Tatalog

Harish Bhat

Description

TATAlog presents eight riveting and hitherto untold stories about the strategic and operational challenges that TATA companies have faced over the past two decades and the forward thinking and determination that have raised the brand to new heights. From Tata Indica, the first completely Indian car; to the jewellery brand Tanishq; and Tata Finance, which survived several tribulations, TATAlog, written by a Tata insider, reveals the DNA of every TATA enterprise a combination of being pioneering, purposive, principled and not perfect .

Sujets

• Histoire
• Strategic management
• Economics
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184758702
• Langue: English

Extrait

HARISH BHAT
Tata Log
Eight Modern Stories from a Timeless Institution
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Foreword
A Path Well Paved
Tata Indica, the Very First Indian Car
Uplifting Tales from Okhamandal
The Tribulations of Tata Finance
Tanishq Sets the Gold Standard
Second Careers for Intelligent Women
EKA: Birth of an Indian Supercomputer
Tetley Enters the Tata Fold
Tata Steel Wins the Deming Prize
Epilogue: One Day in Kolkata
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PORTFOLIO
TATALOG
Currently a member of the Group Executive Council of Tata Sons, Harish Bhat has held many roles in the Tata Group over the past twentyseven years, including managing director of Tata Global Beverages, and chief operating officer of the watches and jewellery businesses of the Titan Company Ltd.
Harish is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He won the IIMA gold medal for scholastic excellence, and later the British Chevening Scholarship for young managers. An avid marketeer, he has helped create many successful Tata brands. He writes extensively, and is a columnist for the Hindu Business Line and Mint.
Harish is an incorrigible foodie and fitness freak. His wife, Veena, is a professor of computer science. They have a teenage daughter, Gayatri. He can be reached at [e-mail].
Praise for the Book
‘A sensitive insider and an old Tata hand … Bhat emerges a good storyteller in Tatalog. This is not purely a tome on management; it is neither just a work on corporate history. This is an attempt to capture the spirit (or the soul) of the Tatas. For the uninitiated, there is the revelation of the Tata Way’— Businessworld
‘These are, of course, well-documented stories; yet, hearing them from a Tata insider gives one a glimpse into the decision-making processes of a massive conglomerate, and the considerations that drive them’— Outlook Money
‘Every episode is narrated with passion and childlike excitement, touched with gentle humour. It sticks to the task of telling the stories straight and succeeds in holding our attention and interest all the way through’— Deccan Herald
‘An interesting look into a group that has survived the vicissitudes of negotiating the tricky terrains of Indian business better than most’— Business India
Dedicated to the late R.M. Lala, historian of the Tata Group and chronicler of its personalities, traditions and culture.
Foreword
I am delighted to write a foreword to Tatalog , this wonderful book by Harish Bhat. The idea of a Tata director writing the foreword to a Tata colleague s book on Tata might appear somewhat incestuous. So, why am I doing it?
I am writing this foreword not merely because Harish asked me to, but because I am fascinated by his work. He could have been a successful writer had he not become a business manager. He is a master storyteller. In the world of business, storytelling is not a skill that is particularly envied-the expression has pejorative undertones, and suggests tall tales and fiction rather than fact. But Harish s kind of storytelling actually plays a valuable role in business.
How do you assemble solid facts and incidents, often mundane when they occurred, into a narrative that interests the reader and leaves him or her with an overarching message? That is the art at the heart of corporate storytelling. And Harish does it very well.
Stories and narratives are at the heart of human evolution. Every region and society has its storytellers and related traditions: there are the Berbers of Jama al Fina in Marakkech, the Harikatha speakers of Tamil Nadu and the Jatra performers of Bengal, not to forget the tradition of the troubadours, bards and minstrels in Europe. The stories accumulate and become modern symbols of a social community.
What would Egypt be without the story of Osiris, Greece without Prometheus or India without Vaishampayana s masterly dictation of the story of the Mahabharata to the scribe Ganapati? Stories and anecdotes have evolved and come to represent the distinctiveness of a society and the culture of its people.
In his celebrated book The Hero with a Thousand Faces , the mythologist Joseph Campbell expounded the startling theory of the monomyth, showing that ancient stories from around the world are based on a standard structure and are made up of similar elements. Campbell identified seventeen stages in the development of all stories, and categorized these into three sections: the hero s Departure, Initiation and Return. Departure involves a hero venturing forth from a common world into a supernatural world, e.g. Rama s departure into Dandakaranya. Initiation details the myriad challenges faced by the hero, which he overcomes to emerge victorious, e.g. Rama s travails in the forest and in Lanka. Return deals with the hero coming back from his mysterious adventures with great and newly acquired powers to benefit other people, e.g. Rama s triumphal return to Ayodhya and his coronation.
