S3 E09 | Tata’s $400 Billion Secret: Ethics, Innovation & Leadership ft. Mukund Rajan

[00:00:00] Mr. Tata ended up writing a letter which I have seen. He hand wrote this letter to Prime Minister Vajpayee. It's probably the fiercest condemnation of government policy that you would see from a corporate leader to the head of government in India. He was very keen to see whether this convergence of IT communications, hardware, software, all of which is frankly supporting today's emergence of broadband,

[00:00:26] artificial intelligence, all the new applications that ride on the infrastructure. He would have loved to see that combination. And therefore the one business I can tell you he was most disappointed about was the fact that our telecoms business didn't do well. Question the unquestioned. Never accept somebody's negativity. Never accept something can't be done until you've actually given it a damn good shot. And quite often you'll find that it can happen.

[00:01:08] Welcome to another episode of the Bloom Podcast. Today we're thrilled to have Dr. Mukund Rajan with us, visionary leader, whose career embodies our theme, Winning Beyond Boundaries. Dr. Rajan's journey is a fascinating blend of academic excellence and corporate leadership. From being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford to serving as the first brand custodian of the Tata Group, he has consistently pushed the boundaries of what's possible.

[00:01:29] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: During his remarkable 23 year tenure with the Tata's, he not only worked closely with Mr. Ratan Tata, but also witnessed the bold global initiatives of the Tata's firsthand. For our younger viewers who may not be aware that Tata's are the OG Indian business house when it comes to building enduring global businesses from India.

[00:01:48] Tata Group companies with a considerable global footprint include TCS, Tata Motors, Tata Communications and the Indian Hotel Company, apart from the myriad acquisitions that the Tata's have made outside of the country. What makes our conversation today particularly exciting is Dr. Rajan's ability to bridge multiple worlds, academy and business, ethics and profitability, tradition and innovation. And Dr. Mukund Rajan, welcome to the Bloom Podcast.

[00:02:15] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: You know, we're going to start by introducing you a little to our audience. You know, you're very well known in corporate India, been with the Tata Group for 23 years, and now doing your own startup yourself. But startup India is generally enamored with new age brands and new people. And we want to show that the OG, the original gangster, and this is the Tata Group itself, though it feels like an old fashioned company.

[00:02:42] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And first I wanted to sort of get a little bit of history on who Dr. Mukund Rajan is. And so if you can humor us with a little bit of that history, you come from a very illustrious family. Your dad, Raghavachari, Guvind Rajan, top of the 1953 batch of IPS, went on to hold key positions in RAW. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And that meant that you also moved many countries, many continents, Jakarta, Colombo, Brussels, London.

[00:03:12] So, and what did that mean for your childhood? What did it mean for learning? Not too many people back in the day had that kind of exposure. So very unique to a family like yours. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So walk us through a little bit of those early years. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Sure. So I think early on in life you were really exposed to a huge amount of diversity. Each of the countries one sort of grew up in. Languages are different. Religions are different. The color of your skin was different.

[00:03:42] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So it really taught you to appreciate the enormous diversity that exists across the globe. And to be successful in school, for instance, you learn to sort of get to the program really fast. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Less in my case, more in my siblings, because I'm the youngest in the family. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Okay. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: They had to, for instance, learn Bahasa in Indonesia, Tamil and Sri Lanka, French in Brussels, and then come to India and learn Hindi in seventh and eighth.

[00:04:11] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And then give the board exams. So I think it was learning by doing and being put through your paces in very, very short periods of time to try and figure out, you know, what the hell is going on all around you. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: It's amazing training for life, though. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Absolutely. And the cultural exposure. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: As I mentioned, color of your skin in Brussels. I mean, most of my cohort in kindergarten and in first and second standard were basically white skin. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah.

[00:04:38] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: To figure out, you know, who you are, what is your place in the world. The only real family, you know, is your parents and your siblings. Apart from that, everyone else is really a foreigner in that geography. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That's right. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So getting used to that and learning how to navigate through some of the stresses that undoubtedly arise. So it's interesting training early on in life.

[00:04:59] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But the most important thing is it tells you that the world is a huge place, the enormous amount of diversity. And you learn to value a lot of the stuff that you see both in other countries and in your own home country. So coming back to India, we could see in the early 70s, India was a scarcity economy. And it compared very poorly with the kind of wealth that you saw on the shelves in Brussels, for instance.

[00:05:20] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But you also learn to appreciate the fact that you have many more friends, many more family festivals that you celebrate all of that. So rich, I think experience growing up. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And you know, funnily enough, as you know, the theme for this year is Winning Beyond Boundaries. And essentially, your family was doing that back in the 70s, in some sense, in your own personal way. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So, you know, lovely to hear those short anecdotes. Now, you know, very illustrious siblings as well, Jay Shree, Srinivas and Ragram Rajan.

[00:05:50] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And of course, Soumya, I've met her as well, your wife who runs Waterfield. So how much does all of that seep into dinner table conversation? And what is that like? Is it like a normal family? Or is it all around business and high, you know, high sort of high stake sort of business conversations around what's happening in corporate India?

[00:06:16] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: No, I think it's very much like any kind of normal middle class family. There's nothing particularly special. I mean, if I think back to typical dinner table conversation, it's often about mundane stuff, like how you spend the day or the latest OTT serial you're watching.

[00:06:33] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Recently, we've been watching, what's it, death and other details on Disney hot star and speculating on who might Victor Sams be. It's very sort of straightforward stuff. Obviously, occasionally, there are strategic issues that are impacting our businesses, because in my wife and my case, we're both now involved in enterprises where a lot is going on. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: In her case, wealth management, in my case, the whole sustainability arena. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Right.

[00:07:00] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So there are interesting sort of notes to compare where the future is headed, but it's not like the conversations are overly intellectual or even when my brothers or sister around that there's anything particularly dramatic about dinner table chat. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Strangely fun fact, the person I get compared most on images is actually Raghuram Rajan. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Oh, really? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah, yeah. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I say, you look exactly like him. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That's quite a compliment. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: A handsome family, of course.

[00:07:28] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But cutting over to the origins of your Tata journey. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So at least it's rumored that your first encounter with Ratan Tata was at the TAS interview. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Correct. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And for people uninitiated around what TAS is, it is the equivalent of the Indian administrative services within the Tata's, the Tata administrative services. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: I still have a classmate who's still doing the rounds from MB days. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And I think people there come with an intent of building for a lifetime.

[00:07:58] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And clearly you caught his eye and, you know, at least, as I said, rumor has it that he said you should come and work with me once your training is done. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: How did that pan out? Why do you think he picked you at that job? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So he didn't actually tell me this, but somebody in the Tata administrative service secretary told me that he had said I need to get this guy in my office once he finishes the obligatory first year of training, where you do assignments at different Tata companies and the famous Bharat Darshan that takes place.

[00:08:28] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: My sense is that he just he needed somebody to replace his existing executive assistant. So he knew there was going to be a vacancy. I think he liked what he saw. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And we sort of hit it off in the interview. And I think as somebody who'd grown up in the US at the time when Kennedy was president, the fact that I was a Rhodes scholar caught his eye.

[00:08:51] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Kennedy had a bunch of Rhodes scholars in his administration and I suspect there's some rub off of that in my favor. But we just sort of hit it off and I think I was in the right place at the right time. I don't think there's anything particularly dramatic about my entry into his office for any other reason. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Two sub questions. One is, I know you as insiders know exactly what TAS looks like, but what was it programmatically designed to do? How did the Tata's come up with the program?

[00:09:20] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That builds sustainable leaders for this long? And does the program have the same punch as it used to say 30 years ago, whenever you were interviewing? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So it was conceived in GRD Tata's time and was really started in 1956. And I think the idea was always to create a general management cadre of people who were truly committed to the Tata values, and who could be moved around group companies, as well as into new businesses.

