Tag: Business

Your brain has 86 billion neurons, each of them poised to drive your responses to the world around you. But is your mind focused on your deepest wishes and values – or is it running on autopilot?

Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart is convinced that we all have the power to lead the lives we want. That’s because the things we most wish for – health, happiness, wealth, love – are not governed by mysterious forces, but by our ability to think, feel and act; in other worlds, by our brains.

From her book, The Source, we extract four things you can do today to change your life.

Set Your Intention

Law of attraction enthusiasts define ‘intention point’ as the meeting place between ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, but science shows us that there is more than just blind faith in this notion. When we set a goal from the ‘intention point’ what actually happens scientifically is that our intuition, our deepest emotions and our rational thinking line up and work in harmony rather than conflict. It’s almost impossible to reach our goals when we are out of kilter in these three dimensions.

Reframe Failure

‘Abundance’ correlates with positive thinking and generosity, with the central belief that there is enough out there for everyone, and that by carving our niche and claiming our success we will add to the realm of possibility.

One of the simplest ways to begin thinking more abundantly is to change the way you consider failure. Abundant thinkers regard failure as an essential element of success.

Visualise Your Goal

The language of self-belief and achievement is rich with visual metaphors. We ‘dream’ of doing something great or we see something happening in our ‘mind’s eye’: this is the language we use more when we are in touch with all our senses and comfortable with daydreaming and mind-wandering rather than focusing on rational thought and concrete examples only.

Visualisation works because there is surprisingly little difference to the brain between experiencing an event directly in the outside world and a strongly imagined vision (plus somethings imagined action) of the same event.

Self-Care of the Brain

The demands of modernity conspire to throw our brains into a constant state of overwhelm and stress, so The Source (i.e. the brain) needs our help to maintain its focus and maximize its efficiency. This is where changes to our lifestyle – everything from the foods we eat, number of hours each night we sleep and physical exercise we get – can bring huge incremental gains.

DIYer n. A disrupt-it-yourselfer; a Jugaad 3.0 innovator; an employee who acts and behaves more like an entrepreneur in the context of an established organization

Dr. Simone Ahuja – consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, is the CEO of Blood Orange where her mission is to empower innovators in large organizations and mobilize them with entrepreneurial tools for a single purpose: to transform the corporate culture from the inside out using design and lean principles. In Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation, she shifts the focus from ‘entrepreneurs’ to ‘intrapreneurs’, the incredible ‘corporate hackers’ who tap into and around the bureaucratic machinery surrounding them to advance their projects. Or we could call them ‘constructive disrupters’,since today’s intrapreneurs often seriously challenge existing business from product offering to business model, yet they do it actively from the inside and, by doing this, help keep the enterprise viable.

Based on hundreds of interviews, as well as the author’s consulting work within companies, Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation identifies the competencies these corporate hackers possess. It also offers a spectrum of carefully crafted archetypes to help people see themselves in this trend and allow organizations identify the innovators in their midst.

Read on to learn more about eight inspirational intrapreneurs whose passion and innovation transformed organizations from within-

Balanda Atis —As a chemist formulating mascara at L’Oréal USA, she set her sights on formulating foundations that did not look ashy on darker skins.

“Although Atis and her colleagues were not freed from doing their day jobs, L’Oréal gave the trio access to a lab. Fuelled by passion and purpose, they produced and tested foundation samples on their own time. Lacking opportunities for data collection, they tagged along on trips to existing conferences and fairs across the country, collecting skin tone measurements from thousands of women of colour. The big breakthrough came when Atis discovered they could work with an existing colour compound. Ultramarine blue was seldom used in cosmetics and difficult to work with, but it allowed them to create richer, deeper shades without the muddy finish that was so common in existing darker foundations. Atis and her tiny team succeeded in satisfying a massive customer need that had existed for generations.”

Ravi Ramaswamy— He led the innovation team behind the Efficia ECG100 an easy to use ECG after realizing that resource-constrained settings needed medical systems should not only be easy to buy but also easy to use and did not require expensive specialized training.

“The prototype exceeded everyone’s expectations. What is now a diagnostic-quality electrocardiogram started with the team’s purchase of an off-the-shelf mobile device. Any Android phone or tablet could act as the user interface after the simple installation of an app. The team’s energies went into making an ECG acquisition box that was just as compact (the finalproduct weighed fewer than ten ounces) and intuitive to use. ‘We worked on it for about six to eight months,’ Ramaswamy recalled, before asking for a meeting with Philips Healthcare’s business unit leader. After hearing the idea and trying out the prototype, the executive said: ‘This is a fantastic product. It’s going to be the pathway to the future.’ Ramaswamy reported that ‘from then on, there was no looking back. We had the complete support of the business unit in terms of driving this model.’”

