The Dojo Leadership Method: A CEO’s Guide to Warrior-Grade Resilience

There’s a concept in karate called “kaizen,” which refers to the practice of continuous improvement throughout one’s karate journey and, more broadly, one’s life. This principle is especially pertinent to founders and CEOs, who will go through many different phases and iterations of their career, with the goal of getting better each time.

Growing up in India, most of my friends played the nation’s most loved sport—cricket—but I wanted to try something different and was curious about what karate could teach me. I had the privilege of traveling all over the country to compete, and even ended up amassing several state and national-level championship wins. As it turns out, many of the lessons I learned throughout my karate journey actively serve me in my role as a CEO today—and I’m still learning both on and off the mat.

Here’s what karate taught me about being a business leader:

Stay focused

During a karate match, focus is everything. Getting distracted by noises from the crowd or thoughts about what’s happening in your personal life, can give your opponent the split-second opportunity they need to catch you off guard and strike.

Similarly, staying focused is crucial for business leaders. At any given time, there are a plethora of things happening: market changes, shifting customer expectations, budgetary constraints, adjustments to your product roadmap, and more. As a CEO, it’s important to determine your top three to five priorities and continually come back to them. At Operant, our leadership team starts every day with a short standup to touch base on the status of the most important priorities, from customers to product updates, creating a continual sense of movement and accountability towards our most important goals. Some days you might be pulled in another direction, but as long as you always return to those top priorities, you’ll be well-positioned to drive forward your mission.

Resilience is essential

Before stepping onto the mat, it’s almost second nature to think about the moves you’re going to make and how you’re going to outsmart your opponent. But oftentimes, your strategy goes out the window once you get hit unexpectedly. This is where resilience comes in: You need to be ready to let go of your original strategy and adapt.

Founders often face a similar predicament. They build a company based on an established set of viewpoints and opinions, but the market is unpredictable in ways that can shake the very core of a business at any given moment. Resilience as a business leader means having the patience to hang back and observe where the market is headed, tune into what that means for customers, and recalibrate your strategy accordingly. The amount of change that has happened in the AI and security spaces in the last year is really unprecedented—just look at how the launch of DeepSeek and new Open AI products have caused a panic amongst many startups who had already become complacent operating under certain assumptions about the competitive landscape. At Operant, we view the evolution and “leveling-up” in sophistication of the AI and Security industries as a huge opportunity and a validation that our core focus on securing the systems the world depends on at an entirely new scale was and remains the right direction.

Anticipate the punches

If there’s one guarantee in karate, it’s that you will get hit—likely many times over. Instead of letting it hurt your ego, you must proactively anticipate your opponent’s strikes so that you can effectively hit back and block subsequent attacks.

Every founder will fail at some point in their career, whether it’s due to their own decisions or factors outside of their control, like the market. The sooner you can accept failure as a natural part of the process, and remove your ego from the equation, the sooner you can experiment to find solutions and a better way forward.

At Operant, we use a socratic discourse method of creative brainstorming, in which we rapidly jump through a “round-robin” of possibilities on a topic, covering the nitty-gritty of each option, including their potential failures. By encouraging open feedback and addressing the “elephant in the room” directly without having to walk on eggshells, we are able to discuss and iterate extremely fast and take ideas to real execution without nearly as many surprises as one might encounter if they’d been afraid to dive deep into the potential failure modes.

Don’t punch just for the sake of it

In a karate match, every move is calculated for maximum impact in order to conserve energy and (hopefully) outfight your opponent. Business leaders should take a similar approach when it comes to the moves their company makes.

It can be tempting to jump on the latest technology trends or try to keep up with competitors by offering more, more, more, but being intentional is key. It’s much more impactful to do a small number of things really well than a dozen things mediocrely. At Operant, we highly value doing a handful of the most impactful tactics exceptionally well, whether it’s on the marketing and GTM side, or on focusing product capabilities on the most critical real-world use cases.

Make your moves, then move on

When you’re operating from a place of strategy on the mat, it’s crucial to make your moves and then move on. Ruminating about how you performed or how you could’ve made a different or better move serves no purpose and will take your head out of the game.

The same applies to business leaders: Once you have clarity around what you want to achieve and your strategy is locked in, commit to executing on it and don’t get caught up in a “woulda, coulda, shoulda” mentality that will hinder your progress. As CEOs, we’ll inevitably have to make many fast—and oftentimes very difficult—decisions. Sometimes, those decisions will result in us getting kicked, but the most important thing is that we move forward.

The pressure in today’s business landscape is intense. But like a martial artist who transforms pressure into power, effective leaders use these challenges to sharpen their focus and strengthen their resolve. Success, whether in the dojo or the boardroom, belongs to those who remain standing after everyone else has given up.