[00:09:48] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And would in a sense be the carriers of the culture, in a sense the brand custodians for the Tata brand. And who obviously had good management skills, a lot of which they would have acquired and picked up typically as understudies to some of the Tata leaders.

[00:10:07] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: I think over the years that thought process changed. So where many of the early TAS professionals would have served as executive assistants, once this whole phenomenon of the MBA, particularly in the 70s, people coming from the IMs who had supposedly been trained professionally in management skills started happening, I think that view that you had to be an EA started becoming less relevant.

[00:10:31] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: A sense about the importance of the EA, by the way, goes back to GRD Tata's time. He was essentially an understudy to one of the Tata directors, a Britisher called Peterson. And a lot of what GRD Tata learned about management was really by watching leaders in full flow in those years. So I think he had a soft corner for putting people in high offices, which is where some of the initial luster and the sense of power and influence that the EA's offices had started.

[00:10:56] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But later that became less important. I think what is more important is really what you delivered on the job as managers. And the good news through the 90s when Ratan Bhatia took over, there's so many new businesses that have been opened up, telecoms, expansion into new joint ventures with IBM, with Mercedes, with Honeywell and so on.

[00:11:17] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: There are lots of potential for a TA's officer to staff important new roles in many of those new joint ventures and to learn from the best from across the world. So that continued. You asked about whether that luster has continued. My suspicion is these days there are just so many managers already in the Tata group.

[00:11:35] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: There have been a number of very successful lateral entrants who have come in from other business houses who have done really well. And therefore, in terms of the potential, and if you did a sort of arithmetic on how many TA's officers have risen to the very top, the data is quite clear. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: There have been very, very few who have reached, for instance, the board of Tata Sons or who have been CEOs of companies for long periods of time. Relatively few compared to the large number of Tata companies that exist.

[00:12:04] So you'd have to say that it's an experiment that potentially hasn't fully sort of lived up to its early promise. In fact, we have a book on that called Tata's Leadership Experiment. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: We call it experiment for good reason. The story of the Tata Administrative Service, which I and two of my TA's colleagues wrote a couple of years back. And our conclusion was that a lot of the promise has been belied. And for a number of varied reasons.

[00:12:30] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And with the generation as we have today, where people are like, so hungry to like, A, learn, but keep moving, looking for new opportunities. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: We all, all of us find it very difficult to retain high quality talent for a very long period of time and show such a glorious path that you can hold on to people for 15, 20, 30 years. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Correct.

[00:12:53] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And, you know, I don't know whether that culture of what's around you can sustain a very, very elite group of like, you know, a dozen or two dozen people inside of even something as vibrant as the Tata ecosystem. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Quite right. It's been a challenge. And I have to say that, you know, there was a time when typically in B schools, the toppers, I remember about number one, two and three would join TAS. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That's no longer the case. I mean, they've got plenty of opportunity. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That's right.

[00:13:20] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So you aren't necessarily attracting always the very best of every cohort. And therefore, when they compete with their peers, even within the Tata system, some of them get found out sooner than later, some of them do well, but not necessarily stars. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I think it's a mixed bag. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And Mr. Tata himself, I know we'll be talking a little bit about his sort of his ambition, his ability to have moved the group where it has.

[00:13:47] But what are the what is the fun side of Mr. Tata in those years, in his early years that the audience doesn't know about any any anecdotes? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: He seems to have had a mischievous fun, of course, love for dogs, love for architecture, love for design. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And all of that played out in many avatars. But any stories given how close you were to him? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Lots of stories. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Any favorite stories that you can share? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah.

[00:14:12] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Well, I've recounted this many times before, but just to show the sort of lighter side of boardroom dynamics, Mr. Tata was probably one of the youngest actually on the board of Tata Sons when he took over as chairman.

[00:14:26] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Most of his peers were like two or three decades older than him. And one in particular that he would pick out for administration of his amusing sort of activities once in a while was a gentleman called J.J. Baba, Jamshedh Baba, who was actually Homi Baba's brother. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Okay.

[00:14:45] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And silly things like Baba would have this habit of slipping off his shoes during a board meeting under the table and just sort of stretching his legs and so on. And Mr. Tata on one occasion spotted this and then gently stretched his foot forward and kicked those shoes away and then hinted to some of his colleagues around the table to do the same.

[00:15:10] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Consequence, the shoes sort of vanished towards the far end of the table and when the board meeting was over, this illustrious senior director stands up and he has no shoes, looking under the table trying to figure out what the hell happened to it. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And of course the rest of the board was in on it and chuckled away. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Silly things like that. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah.

[00:15:27] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: He once threatened to put a very real lifelike green plastic snake on Baba's chair and that one occasion I sort of stopped him and said, Mr. Tata, I don't think it's a good idea. The man is really so old he might have a heart attack. You don't want to do this. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So, but that's the kind of mischief he was capable of doing. It was a way, way lighter side to sort of- Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Did it continue all through the years? You knew him?

[00:15:55] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: No. And I've commented about this that I think the first half of the time I spent with him, I worked with him for 12 years and I suspect that till around 2000, if you had to put a number to maybe 2002, 2003.

[00:16:11] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I joined him in 96, so maybe seven years. It was lovely. I mean, he was just so easy to get along with and he continued to be very easy to get along with. But that sense of humor, that lighthearted sort of chat and all that started vanishing after that.

[00:16:30] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And I attributed to a series of crises that he went through where he was fully in the center of things and was the target of many different vested interests. And as he became older, I think some of this just started getting, getting under the skin. And he was somebody who started smiling less, there were more wrinkles in his forehead. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And the other thing that changed was the colleagues that he had around him. Till the late 90s, he inherited the board that J.R.D. Tata left him. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Okay.

[00:16:59] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But from the early 2000s, that board had almost completely gone. And there were new people that he had appointed. So suddenly from being the youngest on the board, he now became the eldest. And everyone looked up to him in terms of… Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: …the placement emerged slowly. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Correct, correct. And therefore, you're also less likely to be flippant, less likely to be jockeller in your remarks, less likely to pull people's legs. And all the crises that mounted up one after the other, I think just made him a much more serious human being.

[00:17:28] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. No, interesting. No, I think, I haven't met him much. I've only met him once in life. And I can't remember where Sanjay and me misplaced that photograph. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But it was when he started venture investing, which we'll come to. But if you go to the group itself, it's not… International ambitions were never new to the group. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: It felt like, you know, there's a long legacy of looking at global technology, matching up to global trends, being the pioneers in India.

[00:17:56] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But was it Mr. Tata, Mr. Ratan Tata himself, many Tatas, of course, but Mr. Ratan Tata himself who took it upon him to make it deliberately more international? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Or how did that come about? Because in his reign is when I think the group made some of the boldest bets about, you know, becoming a global conglomerate.

[00:18:19] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Though we're seen as an Indian conglomerate, I mean, not too many people might know some of these businesses are owned by a group in India called the Tatas. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That ambition just spread seemingly globally. Why is that? Or did it come from him? Or is it like the board level thing? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Usually, always these are driven by singular visions, I would say. And so just curious on when the transition happened? Or was it always a part of Tata DNA? It was just waiting to be tapped?

[00:18:47] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: I think you'd have to say that it has actually always been part of Tata DNA. In fact, if you go back to the founder of the Tata group, Jamshedji Tata, he was somebody who was extremely well traveled. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: In fact, when he wanted to establish what eventually became Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, he found, you know, people who could help him, geologists and others in markets like the United States.

[00:19:08] So he traveled across the world. He made his early fortune in China working out of Shanghai in a time when very few Indians had traveled to some of these parts of the world. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I think that was always in the Tata DNA. What probably hampered the Tata's post-independence, I think, was the fact that the economy and government policies that have pushed the entire country into being largely a socialistic, protected economy. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: That's right.

