MUMBAI: Two decades back, many in Bombay House, the Tata Group headquarters, thought that Russi Mody, Darbari Seth, Ajit Kerkar and Sumant
Moolgaokar would be there forever. Those who replaced them thought it would be difficult to change the way the group functioned. Both were wrong.
The fiefdom of the old guard which thrived under the legendary JRD Tata’s more than half-a-century stewardship of the group came to an end, acrimoniously in some cases and smoothly in some, after Ratan Tata took charge in 1991. Not only did Ratan Tata throw the old guard out, but also brought in young blood.
“It probably was looked upon as a group where a lot of elderly people worked and one which was hierarchical,” says R Gopalakrishnan, executive director, Tata Sons and a former vice chairman at the then Hindustan Lever. It was against this background that Ratan Tata stated in the mid-1990s that there was a need to have young CEOs. “It has taken some time to get the process right and for this policy to have an impact.”
What would have been once a laughing matter in the Tatas, is now a reality. Young men are becoming CEOs.
Men in the Tata Group rarely retired. So, the younger Tata’s first target was to ease out men from the socialist era and bring in an age limit where it was compulsory to retire. That saw the exit of men such as Russi Mody, the popular chairman of Tata Iron & Steel Co, now Tata Steel, Darbari Seth, the powerful head of Tata Chemicals, Ajit Kerkar who built the Taj Hotels brand as the head of Indian Hotels.
Now, meet Brotin Banerjee. He is 35 years old and heads Tata Housing Development which is pioneering low-cost homes, a near impossible event two decades back. After joining the Tata Administrative Service (TAS) in 1998, he had stints at Tata Chemicals and Barista Coffee.
The move to Tata Housing was in 2006, when he came aboard as deputy CEO. Last year, Mr Banerjee was anointed MD & CEO of the company.
“If you had told me, when I joined the TAS in 1998, that I would be heading a Tata Group company in a decade, I would have laughed it off,” he says.
Mr Tata’s vision
This transformation is the vision of Ratan Tata, who faced many an obstacle in his early days as the head of this tea-to-telecoms conglomerate. He brought in the concept of group head for human resources in 1998. “While a group like the Tatas does have a board which takes strategic decisions on these businesses, they may not necessarily have the skill set to run them on a day-to-day basis,” says Sunil Alagh, management consultant and chairman, SKA Advisors and former managing director at Britannia Industries. “This is where the need to have young CEOs comes in, since these individuals are invariably specialists with a good understanding of such businesses.”
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