Choose People. Every Time.

Few OTT shows bring the whole family together and spark conversation the next day. Last weekend, we watched Made in India: A Titan Story on Amazon Prime. My parents were interested from the start. Even my six-year-old told his friend about it: You know this guy is the boss. They make watches. That’s the best summary I’ve heard.

Their enthusiasm made me realize the show isn’t just about watches; it’s about something much bigger.

It’s about building something despite doubt. Xerxes Desai and his team weren’t sure it would work, but they believed in what they were doing. Certainty waits for proof; conviction acts before proof exists.


What really stuck with me was how the show talked about people. At one point, there’s a choice between focusing on people or on process. The answer was clear: always choose people. It’s not that the process isn’t important, but if you build a process on distrust, you end up causing the very failure you wanted to avoid.

Choosing people isn’t always easy. It means being willing to accept mistakes along the way. The show doesn’t sugarcoat this. It shows the real cost, a wrong decision, a missed target, a product that doesn’t work out. Desai accepted that. He didn’t see every mistake as proof he’d trusted the wrong person. Instead, he saw it as the cost of building a team that would eventually succeed. That’s a different kind of leadership. Most organizations claim to value learning from failure, but few make it possible.

The bond between Desai and J.R.D. Tata is inspiring too. It’s about one person trusting another’s instincts before the numbers made sense. That kind of belief is harder to find than any strategy. Most of us can remember one person who believed in us like that. Not many of us have had more than one.

And then there’s how people in the show talk about Tata. It’s more than just loyalty; it’s almost like love. That comes from years of putting people first, time and again. This kind of people-first culture stands out even more today, when…

With so much news about layoffs and talk of AI replacing people, it’s refreshing to see a show that still believes in what people can do.

I was still thinking about it at my desk on Monday, and that doesn’t happen often.

If you haven’t seen it yet, try to watch it this weekend.