TOYOTA US TEAM—They worked on the margins of Toyota’s organization to redevelop the Toyota Avalon.

“Take the wholesale redevelopment of the 2013 Toyota Avalon. Led by designers and engineers working far from the company’s Japanese headquarters, the initiative was culture defying for Toyota. When the US-based team told their story to industry analyst Mark Phelan, they stressed that they ‘worked in the margins of Toyota’s playbook, following the old adage that it’s better to beg forgiveness than permission’”

Doug Dietz—After seeing the discomfort of young children getting CT scans, he developed the GE Adventure Series—which involves turning dark, scary CT scanning tunnels into inviting storybook hideaways for young patients.

“First, it was by visiting a customer’s facility—the paediatric oncology department of a major hospital—that industrial designer Doug Dietz recognized a customer problem crying out for a better solution. He tells the story of how he had just finished working on a CT design project and thought he’d done a wonderful job. He was very proud of himself, and in 2005 he went to one of the hospitals where the equipment was being installed for the first time. But it only took an hour of observation for him to realize how reductively he had pursued his mission. The first people he watched interacting with the new machinery were a family with a young child. The child was so terrified by the machine that she needed to be sedated. Dietz had to be there to get that the key to better outcomes—including better image capture, higher machine utilization and better patient experience—was decreasing the need for sedation. It wasn’t just about making machines more capable; it was about making children—and families—more comfortable.”

Lars Kolind—His spaghetti organization at Oticon allowed employees across the board to choose projects according to their skills or as an opportunity to develop new skills, and share equal responsibility for projects.

“Going back even further to 1990, an executive named Lars Kolind arrived at the Danish company Oticon with a bold new structural idea he called ‘the spaghetti organization’. If you think about the clean boxes and lines on the traditional command and- control organization chart, and then you think about what happens to those lines in a Holacratic or Hollywood system, you see where he got his metaphor. To the great surprise of the engineers working on Oticon’s innovative hearing aids, asvwell as all its functional groups from finance to sales and from HR to PR, Kolind in one fell swoop did away with everyone’s job title and moved them all from their accustomed offices and desks too. Most important, he told them that it was up to them now to decide where their talents could be best applied. No one would be assigned to projects where they would receive topdown mandates from project bosses.”

Kishore Biyani—His innovative intra-organization recruitment to create more ‘Kishore Biyanis’ for leadership roles.

“In January 2016, he put the call out across his organization for applicants interested in those leadership roles. Already, this was unusual, since the recruiting did not look outside FCL’s walls: this was a campaign, called Ban Jao Biyani, run wholly within the organization. More interesting still, having received 450 applications from employees, he and his team then ‘shortlisted’ fifty applicants, and put them through a boot camp where they were ‘trained on management aspects and asked to present a business plan for the brand they had bid for’. This was, in effect, the kind of competition some organizations today host for proposed innovation projects—but in this case, it was not intrapreneurial ideas but the intrapreneurs themselves who were being chosen for further development and investment.”

SHARMILA SAHA AT Mindtree—Mindtree’s programme

‘5 X50’ chose five intrapreneurial projects, each of which was judged to have the potential to grow to $50 million in revenues. The five were carefully selected through a competitive process and the winning teams were given the full support of an incubator-style experience of mentoring and resource provision.

“A quick win from that programme was a new line of business: Mindtree’s Digital Surveillance unit, launched in 2013. The team behind it, led by Sharmila Saha, was driven by the new market demand for better public-space surveillance technology in the wake of high-impact terrorist attacks, seen on a global scale by the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States and the Mumbai attacks of 26 November 2008. It saw that potential clients like US Homeland Security were struggling with conventional CCTV feeds, which required hours of tedious monitoring, and thought it could come up with next-generation capabilities. Prior to the 5 X 50 initiative announcement, Saha and four colleagues had been working for half a year on the concept, which features audio-video analytics and real-time updates. Winning the competition meant that Mindtree invested about $1.5 million (about Rs 9 crore) to incubate it to the point where it was ready for its first client, the Bangalore City Traffic Police.”

Babak Forutanpour—He found himself the accidental founder of a movement Qualcomm. The group acquired a name—FLUX, for ‘forward-looking user experience’.