[00:19:33] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And there was very little you could do. I mean, under the license, Raj, anything that you wanted to do to expand operations to create new products required government's action often was denied. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I think that held the group back. But people like Mr. Tata, Jr. D. Tata before him, who traveled widely and continued to travel, they were on international boards. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: They were seeing what was happening in the rest of the world. So they had familiarity with how quickly technology was changing and so on.

[00:20:00] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So in Mr. Tata's own case, I think some of the groundwork for being able to push the group in the right direction as soon as liberalization took place, that groundwork happened in the early 80s. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: He actually wrote out a strategic plan for Tata Industries, which talked about the many new industries Tata's ought to consider entering, which included process control industries, the entire IT revolution, which was taking the US by storm through the 1980s. He'd seen all of that and wanted the Tata's to play a role.

[00:20:29] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And after liberalization, when market conditions permitted that, you'll see a string of joint ventures, which is the easiest way to sort of access technology and get started. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Joint ventures with Honeywell, with Lucent Technologies, with AT&T, with IBM for hardware, with Mercedes-Benz. You name it, the Tata's got into that.

[00:20:49] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So I think a lot of that groundwork was done in the 80s. In the 90s, however, the focus was initially on defending your home market. And if you can't fight them, then work with them, which is why the joint ventures happened. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But by the end of the 90s, I think the confidence started coming in the group that, okay, the home market is consolidated. But even then we were like 90% plus really a domestic rupee earning conglomerate.

[00:21:15] So in the early 2000s that we started then building the confidence to go overseas and the whole wave of internationalization which started thereafter. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: And then I think there was this sense that, you know, you could do it organically, you could do it through acquisitions. And a lot of the group companies did both.

[00:21:34] So I think it was something that was in the Tata DNA going back to the founder, was stalled because of economic conditions post-independence, revived after liberalization, initially transacted through joint ventures, and then through companies being pushed over to their own.

[00:21:51] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Fantastic history. You know, I think when you articulated that, that way, it's feels incredibly simple and coherent. But yeah, I'm guessing, you know, hundreds of man years went into executing and perfecting this. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Absolutely. And each stage here, you have to think about the dilemmas that Mr. Tata would have faced. I mean, after liberalization, there was the famous Bombay club, right, which felt that Indian industry needed to be protected for some more time.

[00:22:16] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Yeah. And he was famously one of the people who said no, because we continue this protection, we will never catch up. We've already lost decades. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So that was a very bold decision to make at that point of time that we will compete and we'll compete honestly, we'll compete initially in India, and then we'll take the fight overseas. So it requires, as you said, sometimes the individual to also emerge who can carry that challenge forward.

[00:22:41] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: You touched upon a lot of points, but maybe one element that I definitely wanted the audience to hear is, these are not easy, these, some of the decisions, like, you know, Kodas was like criticized when it got acquired. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Of course, he's been passionate about cars and automobiles and the Nano project originally was, I think, met a lot of opposition, he pushed it through and then it failed.

[00:23:04] Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: How does, I mean, your read sitting a few steps away from him on how, how did he build a framework for saying no, this is like a decision that has to go through and pushes it through? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Because I think as companies mature, as startups mature, this is a constant dilemma, even for founders who had lot more control over product in their life and their early startup years.

[00:23:30] And as they mature and get into even becoming a small size public company in India today, you're answerable aid to most shareholders. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: But the way to create shareholder wealth on a sustained compounding basis is by actually making some of the decisions, adjacencies, acquisitions, you can't keep growing organically at 30% anymore.

[00:23:50] Right. And some of that includes going overseas, which is what I was telling you, some of our companies are contemplating doing because they feel India is too small a market for what they're serving. Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: So just trying to touch upon, you know, lessons from the legend himself on how would he make those calls? Like what was the framework to say, this has to be done and not this, or this industry is the one we got a good chase and not the other. So of course, you're playing to some of your strengths, right?

[00:24:19] But beyond like, like you were in truck manufacturing, so you got into, you were already in auto, bigger steel manufacturers, so you're already in steel. But just trying to get a sense of whether there's an easy way to put a framework around Mr. Tata's thinking around how these he made these decisions, because you could have been in 10 other businesses, right? And why the 10 that you, he chose to do? Dr. Rajan Bhatia, Jr.: Correct.

[00:24:41] That's actually a tough one, because in point of fact, even during his leadership, while we got into a number of businesses, we also got out of a lot of businesses. You know, we used to be strong in businesses like paints, people don't remember that now, or pharmaceuticals, Merind, Cosmetics with Lackme, Tomco, which was the first famous divestment to Hindustan Unilever at that time.

[00:25:09] So we were in a bunch of businesses and yet we continued in business that you could argue were adjacencies. I mean, we sold Tomco, but we continued to Tata chemicals. So I don't think there were, those were easy choices to make.

[00:25:23] Some of it was influenced by the size of some of these businesses that did it make sense for a group as large as Tata's with a market that is now opening up in all kinds of new opportunities in areas of high technology emerging to continue to focus on very small businesses that seem to have limited, you know, lifespan. And potential. And would they be better in different hands that could manage them better.

[00:25:49] But I think the thing that influenced him the most perhaps was, you know, is there a technology angle that Tata's could have a right to sort of compete and potentially win with some of these businesses? Would we have the financing capability to create real value in some of these businesses? And his willingness, which perhaps is the most important element for a Tata leader to play the long game.

[00:26:17] So he wasn't looking for quick results. So, you know, next quarter we need to be profitable or successful. I think he was willing to look at the next 20, 25 years. And therefore, the one business I can tell you he was most disappointed about, or sort of combination of businesses that he felt was a sort of let down, was the fact that our telecoms business didn't do well.

[00:26:42] And the combination of telecoms and software didn't really happen. He was very keen to see whether this convergence of IT communications, hardware, software, all of which is frankly supporting today's, you know, emergence of broadband, artificial intelligence, all the new applications that ride on the infrastructure. He would have loved to see that combination. And you did a lot in telecom, but yes, all of it didn't come together as beautifully as you expected.

[00:27:11] Yeah, yeah, we got our timing wrong on certain issues, regulations against us on certain issues. And there was perhaps not adequate boldness of ambition in some of the boards of the companies that were driving these. So, so my sense of any ask for a framework, I think it has to be largely guided by his sense of how technology was going to create factors of success, and the willingness to play the long game.

[00:27:40] But just by the reality that if you don't have the finance for some of these businesses, you shouldn't be a player unless you can support it for the long run. Thanks for that. And then, I want to ask a few more questions about Mr. Tata before we move to the group and your career there, and what were the sort of most valuable lessons you probably learned from him. But to wrap up, I think you mentioned, you've written a bunch of books, which I'll bring up later.

[00:28:04] But in this particular one, the brand custodian my years with Tata, as you talk about how Ratan Tata had this capability or tendency to identify these extremely talented individuals, not just in the firm, but even outside the firm, pull them into the firm and arguably shake up the way the firm itself reacted to such folks.

[00:28:24] How successful was it? How good was he at, you know, what was his secret sauce in spotting talent? And of course, he spotted you. But like, what did you take away from that? And how do you apply it in your life? So, I think the good thing about him was he had no preconceived notions. And he was certainly not somebody who had a sort of tick the box approach to how you sort of select managers.

[00:28:52] So, for him, it didn't matter if you had a certain number of years of age or you had a certain amount of experience. What he was more interested in was, you know, what kind of imagination you showed, what kind of ideas you had, and your ability to lead people. He didn't always get his selections right, by the way. He made a number of mistakes and I've talked about those also. Some famous ones that really boomeranged badly on the group and on him and impacted his reputation. Yeah.

