The Leadership
Trap.

Aravind Sakthivel

Aravind Sakthivel is a global IT technology leader and the author of the book The Leadership Trap: Why Smart Leaders Fail and How to Break Free. He is a former Chief Information Officer (CIO) across Danaher Operating Companies, where he spent 18 years leading multi-million-pound technology portfolios. He previously worked at market-leading organizations including Oracle, KPMG, and General Electric (GE).

Aravind holds an MBA from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, completed leadership programmes at Harvard Business School, and is a Certified Enterprise Architect from Carnegie Mellon University. Alongside his book, he has published research on autonomous enterprise architectures in the Well Testing Journal. He is currently based in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

His work focuses on a pattern he witnessed across major global enterprises: highly talented leaders with exceptional track records suddenly hitting invisible walls. They would lose their team's trust, make strategic decisions that backfired, or watch their organizational influence quietly evaporate. The most critical factor? Most of them had no idea what was happening until it was too late.

Driven by these observations, Aravind spent years researching the behavioral science and structural friction points behind executive breakdowns. In The Leadership Trap, he provides a definitive framework revealing the six underlying patterns that pull capable leaders off course and delivers practical, data-driven strategies to break out of these self-reinforcing loops before real organizational damage is done.

As an executive who has led deep technical changes at scale, Aravind also explores the complex relationship between corporate leadership and automation. He addresses the exact friction points where human judgment and machine logic collide, guiding leaders on how to stay grounded in emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and clear integrity as Artificial Intelligence continues to reshape modern business strategy.