A banker for most of his working life, a big chunk of it as MD of the Kochi-based Federal Bank, one would expect a book by Shyam Srinivasan to be all about his banking career, spouting acronyms like CASA, NIM, NPAs et al.

The book, instead, abounds in different kind of acronyms, but more of that later.

Better Never Stops is a delightful and fun read of learnings from Shyam’s life bristling in anecdote and candid stories from which one can glean insights.

A lifelong love for cricket — the book’s cover is a suited man carrying a bat — means the book bursts with cricket analogies, drawing examples from the game to deliver life and leadership lessons.

So much so, Shyam’s book was launched in Chennai in a packed auditorium by none other than one of Indian cricket’s greatest captains, Kapil Dev. As Shyam said self deprecatorily, they’re here to see Kapil; if they buy and read my book that would be a bonus!

Self-deprecation, candidness, honesty is a leitmotif of this book.

If one expects Shyam’s book to talk about arcane management strategies that he followed to build Federal Bank into one of India’s best known private banks, it is anything but that.

As the book’s title says, leadership insights from life’s unscripted moments, the book dips into everyday experiences from Shyam’s life, from his early days of playing cricket to learnings from a succulent rosogollo to lollipop moments and moongphali cones!

The lessons are there for the reader to infer as the author does not give it cut and dried with 10 points one can imbibe.

Everyday experiences

Shyam’s prolific writing began at Federal where every Sunday he would dash out Yammer messages to all the staff on the week gone by, macro events impacting the bank, commending staff, exhorting them on targets. Once he retired, Shyam began his posts on Linkedin, commenting on topical events, with a big dose of sports as well. The traction that he got gave him the kernel of an idea to put his thoughts into a book.

Storytelling with a light touch is the book’s strong point. Each chapter, interestingly, begins with a song name, as the track vibes well with the chapter, says the author.

One of my favourite stories in the book is the chapter titled the ‘Mom Test’. Autobiographical accounts tend to burnish the past and paint a glowing account of deeds done. But, in this chapter, Shyam speaks the unvarnished truth. In the cricket-crazy Madras of the 1970s, one unmatched high for a schoolboy is seeing one’s name in the sports page of The Hindu. If you scored 25 runs or took three wickets, your name would appear the next morning. For a 16-year-old, as Shyam says, a certificate of immortality.

In one match, Shyam had scored 23 runs. As was common practice among schoolboys those days, Shyam talked to a teammate, who had 11 runs to his name, to ‘reallocate’ two runs to Shyam so that he would get his name in the paper.

With this plan on board, Shyam approached the coach only to receive a fiery rebuke. It was a life lesson that cut deeper than a physical punishment. What would your mother say if they found out if it was not true, can you look her in the eye, the coach asked? Thus chastised, the lesson remained seared in his memory all his life.

The denouement of this is that next match Shyam scored 44 and got his name in The Hindu on his own steam. The lesson Shyam draws from this incident is that corporate reputations can easily be decimated on minor indiscretions. Once reputation sinks no amount of marketing spends can bring it back. As Shyam says, when one is trying to make the corporate scoring sheet look better with minor reallocations and so on, one would do well to remember the Mom test.

Rosogollas and peanuts

Then there’s the story of the humble rossogolla. What’s a rossogolla, tasty as it is, doing in a book on leadership insights? It’s a masterclass in structural integrity disguised as a dessert, is what Shyam says, recounting a talk by a hotelier. You squeeze out the sugar syrup from one and it’s flattened. But, put it back in the syrup, it absorbs the syrup again and expands, taking in more syrup; the squeeze created capacity! Life’s curveballs may hit you but it’s about having a rossogolla nature, soft enough to get flattened but built well enough to fill back up. A sweet and powerful lesson, perhaps.

The lesson of the moongphali cone is evocative. Shyam stresses that one should develop the habit of learning from everywhere. The paper that wraps the peanuts can contain a valuable scrap of information, like when a Federal Bank staffer found a recruitment ad fraudulently using the bank’s name. And, that piece of paper was about to be binned but turned out to be a revelation.

As Shyam would exhort a new hire, saying stay hungry for the scraps as big breakthroughs come in disguise.

Shyam’s passion for cricket and his penchant for acronyms pop up all over the book. Cricket for him holds life lessons aplenty so there’s a good dose of cricket analogies while acronyms like PINs don’t matter ZIP does, abound, which in his lexicon stands for zeal, intensity, passion.

The book recounts Shyam’s lifelong observations — from banking to everyday and ordinary life — for insights with a good deal of common sense and even dipping into some psychology, aerodynamics, TEDx talks. There is no pontification from the pulpit on leadership but an emphasis that one can learn from life’s everyday moments.

The reviewer is a senior journalist and author of bestselling book Titan, now a web series Made in India

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Published on July 5, 2026