About

Anirvan Sen works with CEOs, senior leadership teams, boards, and investors on M&A, scale, and leadership by designing operating systems for complex organizations. His work focuses on a recurring structural problem: why organizations with strong strategy, capital, and talent still struggle to scale without friction, value leakage, or leadership strain.

He is the Founder and CEO of Fifth Chrome, a global strategy and M&A advisory firm, and the creator of multiple proprietary frameworks, including PROMISE, SCALEUP, COMBINE, ELITE Leadership, and the Buy-and-Build Operating System. Together, these frameworks address how strategy, leadership, operating models, and capital must evolve in lockstep as organizations grow through complexity, disruption, and acquisition.

Over the last two decades, Anirvan has worked across 80+ countries, advising organizations ranging from global enterprises such as ABB, Stryker, ManpowerGroup, AkzoNobel, and Kühne+Nagel, to private-equity-backed platforms, mid-cap companies, and founder-led SMEs. Early in his career, he also worked with organizations such as Dell and Sony, experiences that shaped his exposure to global scale, operational rigor, and complex enterprise environments.

A defining theme of his work is the belief that scale is a system problem, not an effort problem. Strategies that cannot survive execution pressure, leadership models built for stability, and M&A treated as an afterthought all fail as complexity increases. His work focuses on designing the underlying architectures that allow organizations to compound growth rather than absorb damage as they expand.

Earlier in his career, Anirvan held senior roles in global organizations, including General Electric, where he worked across geographies on large-scale transformation initiatives and was trained as a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma. This foundation in operational discipline later evolved into a focus on system-level design, leadership evolution, and execution governance at enterprise scale.

In addition to advisory work, Anirvan has trained more than 500 practitioners worldwide across strategy execution, M&A integration, operating-model design, and leadership systems. He is a published author and is frequently invited to chair and keynote senior executive, leadership, and investor forums across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

At the core of his work is a simple conviction: organizations do not fail because the future is unpredictable — they fail because they were never designed to operate inside uncertainty. His work exists to help leaders build systems that remain coherent, decisive, and resilient when the old rules no longer apply.