“This is what Babak Forutanpour was up against as a software engineer at Qualcomm circa 2004. Once he was onboarded and unpacked his laptop, he realized there was no suitable place to bring a new idea to have it vetted and considered for development. ‘No one was listening, and my boss didn’t even want to brainstorm,’ he recalled. Eventually he was so desperate for a sounding board that he pulled together a ‘little biweekly luncheon’ with like-minded people outside his usual circle. ‘If nothing else,’ he figured, they could all ‘eat a ham sandwich with someone interesting’. But that initial group quickly decided to go beyond the sandwich and try to accomplish something more substantial together. In short order they came up with a cool new technical solution for reducing ambient noise. After a thorough vetting of prototypes by subject-matter experts, a patent that eventually produced real value for Qualcomm was applied for and awarded.”

For more, get a copy of Jugaad 3.0!

Dr. Simone Ahuja – consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, is the CEO of Blood Orange where her mission is to empower innovators in large organizations and mobilize them with entrepreneurial tools for a single purpose: to transform the corporate culture from the inside out using design and lean principles. In Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation, she shifts the focus from ‘entrepreneurs’ to ‘intrapreneurs’, the incredible ‘corporate hackers’ who tap into and around the bureaucratic machinery surrounding them to advance their projects. Or we could call them ‘constructive disrupters’, since today’s intrapreneurs often seriously challenge existing business from product offering to business model, yet they do it actively from the inside and, by doing this, help keep the enterprise viable.

Based on hundreds of interviews, as well as the author’s consulting work within companies, Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation identifies the competencies these corporate hackers possess. It also offers a spectrum of carefully crafted archetypes to help people see themselves in this trend and allow organizations identify the innovators in their midst.

Read on to find out how to ‘hack’ your corporation from within itself with these eight essential principles

Keep It Frugal

Intrapreneurs actively solve problems and seek opportunities, relying on pre-existing elements and recombining resources for novel uses.

What organizations need now are the right tools and a ready mindset to innovate from within. The Jugaad 3.0 agenda items that follow directly support my main message: deep-six the deep pockets. Simple tools, small budgets and human ingenuity can deliver impressive results, including maximum agility with fewer ‘business as usual’ strings attached. Knowing that nothing innovative

is ever truly linear (or one size fits all), consider these to be á la carte strategies for keeping it frugal:

1. Remain Asset-Based
2. Keep It Simple
3. Encourage Frugal Experiments
4. Focus on Teams
5. Rethink Incentives

~

Make It Permissionless

Lets leaders provide support without crushing the creativity and potential of upstart intrapreneurs. Companies need a culture of permissionless innovation a innovation isn’t something that you should be asking approval for.

Making intrapreneurship sustainable requires creating a permission-lite environment for intrapreneurs. It’s autonomy with guardrails. The goal is to establish a network of support rather than a system of tight control by leaders. This ‘support, don’t control’ mantra reinforces frugal funding and has two additional benefits. First, it is an easy fit for intrapreneurs, who want a safe space to pursue new ideas and side projects. Second, it doesn’t oblige large companies and their leaders to bend over backward to manage and measure early-stage projects. Here are the plays that put permissionless to work:

1. Support, Don’t Control
2. Say ‘Yes’ More Often
3. Add Light Structure

 ~

Let Customers Lead

Even though being ‘customer-led’ might sound obvious, it isn’t put into practice by many would-be innovators. Rather than sitting in an ivory tower and thinking about what the customer needs, ask the customer what they want. Look at how the customer is using your product.

Organizations that allow intrapreneurs to take their cues from customers create an instant advantageand avoid many of the barriers that derail internal innovation. These are the plays that I have seen work best in industries and environments across the board:

1. Create Leading-Edge Customer Focus
2. Hack Better Access to Customers
3. Turn Customers into Innovation Partners
4. Make Intrapreneurship a Sales Priority

~

Keep It Fluid

Since fluid team formation does not happen naturally in most organizations, companies need light structures to enable new levels of information sharing, networking and mobility across their talent pools.

