Post by Saji Madapat TOGAF 9, PMP, CPIM, CIERP, CSSMBB

The worst business blunder in history didn’t just cost Western boardrooms hundreds of billions of dollars. It handed me my career. 💼 All it took was two missing digits—and a spectacular, decades-long failure of corporate foresight. 🐛 This month, my MBA batch gathers in Anantapur to mark 30 years since we left SKIM. I couldn't be in the room, so I sent a video love letter instead. But preparing it forced me to answer an uncomfortable question: What did that small campus in the Rayalaseema drylands actually teach a lungi-wearing "Kala Madrasi" from Kerala about global markets? 🌍 The honest answer: How to ride tigers. Or more precisely, how to ride pillion. 🏍️ For thirty years, I’ve watched Western capital repeat the exact same script, driven by the same raw material: the stupidity of irrational exuberance. 🤪 📉 Dotcom: "Eyeballs first" business plans burned trillions, but left behind the fiber-optic rails of the modern internet. 🌬️ Renewables: The planet was on the brochure, but the 100% Accelerated Depreciation tax code was in the driver’s seat. 🤖 AIDC (Today): Boardrooms are bidding against each other in sheer executive FOMO, building expensive digital monuments to the fear of missing out on the "next electricity." ⚡ Irrational exuberance is not a market glitch. It is capitalism’s unofficial infrastructure budget. 🏗️ The crowd’s madness pays for the heavy infrastructure; the early pillion rider collects the career, the equity, and the compounding. 📈 I wrote a full breakdown of the "Tiger Rider" playbook—including the delicious geopolitical irony of IBM fleeing India only to come crawling back during Y2K—in my latest article. 📖