About the Author
Harish Gopal is a practitioner who has spent twenty-five years discovering the working mechanics of career resilience. Along the way he has architected and delivered enterprise systems for Fortune 500 companies, in industries ranging from banking and retail to energy, telecommunications and government.
His career began at twenty-two, writing banking software for Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s largest technology companies. He went on to Accenture, then to Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, and then to Deloitte as a management consultant, working with clients such as Rolls-Royce. A detour into energy and utilities followed. There he rose to chief executive of an international energy consulting business, advising blue-chip investment banks such as Macquarie and UBS on more than $35 billion of energy and utility transactions worldwide, and winning World Bank projects to bring electricity to rural Haiti. From there he became an entrepreneur, building ventures across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Along the way he has built businesses, lost one to the pandemic and started again. Today he leads companies in energy, data and electronic invoicing, some of them run with AI agents rather than conventional employees.
He has seen technological change from almost every vantage point: as an engineer building the systems, a consultant advising those adopting them, an executive leading organisations through them and an entrepreneur betting on what comes next. He has watched wave after wave of technology make valuable skills obsolete, often long before the people who held them noticed.
He wrote Riding the Ratchet because the greatest career risk is not technological change itself, but failing to see how it changes the value of what you know. The ratchet will keep turning. The question is where you choose to stand.