Fluidity delivers more control and autonomy to individual intrapreneurs and small groups, and less to the management layers above them. This tricky little paradigm switch packs a positive punch that promises to increase innovation if managed properly. The trouble is that the type of organizational structure that enables fluidity is less rigid than we are accustomed to today. Just as everything digital tears down existing walls, we need to eliminate artificial, outdated boundaries and allow intrapreneurs some latitude to selfdirect, self-manage and self-organize. Here’s a look at how

to make it work:

1. Create a Team of Teams
2. Make Management Fluid
3. Support Agility Through Structure

 ~

Maximize Return on Intelligence

‘Return on intelligence’ is a reformulation of ROI that puts the short term emphasis on intellectual rather than financial gains.

Intrapreneurs rely on constant learning in an open, agile environment where the culture can balance structure with autonomy and metrics with flexibility as part of these J3.0 principles:

1. When in Doubt, Test It Out
2. Make Learning a Priority
3. Measure Return on Intelligence
4. Make Failure Feasible

 ~

Create the Commons

The corporation should create ‘the commons’, or a space where information is openly shared, for the whole development community,  involving many more types of people and thinking.

The idea that intrapreneurship should be open and inclusive should not surprise anyone. Still, we are left with the question of how to achieve that goal. My approach throughout this book has been to hold up principles to help you create your own J3.0 playbook. That approach reflects the realities that (a) best practices are forever changing, and (b) the ‘best’ answers will, in any case, never come down to cookie-cutter solutions but will be customized to particular settings. With that in mind, start your playbook with these field-tested, flexible ideas for inclusive intrapreneurship:

1. Plan for Full Inclusion
2. Make It Safe to Innovate
3. Use Technology in Appropriate Measure
4. Train Future Intrapreneurs
5. Create Porous Networks

~

Engage Passion and Purpose

Passion is what motivates intrapreneurs to keep going when the work seems thankless or when seemingly insurmountable challenges arise.

Recognizing the passion and purpose parts of intrapreneurship allows companies to think more broadly about how to match their people with the problems they care most about. For employees, having the opportunity to work on passion projects creates greater engagement. For companies, it makes the most of creativity and ingenuity. Here’s how to put this win-win dynamic to work in a Jugaad 3.0 way:

1. Make Purpose Programmatic
2. Leverage Passion That Bubbles Up
3. Push Passion Viral

~

Add Discipline to Disruption

There should be a full spectrum of innovation options for intrapreneurs in any organization, from eye-popping, potentially disruptive innovations to clever little hacks on existing solutions. They are all valid, and companies can create disciplined systems by thinking through three streams of innovation.

 The J3.0 approach requires structure and discipline in the right measure in order to extract the most value from each stream of innovation and install metrics that guide and measure success

without losing the learning or limiting the idea. The prescriptive plays look like this:

1. Develop Multiple Streams of Innovation
2. Create a Culture That Enables Hybridity
3. Manage Disruption with Discipline

Jugaad 3.0: Hacking the Corporation will prove that every organization’s best chance, to survive and become better than ever, lies within itself.

Taking us through a 25-year long journey of Indian politics Ruchir Sharma’s Democracy on the Road builds up the platform and sets the stage for the 2019 elections; the ballot which will offer a choice of two different political visions, one celebrating the reality of the many Indias, the other aspiring to build one India.

Read on to find out why this book is a must-read before you press that ballot button in 2019:

1. The book explores the time of the late 70s and early 80s; when in the face of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, India started finding its ground as a real democracy.

2. It tells the story of the rise of Mayawati in UP.

3. The book delves into the details of the Congress’s journey in the general elections from 1998-2004

4. It travels into the major states of India while exploring the pre-election campaigns in each of them alternately focusing on general and state elections.

5. Democracy on the Road highlights how the Bharatiya Janata Party grew from strength to strength under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

6. It takes us through the intricacies and complexities of the Indian political system and the election system.

7. The book takes us briefly into the political sojourns and offices of some of India’s biggest names in politics from Indira Gandhi to Narendra Modi and everyone in between.

8. It explores and tries to understand the perspective and the mentality of the different voters spread across different states in India.

9. It takes us into Narendra Modi’s political journey and his fight to the top against spanning the years from 2014-2018.

10. Democracy on the Road offers to provide the reader with a very objective overview of the election scenario leading up to the elections that are set to write a new chapter in India’s democratic and socialist history.

Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

Shashank Shah is a thought leader in the fields of stakeholder-centric business strategy, corporate responsibility and sustainability. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School; and is currently the editor-in-chief of the Harvard University Postdoctoral Editors Association; and consulting editor with the Business India Group. His first book Win Win Corporations was published in 2016.

Read on to know more about his new book The Tata Group, as we catch up with him on a conversation.

