The first watch I ever bought for myself came after I got married, and I bought it with my wife beside me at The World of Titan on Commercial Street in Bangalore in the early nineties. The store did not look like a place that sold watches. It looked like a jewelry shop. The watches sat behind glass showcases, lit and spaced the way you would light and space gold. For a middle-class Indian boy, walking in was intimidating. I remember the specific fear, that the price would turn out to be too high and I would have to make some excuse and hightail it out before anyone noticed.

None of that happened. I bought the watch, and it was handed to me in a jewelry box, and I wore it for close to twenty years. I replaced the battery two or three times in all those years and never anything else. That was the whole promise, and Titan kept it.

Not long after, I met a senior executive from Titan who wanted to show me their latest work, a watch whose face carried the phases of the moon. The dial changed with the lunar cycle. I have forgotten most of what we discussed that day, but I have not forgotten the small pride with which he turned the watch toward the light so I could see the moon move across it. He was not selling me anything. He simply loved the thing his company had made.

I have been carrying those two memories around since I watched Made in India: A Titan Story, the series that dramatizes how the company came to exist. The show is good entertainment. What surprised me is how much of it is really about the arguments a person has to win before anything new is allowed to exist. I kept recognizing those arguments, because I have had versions of them in rooms three decades and one industry removed from a watch factory in Hosur. So let me set down what the show gave back to me, in case you are building something too.

Translate Geek to English

The argument that stayed with me happens in a bank. The team needs a loan, and the pitch fails, because the pitch is too technical and the bankers cannot follow it. An outsider is the one who names the problem. They were explaining the machine to people who only wanted to understand the result. I have spent years since then giving keynotes on exactly this, on how to translate Geek to English, on how to lead with the business outcome instead of the mechanism underneath it. The bankers in that scene have become the CFO and the non-technical members of every buying committee I now present to, and the quartz movement has become software, and the lesson has not changed at all. The people deciding whether to say yes are buying the result. The mechanism is your burden to carry, not theirs to decode.

Persistence without validation is just stubbornness wearing a nicer coat.

Persist, but keep validating

Everyone repeats the lesson of persistence and few get it right. The Titan team never abandons its core belief, but it also never stops testing that belief against the world. If you are building a company, the danger is not that you will quit too early. It is that you will confuse conviction with correctness and stop checking. The show is honest enough to draw the line between the two.

Trust the experts you hired

The leadership takes the counsel of the people who know more than they do, in design and engineering and retail, and lets them lead in their own domains instead of overruling them. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. I have watched enough founders and executives do the opposite, hiring specialists and then treating their judgment as a suggestion, to know how rare it is to actually step back.

Boards fund conviction

The numbers have to hold, of course, but I have sat in enough of those rooms to know that numbers alone do not move a board to back something risky. Boards want to feel the conviction of the people asking. When you pitch something that does not exist yet, your enthusiasm is not decoration on top of the model. It is often the thing that tips a cautious room toward yes.

Loyalty is not sentimentality

This last one I am still turning over, because I am not sure it qualifies as a lesson so much as a value the show quietly honors. When a new head of marketing is brought in, the existing head is not fired. The company finds a way to keep the person. I grew up believing loyalty was a virtue, and somewhere along the way corporate life taught me to expect the opposite during every transition, the clean sweep, the new leader clearing the decks. Watching that scene, I did not learn something new. I remembered something I had let myself forget, that the institutional memory walking around inside a person is worth more than the tidiness of replacing them.

The watch I bought on Commercial Street is probably still in a drawer at my parents' home, still keeping time if someone bothered to change the battery. Jim Sarbh and Naseeruddin Shah anchor the series, and Robbie Grewal directed it from Vinay Kamath's book on the company. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and free on Amazon MX Player. Watch it for the story. Stay for the reminder that somebody had to fight, in a bank and a boardroom and a showroom lit like a jewelry shop, for a watch to arrive in a box that made a young man feel like the purchase mattered.