believes in: Kurmi, every single morning.

Roll up your sleeves. Keep your face steady. Improvise brilliantly when it all goes sideways. Do that consistently and something odd happens, leadership starts to look effortless from the outside.

They don't just lead. They legend.

An earlier, shorter version of this appeared on Medium in 2025. The forces haven't changed; the examples have multiplied.