According to you, how has Tata group maintained its leadership position over the years? What are the main factors of its successful performance?

How many companies in India can boast of celebrating 15 decades of existence? Very few. Moreover, how many of those have consistently ranked at the top of the charts for their financial and indeed all-round performance? Tatas have remained India’s numero uno corporate for 80+ years, ever since corporate rankings have been measured in India. Contextually, let us compare two among the tallest business leaders of the 19th century – Jamsetji Tata and Premchand Roychand (the former worked under the latter in his formative years) and their institutions a century later. While Premchand Roychand & Sons (under the fourth generation) recorded a turnover of ₹82.3 crores in March 2014, Tatas had a turnover of ₹650,000 crore. It can be said that the successors of Jamsetji Tata fulfilled their commitment to sustain and achieve the dream of India’s industrialisation, the seeds of which he had sown in his lifetime in substantial measure. Two key aspects contributed the most in ensuring that the Tata flame shines brighter by the day. These are the founder’s vision and the Tata model of business.

Firstly, let’s talk about their model of business. The Tata companies are commonly referred to as the Tata Group. There are approximately 100 Tata companies of which 29 are publicly listed and the remaining 71 are privately held by Tata Sons, which is the main holding company. Tata Sons ownership in Tata companies varies from 20 to 70%. The elected chairman of the Tata Sons board is recognized as the Tata Group chairman. In 2018, about 66% of the equity capital of Tata Sons was held by 15 philanthropic trusts endowed by various members of the Tata family over many generations. The Tata Trusts are legally mandated to annually spend 85% of their dividend earnings on social welfare projects. Thus, the Tata model of business is a virtuous cycle of wealth creation and not just profit making. The wealth thus created from the society, is ploughed back into the society, thereby completing a virtuous loop – a rarity in contemporary capitalist society.

Second is the vision of the founder who made the society the core stakeholder of the Tata businesses and not the Tata family or the shareholders. In my interactions with the senior-most executives of the Tata Group, I observed a conviction that the ultimate objective of the Group is to contribute to societal well-being through the Tata Trusts. If this wealth is generated by harming/negatively impacting any of the stakeholders during the process of wealth creation, and then distributed as charity, it defeats the vision of the founding father who said 120 years ago, ‘In a free enterprise, the community is not just another stakeholder in business, but is in fact the very purpose of its existence.’

Thus, the vision and its execution has been done with a far-greater passion for creating wealth through entrepreneurship. Albeit, the focus has not been on profit-making alone, but on investing in core sectors vital to nation building, venturing into businesses involving long gestation periods, taking risks to go global, focusing on customer affection and employee wellbeing, investing financial and human resources to change with a changing world and integrating business excellence and innovation into the core approaches of doing business. Lastly, despite these efforts, if a Tata company isn’t successful in retaining a slot among the top three in that industry category, exit the business and divert investment and energy in newer and more promising areas.

These, I believe have been the building blocks of the Tata success story.

What motivated you to author this monumental work?

You have used the right word – monumental. 180,000 words and 1,500 end-notes make my book an almost encyclopaedic work on the Tata Group, which is without a parallel. When you study a conglomerate like the Tata Group, you aren’t just studying a company; you are studying 100 companies from 20+ industries operating in three distinct time periods – the British Raj, the post-independence period and the post-liberalisation era. To add to that is also the business-bureaucracy angle from the years of Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi. So it is indeed a monumental task!

However, the world of Tatas has always fascinated the researcher in me. Not only do they serve every industry—from the seas to the skies (as depicted on the cover page of my book), but also, for fifteen decades, their leadership and management philosophy have balanced the commercial and social imperatives of business. They have distinguished themselves through priorities and processes by evolving and practising an approach that can be referred to as the ‘Tata way of business’, which effectively combines international best practices with Indian values, and blends the capitalist spirit with socialist primacies.

At a time when the world is undergoing serious problems—environmental, social, financial and emotional—corporations, which have been one of the most potent forms of collective effort towards the achievement of focused objectives, can play a major role in contributing to solutions through products, services, processes and practices. In contemporary times, corporations have the opportunity to transition from purely economic and profits-focused entities to those prioritizing value creation for several stakeholders. In the Tata story, I have found a strong resonance to the approach I subscribe to—where profits and social well-being can coexist; where profits are not at the expense of the society, but profits benefit society; where profits are not an end in themselves, but the means to a more noble end.