[00:29:17] So, I mean, nobody's perfect. We make some good selections. We make some lousy selections. All of us do that. The people decisions are like probably the toughest thing in the building business. Toughest. Absolutely. But I think what I would credit him with, and I think this goes back to his early years in the Tata Sun's board, when he was still just a director working under JRD Tata as chairman. He was, as I mentioned, one of the youngest on the board. And I think he saw that, you know, people who are two, three decades older than you can quite often have a very different worldview. Yeah.

[00:29:44] And very different willingness to take risk and to push, you know, a group like Tata's into new sort of directions. And having suffered to some extent his own ideas being trashed at some of these board meetings, I think when he became chairman, he was much more supportive of young people. And later in life when he got involved with startups, again, I think part of it was just the attraction to the kind and quality of work which young people are doing, the risks that they were willing to take.

[00:30:09] He just thought this represented a new India that was emerging. And he's famously said that he wished he was 20 years younger to be able to participate himself because he also had some very clever ideas. You talked about the group's entry into businesses like the Indica and the Nano. Those required a huge amount of risk appetite, the willingness to create India's first indigenously designed passenger vehicle.

[00:30:32] Largely his baby, I mean, similarly the Nano. So he knew what it felt like to have people sort of discard and yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, that explains that question that I was going to ask and maybe that was my final question on the late years of Mr. Tata engaging with our world, which is the startup ecosystem. And I think there was a flurry of it. And I think you partly explained that that's his core DNA. He wants to innovate. He wants to be at the cutting edge.

[00:30:57] And I'll admit, I think one of the perks of our job is as a venture capitalist, one level removed from these youngsters all trying to change the world is you stay young. Yeah. Right. And if he had the opportunity to be that 20 years ago, it's exactly the same emotion that we share. Right. The fact that we live and breathe this every day and we have get a chance to meet young founders pitching us these ideas every day.

[00:31:21] It felt like though his heart was in the right place, but it like then seemed to have gone all over. Like he tried a bunch of funds and then he wanted to set up his own fund. And then was it a distract? Did the board tell him it's a distraction or did he say it's too little too late and then discarded that idea because he came, he was very active for two, three years and then he just took a break from it all.

[00:31:45] So that period I was not actually engaging very much with him. So I don't know very much about what would have driven that kind of decision. No, no problem at all. And the last thing on him, you know, of course he was a lover of dogs. He did a lot for, you know, just anything that was in support of, you know, stray dogs and dogs, etc.

[00:32:08] The other passion he had was design and architecture. So I remember seeing a studio that he had put up in Kalagoda. I think that was his, his baby. This was when we had moved back from the US. He had one in Kalagoda and they said, Mr. Tata, you know, comes and sits here sometimes.

[00:32:24] Sometimes. How did, how much did it play into like his daily work life? I mean, you've talked about his role in, in the logo redesign and did he, like, I think all of us as founders have these one or two loves that you try to somehow stitch into your life.

[00:32:41] I'm doing a little bit of this podcast and my t-shirt design that I spoke about you. It's because you essentially want to communicate and, and talk to audiences and be an idealist the way I want to is this is all my expression of that emotion, right? Any examples of how else Mr. Tata would actually bring this into his work life or did he, he didn't have time for it in the middle?

[00:33:05] No, no, he'd try and make time for this kind of stuff. In fact, two examples I'd give of that. One was really to do with the Tata logo that you mentioned, designing that and working very closely with Wolf Hollins, with Wally Hollins, the founder of Wolf Hollins on, you know, what would be the right sort of group corporate composite mark that should be developed.

[00:33:27] And then of course all the attributes around it, which companies get to call themselves Tata, how should they be named, simplifying that whole structure, all of that. But the design in particular was something that was completely involved in, including in those days, small issues of detail. How does your logo appear when you faxed it to somebody on the other side? How will it look with the fax and receive? Things like that.

[00:33:51] Likewise, with the Tata Indica, you know, how do you fit the logo on the front, on the front grill? And what should it look like? What size should it have? What dimensions would it have? We'd get into millimeter discussions of how it should be placed. So, and the Indica itself, I mean, the vertical taillights that it had was an innovation for the Indian market.

[00:34:40] That's right. The fact that so many people didn't know him. Yeah. They knew that he was quite reclusive, introverted, not somebody given to a flashy lifestyle, very down to earth, humble people at the airports. I mean, I've seen that experience did so many times. He'd carry his own bags. Yeah. Today you see people who would like to flaunt the entourage around them. Yeah. The security personnel with 10 guns. He had none of that. He didn't want that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:07] Very unique person. And it was one fun anecdote from 20 days ago. So, I think we're coming back from Japan and they didn't have a direct flight that day to Bombay. So, they connected me on Air India from Delhi.

[00:35:23] It was one of those, I think, connector flights, which has like boatloads of transit passengers, probably flying to the Gulf or wherever. So, it was a mixed motley crew. I got like some random seat and there's a lot of chatter.

[00:35:38] It was the most eclectic international flight I've seen. So, this guy's getting off long lines. They didn't get an aerobridge. And sadly, Air India still has to fix a lot of that. I don't think it has come under true Tata ownership in that sense. And so, this guy looks at the flight duty attendant and says, So, he said,

[00:36:08] So, he just smiled. He didn't know what to say. And he says, And so, he said, Tata's. Yeah, Ratan Tata ji. It was very good. You know, And, you know, So, it felt like, you know, Remarkable sort of example of like what he's left behind. But yeah, that was a fun thing. But switching over to your life at the Tata's,

[00:36:38] What are your fondest memories? And like, you know, I know various things that we dug up in research showed you played like influential roles, whether it was brand, whether it's ethics, whether it is the TCS IPO. I'm sure there are a lot of stories, but at a high level, like, what did, how did it shape you? Like, who, what are the Tata's, you know, as an experience, how has it shaped you as an individual? I think the fact that they were willing to take a bet on a youngster,

[00:37:07] who didn't have an MBA, that made a big difference to me. And the fact that they put me in very interesting roles very early on in life, with a lot of responsibility. I think that sort of shaped my outlook on business management, corporate leadership, in all the years thereafter. And I'm ever so grateful to them for the bets they took, and continue to take on young people. And for a conglomerate, there's so much opportunity, and such a transformation that can make in your life,

[00:37:36] if you get responsibility and a challenge given to you, when you have the energy, the passion, and youth on your side. So, that is probably what I would hold dearest to my Tata years. And a big part of that was Mr. Tata himself. I remember he put me on the boards of all our telecom companies, when, you know, there were very, very senior people. I was the youngest person on all those boards. I became a CEO before the age of 40. I was running a listed company, which was then, I think, the fourth largest listed company in Tata's. So,

[00:38:06] these are things that I'm sure in many companies, in many other conglomerates, people would be very unlikely to receive such opportunities. And I think it helped me to grow as an individual much faster, and to mature, I think, early on in my career. And what would you describe as like, the Tata way of doing business? I mean, why is it, even today, with so much written in the annals of history, Indian corporate history around it, why is it difficult to emulate? How come others can't do it?

