The Brand Custodian: My Years with the Tatas

By Mukund Rajan

| LONGLISTED FOR THE TATA LITERATURE LIVE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 |

| LONGLISTED FOR THE TATA LITERATURE LIVE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 |Immediately upon completing his DPhil degree, young Mukund Rajan came back to India and joined the Tata group as Ratan Tata's executive assistant. Over the next twenty-three years, as he worked closely with Ratan Tata, he got an inside view of the ups and downs, the controversies and achievements of the Tata group. In this book, his memoirs, he talks of what really went on during those turbulent times and how the Tatas pulled through each of these situations. Along with that, this book offers a close portrait of the enigmatic Ratan Tata from his longest-serving executive assistant. The Brand Custodian is a study of the Tata group's evolution and explains the relevance of the conglomerate to the world we live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353024871

Mukund Rajan

Dr Mukund Rajan chairs a pioneering investment firm focused on catalysing Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) improvements. Previously, in a twenty-three-year career with India's largest corporate house, the Tata Group, he served as the Group's first Brand Custodian, Chief Ethics Officer, Chairman of the Tata Global Sustainability Council and Member of the Group Executive Council. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Dr Rajan completed a Doctorate in International Relations on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. His previous books include Global Environmental Politics (1996) and The Brand Custodian: My Years with the Tatas (2019). 

Book preview

PART ONE

The Budding Manager

How I Joined the Tatas

GOING TO OXFORD

IN SEPTEMBER 1989, I left India to go to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Immediately after completing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at IIT Delhi and being selected for one of the three Rhodes Scholarships from India,¹ I elected to read for an MPhil in international relations at Oxford. An attractive feature of the Rhodes Scholarship is that it allows candidates the opportunity to study pretty much any subject of their interest at Oxford. One of my fellow scholars from India, for instance, was a medical doctor who chose to read for a master’s degree in mathematics and a separate master’s degree in computer applications. I chose international relations, then a sub-faculty of the Department of Political Science, because of my interest in world affairs. This interest was probably stimulated by the international exposure I had had when growing up. My father was an officer of the Indian Police Service and was selected to join India’s elite foreign-intelligence gathering service, RAW. Our family travelled the globe with him as he served in Jakarta, Colombo and Brussels between 1965 and 1974. In fact, the first language I learnt officially at school was French, at the École Marcel Van Hemelen in Brussels.

The foreign sojourns continued when my father was posted as minister (consular affairs) at the Indian High Commission in London in the mid-1980s. This coincided with the period when European politics and global affairs were being dramatically changed by the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His policies of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ were reshaping the Soviet Union. They would later lead to the dramatic implosion of the East European Soviet satellites, the re-unification of Germany and, ultimately, the end of the Cold War.

Until then, it was the Cold War that defined international politics for me. As it neared its end, I was keen to understand the dynamics of the emerging new world order. My extra-curricular and leadership pursuits at IIT Delhi—including captaining the badminton team and heading the student body, the Student Affairs Council—helped me secure the Rhodes Scholarship. And off to the city of dreaming spires I went, in September 1989.

The first term of the academic year at Oxford, Michaelmas term, can present several shocks for the unprepared Indian student. For starters, the weather for much of this eight-week term between September and December can be cold and quite depressing, with the sun setting really early in the day. Coming from bright and sunny India, it can take a while to get used to the gloomy greyness of England.

As an engineering student in India dealing with numbers and equations, I was not widely read or particularly proficient in writing essays. You can imagine, then, my state of shock when I was handed my first reading list in the Michaelmas term on ‘International History Between the Two World Wars’. It listed over 1,400 books that could be profitably studied! How could anybody read so many books, that too in eight weeks?

After the first wave of panic subsided, I learnt from my seniors at Oxford that examinations typically offered candidates significant choice in questions to be answered, and one could limit the extent of one’s study to one’s areas of interest without necessarily needing to master everything in the course material. One could, for instance, read extensively about the Great Depression and the emergence of Hitler and score well by answering questions on those subjects, without needing to be an expert on the changing politics of Japan or the rise of militarism in that country.

I soon came to admire and enjoy the unique model of social-science teaching at Oxford. Students at the university are trained to think for themselves and make reasoned and original arguments, which often get tested over one-on-one discussions with a tutor, sometimes over a glass of port—the genesis of the famous ‘tutorial system’ at Oxford. Over time, these discussions sharpen their debating skills—therefore the added prestige attached to positions in the student body, such as the president of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society.² The focus is definitely not on the volume of information a student can memorize. This was a refreshing change from the Indian system of learning by rote that I had followed throughout my school years!

POLITICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT

My MPhil dissertation was on the politics of ozone depletion. At the time, the widening hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica had begun to create major concerns in developed countries, especially those in the Southern Hemisphere, such as Australia, where increased exposure to solar radiation and a rise in the numbers of skin cancer cases were being attributed to this phenomenon. The hole in the ozone layer was being created by chemical reactions linked to the release of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs into the atmosphere. CFCs are compounds used in aerosol sprays and as essential cooling agents in air conditioners and refrigerators. The politics of this issue revolved around who would pay for replacement of CFCs with the new, patented, ozone-friendly alternatives that typically vested in the hands of a few Western multinational corporations (MNCs).