This book is the third in a series of my research work that explores stakeholder-centric corporate strategies in India Inc. There couldn’t have been a better conglomerate than the Tatas to study this. Moreover, the last major book on the Tata Group ‘Creation of Wealth’ was published by RM Lala in 1992. In the subsequent 25 years, the revenue of the Group has increased 25 times from ₹24,000 crores to ₹650,000 crores of which 67% now comes from outside India. This story had to be told. Hence, I embarked on this ‘monumental work’.

In the book, the reader will find out what makes the Taj one of Asia’s largest group of hotels; why did the Corus acquisition not meet expectation and yet how does Tata Steel rank among the top 10 ten steel-makers in the world; how did Tata Power envision and deliver clean energy a century before that term first become popular; how could Tata Chemicals become the world’s third-largest producer of soda ash; how did Tata Motors turnaround Jaguar Land Rover when even the Ford Motor Company failed to do so and also rank among the world’s top 10 ten commercial vehicle manufacturers; how did Tata Global Beverages beat global competition and emerge as the world’s second-largest tea company; and how come TCS, which was on the verge of being wound-up in 1978 went on to become not only India’s most valued company at $100-billion but also the second largest IT services company in the world. These are some of the most fascinating stories that have been narrated in an engaging manner such that even a lay reader can understand.  

Could you share with our readers a few iconic path breaking findings of the Tata Group that you discovered while working on this book?

I think the greatest path breaking finding has been their financial success story, which is rarely discussed. People believe that Tatas are a good company, but are doubtful of their wealth creation capabilities for their shareholders? Tatas spending ₹2,000 crores every year through their Trusts and CSR investments, and their contribution in the establishment of some of the finest educational, health and cultural institutions don’t impress hard-nosed capitalists. To explore whether Tatas have done well by being good or not, I embarked on a comparison of Tata Group with leading Indian business houses and global conglomerates on the benefits shareholders received by investing in Tata companies. The analysis revealed some eye-opening numbers.

A simple review of shareholder returns across Tata Group showed that over a 26-year horizon (1 April 1992 to 31 March 2018), the Group outperformed the market and other well-known conglomerates in India and abroad. This was particularly important given that the companies analysed had lasted various economic, business and political cycles while they continued to be leaders in their sectors. Given Tatas’ diversity, we identified 16 businesses that best represented the Group’s presence across most sectors and decided to equally divide an investment of ₹100,000 in these businesses. The 16 companies included: Tata Steel, Tata Motors, TCS, Indian Hotels, Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Tata Communication, Tata Elxsi, Tata Metaliks, Tata Sponge Iron, Tata Investment Corporation, Tata Global Beverages, Titan Company, Trent, Voltas and Rallis. By 2018, the invested ₹100,000 would be worth roughly ₹40-lakhs, nearly quadrupling the same investment in benchmark indices. During the same period, a BSE Sensex investment would be worth ₹10.26 lakhs and the Nifty would be worth ₹10.73 lakhs.

While India witnessed several notable conglomerates over the years that have benefitted shareholders, the Tata Group stood ahead of comparable size companies post-liberalisation. An investment of ₹100,000 in January 2009 equally across the selected Tata companies would be worth ₹998,200 (10x the initial investment) in March 2018. The same would be worth almost 5x and 2.5x in the case of Aditya Birla Group and Reliance Group respectively. The Tata Group also outperformed developed market peers in Asia, America and Europe. Annualized total shareholder returns over a 26-year period from 1 April 1992 to 31 March 2018 for Mitsubishi (Japan) were 5.2%, GE  (USA) were 5.9%, Siemens (Germany) were 10%, Berkshire Hathaway were 14.2% and the Tata Group were 15.2%.

These findings have amazed even Tata insiders who haven’t attempted such a study. I haven’t come across such analyses in any other publication on the Tata Group. I believe this is one of the greatest contributions of my work.

Any interesting anecdotes that you came across while working on this book?

Let me share three – one from the post-liberalisation era, one during the License Raj and another during the British Raj. Through each of them, you will see a common thread of Tata-ness in decision making.When Tata Tea decided to exit from the plantation business in 2000s, and transition to the branded tea and retail business, it wasn’t willing to exit its plantations before a sustainable model of livelihood was chalked out for its plantation workers. For this, Tata Tea had three strategic options. One was an outright sale to another company. This was the option selected by its competitor—Hindustan Unilever (HUL). McLeod Russel India, the world’s largest tea producer, had picked up HUL’s seven tea estates in Assam. Given that Tata Tea’s plantation earnings were in red, the new company would most likely slash wages, shut down social welfare programmes and even relieve thousands of employees. So, Tata Tea decided against it. The second option was to close the plantations. This would again lead to loss of livelihoods for over 13,000 employees working on those plantations, some of whom were third-generation workers. The company ventured for the third option, which involved divesting control to its workforce. It was a first-of-its-kind experiment in the world, at least in the tea plantation business.