[00:38:35] I think there are, two or three things that stand out for Tata's. One is the ownership structure, is quite unique. In fact, there are probably, no parallels, exact parallels, anywhere in the world. So, the fact that you have a holding company, which is largely owned by charities. So, it means, technically, that the harder your companies perform, and work, and deliver success, the more dividends get paid out to, the holding company, and therefore, the more the charities benefit. So, for employees in the group,

[00:39:04] the sense that there is a larger purpose that you're serving, that the harder you work, the more is actually going to be divided out from the surpluses, and therefore, the more good work gets done in society. The charities are the largest in India. So, I think that plays a big role in people's sense of who Tata's are. Understood. When you said the gentleman you met on the flight said he's a good man, it's not just because of him, it's because of the work that the charities have done. Yeah. Funding some of India's best known institutions. Almost every large non-profit of any note in this country,

[00:39:34] has been funded at some point or the other with the Tata's. So, I think that makes a big difference. But you have to build on that. So, you need both a mission statement, and Tata's mission is to improve the quality of life of the communities we serve. So, it's not to make our shareholders richer or to make a ton of money. It's to improve the quality of life of people. And that resonates with your ownership structure. And then you need the leadership. You need people like Mr. Tata, before MGRD Tata,

[00:40:01] who genuinely believed that this was really where the group needed to head, who were willing to take bets that were really in the direction of nation building. So, I think people, stakeholders, the average retail customer sees this, and then feels, okay, this is a group with a difference. This is somebody that I can trust. And that then becomes your biggest sort of card in the market, the fact that people trust you. And there's, no, thanks for, again,

[00:40:28] sharing these kind of very succinct ideological views that you can't, you know, I mean, it would take a book to absorb all of it. But thanks for sharing that. And then, you know, there are two, three little stints that I want to touch upon in your life there. One was, you know, you set up this Tata Opportunities Fund when you were working the telecom side. What is that experience like? I mean, it feels closest to what we do for a living, setting up funds. So,

[00:40:57] I was just curious what that experience translates to. It is amazing on two counts. First of all, I'd never done private equity before I was asked to found the Tata Opportunities Fund as its founding managing partner. So, the first thing I did was to put together a really good team. I had Paddy Sinau, who was then the India head of Temasek and a bunch of others who joined. I met Paddy in Temasek. I met him in Tata. I met him in IVC. And I took out. Now I have. Correct. Yeah. So, we had a great team.

[00:41:26] And I think I learned a lot from that team, which is one of the, by the way, the leadership lessons I often transmit that you don't have to be the best in anything. Yeah. As long as you can. You hired the best. Fantastic. Exactly. But you need to be willing to rely on them and to show them your vulnerabilities. The fact that I didn't know anything about private equity was very evident to the team from day one. Yeah. But I think getting that team together and then marketing the fund, because I'm sure this is an issue that many VCs and PE funds face. We were told early on that you have zero chance of success.

[00:41:56] Why? This is a Tata-sponsored fund being raised under the supervision of a Tata guy, me, to invest into Tata companies. That's the Tata opportunities you're going to invest in. They said, the conflict of interest is so high, nobody in the right mind is going to invest in you. And we started doing the rounds. We had probably the fastest first close at 400 million for an Indian fund in four months. And we raised just under 600 million. So, going back to something Mr. Tata would often say,

[00:42:26] question the unquestioned. Never accept somebody's negativity. Never accept that something can't be done until you've actually given it a damn good shot. And quite often, you'll find that it can happen. So, what do I attribute it to? Obviously, we had a good team. People felt that we'd be objective. The Tata brand was huge. And the fact that it is Tata's doing this, people are willing to, that point about trust. But, you know, the folks who told us early on, they don't even waste your time. All of them have proved wrong.

[00:42:54] The other part of what I loved about the PE fund was the people you meet. So, when you're marketing the fund, one sort of tended to meet folks across many geographies. You see different cultures at work. The ways investors think about investing in funds. Met a bunch of billionaires in the US. Discovered that these guys are so sharp. They actually, you know, deserve to sit on the billions they made because they are very, very, you know, canny investors.

[00:43:24] So, learning all of that, I think was, opened my eyes to a different kind of world from what had been exposed to. Tata's is really manufacturing conglomerate. And then suddenly I'm seeing the world of financial services post the global financial crisis. And the way people are thinking about investments are huge learning. And, and, shifting gears to the TCS IPO. What was unique about it? I mean, it's probably Tata's largest export in that sense.

[00:43:52] And it's been quite a remarkable story. It's great to see TCS splashed across every global marathon nowadays. And, and anything you can share from that experience. So, I've, I've cited that as, you know, my own sort of personal encounter with corporate governance, I feel of the highest standard. And maybe it's worth sort of recounting that for people who are thinking about doing an IPO in the market, particularly when the markets are so hot just now. So,

[00:44:20] this goes back to the mid to late 1990s. And, when I was working with Mr. Tata, one of our finance directors actually sent him a note saying, you know, the markets in the US around IT stocks are very buoyant. And, we've done some back of the envelope calculations. I think Infosys had already listed. Yeah. And, there was some math which suggested that if we took TCS public, for a fairly modest divestment by the Tata group,

[00:44:49] by Tata Sons, which was the principal owner of TCS, you could raise enough capital that would allow you on the Indian bourses, to take every single listed Tata company private. So, that meant what used to be Tisco, which is now Tata Steel. Telco, which is now Tata Motors, Indian Hotels, Tata Chemicals, every one of those companies could have been taken private. And, remember, this is part of group strategy because Mr. Tata felt that in the years before liberalization,

[00:45:17] the Tatas had gradually diluted their positions in many companies. In fact, in Tata Steel, there was a point of time when the Birlas had a higher stake in Tata Steel than the Tatas. Fun fact. So, there was a huge amount of concern that we needed to earn the right to manage these companies, and that would come from control. So, it was part of our stated mission to increase our stake in those companies. And yet, when push came to shove, when Mr. Tata was presented with the data, he took a view that we would not list TCS at that point of time. The reason,

[00:45:46] he felt the markets are very frothy. This would be a listing where shareholders would sort of buy into it, but it wouldn't sort of survive the hoopla. And in fact, all this dot-com boom, which is then, sure enough, followed by a bust. Yeah. So many shareholders would have lost money in this. And he felt, we are in this business for the long game, right? We are going to be here another hundred years. We can't afford to play this quarter-on-quarter kind of game and hope that, you know, people forget the price at which they came in, in this IPO.

[00:46:14] So we'll do the IPO when the markets are more stable. Also, by then, we would have grown the business. There'll be many more opportunities that'll come to us. So let's bide our time. And eventually, we actually did in 2004, much after the dot-com boom and bust. And of course, India's most successful IPO at that point of time also. But the fact that, the temptation would have been huge, right? We can take every Tata company private. And he didn't do it. Because he said, you know, we're in this for the long run. We don't want shareholders to feel disappointed. Or even worse,

[00:46:43] to think that we deliberately cooked up a story, took them to the cleaners, made money at their expense. And we are laughing all the way to the bank, but it's somebody else's expense. That's when trust gets completely destroyed. No, we use, I didn't know the nerds of that TCS story. So thanks again for setting that as like the high water mark. I have a variant of that, that I tell companies, as you rightly said, startups are beginning to realize that if they really want to build long term,

[00:47:13] they have to get away from the clutches of us VCs who are short term cap table, you know, occupants. The reality is that we raise 10, 12 year funds. We want our money back. That doesn't mean they have to sell everything that they built. And more founders are beginning to realize that because it wasn't apparent in the first 10 years. Right. So it takes 10 years to get there. And our cycles don't get done. So everybody was like, let's keep pumping this one way up. Right. And, but eventually when you come to that fork in the road, you have to decide, do I sell the business?

[00:47:43] Do I like continue building? And I have to go IPO. So now my prediction is that like we'll, between now and the end of the decade, we'll have a hundred plus new IPOs in tech, maybe 150 of all different sizes. So they won't all be mega. They won't be these billion dollar plus. They'll be 250, 500 million. And whoever stopped business from compounding after listing at that price. So I, again, I don't know if you recall this 97 Amazon list said 300 million.

