There’s no shortage of people talking about leadership today. But much of that is retrospective polish—stories made neater by time, insights framed like case studies, vulnerability edited down to a footnote. We celebrate the decisive, the visionary, the resilient—but don’t spend enough time understanding the beliefs that shape these traits. We consume leadership as inspiration, not investigation. In this world where hindsight is 20/20, Reuben Mistry and Saket Jain, partners at Native—an executive search firm—found themselves hearing something else. In private conversations with some of India’s most respected business heads, leadership wasn’t being packaged. It was being lived. And it was full of ambiguity, emotion, conflict, and quiet clarity.

Having worked with Open to create their brand identity, they came to us with this tension. It wasn’t a brief, and it wasn’t a brand. It was just a feeling: that something important was being left unsaid. And that someone had to create the space to say it. We knew immediately that there was something worth building here. Our best work often begins like this—not with a filled-out RFP, but with an unformed truth. Something that lives more in instinct than in language. What we saw clearly was this: most leaders want to be seen as thoughtful, inspiring, grounded. But very few platforms allow them to be seen that way. The default formats either glorify or flatten. They rarely allow for reflection. They almost never allow for vulnerability. So we asked: what kind of platform would leaders actually want to show up to? What kind of questions would help them reveal not just what they’ve done—but how they think? More importantly, what kind of identity could hold space for all of this? That question led to the platform we eventually named Qunba.

Qunba is a word that means tribe or chosen family. It was the perfect expression of what the platform stood for—a collective of Indian leaders, each reflecting on their people philosophy, their formative moments, their unseen struggles, and the choices that made them the kind of leader others want to follow. Qunba is not performative. It does not sell a playbook. It is not interested in distilling leadership into aphorisms. Instead, it does something quieter but more powerful. It offers a window into the minds of those building the country’s most influential institutions—and invites them to reflect on what kind of leadership India actually needs next. Every conversation here starts from the same premise: leadership is complex and contextual. Universal principles don’t always apply. India needs its own vocabulary, shaped by its own stories. Qunba is an attempt to gather those stories—one voice at a time.

The design of the platform followed the logic of the idea. We didn’t want to build a personal branding tool for executives. We wanted to create a space that allowed for honesty. So the tone had to be clear and conversational. The questions had to be universal enough to create structure, but open-ended enough to allow surprise. The leaders weren’t being profiled—they were being invited into a conversation. And what emerged, over time, was a richer, more layered understanding of leadership—not as a set of attributes, but as a lived experience. We heard stories of mistakes. Of unexpected influences. Of people who shaped their leadership quietly. We heard answers that weren’t always polished, but were always real.

Qunba is slowly becoming a kind of cultural archive that is helping build a vocabulary of Indian leadership rooted in our own realities—not borrowed frameworks. As India continues to rise in global influence, the quality of our leadership will increasingly be a defining factor. And that quality will depend not just on competence, but on perspective. What makes Qunba meaningful to us at Open is not just the elegance of the final identity, but the process that got us there. It is a case study in how a platform can be built not around what a brand wants to say—but around what a culture needs to hear. It began with an unformed idea. And it is now a growing network of voices that are shaping a more thoughtful understanding of people, power, and purpose. In the end, Qunba asks the kind of question we need to hear the most: what do we want leadership in India to actually feel like? And what will it take to get there?