At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026, one message emerged consistently across sessions: today’s leadership challenges cannot be solved with yesterday’s thinking. Leaders in the room were navigating geopolitical uncertainty, AI disruption, economic volatility, and a growing expectation for purpose-driven leadership, and the common thread wasn’t a need for better execution. It was a need for elevated perspective. Chaitra Vedullapalli and Dee Dee Walsh built ICONIC Leadership, out on Amazon this September, to translate that shift into something usable, pulling in 20 leaders to write from direct experience rather than observation. The result is the ICONIC ARC, structured around six pillars: Inclusive Foundations, Collaborative Partnerships, Open Access, Navigational Agility, Innovative Solutions, and Collective Action.
Navigational Agility, the pillar concerned with leading through complexity and systemic change, is where two of the book’s co-authors bring their experience into focus from different corners of enterprise and nonprofit leadership: Anand Eswaran and Akhtar Badshah.
Eswaran has served as CEO of Veeam Software, a data protection company, since 2021. He previously served as President and Chief Operating Officer of RingCentral and held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, SAP, and HP over a career spanning more than two decades, focused on cloud transformation and enterprise go-to-market strategy across global product, engineering, and sales organizations.
Badshah led Microsoft’s global philanthropic efforts for a decade, a period in which the company distributed an estimated five billion dollars in cash, software, and services to nonprofits worldwide through programs including Unlimited Potential and YouthSpark. He now teaches at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, founded Catalytic Innovators Group to advise organizations on social and philanthropic strategy, chairs the board of Global Washington, and authored Purpose Mindset, which examines Microsoft’s approach to employee giving.
Their chapters sit alongside publicity pieces built around the same argument from different angles, including “What AI Cannot Replace: Judgment, Discernment, and Human Trust” and “The Three Skills Every Professional Needs to Thrive in the AI Economy.” AI can already out-process and out-analyze people, the book argues, but it cannot decide to open a door for someone who hasn’t yet earned trust, and it cannot be a mentor. Women in Cloud has also disclosed where AI was and wasn’t used in producing the book itself: it assisted with structural editing, language refinement, and consistency review across 20 co-authors writing in their own voices, while the frameworks and lessons originated with the people who lived them.
Readers can meet many of the co-authors in person at the ICONIC Leadership Workshop on July 18 in Bellevue, Washington, part of the opening week of the Kickstarter campaign. A longer-term Davos Leadership Activation is also planned for January 2027, contingent on funding.