Given that plantation workers were no longer Tata employees, but its suppliers, a prudent decision would have been to absolve itself from investments in existing employee welfare programmes. Over the years, Tata Tea had invested substantial amounts in providing health and education facilities to its plantation employees. Logically, with the formation of a new company, the responsibility of managing these should have been transferred to the new management as the quantum of annual investment was nearly ₹20-crores – not a meagre sum. This included a 150-bed secondary care general hospital, a school for employees’ children, and four vocational institutes for workers’ children with disabilities. When this matter was discussed with the then vice chairman of the company, his answer was, ‘Continue, whatever it takes.’ And so Tata Tea continued to spend ₹20-crores every year on the social welfare projects of a company that was now its supplier!

In the late-1980s, Taj Hotels had suspended two employees on charges of theft. Post an enquiry process, the charges were upheld, and their services terminated. They made several appeals, one of which was to J.R.D. Tata, the Tata Group Chairman. On the morning of the day he completed 50 years as chairman of Taj, J.R.D. spent an hour reading the enquiry proceedings and questioning the main witness. He told the concerned Taj manager, ‘I am satisfied that you have been fair. Go ahead and terminate them, but please see if we can do something for their families, especially if they have school going children.’ The octogenarian J.R.D. did not want the kids to suffer because of their fathers’ follies.

In 1922, Tata Steel was on the verge of closure as its profits plummeted thanks to the British Raj’s antithetical reciprocation to Tatas’ magnanimity. The Tatas had supported the British Raj during World War I by fulfilling war-related product requirements instead of more profitable commercial products. However, in the post-war years, the Raj opened up the market leading to low-cost steel dumping from Europe and Asia severely affecting Tata Steel’s profitability. Some investors suggested that Tata Steel be sold off. ‘Over my dead body’, thundered R.D. Tata (father of J.R.D. and one of the four founders of Tata Sons). To salvage his father’s dream and the Tatas’ flagship company, Sir Dorabji Tata (Jamsetji’s son) pledged his personal wealth of ₹1 crore, including his wife’s jewellery and the Jubilee Diamond (twice the size of the Koh-i-noor), and raised a loan from the Imperial Bank of India (now State Bank of India) to pay salaries and remain afloat. This is contrasting to contemporary times when corporate leaders secure pay-rises for themselves when their companies are bailed out through governmental support and tax payers’ munificence – both in India and especially overseas (during the financial crisis of 2008). The likes of Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya who enjoy luxurious lives while their employees pay a heavy price for their failed businesses have a lot to learn from the Tata way of business. It isn’t limited to the case of Tata Steel in 1922, Jamsetji did the same for the Swadeshi Mills in 1880s and Ratan Tata for Tata Finance in 1990s and Tata Teleservices in 2017.

How intense was the research process for this book?

I have always believed that business books – whether in the genre of trade books or research books, need to be grounded in reality and not just based on individual opinions. In recent times, a lot of opinionated books pass for books on business, management and leadership. I believe, the job of business authors is to provide the readers with several perspectives on the core issue of study, explore and share insights from the existing body of knowledge and finally complement them with the author’s observations. This rigour is rarely seen in contemporary writing. Probably, for that reason, we see authors churning out books almost every year.

I have followed the approach I have just recommended for this book, and even for my previous book, which was also published by Penguin – ‘Win-Win Corporations’. The research and writing process has been very intense. It started a decade ago, when I first started interviewing Tata leaders for my doctoral research in the area of Corporate Stakeholders Management. It continued as I pursued my postdoctoral research on Leadership. By then I had already interviewed nearly 50 Tata leaders across group companies. During my postdoctoral research, I discovered that an opportunity existed to capture the contemporary Tata story through a book. Over the next five years, I interacted with 50 senior leaders and in 2018 began the process of writing the book. I visited Tata factories and offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Jamshedpur. I visited Tata Central Archives in Pune, which are a repository of rare and unpublished documents dating back nearly 100 years. The Tata Steel Archives in Jamshedpur were an equally useful treasure of unknown facts and material going back to early 1900s.

