Careers: Optimism as a Career Strategy: The Story of Namit Sharma

Namit Sharma’s career does not read as a steady climb up one ladder.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, he has spent almost three decades as a leader inside the discipline of risk, moving through GE and Genpact, through Fidelity, and into catastrophe modeling at RMS, where he came to lead the analytics and data services function.

Four distinct kinds of risk: market, consumer credit, insurance, and catastrophe, in a single career. Ask him what connected the moves, and the answer is not ambition. It is optimism, and he insists it can be learned.

He begins by clearing away the usual vocabulary. Humility, curiosity, positivity: these fill every leadership book, and almost everyone, even the most difficult colleague, privately believes they possess them.

They are the surface. The real test, Sharma argues, comes where the rubber meets the road, at the moment theory has to produce a result and the outcome is genuinely uncertain.

The quality that shows up there is optimism, and it asks far more than cheerfulness. It is a willingness to loosen your grip on control, to empower other people, and to accept that the result is then no longer entirely yours to dictate.

A leader unwilling to give up that control cannot be optimistic in any way that counts. Optimism of that kind is not summoned by force of will; it is fed

by evidence.

It grows when people watch ideas combine with another and produce something no single idea could have reached alone, when two and two visibly begin to make five. Results build momentum, momentum builds confidence, and confidence is the raw material of optimism.

This is why Sharma is so deliberate about who is on a team. He looks for differentiated, complementary skills rather than reflections of his strengths, and trusts by default, because secure, talented people are not threatened by the talent around them.