Nishant Saxena is a seasoned business leader, mentor, and author whose professional journey reflects a deep understanding of what it takes to move from functional excellence to meaningful leadership. As the Global CEO of Erba-Transasia, Saxena has built a career around strategic vision, organizational growth, business transformation, and developing high-performing teams. With more than two decades of management experience across multiple countries and industries, he brings to his writing not merely theories of success, but lessons shaped by years of observing, mentoring, leading, and learning from people at different stages of their careers.
His book, Timeless Skills: Playbook to Climb the Corporate Ladder, emerges from a question that is familiar to countless ambitious professionals: why do some talented individuals eventually reach the CXO level while others, despite being intelligent, hardworking, and technically capable, remain stuck in middle management? For Saxena, the answer lies beyond technical expertise. Career advancement increasingly depends on a set of timeless skills, behaviours, perspectives, and habits that determine whether an individual is ready to take on greater responsibility.
Throughout his management career, Saxena has personally mentored more than a hundred professionals. He witnessed promising individuals rise rapidly, while others with similar potential struggled to progress. The difference was often not intelligence or knowledge, but certain missing skills or habits that became increasingly important as their careers evolved. What makes the challenge particularly difficult, he observed, is that the very behaviours that helped professionals succeed at one level can sometimes prevent them from succeeding at the next.
This observation became the foundation for a workshop designed by Saxena in a large listed organization to help middle managers become more effective. The programme received an exceptional Net Promoter Score of 94 percent and became the organization’s highest-rated workshop. Its success demonstrated that professionals were not simply looking for another conventional leadership programme; they were looking for practical guidance that could help them understand their blind spots and make meaningful changes.
The success of the workshop eventually led to the creation of Timeless Skills. Rather than presenting career advancement as a rigid formula, Saxena approaches leadership development as a process of self-awareness, adaptation, and continuous improvement. The book combines personal experiences from his CEO-level career with practical case studies, exercises, and insights designed to help readers translate ideas into action.
One of the distinctive features of Saxena’s approach is his emphasis on skills that can easily be overlooked. In a corporate environment where performance is frequently associated with ambition, speed, expertise, and measurable results, qualities such as balance, perspective, interpersonal awareness, and adaptability can receive less attention. Yet these attributes can become increasingly important as professionals move into positions where they are expected not only to deliver results themselves but also to influence people, build organizations, make complex decisions, and create sustainable growth.
Saxena also recognizes that leadership cannot be understood through a universal Western corporate template. His experience across India, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and the UAE has given him exposure to different workplace cultures and leadership expectations. This international perspective, combined with his understanding of the Indian corporate environment, allows him to explore leadership development through a context that is particularly relevant to Indian professionals. Cultural factors such as hierarchy, individualism, authority, and workplace relationships can influence how leadership is perceived and practised. Timeless Skills therefore seeks to provide a framework that acknowledges these realities rather than assuming that one model of professional success works everywhere.
Another important influence on Saxena’s thinking is his long-standing engagement with books and ideas. As the curator of 99reads.org, associated with the concept of “99 books to make us wise,” he has spent years exploring and distilling knowledge from books across diverse subjects. His decade-long blogging journey, which has attracted a significant readership, has further strengthened his belief in the transformative power of ideas. This intellectual curiosity finds its way into Timeless Skills, where curated wisdom from numerous books is brought together with real-world leadership experiences.
Saxena’s professional achievements provide an additional dimension to his perspective. He has been recognized with Industry CFO Awards, including Young CFO of the Year and Best-in-Class High Performance Team. During his leadership career, he has been associated with significant improvements in revenue growth, profitability, cash flow, return on invested capital, working capital, and cost optimization. His experience demonstrates his ability to connect strategic thinking with measurable business outcomes.
His academic background further complements his professional experience. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from NIT Trichy and an MBA from IIM Lucknow, along with having completed an advanced course at Chicago Booth School of Management. He is also a Distinguished Alumni Awardee of NIT Trichy. Beyond his executive responsibilities, Saxena serves as a Board Member and Chair of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee at IIM Amritsar, reflecting his continued engagement with leadership, education, and institution-building.
What makes Nishant Saxena’s contribution particularly relevant is his willingness to examine the uncomfortable gap between professional potential and professional progression. Timeless Skills is not simply about climbing a corporate hierarchy. At its heart, it is about recognizing the habits and blind spots that can limit growth, developing the capabilities required for greater responsibility, and becoming more effective both professionally and personally.
For young professionals aspiring to leadership, middle managers seeking their next breakthrough, and experienced executives interested in refining their effectiveness, Saxena’s work offers a practical invitation to look beyond what has already made them successful. His message is ultimately one of continuous evolution: the skills that helped us reach where we are may not always be the skills that will take us where we want to go. Through Timeless Skills, Nishant Saxena encourages readers to identify those gaps, challenge familiar patterns, and deliberately prepare themselves for the next level of leadership.
