The Quarterly Review
Or: how Indian retail discovered you can replace strategy with vocabulary and nobody will notice.
It is Monday.
It is also Q1 of the new financial year.
Which means somewhere in India, right now, in a boardroom with a working AC and a coffee machine that hasn’t worked since 2023, a regional manager is on a phone, sweating, pacing, and gathering his energy to deploy the Sentence of the Week.
The sentence will contain at least four buzzwords.
The buzzwords will not be related to anything happening on his actual retail floor.
The room will nod.
THE ROOM WILL NOD.
This is corporate India in Q1. We are still warming up.
I have sat through roughly 2,000 of these meetings.
Possibly more.
I have a working theory that every regional manager in Indian retail attends one LinkedIn-saturated conference each quarter, and brings back exactly four new buzzwords. Three are deployed within seven days. The fourth is held in reserve for the Friday review meeting, where it is dropped with the dramatic timing of a magician revealing a coin behind a child’s ear.
Some of these buzzwords are real. They point at real shifts in retail behaviour. They deserve respect.
The other 95% are corporate plaster on a wall with a crack.
Allow me to share my findings from a decade of buzzword fieldwork.
The Buzzword Decade — A Field Guide
2015–2016: Omnichannel. Nobody understood it. Everybody used it. Twelve companies launched omnichannel “transformations”. Eleven of them just added a website. The twelfth added a website and a confused intern.
2017–2018: Customer-centric. Survived three financial years. Meant whatever the speaker needed it to mean. Still occasionally deployed by veterans who haven’t updated their vocabulary since their last promotion.
2019–2020: Phygital. The greatest fake word ever invented. A combination of “physical” and “digital” that solved no problem and described nothing. Yet it appeared on slides, on posters, and in at least one award ceremony category. The pandemic killed it briefly. It rose from the dead in 2022. It refuses to die. Like a vendor who keeps showing up at your office uninvited.
2021–2022: Data-driven. Asked at random in any retail boardroom: “Are we data-driven?” The answer was always “Yes, absolutely.” The follow-up question, “What data?” was never asked. If it had been, the answer would have been “Excel.”
2023–2024: Hyperlocal. Useful for about six months. Then deployed indiscriminately. By the end of 2024, a single cooler showroom in a single mall in Bengaluru was being described as “a hyperlocal experience activation node.”
2025–2026: AI-led. We are currently here. We are still in the AI-led era. The era has not even peaked yet. We have many months of AI-led ahead of us. Brace yourselves. Hydrate.
2027 (forecast): Agentic. I am calling it now. You heard it here first. By next March, somebody will have used the phrase “agentic omnichannel” in your hearing. When that happens, please remember this paragraph.
The most dangerous question in Indian corporate life is six words long.
It is whispered. Sideways. Without eye contact. Usually after a slow sip of tea or buttermilk.
The question is:
“Sir… what does this actually mean?”
This is the question every retail trainee thinks at least once a week. Most of them never ask it out loud. The ones who do, ask it once and then never again. There is a moment of silence, a turning of heads, an air-conditioner suddenly louder than before. And the trainee discovers that clarity is dangerous in a room where confusion is currency.
So they learn.
They learn to write the buzzwords down. They learn to underline the important-sounding ones twice. They learn to nod in rhythm with the senior team. They learn that “I’ll get back to you on that” is a complete sentence and a survival skill.
By their third year, they are using the buzzwords themselves.
By their fifth year, they are generating new ones.
This is how Indian retail builds leaders. Not through training. Through vocabulary inheritance.
There is one more truth about boardroom buzzwords that nobody talks about.
The senior people in the room, the ones who have survived 15, 20, 30 years of these cycles, they also don’t know what the buzzwords mean.
They have just stopped asking.
They sit at the end of the table. They drink their buttermilk. They watch the new buzzword wash through the room like a wave. They have seen omnichannel. They have seen phygital. They have seen data-driven. They will see agentic. They will see whatever comes next.
They know that in 18 months, this Monday’s Sentence of the Week will be forgotten. The roadmap will quietly stop being mentioned. The whiteboard will be wiped. A new buzzword will arrive on a Monday morning, from a different LinkedIn post, brought back from a different conference.
And the cycle will continue.
The whiteboard does not remember. The minutes are not read. The action items are not tracked.
But the buzzwords keep coming.
This is not unique to India. This is global. But in India, the buzzwords are deployed with a little more confidence, and a little more sweat, and a little more shouting into a phone.
This is our charm.
This is also our curse.
This is why retail veterans drink so much buttermilk. It cools the system before the buzzwords overheat the brain.
Note: The “phygital” observation is real. I heard the word “phygital” used in three separate retail leadership conversations this past week alone. The word should have been retired in 2021. It refuses. Nobody knows who is keeping it alive. We suspect a small but committed cabal of mid-career strategists who refuse to let it die.
Also: the 2027 “agentic” forecast, I am putting this in writing now so that when it happens, I can claim credit. If it does not happen, please pretend you never read this paragraph. The whiteboard will not remember either way.
If this triggered a flashback to a boardroom you survived, you are not alone. Every retail veteran has been the trainee writing down a sentence they did not understand. Most of us have also, eventually, become the one saying it. This is the lifecycle.
Strip 05 lands Thursday. The store. The auditors are 10 minutes away. The Auntie has arrived.
Some chaos cannot be managed. It can only be witnessed.
Bring tea. Bring buttermilk. The Auntie brings her own jhola.