About Shobha Ponnappa
Who I Am Today
For more than 45 years, I have worked across advertising, entrepreneurship and consulting. My experience spans very different organisation sizes, industries, geographies and cultures. I have worked with global enterprises, established businesses, mid-sized companies and entrepreneurial ventures. That breadth has shaped both the way I think and the problems I am most interested in solving.
Today, my work is centred on Sub-Surface Strategy™, an approach I developed from observing what happens beneath visible organisational problems. I work with leaders when strategy loses momentum, agreement produces little change, or recurring problems refuse to disappear. I look at the assumptions, meanings and invisible dynamics that influence how people think, decide and act. I look beneath the visible problem to understand what is actually shaping it.
From Ideas To Building Organisations
I began my career in advertising, working at Ogilvy and JWT before helming Creative Direction at Lowe Lintas. Those years taught me how ideas have to survive commercial realities, competing perspectives and the demands of execution. I later became Founder and CEO of Avigna Technologies, building the company to nearly 150 people and attracting investment from a global technology giant. Those experiences gave me very different perspectives on how organisations work.
They also taught me that the visible answer is not always the most useful one. A business challenge may look like a strategy problem, a brand problem may look like a communication problem, and an organisational problem may look like an execution problem. Yet something deeper can be influencing all three. I became increasingly interested in what was operating beneath the surface.
Consulting in C-Suite Articulation And Brand Reframe
My consulting work brought me closer to leaders and organisations facing complexity, transition, stalled growth and strategic uncertainty. Two important conduits emerged from that work: C-Suite Articulation and Brand Reframe. C-Suite Articulation helped senior leaders clarify and express their thinking with greater authority, while Brand Reframe helped brands recover clarity, meaning and distinctiveness. Both became important chapters in the evolution of my consulting work.
Over time, I saw that clearer articulation did not necessarily create shared judgement. A stronger brand expression did not necessarily resolve the conditions that had caused a brand to lose direction. The deeper issue often lay in how people interpreted strategy, what they assumed mattered, and what meanings they shared or failed to share. The work was gradually taking me beyond articulation and reframing towards something deeper.
45+ Years. 125+ Organisations. One Direction.
After more than four decades and work with 125+ organisations and brands, I had accumulated more than a collection of individual solutions. I had seen recurring patterns appear in organisations that otherwise had little in common. They appeared in large enterprises, growing businesses and entrepreneurial ventures, across different sectors, geographies and cultures. Experience had given me the ability to recognise patterns beneath circumstances.
That recognition gradually changed the direction of my own work. I became less interested in correcting what an organisation could already see and more interested in understanding what was influencing its behaviour beneath the surface. I began looking more closely at the connections between strategy, judgement, behaviour and organisational coherence. After 45+ years, the direction of my work had become clear: look beneath the visible problem.
Sub-Surface Strategy™: The Work Today
That thinking became Sub-Surface Strategy™, the approach that now defines my work. I work with organisations and leaders to understand the invisible conditions beneath visible problems. These include the interpretations, relationships and organisational dynamics that shape strategy, judgement, coherence and action. The aim is to make the invisible organisation visible enough to change.
Today, I am developing this thinking through my consulting work, my essays and my book, The Sub-Surface Warfare of Corporate Narrative. The book explores the invisible organisation beneath the visible one, and the conditions through which organisational coherence emerges, weakens and can be shaped. I continue to explore these questions through my writing and through my work with organisations and leaders. I am interested in what becomes possible when we learn to see what has been operating beneath the surface all along.
Continue Exploring
READ MY ESSAYS →
My latest thinking on strategy, organisational coherence, leadership and the invisible dynamics beneath visible problems.
READ THE BOOK →
The Sub-Surface Warfare of Corporate Narrative
EXPLORE SUB-SURFACE STRATEGY™ →
The thinking, principles and approach behind my work.
Shobha Ponnappa
Strategist · Author · Originator of Sub-Surface Strategy™