As a trained management researcher, I reviewed national and international publications – journals, magazines and newspapers from India and overseas, especially USA and UK, where the Tata Group has a substantial presence. Another interesting fact is that The Tata Group is the most studied conglomerate at global business schools. I referred to nearly 100 case studies on various Tata Group companies published by Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, Darden, IIMs and several other leading business school publishing houses. For quantitative analysis, I accessed rare statistics and trends on the performance of Tata companies form the 1940s to the current times. You will find in the book analysis of the kind that isn’t available even with the Tata Group themselves. In my recent interactions, some of the Tata insiders confided that they will be using my analysis in many of their presentations! Such interest and appreciation makes my research a very fulfilling exercise.  

I believe the book has the rigour of another doctoral research project. It isn’t a hagiography. The Tatas have their share of mistakes, misjudgements and missed opportunities, which have been elaborated by me. The book has triangulated perspectives and presented successes, failures, learnings and implementable approaches on India’s largest conglomerate. And all this, in a very readable and simple story-like style. I believe the real success of writing a simple business book is when your homemaker mother or grandmother can enjoy reading it. That’s ‘The Tata Group’ book for you!

The Tata Group decodes the Tata way of business, making it an exceptional blend of a business biography and management classic.

While many people talk about the path to the top of organizations, very few are honest about how difficult it is to stay at that position. R. Gopalakrishnan analyses the ‘software’ challenges, which leaders confront every day, and shares the insights he has gained developing, managing, investing in and supervising a variety of companies.

Here are a few tips for budding leaders on surviving in the B-game –

You are completely accountable

“ Leaders operate in an environment, and their actions and judgements cannot be separated from their environment. So the totality of the event and the leader’s role in the event might offer more valid lessons than anything else.”

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Experiential learning is the best teacher

“The model of three worlds indicates that leaders learn and develop in their inner world, the world of people, and the world of getting things done.Managers learn lessons through their insights and experiences. By definition, insight is experiential and cannot be taught or preached.”

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Absorb the surrounding culture around you

“Each leader described has been a professional of considerable accomplishment and flair, each of them had built a career which was exemplary. Each of them rose in the world of business during my own times, each was noticed by me as part of my readings, and each of them exited his/her position of power in spite of being acclaimed as a ‘terrific find’. These leaders did not part on ethical grounds or corruption, but because of ‘cultural differences’. They were all top-quality leaders, rose very impressively and exited, in most cases, due to some perception of the lack of the cultural fit of the candidate.”

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Don’t be surprised if your friend circle shrinks

“It’s lonely at the top is a popular adage. However, a leader should not make such a big deal out of it that he or she becomes isolated. Deep suspicions about the motives of your colleagues, silence when you should be speaking up and keeping your ears tuned to whispers and murmurs—these are all symptoms of a derailing leader.”

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Always seek advice on difficult matters

“Don’t hesitate to show that you need advice or that you are unsure about which option you should pursue while addressing a particular problem. CEOs should not feel that they have to present themselves as the great, all-knowing leader. After all, deep inside, they know that they do not match that description.”

Filled with anecdotes, analysis of various situations CEOs may find themselves in and unconventional advice to help them, Crash: Lessons from the Entry and Exit of CEOs is for veteran leaders as well as for those who aspire to start their own ventures.

Nothing says a fresh start like the New Year. Whether your is business is booming, could do with a little push, or is yet to take off, we’ve got books that are sure to pique your interest.

Take a look at our business bookshelf for the month, and tell us which book you’re going to pick up first!

Get Better at Getting Better

To achieve extraordinary success, you need something other than core capabilities like analytical skills, people skills, conceptual and intuitive skills, hard work and hunger for success. Chandramouli Venkatesan identifies this as developing the capability to succeed and continuously improve that capability. He calls this the Get Better Model, or GBM-your model to continuously improve how good you are.

The Age of Awakening

The Age of Awakening tells India’s economic story since the country gained independence. It unfolds a tale of titanic figures, colossal failures, triumphant breakthroughs and great moral shortcomings. Weaving together vivid history and economic analysis, this book makes for a gripping narrative.

Game India

The book aims to unearth India’s strategic advantages; explore what has been done (or not done) to exploit them; what potential they hold out for people; and how they could redefine the game for this country.

Very well-researched, backed by personal anecdotes and industry lore which Bhaskar has been privy to for many years, Game India is essential reading for every Indian looking ahead.