There is a comment I keep returning to from a conversation I had recently with Shalaka Kharche.
She is describing Indian classical music — the ragas she has studied since childhood, the harmonium, and now the sitar she is learning in Seattle. She is talking about what the practice has taught her about leadership, and she says, “It’s not just what you are playing. It is understanding what is not being played.”
In a raga, she explains, the musician learns to hear the gaps between the beats. The silence between the notes. The space where the music breathes. A beginner plays the notes they have been given. A seasoned musician listens for what is missing and finds the music there.
Rebel With a Cause
Shalaka spent two decades leading product at Amazon, GE, and Honeywell before founding CareGrid Health, an AI consulting company helping independent clinics reduce the administrative burden that suffocates both doctors and patients. She is an engineer by training, a musician at heart, and — by her own description — a rebel.
As you can imagine, the rebel part started early. Growing up in India, she was told explicitly what paths were available to women in technology. Still, she chose differently. Then she and her husband gave up their jobs, went to graduate school together, had a baby, and started over — moving from, as she put it, net negative to net positive. When she finished her first master’s degree, her infant was in her lap.
I asked her about that image. She smiled and said it wasn’t about defiance for its own sake. It was about something simpler: I cannot be put in a box. And so she kept walking through doors that weren’t supposed to be open to her because she genuinely could not see the walls others saw.
What strikes me about Shalaka’s story is that her rebellion was grounded in something deeper than just being a rebel for the sake of rebellion. It came from a systems thinker’s instinct, inherited from a father who liked to take apart VCRs to see how they worked, and a mother who taught her that every problem has inherent beauty. Engineering gave her the discipline to follow the signals. Music gave her the instinct to listen to what wasn’t being said.
Bridging Music & Engineering
When she describes her work as a product leader, she returns again and again to the music metaphor. A product team is an ensemble. The product manager is listening to every instrument at once, noticing when one is rushing, feeling when the rhythm is pulling apart, knowing when to bring the whole thing back together. This is not something you learn in a workshop, she says. It is a practice. It is built slowly, over years, through the accumulation of attention.
What she is describing — though she doesn’t use this language — is what researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett would call interoceptive awareness extended outward: the capacity to notice subtle signals, in yourself and in others, before they become crises. It’s a type of perception that comes from presence and from awareness.
Play to the Music
The Bhagavad Gita offers a concept that Shalaka returned to at the end of our conversation. Focus on right action. Do not attach to outcomes. It is ancient wisdom that sounds, on the surface, like it might excuse passivity. But Shalaka’s life is its own argument against that reading. She has taken big risks — left stable careers, founded a company in a complex industry, committed herself to changing a healthcare system that has resisted change for decades. None of that is passive.
This is also, I realized listening to her, what the raga teaches. You learn the notes, you learn the constraints, and then acting within those constraints, you play with everything you have. You do not play to the outcome. You play to the music.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Shalaka what mindful leadership means to her. She paused before answering and said it is about building conviction in your team that you are moving in the right direction. This is done not by telling them what to do, but by helping them understand how they fit into the larger picture. It is about speaking your mission until it becomes the way your team thinks. It is about knowing that in ambiguous spaces you cannot promise outcomes. You can only promise the quality of your attention, the clarity of your values, and the willingness to learn like a beginner every time the situation changes.
Beginner’s Mind Leaves No Room for Ego
Learning a new raga, she told me, means starting from scratch, even if you already know ten others. The musician who arrives with past songs as luggage cannot hear the new music. The new leader who arrives with certainty cannot hear their team.
I left that conversation thinking about what I listen for in my own work. As a coach, as a writer, as someone who has spent decades practicing mindful attention — am I hearing what is being played? Or are there ways for me to hear what is missing, too?
If you want to hear more from Shalaka, I encourage you to watch the conversation, check out her business CareGrid Health, and to connect with her on LinkedIn.
Mindful Minute: What is the one thing you consistently practice in your life that has most shaped how you lead? I’d love to hear it in the comments and I’m sure others would too!
