{"id":151495,"date":"2024-10-10T20:33:50","date_gmt":"2024-10-10T20:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/10\/ratan-tata-the-conscious-capitalist-who-saw-tomorrow\/"},"modified":"2024-10-10T20:33:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-10T20:33:50","slug":"ratan-tata-the-conscious-capitalist-who-saw-tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/10\/ratan-tata-the-conscious-capitalist-who-saw-tomorrow\/","title":{"rendered":"Ratan Tata: The conscious capitalist who saw tomorrow"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ratan<\/div>


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One needs to have the ability to envision the future to lead a timeless organisation like the Tata<\/a> Group. It may have been serendipitous that Ratan Naval Tata\u2019s anointment as group chairman coincided with the Indian economy opening up to the world. With an instinct for the global, he was \u2013 among all his peers \u2013 the fastest to adapt to rapidly evolving business trends, technologies and tastes.<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, how many car company bosses from a country of $300 per capita income would fret over \u2018design thinking\u2019 and fly to Turin, the home turf of Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Maserati, to bring to life his vision of a car that had to be the size of a Maruti Zen, have the fuel economy and pricing of a Maruti 800 and the internal volume of an Ambassador. Tata chose I.D.E.A, an Italian design shop, over IIT Mumbai. Months later, he was in Australia overseeing the efforts of Tata engineers to dismantle an underutilised Nissan car plant and ship it to the west coast of India in 600 containers, tagging each part to help rebuild it in Pune within six months. Indica, the country\u2019s first indigenously designed car, was global in spirit but frugal in capital allocation. It was also an exercise in globalisation. Le Moteur of France helped develop the engines, American giant Johnson Controls helped with the seats. Ficosa of Spain made the rear-view mirrors and an alliance with Japan\u2019s Toyo churned out radiators.<\/p>\n

Ratan Tata<\/a> single-handedly redefined the geographical boundaries of corporate India\u2019s aspirations. Much like Dhirubhai Ambani, he made India Inc dare or dream, to compete with the world\u2019s best. That explains his gumption in taking on much larger, multinational technology titans and building a supercomputer, the Tata Eka, the fastest in Asia.<\/p>\n

Or altering the nature of the country\u2019s unorganised jewellery industry to create a national brand called Tanishq that embodied trust.<\/p>\n

Or even giving women the opportunity to return to work after motherhood as part of the Second Career Inspiring Possibilities (SCIP) programme.<\/p>\n


That was in sharp contrast to the private gentleman who was reticent yet endearingly geeky, sometimes even goofy. He was deeply private, soft-spoken and liked his solitude. A man of eclectic taste, taking pleasure in the music of Mozart and Sonny Rollins, the quintessential Americana shirts of Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren, the paintings of Laxman Srestha, the roar of a Ferrari California, the exhilarating lift of an F16 fighter jet (he was a licensed pilot), Tata\u2019s self-deprecating humour belied a feisty, even flinty, ability to stand his ground against sneers, shrill opposition, shadow-boxing peers, politicians and business rivals. It acted as a varnish and helped one of the oldest and most unwieldy business groups become resilient as well as reinvent itself for the new millennium.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThink Big, Lead, Never Follow\u201d\u2013 that was RNT\u2019s punchline to senior managers at the annual group management meeting in February 2012 at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, also his last as group chairman. It perfectly encapsulated his philosophy and business contribution much more than statistics \u2013 group revenue surged 10 times to $100 billion in just a decade (2002-2012) under his stewardship. With 60% of the then topline coming from markets<\/a> outside of India, it is also fair to say RNT transformed India\u2019s most dependable group into being its first multinational conglomerate. If he backed Tata Tea to successfully take over Tetley<\/a>, the first ever leveraged buyout involving an Indian corporation, then the Jaguar Land Rover purchase in 2008 put him way ahead of what any Chinese carmaker had done by then. Tata Steel<\/a> won the prestigious Deming Application Prize in 2008, the first integrated steel company outside Japan to receive the recognition while opening global delivery centres for Tata Consultancy Services<\/a> (TCS<\/a>) in China or distant Chile attracted a global talent pool to serve clients worldwide.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, not all his calls were correct, neither were all his strategies perfect. Along with the highs came the lows, Corus among them. Leadership transitions are never easy. Ties with his immediate successor soured and led to the latter\u2019s ouster. Corus never fully recovered apart from a brief spell years after the global financial crisis. By and large, growth has eluded Europe and the turnaround has been painfully slow and expensive. With climate change worries escalating, the pivot toward green steel hasn\u2019t helped. The Tata Group entered telecom in the 1990s but were forced to head for the exit after mounting debt and losses, straining ties with Japanese partner NTT Docomo. Titan\u2019s early diversification into Europe boomeranged. Tanishq’s misreading of consumer preferences led to prolonged losses. His dream people\u2019s car project, the Nano, remained in Tata\u2019s own words, \u201ca wasted opportunity.\u201d Two attempts to take over the uber luxurious Orient Express chain via unsolicited bids were summarily rebuffed. His faith in Tata Finance<\/a> MD Dilip Pendse was belied as a fraud was uncovered, denting the brand. In most cases, Ratan Tata made good on his commitments. What use is being a pioneer if not to be \u201cpurposive\u201d \u2013 profit with purpose? As a self-confessed \u201cidiot inventor\u201d in his youth, he painstakingly tried to adapt daily use items such as scissors for left-handed people like him. It was this childlike curiosity that persuaded him to conceive the world\u2019s cheapest car, after seeing entire families perched on a scooter, or a cheap water filter for all. Yet he came up short in navigating the byzantine Indian policy landscape that failed to keep up with his turbo-charged vision.<\/p>\n

He faced several challenges during his time at the helm. There were allegations of protection money being paid to militant organisations in the Northeast to ensure the safety of tea planters in 1996-97. Elsewhere, leaked phone conversations referenced ministerial appointments. There were reported differences of opinion with a former telecom minister after the group took over the erstwhile Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd<\/a> post privatisation. Three decades on, the group was at the centre of another pivotal privatisation, that of Air India.<\/p>\n

Ratan Tata inherited the family DNA of conscious capitalism<\/a> decades before it became accepted practice. Beyond his shareholders, he remained forever empathetic to his employees, vendors and the society at large, donating millions in grants to educational institutions as diverse as the University of Cornell<\/a>, his alma mater, the University of California, San Diego, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to come up with design and technology for resourceconstrained communities such as India apart from scholarships to fund Indian undergraduate students study at the prestigious schools. Even after the Nano project was driven out of West Bengal in 2008, Ratan Tata kept his word and invested close to $75 million on a new, state-of-the-art cancer care centre in Kolkata.
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One needs to have the ability to envision the future to lead a timeless organisation like the Tata Group. It may have been serendipitous that Ratan Naval Tata\u2019s anointment as group chairman coincided with the Indian economy opening up to the world. With an instinct for the global, he was \u2013 among all his peers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img.etimg.com\/photo\/msid-42031747\/et-logo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[602],"tags":[82991,119467,10944,9036,89041,5103,6097,5385,119466,6783,6179,119144,7793,119465,119464],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151497,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151495\/revisions\/151497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}