Why I Chose Super Villain Over Hero: Knowing When to Shout & When to Shut Up 🦹♂️🤫
Status: Declassified - File Archive 4 | Quiet Leadership, Super Villain Style
We’re back with another file from the archives.
This time, the intel comes from a different source. Not an engineering leader. Not a Silicon Valley playbook.
A football manager. Carlo Ancelotti.
Four-time Champions League winner. The man who managed Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo — and made them play like a symphony. 🎶
His book Quiet Leadership sat on my shelf for a while. When I finally opened it, I realized he wasn’t writing about football. He was writing about US.
Let’s connect the dots.
📌 The Dot: Leadership Cannot Be Imitated
Ancelotti opens with this:
“We should never cease to learn.”
Then drops this:
“Leadership can be learned but cannot be imitated. It is possible to observe other great leaders at work, but if your natural inclination is to be quiet, calm and take care of others it is unwise to try to be anyone else.”
Read that again. Leadership can be LEARNED. But it cannot be IMITATED.
There’s a difference.
The Field Reality:
Let me confuse you. 🎯
I tried to imitate Sam Prasad for years. He was my mentor from 2004 to 2010. Every time I copied his moves, he’d call me aside:
“I don’t want you to be my clone. I want you to be YOU.”
It took me a while to understand. Today, I can say:
⚡ On the outside — I am Swami
⚡ On the inside — My leadership is heavily influenced by Sam, even though he’s no longer around to guide me
⚡ The truth — I carry him in me
And that’s the difference between imitation and absorption.
🚫 Imitation = copying the moves
✅ Absorption = making it yours
Over time, we get inspired by people. Without even realizing it, we practice their lessons in our own way. That’s not cloning. That’s evolution.
The Twist:
Here’s the Swami signature that I didn’t borrow from anyone:
I want to be seen as a Super Villain. Not a Hero. 🦹♂️
Why?
🦸 Heroes have rules — they have to be noble, fair, follow the code
🦹 Villains have freedom — no script, no constraints, crazy is allowed 💀
And I use that freedom FOR my team, not against them.
Think about it — in Avengers, Nick Fury isn’t the hero. He’s the guy in the shadows making uncomfortable calls. Lying to the team when needed. Taking the heat from the World Security Council. Doing what the “heroes” can’t do. 👀
That’s the Super Villain energy.
I become the lightning rod. The one they can get angry at. The bad cop — no, the Super Villain — so they can focus on the game.
Like Pep Guardiola says: “If you want to get angry at your team, don’t. Get angry at ME together. Then focus on the game.”
Abhishek Paul, our Kissflow Cultural Shepherd, sometimes appreciates me for being the bad cop. I feel sorry for him — I always wanted to be a Super Villain! 😈
But at the end of the day, my villainy has only benefited the team and the company.
And to my leads, I say the same thing Sam said to me: I don’t want you to be my clone. But I want you to join my club of people with the same mental disorders. 🧠
📌 The Dot: The Quiet Side
Ancelotti’s core philosophy on the sidelines:
“The game belongs to the players. Once the whistle blows, the coach must trust, watch, and resist the urge to control every moment. Preparation is yours. Execution is theirs.”
This is the heart of Quiet Leadership. The restraint. The trust.
The Field Reality:
I’ve shown you the Soccer Coach yelling from the sideline. The “patience driven by impatience.” The Rough Sea intensity.
But what about quiet? 🤫
Let me go back to the football pitch. 🏟️
All my coaching, strategies, and playbooks happen:
📋 Before the game — Preparation, alignment, playbook
⏸️ Half-time — Corrections, adjustments
📋 After the game — Debrief, learnings
But DURING the game? I have to let the captains and players execute what we agreed upon.