You can see the same pattern in every legendary story from every land: Yudhisthira, Ulysses, Gautama Buddha. The same patterns appear in the historical stories of the world wars and the colonization and subsequent independence of India. So why would they not apply to the story of a corporation?
Harish has deployed these principles and concepts in an impressive way. He has done so with what one could consider fairly mundane events that were encountered by a company! However, the organization happens to be a long-living corporation-which Harish refers to as a timeless institution .
The Tata organization began almost one and a half centuries ago, and has had only four chairmen before Ratan Tata. Since the average life of Fortune 500 companies is under forty years, the very fact of long-lived and calibrated continuity makes Tata an interesting subject of study.
Is there a secret sauce to its long life? How did it change and adapt from the Victorian era to the information era? In his celebrated book about long-life companies, The Living Company , author Arie de Geus identified four Ds that are key to longevity: Developing an intense sensitivity to the environment Displaying a cohesive purpose and identity Demonstrating tolerance to diverse views Deploying finance conservatively
Perhaps many-or all-of these characteristics apply to Tata.
Many of the early stories of Tata have been memorably captured by Russi Lala in his widely read and masterful books The Creation of Wealth and For the Love of India . Lala narrated stories about Jamsetji Tata s dogged determination to envision and execute nationally relevant projects. There was restlessness in the founder, who desperately wanted to build human capabilities through education and science. He and his successors persisted with public advocacy to do what is right for the nation as expressed through the encounters with Lord Curzon and Pandit Nehru and, lastly, collaborated after Independence with other industry doyens of the time to write the Bombay Plan.
Several Tata directors provided public service leadership: Ghulam Mohammed became the first finance minister of Pakistan, John Mathai became the second finance minister of India and Nani Palkivala became the de facto Indian finance minister -though he never formally became one. Their examples are inspiring.
What Harish has captured is a subaltern s view of the post-liberalization decades from 1991 to date. He writes with candour about dreams, challenges, dilemmas, failures and successes. The dogged persistence reflected in the Tata Indica story, the recovery from the depths of the Tata Finance debacle, the imaginative development of the EKA (which was most likely the world s first privately funded supercomputer)-all these and many more appear in the pages of this book. All of these are told with the formula of Departure, Initiation and Return of the hero, who in this case is a corporation rather than a person.
Tatalog is commendable as a work of corporate history through storytelling, as a personal view of history and, finally, as an act of love for a timeless institution .
R. GOPALAKRISHNAN Mumbai 26 September 2012
A Path Well Paved
It is not getting to the top of Everest that matters in life. It is how and why you get there.
-Lord Hunt, who led the first successful expedition to Mount Everest
Ratan Tata talks about a voyage
You can hear a pin drop when stories of great voyages are narrated by the captain of the ship. Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group of companies, stood up to speak at the Crystal Room in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai in February 2012. Over a hundred senior Tata managers eagerly listened to him describe how the Tata Group had achieved its revenue target of US$100 billion in 2011, up tenfold from US$10 billion in 2002. This made it the largest Indian enterprise, well ahead of the other industrial groups in the country. Amazingly, 60 per cent of group revenues were now derived from markets situated beyond India s borders, signifying the global spread of the Tata Group. It had also become one of the most visible conglomerates in the world, with over ninety companies engaged in widely different businesses ranging from salt to wristwatches to cars.
The managers listened with rapt attention as Ratan Tata highlighted some of the notable achievements of the Tata Group over the past few years. It was a list that promised to make any corporate entity blush with pride. It had path-breaking innovations, such as the Nano car and the low-cost Tata Swach water purifier. Then came the gigantic global acquisitions like Corus, Jaguar, Land Rover and Tetley. Ratan Tata also mentioned India s largest information technology (IT) company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and a clutch of companies that formed the country s second largest organized retailing business. Early moves in new-age sectors such as aerospace and fina