Ratan Tata – the man behind the legend, writes Mukund Govind Rajan

My most vivid image of Ratan Tata is of a fifty-something, six foot plus, handsome man in his prime, with broad shoulders and a large frame, dapper in his well-cut suit, stepping out of his black Mercedes Benz E220 vehicle, and striding into Tata Headquarters at Bombay House, with heads turning all around him. He probably did not realize how many hearts he set aflutter, and he certainly did not detect the wistful looks of many employees.
Being himself
In the confines of his personal office and at home, Ratan Tata could be himself, a shy, curious and very friendly human being. He was extremely grounded, and never assumed a superior attitude with anybody, regardless of their rank or status.
He could be naïve about the ways of the world, in an enchanting way. During a rare industrial relations problem at one of the Tata companies, I was astonished when I received a phone call from Ratan Tata asking me to check whether a police constable at his doorstep was there to arrest him! As it turned out, the man was posted there for his protection.
At the airport, Ratan Tata was that rare corporate leader who would insist on carrying his own bags. While he expected good service, if for any reason he was disappointed with you, he didn’t have to raise his voice – his look and aloofness would say it all! Comfortable giving his people their space, weekends for him were usually sacrosanct, as was the Christmas break when his office closed, a period that also coincided with his birthday.
Ratan Tata had a wicked sense of humour. On one occasion at a board meeting of Tata Sons, he had a bit of fun by quietly kicking fellow Director Jamshed Bhabha’s shoes to the far corner of the Board Room – Bhabha, getting along a bit, had a habit of slipping his shoes off under the table. After the meeting, Bhabha was singularly distressed when his colleagues started filing out of the Board Room and he was unable to locate his shoes! I once even had to restrain Ratan Tata from planting a lifelike green plastic snake in the recess of the chair Bhabha typically used during Board meetings — I was worried lest the senior citizen be frightened into a heart attack!
Jokes apart, Ratan Tata showed great empathy for people in distress. He took a personal interest in relief efforts mounted by Tata companies in the wake of natural disasters, and ensured these were supported by the Tata charities he chaired. After the tragic deaths of several Taj employees during the terror attack in 2008, he made unpublicised personal visits to the bereaved families, and ensured that generous financial support was made available to them.
The same empathy informed Ratan Tata’s favoured approach to strategic acquisitions overseas. There were no mass firings or replacements of senior leaders, and due respect was shown to the acquired entities and their people. Every effort was made to retain the local ethos and heritage of the acquired company. In the acquisition of Tetley Tea, for instance, this meant holding on to the brand equity of the Tetley ‘folk’, the cartoon characters that were much loved in Great Britain, the home of Tetley. Honed at Tetley, this soft-touch approach became the model for later Tata acquisitions.
Lonely at the top
For all the pomp and glory that surrounded him, I do not believe Ratan Tata particularly enjoyed the privileges of being the leader of India’s largest corporate house. Taking charge of the Tata Group in 1991, in the wake of economic liberalization in India, he had to work very hard to prepare Tata companies to face the new forces of competition unleashed by the changed business environment, including the entry in the Indian market of foreign multinational corporations with world-famous brands, sophisticated technology and large financial resources at their disposal. Moreover, having stepped into the very big shoes of his predecessor, the legendary JRD Tata, and having been chosen to lead Tatas over the claims of several other corporate giants within the Group such as Russi Mody, Nani Palkhivala and Darbari Seth, he felt a constant pressure to justify the trust that had been reposed in him.
Almost a decade would pass before Ratan Tata was able to wield a freer hand on the Tata Sons board, with his much older colleagues on the board, several in their eighties, accepting retirement under a new retirement policy. But by then, new challenges had been thrust on the Group, including the important pursuit of internationalization in a context defined by the emergence of a unipolar world and the creation of the World Trade Organization to foster free trade across the globe. The preferred route for a number of Tata companies to expand their international footprint was through acquisitions, many of which entailed taking on debt. The two largest acquisitions, of Jaguar Land Rover by Tata Motors for $2.3 billion and Corus Steel by Tata Steel for $12.1 billion, created significant financial stress for the acquiring companies, made worse by the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-9.
Nearing retirement, instead of planning post-retirement hobbies and spending more time with his favourite Alsatian dogs, Ratan Tata was pulled into intense firefighting to mend the strained balance sheets of the flagship Tata companies. And as if this was not stressful enough, he soon found himself sucked into a telephone tapping controversy and corruption allegations linked with the allocation of 2G telecom spectrum.
Chairmanship of the Tata Group was no bed of roses for Ratan Tata. The constant drumbeat of high stakeholder expectations meant he could never rest. Unfortunately, as a very private individual, he also had a very small social circle of people he could trust and whose company he enjoyed, and that only made it harder for him to vent his frustrations and discuss problems freely.
Technology geek
Ratan Tata had great interest in new technologies. A licensed pilot, he was familiar with the life-saving and productivity improvement attributes of many of these. Unsurprisingly, he championed joint ventures with the likes of computing behemoth IBM and automation giant Honeywell in the 1990s, conceptualised visionary new automobile products for the Indian market like the Tata Indica and the Tata Nano, and took a deep interest in promoting the Tata Group’s information technology plays.
Any diverse and complex industrial conglomerate in this increasingly digital world needs a technology-savvy individual to head it. The Tata Group was fortunate to have Ratan Tata leading it at a time when multiple opportunities were emerging in areas like digital connectivity and business process outsourcing. Small wonder he presided over the most successful IPO in Tata history, that of Tata Consultancy Services in 2004.
Life’s mission
As a life-long bachelor with few distractions, Ratan Tata dedicated his time and energies almost exclusively towards building the Tata Group into one of the pre-eminent enterprises of the world. But it was not only commercial considerations that mattered for him. Let me close with the tale of the high-quality cancer treatment facility that was promised to Kolkata when the Tata Nano project was being set up in Singur in West Bengal. Once the Nano plant relocated out of the state because of local protests and violence targeted at Tata Motors and its employees, some expected that the Tata investments in the cancer centre would be terminated. However, Ratan Tata made it very clear that the Group’s problems were with the political dispensation, not with the people of West Bengal, and promised that the investments would continue. The Tata Medical Centre was eventually inaugurated in 2011 and has lived up to the promise of being a world-class facility accessible to all the people of the state.
(The author worked very closely with Ratan Tata as part of the Chairman’s Office at Tata Sons, from 1996 to 2008; he was later the first Brand Custodian of the Tata Group, and now chairs ECube, an ESG-focused firm.)