When Vik Bansal FIEAust CPEng(Ret) joined Boral as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director in 2022, the business was grappling with what he describes as “all the significant fundamental problems across people, customers, assets and finance you can think of”.
Boral had endured COVID construction shutdowns, La Niña rainfall events on Australia’s east coast and substantial energy cost inflation. Performance had slipped. Capital had been misallocated. Morale was low and market share was eroding.
Bansal’s instinct, influenced by his training as an electrical and computer systems engineer, was to pull the issues apart.
“We needed to understand each issue and start solving them one by one,” he told create.
The approach was systematic and classically engineering: start by reducing complexity to its smallest observable units, then rebuild the system only once the interactions between those units are understood. It is a mindset that serves boards and business leaders well.
Twelve months after Bansal’s appointment, Boral’s share market value climbed by more than $2 billion. In 2025, the recovery was recognised with the Large Company Turnaround Award at the Turnaround Management Association Australia Awards.
“The aggregation of marginal gains which we got through people, market, assets and finance ended up turning into what Boral’s performance is today,” he said. “Anchoring in facts and data was fundamental.”
Behind this successful strategy sits something more profound: an engineering mindset that keeps expanding.
Thinking in systems, not silos
Before Bansal talks about strategy or capital or markets, he talks about people.
“People want clarity and structure. They want to know their lane, and how their work connects to the whole,” he said. This belief – that structure creates confidence – runs through his leadership.
At Boral, it took shape as Our Boral Way, an operating model built from his systems background. This “operational cadence” gave the organisation shared guardrails, accountability and rhythm.
But it is not structure for structure’s sake. His engineering reflex to deconstruct complexity is, in practice, a way of freeing people to act with clarity and confidence.
“Having an analytical and systems understanding, attention to detail, a focus on data and facts helps me personally in my career. I wouldn’t be here without these engineering skills.”
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From solving problems to framing them
Before joining Boral, Bansal held chief executive positions at InfraBuild and Cleanaway, and served on industry boards, including the National Waste & Recycling Industry Council, the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia and Disability Services Australia.
His engineering training was valuable, but he remembers distinctly the moment his mindset widened. After several years in technical roles, he embarked on an MBA. “Engineering teaches us to solve a problem narrow and deep. But in leadership you can’t be just narrow and deep, just as you can’t be shallow and wide. You have to be wide and deep.”
This breadth is essential not only for executives, but for directors who must distinguish between symptoms and structural causes.
The same applies for communication. Engineers often communicate “narrow and deep”. But at senior levels, where you are leading teams of people, framing matters more than detail. The MBA – and Masters in Law that followed – helped Bansal learn to “move from fixing problems within the frame to defining the frame itself”.
When strengths become anchors
Bansal is frank about the limitations of the engineering mindset. People who choose engineering usually come with a natural affinity for structure. Maths and physics reward that way of thinking, and the training strengthens it. That inclination delivers precision, rigour and attention to detail – all invaluable.
“But strengths overplayed become weaknesses,” he said. His observation is simple: to lead, you must outgrow your own habits.
The biggest shift, though, is understanding that leadership is about people and becoming an effective communicator. “If you get a leadership position, your role is helping people to rise and do better. And people are not data. People are not facts, pluses and minuses. People are ambiguous and complicated.”
“Leaders must learn to communicate effectively and simply to create meaning for people, to remove ambiguity wherever possible and bring them along on the journey. That’s not something that always comes naturally to engineers.”
The 80:20 rule
“Engineers learn how to seek the truth in facts,” Bansal said. “But you will never get 100 per cent of the facts on the table. You might get 80 per cent, and the rest comes from intuition, pattern recognition, experience and insight.”
Engineers are trained for the 80 per cent; leaders must master the remaining 20. This skill, he said, is being “comfortable in your skin” when making decisions built on that combination of fact and ambiguity.
Rather than being a contradiction of the engineering discipline, this willingness to act without perfect certainty is a natural progression of the engineering mindset. This 80:20 rule is a practical expression of Bansal’s wide-and-deep philosophy.
Engineering creates exceptional leaders when they are willing to widen the circuit – to combine structure with ambiguity, systems with relationships, analysis and communication with judgement.
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