A drummer has a peculiar relationship with power. He can make himself impossible to ignore, but the song usually improves when he pays attention to everyone else. Shankar Narayanan, the chief executive of Real Chemistry, plays drums. He is also interested in improv. Put those two pursuits beside a career in consulting and company operations, and a question emerges: how much of leadership is knowing what to do, and how much is hearing what is happening?
Narayanan has offered a small, direct answer about improvisation: “it taught me to be present.” Onstage, the next move depends on another person. You have to notice it before you can respond. There is something pleasantly inconvenient about carrying that lesson into an executive job. The person with the title still has to listen.
His first months at Real Chemistry gave him plenty of opportunity. He became CEO on January 3, 2022, succeeding founder Jim Weiss. He set out to learn from employees and clients, asking about the company’s culture and what people would change. A new chief executive arrives with authority already attached. Understanding the place takes longer.
A drummer’s problem
The musical part of this story is quite literal. Narayanan taught himself to play drums and has described making music with people at work as a way to bring them together. His company biography puts him behind the kit in the RC band. It also describes a reader, a golfer and a lover of puns. This is an executive biography with an unusually plausible soundtrack.
There is a temptation to turn every hobby into a management credential. Reading becomes strategic thinking; golf becomes relationship development; even lunch might find itself responsible for stakeholder alignment. Narayanan’s account of music is more concrete. Colleagues get together and play. The shared activity gives them another way to encounter one another.
That distinction matters in a company built from different disciplines. People can belong to the same organization while speaking different professional languages. A common task, whether a client assignment or a song, asks them to notice what the others contribute. The drums make a useful image for that arrangement: everyone can hear when the parts fail to meet.
“it taught me to be present”
Shankar Narayanan, on improv · 2022
From the recommendation to the result
Before Real Chemistry, Narayanan spent roughly fifteen years at McKinsey & Company, where he became a partner. He later led Cognizant’s Life Sciences business. Reporting at the time of his Real Chemistry appointment described that business growing from $800 million to $1.3 billion in revenue. His career had moved from helping companies make decisions to running a business with financial results attached.
There is a practical difference between those jobs. An adviser can make a recommendation precise enough to persuade a room. An operator must then live through the months in which people try to carry it out. The calendar becomes less accommodating. An elegant idea has to survive staffing, competing priorities and the ordinary friction of getting work finished.
At Equian, where he served as chief operating officer, that challenge included bringing nine companies together. New Mountain Capital credits his strategic and operational leadership with contributing to doubled revenue and tripled EBITDA before Equian’s sale to Optum in 2019. Those figures describe a collective business result. His part was the operating responsibility within it.
Equian milestones credited in New Mountain Capital’s executive biography; company results, not personal earnings.
Integration is an economical word for a considerable amount of work. It contains systems, reporting lines, client relationships and people accustomed to doing things their own way. Buying a business produces an announcement. Making its work fit with another business produces a much longer series of decisions. Narayanan’s experience at Equian gave his next appointment a relevant precedent.
A handover with the founder still in the room
Real Chemistry had its own history before Narayanan arrived. Weiss founded the business in 2001. Its earlier name, W2O Group, gave way to Real Chemistry in 2021, following years of growth and acquisitions. By the time the CEO succession was announced, the organization already contained multiple businesses and specialties. Narayanan was accepting responsibility for an existing cast.
Weiss moved to chairman and continued as a mentor and strategic adviser. Narayanan joined the board as well as taking the CEO role. The arrangement kept the founder involved while giving the incoming executive responsibility for running the company. Their acquaintance had developed through connections to New Mountain Capital, an investor they already knew through their respective businesses.
During 2022, the pair traveled to meet teams. Narayanan’s account of the tour ranged from Southern California and the Bay Area to Chicago, Washington, Texas and London. People working from home joined virtually. He described the pleasure of escaping his Zoom box and getting to know colleagues. Even a chief executive can tire of being a rectangle.
His London visit included meeting an EMEA team with people based in England, Switzerland, Brussels and Germany. He tied his enthusiasm for the company’s international future to another enthusiasm: Manchester City. The football reference adds a little life to the travelogue. A global executive can still have a very particular team in mind.
The tour also offers a useful picture of succession. The founder knew the organization’s accumulated history. The incoming CEO needed to hear how it was working in the present. Meeting people together made room for both perspectives. The company’s next phase began with conversations involving the people already doing its work.
Turn the training session up
By 2024, the soundtrack had entered another part of company life. Narayanan explained that Real Chemistry leaders had been planning an event around the AI tools available to employees. Several shared an affection for rock music. The event became AI Palooza, a name with considerably more stage presence than an ordinary invitation to software training.
In his public account, he acknowledged colleagues helping teams become comfortable with AI and improve their use of generative tools. Danny Bellet’s interdisciplinary incubator featured in the account, alongside work by Romain Bogaerts and Mark Bell. The details put people behind an otherwise abstract technology initiative. Someone had to make experimentation accessible to colleagues.
Narayanan’s affection for the Foo Fighters helps explain the musical packaging. He has said that anyone spending a few minutes with him is likely to hear about the band or drumming. The naming of AI Palooza makes that enthusiasm part of a shared occasion. A familiar interest becomes an invitation to learn something unfamiliar.
There is an organizational question underneath the entertainment. When new tools arrive, participation matters. Employees need time to try them, people to ask, and examples that connect to their own work. A memorable event can create an opening for that process. The lasting test comes afterward, in whether colleagues keep using what they learned.
Three things for the interns
Another revealing encounter came with an intern class. In July 2025, Narayanan shared an account of an Ask Me Anything session held with participants joining live and virtually. The conversation brought him back to three career lessons: taking initiative, making the essential things clear, and building relationships through repeated attention over time.
“Clarity matters,” he wrote. It is a compact piece of advice from someone whose career has involved complex organizations. Clarity asks a speaker to decide what another person actually needs to understand. That can be demanding work. Making an explanation longer is always available; making it useful requires a choice.
His advice about relationships was equally ordinary in its scale. He emphasized showing up, listening and staying engaged. The intern session echoes the first-year tour without requiring a grand theory to connect them. In both accounts, progress depends partly on contact with other people. An answer worth hearing may come from someone with a much shorter employment history.
The next room is in Singapore
Meanwhile, the business has continued to change around him. In April 2025, New Mountain Capital formed a $3.1 billion continuation vehicle to acquire Real Chemistry from New Mountain Partners V. The ownership arrangement gave an existing investor a way to continue holding the business through a new fund. Narayanan used the moment to describe his plans for further investment.
Those priorities included AI across the company, international growth, talent and culture. Money supplies room to act; the priorities say how leadership intends to use it. His list kept organizational development beside technology. For a company selling the work of its people, those investments necessarily meet in the daily business of serving clients.
On July 7, 2026, Real Chemistry announced the acquisition of Spurwing Communications in Singapore, establishing its first Asia Pacific strategic hub. Spurwing founder Emma Thompson continues leading the business as president of APAC growth, reporting to Kath Harrison, group president for international growth. The announcement supplies names as well as a new point on the map.
For Narayanan, the move returns to a familiar operating question: how do different teams work together without losing the knowledge that makes each useful? His earlier integration experience gives context to that question. His public welcome to Spurwing emphasized local understanding, technology, data and the team on the ground. Expansion will depend on how those contributions meet.
Back in Massachusetts, his public life still leaves room for books, puns, football and the drums. They give the executive story a recognizable human scale. The CEO has a company to run and colleagues to hear. A drummer has other musicians to hear, too. Both jobs become harder when the person keeping time stops listening.