Yes, I can jump in when required. But I can’t shout the entire 90 minutes. If I do:
🚫 They’ll only be listening, not playing
🚫 They’ll become puppets of my directions instead of owning their game
So I cage what Noordeen and Aravindhan call the Advice Monster. 🐲
Think of Nick Fury on the Helicarrier during the Battle of New York. The Avengers are fighting. Chaos everywhere. What does Fury do? He watches. He trusts. He doesn’t micromanage Stark’s flying or tell Cap how to throw the shield. He lets them execute. 🛸
Does it make me nervous? Anxious? Absolutely.
The Twist:
But here’s what happens when I go quiet:
✨ The team surprises me
✨ They do things THEY didn’t think they could do
✨ My strategy stops being a script — it becomes a framework
✨ They take it to the required breadth and depth — on their own
In those moments, my listening and watching helped the team more than my dictating ever could.
Quiet isn’t passive. It’s deliberate restraint that lets them fly. 🕊️
📌 The Dot: Help Them Stay in Love
Ancelotti writes:
“As children, we first play the game because we fall in love with it… Sometimes, somewhere along the way the pressures and difficulties on and off the pitch can cause the passion to fade or die. It is my responsibility to help the players stay in love.”
This hit me. Because my players didn’t fall in love first.
The Field Reality:
Most DevOps, SRE, and QA folks didn’t aim to land here. They were pushed.
💼 College told them to try it
💼 First job assigned them to the role
💼 They didn’t choose it — it chose them
For sports pros, the journey is:
🏆 Inspired by the sport and its legends → Pursued the passion → Made it to the field
For my people? The journey is REVERSED:
🔧 Placed by compulsion → Joined the field → NOW need to find the love
That’s a leadership problem I have to solve.
The Twist:
I tell them straight: “You came here by compulsion. That’s okay. But to GROW, you need to develop passion — or hop out and find it somewhere else.”
This takes cultural work:
🎯 Flood them with materials, directions, “confusions”
🎯 Help them find their own inspiration
🎯 Introduce them to the legends of the field
Because here’s the key: If they find someone in the field to admire, the passion engine starts. 🔥
Every footballer has a Messi, a Ronaldo, a Maradona. But who’s the legend of DevOps? Of SRE? Of QA?
Part of my job is helping them FIND that hero. Without a hero, no fire.
📌 The Dot: Never Stop Learning
Ancelotti opens his book with:
“We should never cease to learn.”
Sam Prasad said the same thing — before DevOps was even a word.
“Learning is a continuous process.”
The infinity concept. ♾️
The Field Reality:
Over the years, thanks to Sam and my other bosses, I developed a system:
📚 Biographies — Entrepreneurs, companies, sports professionals, coaches
📖 Fiction — English and Tamil — stories shape us too
🎙️ Interviews — Watching how leaders articulate their thinking
🎬 Movies — Leadership and team dynamics on screen
That’s how I landed in MCU. Not for entertainment. For education. 🦸
The Twist:
When I read and watch, I connect the dots. The leaders I study went through the same struggles I did.
⚡ Sometimes they handled it the way I did → Validation
⚡ Sometimes they did it differently → New angle
⚡ The biggest lessons come from their failures, not their wins 💀
This IS the blog. “Connecting the Dots I’ve Collected” — it’s not just a title. It’s my learning operating system.
I’m still rusty. Still learning. Still reshaping how I lead.
The day I stop learning is the day I stop leading.
📌 The Dot: Without Players, No Game
Ancelotti states the obvious — but most leaders forget it:
“Without the players there can be no game, just as without people and a product, there is no business.”
Under pressure, we optimize for systems, processes, metrics. And we lose sight of the humans.
The Field Reality:
Sam gave me another framework. Not PowerPoint. The REAL PPT:
🧑🤝🧑 People → Align them to culture first
⚙️ Process → They will drive the process you recommend
🛠️ Tools → They will select and optimize the tools
The hardest part? Aligning the people. But once that’s done, the rest follows.
The Twist:
In 2018, I made a switch:
🔧 FROM: Techno-Functional Leader (The Craft)
🛡️ TO: Cultural-Functional Leader (The Shield)
I went from Captain to Coach.
