Inspire: The Privilege and Responsibility of Leadership

After I shared “Five Principles for Leading Through Uncertainty,” several leaders asked me to expand on each principle. This final article focuses on the fifth, and perhaps the most personal: inspiration.

Inspiration is often treated like something leaders reach for only when morale drops or uncertainty rises. It absolutely matters in those moments. But it can’t be episodic. Inspiration has to be steady because it’s always shaping the organization: what people think they can achieve, what they choose to care about, and how they show up for each other day after day.

Real inspiration is not performance. It is not hype. It is a responsibility. A leader chooses to be a reliable source of clarity, energy, and meaning, and then earns the right to transmit it through consistent decisions and actions.

When Coupa was still small, around 25 people, we agreed on three core values that became our collective DNA as we scaled. We committed to ensuring customer success. We committed to focusing on results. We committed to striving for excellence. Those values didn’t come from a branding exercise. They were informed by what inspired me personally, and they shaped how I approached leading and building from the start.

1. Seeking your inspiration

If you want to inspire others, you have to begin by seeking inspiration yourself. Deliberately. Consistently.

Early in my career as a software implementation consultant, I noticed something that stayed with me. In enterprise software, customers were often left with promised value rather than realized value. Projects went live. Implementations were declared complete. Yet customers didn’t always see meaningful outcomes. They might have been satisfied, but they were not truly successful.

That gap bothered me deeply because I’ve always aspired to living an authentic life grounded in integrity. If we say we serve customers, we should be able to point to outcomes that prove it. That frustration became fuel for me. It clarified what mattered enough to build around. It played a meaningful role in why Coupa was designed to center on ensuring customer success, not simply delivering software products.

This is often how inspiration begins. You notice something you cannot unsee. You pay attention to what energizes you and what violates your sense of integrity. Then you ask a practical question: What would it look like to do this the right way, and what would I be willing to do to make it real?

If you are a leader reading this, take time to think about three things: what you believe is broken, what you believe is possible, and what you feel a calling to elevate around you. Inspiration becomes much clearer when you stop treating it as mysterious and start treating it as something you can pursue.

2. Finding the root of inspiration within you

Inspiration becomes durable when it connects to your story. It becomes sustainable when it’s not only intellectual, but personal.

I came to America when I was six years old, and I didn’t speak English. Those early years were challenging. I had to learn the language, assimilate into a new culture, and find a way to succeed while feeling behind. That experience shaped something foundational in me: resourcefulness.

When you are trying to catch up, you learn how to make progress with what you have. You become thoughtful about waste: waste of time, waste of money, waste of effort. You develop a bias for practicality because practicality helps you survive, and then helps you succeed. Over time, that mindset can look like frugality. But at its core, it is disciplined resourcefulness.

Years later, I saw that same foundation showing up in my decision to lead Coupa. We built a company focused on business spend management because we believed companies need to be resourceful at scale. That root conviction also shaped how we operated. We cared deeply about results and about finding the fastest way to deliver them. We wanted impact that customers could realize and sustain over time.

Many leaders try to inspire through ideas alone. Ideas matter, but the most credible inspiration is anchored in personal truth. If you want to find the root of your inspiration, ask yourself what shaped you. Ask yourself what you had to overcome. Ask yourself what that taught you about what matters. Then look for how those lessons show up in the way you lead.

When inspiration is grounded, it doesn’t disappear when conditions get hard. It holds because it is connected to who you are. Your identity.

3. Emitting and manifesting inspiration across your organization

Inspiration doesn’t spread through speeches. It spreads when it shows up in the way the company runs: how priorities are set, how tradeoffs are made, and how people are treated.

I grew up believing America is the land of opportunity. If you work hard, keep learning, and surround yourself with good people, you can build something meaningful. What I learned over time is that impact at scale is almost never an individual achievement. It comes from operating in a community that trusts each other enough to be direct, share what they’re seeing, and hold each other to a higher standard.

That belief shaped how we built Coupa. It is also part of what drew me to join ICONIQ. At Coupa, we invested in a community of customers, partners, and colleagues who wanted to succeed together. We innovated continuously, shared data openly, and built feedback loops so learning could compound. In that environment, progress accelerates because the organization gets smarter every day.

But none of this works if inspiration lives only in the CEO. If people need the leader in the room to feel the mission, it won’t scale. The goal is to embed purpose into the company’s routines and decision-making.

In practice, that means turning purpose into clear priorities. It means making values visible in everyday choices: what gets funded, what gets fixed, what gets rewarded, and what you refuse to tolerate. It also means developing leaders at every level who can connect the day-to-day work to why it matters.

That’s why our early values mattered so much. Ensuring customer success meant we built for realized outcomes, not just features. Focusing on results meant we delivered value quickly, resourcefully, and measurably. Striving for excellence meant we learned together, raised the bar, and improved through collaboration with our community.

Conclusion

I view inspiration as a core responsibility of leadership. A leader doesn’t just set direction and track execution. A leader sets the emotional tone. People watch what you pay attention to, what you celebrate, what you tolerate, and what you do when things get hard. Over time, those signals become culture. Culture becomes behavior. Behavior becomes outcomes. That is why inspiration matters. It connects daily work to something meaningful and gives people the energy to do the hard things well.

When inspiration is real, it travels farther than your voice. You see it in how leaders operate, how teams serve customers, and how colleagues treat each other when no one is watching. It shows up in the standards that are upheld and the speed with which problems get addressed instead of avoided. You feel it in the confidence people have to take ownership, learn, and improve. That’s how impact expands. It becomes distributed. It becomes self-sustaining.

I say this with humility because building anything meaningful takes a lot of people, and leadership is often tested in quiet moments nobody applauds. I’m also proud of what we built at Coupa by anchoring ourselves in our values. We didn’t get everything right, but we kept returning to them. Over time, they became more than words. They became a shared standard that helped people lead from every seat.

So how do you lead with inspiration? Where do you begin? Start with reflection, not performance. Ask yourself what you want your company to stand for when you’re not in the room, and what you want people to feel when the work is hard and the answers aren’t obvious. Get clear on the few principles you consider non-negotiable, the ones you’re willing to protect even when it costs you. That clarity is where inspiration starts.

Then do the harder part. Take what inspires you and build it into the company. Make it show up where it counts: in priorities, tradeoffs, meetings, reviews, what you fund, what you fix, what you reward, and what you refuse to tolerate. Inspiration grows when it becomes the way things are done. When values are visible in those moments, people stop guessing. They know what matters. They trust the signal. And when the signal is consistent, people engage deeply. They take ownership. They raise their standards and the standards around them. They bring their full potential to the work.

Inspiration is both a privilege and a responsibility. I believe there may be almost no better time than now to lead with it. In an era of uncertainty across business, geopolitics, communities, and everyday life, people are looking for something steady that still points forward. If you can bring real inspiration in your corner of the world, it does not just lift morale. It can ignite momentum and spread like a fire through the people around you. Even if it does not travel far, it still matters. It becomes the proof that what you believed, and what you set out to build, was possible all along.