Maneka Gandhi, India’s former environment minister, stirred up controversy but also won significant support from the developing world when, in 1990, she accused the rich developed countries of being largely responsible for the problem through their disproportionately high use of CFCs. She insisted that they pay for transfer of the relevant replacement technology to firms in developing countries and for adoption of alternatives to CFCs by them. After much debate, the developed world did indeed concede these demands. The resultant Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer represented a significant milestone in advancing the argument of the developing countries, that when it came to protecting the global environment, they had a ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ as compared to the developed world.

My analysis of the subject suggested that the emerging arena of global environmental issues, including—besides ozone depletion—global warming, tropical deforestation and loss of biodiversity would see growing conflict between the developed and developing countries. Developing countries would try and use such issues as bargaining chips to negotiate better deals for themselves by way of technology transfer and concessional financial aid. I saw developing countries, led by India and China, leveraging the requirement of their cooperation in resolving global environmental issues to secure critical assistance from the developed world on the lines of the power wielded by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s with their oil-pricing cartel. This assistance would help them raise their standards of living without having to repeat the mistakes of the Western development model.

Global environmental politics was an exciting new domain of study in international relations. The Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, attended by over a hundred heads of state and government, demonstrated the seriousness with which the global community was viewing environmental issues.

After completing my MPhil, I was encouraged by the faculty at the Department of International Relations to break new ground in this emerging area by pursuing a doctorate. I duly completed the DPhil in 1994 with a dissertation titled ‘Global Environmental Politics: India and the North-South Politics of Global Environmental Issues’.

It is expected from true scholars that they make every effort, particularly after completing higher degrees like doctorates, to disseminate their original research. I sent in my doctoral dissertation to Oxford University Press India, and was gratified when they agreed to publish it. My book, titled Global Environmental Politics, hit the stores in 1996. I dare say there are still copies of it in some university libraries around the world. There should certainly be one in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which by royal mandate receives a copy of every book published by Oxford University Press.

Over the years since my book was published, the broad thesis that developing countries would bargain for more concessional finance and transfer of technology in order to leapfrog the environmentally unfriendly model of development of the West has played out, but with mixed outcomes for developing countries. The quantum of capital flows from the developed world to developing countries and the technology support offered to developing countries have in fact proved to be trivial in the scheme of things. Meanwhile, developing countries are bearing the brunt of the adverse impacts of global environmental issues, such as climate change.

Countries like India have consequently decided to embrace environmentally friendly renewable energy sources, like solar power, in a major way, and make economy-wide adjustments to mitigate the risks of climate change. They have also endorsed international agreements like the Paris Agreement of 2015 on climate change. As extreme climatic events become more frequent and cause more damage, however, we can expect the discourse over global environmental issues to become more contentious and heated, and equitable solutions will have to be found that do not unfairly impede economic growth and improvement in the quality of life of communities in the developing world.

RETURN TO INDIA AND INDUCTION INTO TAS

In the years I was away, 1989 to 1994, as much as the world was changing, so was India. The 1991 economic reforms, in particular, had a dramatic impact on the structure of the Indian market. When I had left India in 1989, it was de rigueur to ask friends and relatives going abroad to bring back products like TDK audio cassettes, Sony Walkman systems and Nike shoes, which were hard to find in the sheltered Indian market. By the time I returned in 1994, these and plenty of other products were stacked on the shelves of Indian shops, and consumers were delighting in the new choices that were becoming available.

The best example of this was perhaps the automobile industry, where customers long constrained to selecting from three brands—Hindustan Motors (Ambassador), Premier (Padmini) and Maruti Udyog (Maruti 800)—suddenly found high-quality products available from the stables of global players like Hyundai, Ford, General Motors and Daewoo.

I was clear that I wanted to make a career in India. The girl I had met in Oxford and was determined to marry, Soumya Iyer, had also returned to India.³ I was faced with the choice of extending my academic inclinations into post-doctoral research and securing a faculty position at one of the Indian universities, or entering the corporate world to understand the massive changes that were impacting India Inc. However, I felt I had time to make my final decision, since my book had already been accepted for publication and I had the necessary credentials of academic rigour and competence, were I to choose to join academia even after a couple of years. I could afford to test the waters in the corporate world.

As luck would have it, the Tata Administrative Services, the renowned fast-track general management programme of the Tata group, advertised in Oxford its interest in considering applicants from foreign universities. Established in 1956 by J.R.D. Tata, TAS was designed to create a talent pipeline of leaders for group companies to draw from. A number of well-regarded managers had already been trained under the programme, mentored by some of the best senior-level Tata executives and put through their paces at the Tata Management Training Centre. They included Dr Freddie Mehta, who served as the first economic advisor of the Tata group; Xerxes Desai, who established India’s largest watch company, Titan; and Camellia Panjabi, who was one of the first women professionals to be elevated to the board of a major Tata company, the Indian Hotels Company Limited.