[00:48:11] It's a $2 trillion company. Right. So you can compound after listing and grow as well. Why does it have to be in private hands? So the two lessons I impart, which are very similar to your TCS story. One is if you have an opportunity to make literally millions of people now through distributed shareholding, through mutual funds, et cetera. So if somebody has bought units of a particular fund, which is an investor in you, there are literally millions of people benefiting. Why wouldn't you give them as much of the upside possibility than just a

[00:48:40] clutch of VC sitting on your cap table? Right. Right. Absolutely. So if you can, if you do believe you have faith that you can grow from 500 million to 5 billion, give 4.5 billion share of value to the new shareholders. You don't have to perfect this math in private markets. Right. And optimize it to a point where there's no value left for them or growth slows. Correct. Right. Second is if you don't leave that money on the table, I think that karmic load, apart from the ethical, moral thing, it's just going to weigh on you. Right.

[00:49:10] And so my rule of thumb for that is think of yourselves building for another 10, 20, 30 years. No shareholders ever bought your stock and holds for three years should ever lose money on the principle. Hmm. If you're doing that, then fundamentally you've built something wrong in the org or you've missold, or you're just going through a hype cycle and you can't control all of that. You can't go tell every shareholder don't buy today, but you should do enough to make that ground up.

[00:49:38] Even if somebody bought it at the hottest point of your thing existence. So it's just a variant, but I thought I'll share it because I, some of what I do is so that my founders listen from not just because, but like what that's translated into, into our ethos. Right. So thanks for sharing that lovely story. Then two parts of one, you know, is you, um, you took over, what does the chief ethics officer mean? And why do you need it? Uh, in,

[00:50:05] and is it again unique to the Tatas? And I know you sort of literally, uh, had to, uh, overhaul it and there's no other word for it. Why was that the case? And what is that experience like? So the chief ethics officer was a role, which is embedded in the role of brand custodian, which, uh, Cyrus mystery offered me. He was, uh, creating his group executive council and he was quite a thoughtful person. And he felt the Tata brand really needed to be explained better to all our stakeholders,

[00:50:34] including all the employees overseas, uh, would come into the fold after the many acquisitions we'd done. So he felt the brand had been built on two pillars, one of corporate governance and ethics, and the second pillar of sustainability. So he wanted me to serve as the chief ethics officer on the one hand, but also serve as the chair of our sustainability council. And because I had the brand portfolio, I was also the group spokesperson. So very unusual combination. You have very few groups where you will entrust the ethics function to

[00:51:03] somebody who's also supposed to meet with the media and be a public spokesperson, because they're often things that you can't talk about, uh, on the ethics front. So I think he wanted us to be extremely transparent. And, uh, I think hats off to him for the way he visualized the role on the code of conduct. Uh, you know, we had a code of conduct going back to 1998. Uh, in fact, as again, very fortunate to work with Mr. Tata when that was first crafted, that first score, when you look at it today, it sort of brings a smile to your face,

[00:51:31] because it was very much in sync with the kind of hierarchical top down, you know, Moses and the 10 commandments kind of sense of ethics and codes. Yeah. Um, the code was, uh, replete with, uh, descriptions of employees as he, as if there were only males in the Tata group. There's not one single reference to she anywhere in the code of conduct. Uh, the code sort of, exhorted our employees to really work hard for the progress and development of the Indian economy.

[00:52:01] So all this in 1998, when we were still very much in India based group, uh, fast forward to 2007, there was some minor tweaks done by then would become an international group. Yeah. The acquisitions of chorus and JLR were just happening. So the focus on the Indian economy shifted to the markets in which you work. So if you're a Britisher working for Jaguar Land Rover, then your commitment is to support the British economy and so on and so forth. The other change was the gender change. So it became gender neutral. Thankfully,

[00:52:30] but it was still very much top down. And I think in 2015, when we, uh, rehauled the overall, the, the code of conduct, a, we recognize the fact that Tata's in our much younger organization, many more young people in the group, the tonality had to be conversational, not the stop down. Thou shall not do this. And thou shall not do that. Uh, it had to have lots of, um, uh, illustrations of what happens. What are the kinds of dilemmas that typically you face? Uh,

[00:52:59] what happens if things go wrong? Who do you report to? How do you work these things out? Some amount of cultural nuancing, which is very interesting for me. So we had a whistleblower clause, which is now obligatory for all corporations, but the way it was phrased, uh, some of our colleagues in France and Germany took objection. Hmm. And we later realized it was because they've had a very bad experience in Germany, of course, under the Nazis and in France, again, under the Nazis. And then in Germany later on, under the communist rule,

[00:53:28] where whistleblowing was the way in which informers would sort of, uh, you know, share secrets of the Gestapo or the Stasi. And therefore being an informer was looked down upon. So to be a whistleblower is actually no badge of honor. It's actually something quite condemnable. yeah. So we had to reword it. So it didn't sound like we were asking people to rat on their colleagues or squeal on them. But to say that, look, in the organization's interest, all of us need to adhere to the same culture, standards, values.

[00:53:58] If somebody is out of line before things get, you know, problematic for the organization, jobs are impacted. We all need to step forward and blow the whistle. So things like that, I think when you're an international group, suddenly pick up these nuances, which are so important. Hmm. So we came out with a completely new code of conduct. If you match it with the old code of conduct, you won't see any real similarity. And yet, I think at the heart of it, the basic values all remained the same. Yeah. It's a wonderful experience. Awesome.

[00:54:26] And were you involved at all with the Vistara launch? Yes, I was part of the inaugural board of Vistara. In fact, I served on the board for, I think, five or six years. Some of it seems like this nostalgia to like, you know, fill the place that Air India was taken away at some point. But like, no, but at that juncture, I knew, I know you partnered with Singapore Airlines. What is the, what is the thinking through why that JV was done the way it was? And then became a very dear brand. I mean,

[00:54:55] replacing the, you know, unfortunate death of Jet, in some sense, at least for me, as a full service brand, I really enjoyed it. And I know you're away from the action right now, but this challenge of merging these two is daunting at one level. And if you were to simulate, or if you're a betting man, when do you think that Air India becomes more like Vistara?

[00:55:21] Which is what everybody I know who's an aviation geek keeps asking each other. So yeah, going back to the beginning of the story. Yeah. What are the origins and where does it end? Lots of questions there. I don't know. Just tucking in the whole story. Let me try and make, make it quick. Yeah. Let's start first with aviation itself. And as everyone knows the story, I mean, Tatars were the founders of Air India back in J.R.D. Tata's time. Yeah. And then it got taken away. It got nationalized. J.R.D. Tata stayed as chairman, got booted out during the Janta Party regime.

[00:55:50] Ratan Tata came back briefly as chairman in the late 80s under Rajiv Gandhi. But we again lost that connectivity. In the early 90s, P.V. Narasimarao, as prime minister, one of the most brilliant prime ministers I think we've had, used to be external affairs minister as well. He saw the potential and the importance of looking east. He saw Asia was going to be the new fulcrum of economic growth. And so there was this outreach to Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.

[00:56:18] And the idea that we should do something that makes a statement about, you know, the east and Asia really emerging. And at that time, at that time, of course, no private airlines were being allowed. And therefore, a decision was taken by the two governments to set up a joint venture, which would have the best companies from both sides. So Singapore obviously volunteered Singapore Airlines. And Tata's were suggested by the government. And Mr. Tata immediately said yes. It brought back the sense of being a player in aviation.