⚽ Captain plays on the field
📋 Coach builds the team that plays
I chose to step off the pitch and focus on the humans. Like Abhishek Paul calls himself Cultural Shepherd, I want that tag too.
Bootstrapping teams and their operations — that’s my playbook now. That’s my strength.
📌 The Dot: Bouncing Back Together
Ancelotti says:
“Working with these athletes, taking care of them and helping them develop and grow, building trust and loyalty, sharing our successes and bouncing back together from disappointment, this is the heart of my job for me.”
Successes AND disappointments. Together.
The Field Reality:
I tell my team:
“Go to the field every day. Play with passion. Make healthy progress. Enjoy the game. Success will come — eventually and consistently.”
When they get knocked down, I ask them to dig:
🔍 What went right?
🔍 What went wrong?
🔍 What can we do to bounce back — and never fail the SAME way again?
Blameless postmortem. DevOps and SRE already practice this. We just apply it to everything.
The Twist:
Here’s the Super Villain’s code:
To the outside world (stakeholders):
⚡ When they WIN → I shamelessly promote them
⚡ When they FAIL → I take the hit
To the inside (the team):
⚡ When they WIN → They own the glory
⚡ When they FAIL → They own the accountability
I’m the shield externally. I’m the mirror internally. 🛡️🪞
Netflix calls it “Freedom and Responsibility.” That’s the building block of the culture I’m constructing.
“Whatever it takes.” — That’s not just Endgame energy. That’s bouncing back energy. 💪
📌 The Dot: Why I Get Up
Once upon a time, I got upset when team members left for another company. I treated them like family.
One day, Sam had enough. He shouted at me:
“We are a TEAM, not a family!”
Hard lesson. 💀
The Field Reality:
Pep Guardiola says it best: As a coach, our responsibility is to make the player better versions of themselves. Day in. Day out.
That goes for as long as they stay with us. And when they move on?
They become part of my Avengers Initiative. 🌍
Spreading across the world. Carrying the mission forward to places I’ll never go.
Like Tony passing the arc reactor to Peter. Like Cap passing the shield to Sam. The mantle moves. The legacy continues. 🛡️
The Twist:
It’s a process. Magic doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes the team doesn’t align with me. Sometimes I feel low.
But like Captain America, I tell myself:
“I can do this all day.” 🛡️
And I retry. Like Dr. Strange bargaining with Dormammu. Time loop. Run it again. 🔁
Coaching people is an addiction. And only crazy coaches like me will admit it.
I don’t want to rehabilitate from this addiction.
This is why I get up every day.
🎯 The Debrief
Ancelotti taught me that quiet leadership isn’t weakness. It’s deliberate restraint.
The Super Villain has two modes:
🦹♂️ Loud — When I need to take the hit, cage the blame, be the lightning rod
🤫 Quiet — When I need to step back, let them play, and watch them surprise me
Here’s the operating system:
⚡ Leadership can be learned, but cannot be imitated — absorb, don’t clone
⚡ Cage the Advice Monster during the game — strategy becomes framework, not script
⚡ They came by compulsion; help them find passion — the Role Model Engine
⚡ People → Process → Tools — align the humans first
⚡ Shield externally, mirror internally — take the hit outside, hold accountability inside
⚡ Team, not family — build your Avengers Initiative, spread the legacy
⚡ Coaching is addiction — I don’t want rehab
The sea is still rough. The Super Villain is still loud when needed.
But sometimes, the quietest thing you can do is let them fly. 🕊️
And that’s when the magic happens.
Stay quiet. Stay loud. Stay addicted. 🦹♂️⚡
Class dismissed. ✊
🎬 Experience It Visually
Finished reading? Now see it.
I transformed these seven dots into comic-style visual stories. Same Super Villain wisdom. Frame by frame.
👉 View the Comic Tales version →
Part of the Connecting the Dots I've Collected — Comic Tales series.