The exposure TAS provided to a wide range of Tata businesses, functional areas and business strategies was impressive, and the programme seemed designed to help managers explore their personal passions and chart their own paths within the group. As I have said earlier, I had heard only good things about TAS from my older brothers.

To the best of my knowledge, late 1994, when I interviewed with TAS, was the last time a special selection of candidates from foreign universities was conducted, outside the normal cycle of recruitment from Indian business schools. It was also possibly the last time Ratan Tata would chair the final interview panel for TAS candidates.

Selection to TAS in those days was structured around a group discussion, followed by two rounds of interviews. My final interview was with a three-member panel comprising Ratan Tata, Shahrokh Sabavala and Jamshed Bhabha (brother of the famous nuclear physicist, Homi Bhabha), all three directors of Tata Sons. I was given to understand years later by Bhupen Chakravarti, the much-loved manager of the TAS secretariat, that Ratan Tata, after my interview, had left instructions that I was to be earmarked for his office once I completed the obligatory one-year induction programme, including the famous ‘Bharat Darshan’ that all TAS officers are put through.

I joined TAS without an MBA. From my own experience, I can say that young people do not require such specialization for doing well in business. Witness the brilliant defence by Jonathan Black, director of the Careers Service at the University of Oxford, of the value of a master’s degree in English literature for a career in the corporate world:

Any degree signals intellectual power and flexibility, and in a world where jobs are changing, employers recruit for strong transferable skills. On your master’s course you are likely to have learnt resilience, to maintain energy and to work without supervision. Also, by studying literature, you have analysed texts, sought meaning, identified characters’ motivation and synthesized, summarized and presented your findings. These are sought-after skills.⁴

The first year of induction into TAS lived up to all my expectations and persuaded me that a career in the corporate world would suit me. The assignments with different Tata companies opened my eyes to the changes that were influencing corporate behaviour in India. I also interacted with some wonderful personalities and came to appreciate why the Tatas had earned a name for strong management and good governance.

My assignments included stints with D.S. Gupta, who was establishing a new auto-components business for the Tata group, which eventually became Tata AutoComp Systems (TACO); Syamal Gupta of Tata Exports, who had me review the opportunities for passenger vehicle sales in post-apartheid South Africa; Ishaat Hussain of Tata Steel, who asked me to evaluate the benefits of foreign-currency borrowing by Tata Steel in Japanese yen versus in German Deutsche Marks; and Camellia Panjabi of Indian Hotels, who tested my interest in environmental matters by asking me to review the impact of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules on the tourism and hospitality industry, particularly along the coastline of Goa, where several Taj hotels had been

Reviews for The Brand Custodian

[Jo Gina Mwaka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Generally, the book gives an illustration of the journey of any executive - learn along the way, grow and you will have the opportunity to shine. Thank you for sharing insights on one of the greatest and most admired family businesses in the world. I hope i can start my own story… :-)

[Salil Lavgankar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tatas and their way of doing business in a socially conscious way are unique in many aspects. Rarely has a Business group has been so influential and contributed for more than a century towards society and nation building, as done in India. The brand ‘Tata’ has a footprint in almost all business areas and many of the organizations are quite successful in their streams. In contrast to the public image of the Tata Group, the holding company ‘Tata Sons’ is discreet in nature and out of the public limelight. Hence a book from a Tata Sons Insider certainly generates some curiosity for a peek-in.

The author does justice to his story with the Tatas in the book enumerating his start and various positions he held within the group. The author’s career with the Tata coincides with an important phase of the Tata Group where the global footprint was expanded, with many successes and some not-so-successful and internal corporate battles. However the book is not a biographical sketch of the Tata Group and that’s an important distinction to note for the readers.

The author covers many of the important events that took place and, in most cases, takes a balanced view and provides his views succinctly. In many of the scenarios like the Tata’s foray into Telecom sector, the author was involved to a large extent and he provides a ring side view of the same. Few of the activities like ‘Investing and Building the Tata Brand’, ‘Moving towards an integrated Tata group’, the ‘Sustainability and Ethics of the Tata Group’ where the author again played a pivotal role are given the required focus and importance in the book. The author again strikes a balance between degenerating the book into a ‘tell-all’ but yet providing some behind-the scenes information which may not be easily known earlier.

All through out the book, Ratan Tata as the author forthrightly mentions looms large in the book as a dominant personality. The author seems to have presented a fair picture of the luminary and the reader definitely gets some more insights into the minds and working of the person itself.

The book is definitely a must read for anyone interested in the working of the Tata Group and the author’s journey is quite eventful with its own highs and lows, with many lessons for Leadership and management that can be definitely uncovered.

[Angel Palomino · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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