Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
May 2026 · Yale MAM · Commencement
Two years ago I left a Director's chair in heavy industry to sit on the other side of a Yale classroom. Today the degree is conferred.
The most valuable thing the Yale School of Management taught me had nothing to do with the curriculum. It was the room. Forty senior operators from twenty-eight countries, all of us pretending — for the first month — that we knew exactly what we were doing. By month three, the pretense was gone and the actual learning began. That is the asset.
Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
April 2026 · Enterprise AI · Heavy Industry
Every CEO I speak to wants 'AI in their company.' Almost none of them want what AI actually requires.
Production-grade AI in heavy industry is not a model. It is a data contract between four departments that have not spoken honestly in twelve years. Until plant operations, finance, IT, and corporate strategy agree on a single source of truth for tonnage, cost, and uptime — every LLM you deploy is a very expensive hallucination engine. Fix the data covenant first. The model is the easy part.
Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
March 2026 · Capital Allocation
The single most underrated CEO skill is the willingness to shrink a business that is still growing.
Growth at any cost is a story for the analyst day. Capital efficiency — knowing which $50M of revenue you should walk away from to free up $30M of capex for the next bet — is the story behind every great compounder. Read The Outsiders. Then re-read it. Then look at your own portfolio.
Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
February 2026 · ISB · Yale · MBA Admissions
I have read 400+ MBA essays in the last 18 months. The ones that work all do the same three things.
(1) They name a specific decision the candidate owned — not a project they were 'part of.' (2) They quantify the second-order consequence, not just the headline metric. (3) They say what the candidate would do differently with the benefit of the degree. Specificity is the entire game. Adjectives are the death of an admissions essay.
Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
January 2026 · Cross-Border Trade
Tariffs are not the story. Re-routing is the story.
The companies that will compound through the next five years of trade policy are the ones building parallel supplier networks in three regions before they need them. The cost of optionality looks expensive on a clean spreadsheet. It looks like genius on a CNBC chyron. We are launching a US import-export venture this year on exactly this thesis.
Vishnu Kiritee Guttikonda
December 2025 · Predictive Procurement
We cut $300M+ portfolio demurrage by 15% with a forecasting model that any sophomore could build. So why hadn't anyone built it?
Because the model wasn't the bottleneck. The bottleneck was the political agreement that finance, procurement, and logistics would act on the same forecast. The technical work was three weeks. The stakeholder work was nine months. That ratio is the entire enterprise AI industry in one sentence.