Some conversations stay with you because of the information you gain from them. Others stay because of the person sitting across the table.
My conversation with Dipak Sanghavi was the second kind.
I went into the meeting expecting to understand the story behind Nilons, a business that has been built and sustained across generations. But somewhere between discussing family, business and leadership, I found myself paying less attention to the company and more attention to the man.
What struck me first was how unassuming Dipak was.
There was no visible need to establish authority. No attempt to make every answer sound like a lesson. He spoke about difficult decisions, mistakes, dilution, professional management and moments of uncertainty with the same ease with which he spoke about growth. There was very little theatre in the way he described his journey.
That, to me, said a lot.
People often associate successful family-business leaders with control. The business is their identity, their wealth and their family’s legacy, so giving up any part of it can feel deeply personal. Dipak seemed to view it differently. His relationship with the business appeared less like ownership and more like responsibility.
That distinction stayed with me.
He has spent decades building Nilons, yet there was no sense that he believed the company existed to serve him. His approach seemed to be the reverse: he had to make himself useful to the company.
That also explains his comfort with bringing in people who knew more than he did in their respective fields. There is a particular kind of confidence required to do that. Not the confidence of knowing everything, but the confidence to accept that you do not.
And perhaps that is what I found most interesting about him.
Dipak did not come across to me as someone trying to preserve a family business exactly as it was inherited. He seemed much more interested in making sure that the business remained relevant enough to be passed forward.
That is a difficult balance for any next-generation leader.
You inherit more than a company. You inherit decisions, relationships, habits, expectations and sometimes ideas that worked brilliantly for the previous generation. The temptation is either to protect everything or to change everything simply to prove that you are different.
Dipak’s journey made me think about a third approach: respect the legacy, but don’t become its prisoner.
The more we spoke, the clearer it became that his idea of leadership was not centred around being the smartest person in the room. It was about creating a room where smarter people could contribute, disagree and take the business further.
That is a rare quality.
And perhaps the most important thing I took away from meeting him was his humility.
Not performative humility. The quieter kind—the kind that comes from having seen enough ups and downs to know that businesses evolve, people change, and no individual is bigger than the institution they are responsible for.
I walked into the conversation wanting to understand how a family business can survive across generations.
I walked out thinking about something else entirely:
Maybe a legacy survives not because someone holds on to it tightly, but because someone has the wisdom to let it grow beyond them.
That is what I will remember about meeting Dipak Sanghavi.