[00:56:47] And we wanted to create what could have been the finest airline of its time. And then we were blocked repeatedly. And under the coalition governments in the mid-1990s, a policy was introduced, which banned a foreign airline from owning equity in a domestic airline. Yes. And therefore, it put paid to... We've seen the perilous ramifications of that many times. Yeah, absolutely. It would have saved a lot of good airlines out in the country. Correct. Yeah. And there was talk about, you know, all kinds of vested interests being involved in that. Anyway,

[00:57:16] we took it on the chin and we had to drop the plan. In the late 90s, when the BJP government then under Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to power, there was a proposition to privatize Air India. That is the first privatization proposed. First off of it, yeah. And through a series of moves and selections, we finally emerged as the preferred partner to invest. And we did say that we want to create a world-class airline. We knew that Air India was already paying the price

[00:57:43] for a lot of the bureaucracy and political interference and so on. And we said, we're going to bring in Singapore Airlines as a technical partner. The minute that got known, again, the knives are out to stop us from doing that partnership. And the license is just blocked. And finally, Mr. Tata ended up writing a letter, which I have seen. He hand wrote this letter to Prime Minister Vajpayee. It's probably the fiercest condemnation of government policy that you would see from a corporate leader

[00:58:11] to the head of government in India, in any regime. God bless both their souls, yeah. Absolutely. There were no repercussions, by the way, for us, which is remarkable. Because I know we had somebody in Delhi who said, for God's sake, don't send this letter. You know, this can be the end of everything as we know it. And it didn't have any repercussions. Both remarkable people, yeah. The next almost decade and a half, there was nothing that we could do. Till in 2013, they changed the policy sensibly

[00:58:39] to now permit foreign airlines to take a stake. Singapore Airlines could have gone to anybody in India. They could have gone to the Ambani, to Adani, to Birla, whoever. And they came back to Tata's. Almost a decade and a half after the previous experience and the bitter experience of the early 90s. And that, to me, sort of tells you a story that culture, values, the esteem in which a group is held can really pay long-term dividends.

[00:59:09] And here you have the world's best airline still coming back to you for a partnership many years after all of the past is dead and buried. And because they think you're still the best that they can work with. And so when we started Pistara, the ambition is very much to create India's finest airline. And as you said, a full-service carrier which could offer the best in terms of seating, the best in terms of cuisine, the best service. All the hostesses were trained by Singapore Airlines. The meals, a lot of time and attention went into designing the cuisine,

[00:59:39] changing it often enough. not some crummy thing wrapped in, you know, aluminium foil paper but something that's laid out on a tray. We created the premium economy class between business and economy. Yeah, finally somebody did. Yeah. So I think we got a lot of things right. What we, unfortunately, I think, did suffer from was the fact that investment was limited. We got to a 20 aircraft fleet I think only after five years. All that has now changed. Yeah. Thanks to Air India

[01:00:09] and thanks to the fact that now the group is all in because you have no choice. Yeah. You're ordering hundreds of aircraft. Yeah. You have economies of scale. As you mentioned, some of your competition like jet is now out of the business. So I think it's a very interesting runway for the group. I tend to feel that the benefits for the group on the brand side will be enormous if we can create one of the best global airlines flying to all parts of the world with a very large fleet of several hundred aircraft.

[01:00:38] The Tata brand can become something that everyone in the world knows and recognizes. Now it's going to need huge investment and as rightly said a lot of the investment on the service side and the quality of people. I'm not saying anything to do with the past is necessarily bad but there were obviously pockets of complacency and where hardly any investments had gone including the look and feel the inside the hygiene and so on. All of that I think will take time. So when you ask

[01:01:08] how long will it take my sense is that these kinds of things for a complete and proper turnaround I'd be very pleasantly surprised if Tata pull it off before the end of this decade but they're sitting on a property that can become huge for an Indian economy that's growing and for a carrier that can reach all parts of the world. So it's I think very exciting if you're part of Air India and involved with its future but there's a lot of work to be

[01:01:38] done right now. No, no, well put. I think by the way we had Aditya Ghosh on a prior episode so we got a lot of the Indigo masala and I have my pet peeves with Indigo as well but I can't deny it's I think they got culture right on day one and the way they want to run that airline it might not be to everyone's liking but it's a most it's a profitable machine and a market share machine because they know how to run what they want to run right and but there's nobody else and so I think

[01:02:08] opportunity can't be any bigger than and the market is barely being scratched we have like more airports to build first time India is going to see a second airport in a city right in multiple cities now so I think there's no end to this the upward curve so exciting times and I spend way too much time on planes so it's particularly close to my heart I just compiled my year this year for the first time generally I know it's a lot but I don't want to spook everyone at home but it's like

[01:02:38] 116 flights so flights are like little close to my heart let's final gears to your future now like you know what made you say goodbye and I know ESG is close to your heart given all your Tata experiences it seems like a natural calling but what is E-Cube about and I know of course Alan as well as a founding partner and that's how we got introduced twice over

[01:03:08] but what does that effort look like and what is the future of E-Cube yeah so first of all my exit from the Tata I think couple of interesting factors one of course the fact that all the three chairmen that have been there in the last decade people I worked very closely with but there were so many leadership changes and each person comes in with their own sort of sense of what they want to do and at some point I decided that I had paid my dues to the group the group

[01:03:38] had rewarded me very well but it was time for me to do something on my own sure you mentioned Samya's business and she turned entrepreneur I think almost seven years before me and I'd seen the fun that she was having how much she loved what she was doing her joy in building and I thought it was a good time for me to try and do something similar but what gave me the confidence to step out was really actually a management buyout I attempted unsuccessfully to acquire my old sort of hunting ground with the Tata telecom business so I made an offer

[01:04:08] to acquire the Tata fiber optic network which Tata teleservice had built which I was quite intimately aware of and I had a team with some of my old colleagues willing to work with me and TPG and Canadian Pension Fund together were willing to back me for 1.6 billion dollars so the fact that you could raise an enormous amount of money to do something like this on the back of an idea you had which by the way has played out because we've seen how much broadband has become part of people's lives

[01:04:37] during COVID none of us would have survived without all the video conferences that are happening on fiber optic cable but I think the fact that one could even do this gave me the confidence to step out and do something on my own as you said it connects the dots with what I was doing immediately before that in Tata where I was looking after ethics corporate governance sustainability but even more importantly and not too many people are aware of this it goes back to my masters and doctorate at Oxford

[01:05:07] where my research was on the politics of the environment so climate change ozone depletion tropical deforestation biodiversity loss in fact wrote a book on this in the mid 90s called global environmental politics that's not in the list of books we found so that that was the first book it's actually based on my PhD dissertation and Oxford University Press published that and so I could see that the world was changing and I think we talk about the digital disruption of the last two decades

[01:05:37] I think sustainability is going to have as much of a disruptive effect and particularly climate change amongst the various sustainability issues and therefore a lot of the things that we're doing at E-Cube are really focused on helping Indian companies to navigate the sustainability disruption that we see ahead of us in fact aimed E-Cube E-Cube based on three E's engage and empower for ESG so when we started it hardly anyone in India knew what ESG stood for but now fortunately a lot of people understand it

[01:06:06] and so we do consulting capacity building we're knowledge partners to FICI the industry association for their center for sustainability leadership we have a partnership with the Indian Express group to start a sustainability media platform we have a partnership with the stock exchange in Mauritius to help them establish an ESG board which will crowd in issuances particularly directed at Africa we're planning to set up a private equity fund focused on the climate transition with some of my old team from the Tata

[01:06:36] Opportunities Fund next year so a whole bunch of interventions but all predicated on supporting Indian companies we should create some indices as well I can introduce you to our guys that small case and we can have ETFs would love to we've just actually put out on the media platform it's called Earth Inherited there's a website already some analysis of the BRSR reporting by the top thousand listed companies and drawing the data from those metrics we believe there's a case to make actually a bunch of indices I'll connect you to those lovely

[01:07:06] thank you and prolific book writer where do you get the time is it is a passion is it we're going to see more books from you you might so the first book as I said was based on my PhD dissertation and that was really because I was told that as an academic you must make your research available to a wider audience the best way to do that is write articles which I did and write books so I wrote the book then I got into the corporate world and had no time to write when I got out of Tata's

[01:07:36] I felt that there was so much that I had seen experienced and really lived through many of the most critical junctures in Tata history in recent times if I didn't write something I would forget it all so I wrote the book that was the brand custodian the next book which is outlast how ESG can benefit your business I wrote during COVID because lockdown was there I was stuck at home nothing better to do a lot of books for another generation COVID books for your generation so since so few

[01:08:06] people knew what ESG is about I said let me at least educate the market on what ESG is all about so that was the ESG book and the most recent one which was Tata's leadership experiment the story of the Tata administrative service was really a function of a WhatsApp group with which all of us TAS officers are part and people said somebody should write a history of the TAS before we all forget what it was like and in fact some of our TAS colleagues sadly have passed away so before those stories are lost get the oral history and try and write it up so three

[01:08:36] of us were asked as former authors to take a slab at this the three of us collaborated and wrote that the world's richer place for those stories being recounted so again thanks from the entire ecosystem for that and the last thing which is not in our discussed questions but I know you did something with the Rhodes scholarship this year and we're very proud of it so again motivation to do it and what is it about like a lot of people don't know the erstwhile

[01:09:06] glorious era of Rhodes scholars and you've been one so I'd love for the audience to know what it meant so the Rhodes scholarship is Oxford even today it is the richest and most prestigious scholarship for graduate studies at Oxford and it makes you part of a global network I mentioned Ratan Tata during the Kennedy years when Kennedy had a bunch of Rhodes scholars in his cabinet today if you look at the Biden administration people like Pete Buttichek Gina Raimondo the Commerce Secretary Pete Buttichek the Transport Secretary

[01:09:35] are all Rhodes scholars so Rhodes scholars continue to be in positions of great influence and importance across countries and India has had very few Rhodes scholars over the years in my time it was only three it increased to five in fact this year also we selected five and Oxford which is where the Rhodes scholarships operate is where I met Samya my wife so we felt if there's something we could do to increase the number of Rhodes scholarships for India but also

[01:10:05] in that sense fund the education for somebody to go to Oxford that would be great Samya has a connection with Oxford her great grandfather is Sarvapali Radhakrishnan who was the Spalding professor for Eastern religion at Oxford in the 1930s as portrayed today hangs in All Souls College so between the two of us we had many reasons to want to do something for Oxford and to do it through the instrumentality of the Rhodes scholarship and for the first time in Rhodes history the trust has recently permitted

[01:10:35] the scholarships to be named after donors so we decided to name it after Dr. Radhakrishnan and my father Radhakrishnan lovely lovely into that journey which started at Oxford and as I joke I tell people this is the one opportunity you'll have to create a thousand year scholarship because it's in perpetuity in a thousand year old university which is how old Oxford is did you also meet there by the way yes we met in Oxford beautiful so

[01:11:05] we're kind of done thank you for like recounting such memorable tales of Mr. Tata the Tata group your story we'll just end with a fun sort of rapid fire session and we'll let you go back to work but thank you again so rapid fire question you can elaborate one word one phrase one sentence one skill that served you best during your Tata years I think the ability to listen

[01:11:35] your go to book on corporate leadership I'd probably say execution Larry boss and Ram Charan most memorable international negotiation this has got to be a telecom deal we pulled off for telecom hardware replacing a legacy network got fantastic terms

[01:12:25] decision telecom so I love the description of ethics as being what sort of guides their conduct when nobody is looking and I think that's a very good measure to use whether somebody is behaving ethically or not one misconception people have about working for family businesses whereas the Tata as you well described are really not that but that's a perception and probably very unique from other family businesses but still what is the misconception

[01:12:55] actually I've also seen a lot of this through the eyes of my wife who runs a multifamily office and a bit of my experience with the Tata Opportunities Fund as I mentioned interacting with some of these rich people and I think the point that many of them

[01:13:25] do very well on their own steam and any global brand of course outside of the Tatas that you admire for their values I think during the time as brand custodian there was a lot of focus we paid to the Unilever brand under Paul Polman because he was doing some remarkable things particularly on the sustainability agenda and I think linking that with the ethos of Unilever as a brand interesting lessons for us and similarly besides Ratan Tata any other business leader you've

[01:13:54] grown to admire a lot I'd have to say whatever I've read about Jamsidji Tata founded the group because Ratan Tata in a sense was standing on the shoulders of giants and I think the people who went before him J.R.D. Tata also in his own right but you know one thing I'll tell people that everyone has their vulnerabilities weaknesses angularities eccentricities so many people that you put on pedestals turn and therefore there are

[01:14:24] lots of people that you see who have aspects of leadership that you really admire going back in time I remember being so struck by Carly Fiorina's autobiography for years in telecoms and the computer industry people like that have so much to share and yet she's not recognized as a great corporate leader but I think it depends on what you're looking for I'd love to recommend I'm recommending that book now to everybody there because as you said nobody knows

[01:14:54] the story at least here nobody has read it so if you're saying it's good we should read it biggest learning from your current work in ESG I think it's quite simple the fact that ESG is a vast ocean of quote unquote non financial

[01:15:40] space but electric vehicles battery technology waste to energy biofuels so names that come to mind I mean Zip Electric Smart Juules Banofi very exciting company that converts banana waste into four leather that has been exporting so I think large number of companies super you have your work cut out a lot more to choose from absolutely absolutely and finally the last piece of advice for Indian companies trying to go global

[01:16:07] which is why we set this entire season up, to try and win globally. So I think going back to what Tata's themselves did, I think global markets are brutal. So when you're stepping out, you have to be aware that you have to make the full commitment, you have to be all in. So whether it means investments in technology, investments in building up your market capabilities, understanding regulation, regulation can catch you off guard

[01:16:37] and can be the end of you in these markets where enforcement is oftentimes very different from what you may have experienced in India. True. So I'd say that you have to be very clear what are the key success factors and then be willing to back up your play with total passion and full commitment. All relate to actually somebody who wants to gift you something today, which is one of our companies called Ultra Human. Oh, sweet. So they make this ring.

[01:17:05] And it's a sleep measurement ring and a health monitoring ring. Okay. And we actually sell more than 90% of our stuff globally. I see. Just launched on literally this quarter, Walmart, Costco, Best Buy, Verizon, all in the US. Congratulations. Yeah. And actually, everything you said in the last sentence applies to them. They have to win on all of those factors. There are giants competing and pushing regulators on them and saying they could have violated something. So we're in that new territory,

[01:17:35] but basically 100 plus million ARR. Wow. Yeah. Just with 80, 90% of it coming from this. But essentially want to be like a new age health tech company. Right. For global audiences. Right. And yeah, they want to get engaged to you. Sweet. Please thank them from my side. There's a sizing kit. Uh-huh. So you have to get home. Uh-huh. Then these are the two fingers. And you just size yourself. Send us the sizes. Okay. And there are five colors. Wow.

[01:18:05] And we'll get them to ship over to you. Terrific. Thank you so much. Yeah. And they're launching something called Ultra Human Home next year. I see. So it'll be fun. But they've been one of our remarkable cross-border stories. And I think this passion of doing this season's podcast came from we have those stories in the portfolio. Uh-huh. They someday will feature on our podcast. It was the thinking. But we want hundreds more to come in India. Right.

[01:18:32] And I think you can't just leave it to the structural advantages that large conglomerates had. Right. It'll be too long to wait. Correct. And why can't most startups do this? And so that's the messaging. And thanks for contributing to it. Most welcome. Thanks for having me. We thank IDFC First Bank for being our annual partner. IDFC First Bank is deeply engaged with the startup community in India. The commitment to fostering innovation and supporting entrepreneurship has made them a valuable partner

[01:18:58] in the growth journey of numerous startups, including many, many Bloom portfolio companies. This partnership helps us in a mission to back the next generation of revolutionary founders in India. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.