The Author with the Late Aditya Birla at MRPL site in the early days of construction
Changing to a new employer and getting acclimatized to an unaccustomed organizational context pose challenges that test our nerves. The transition is a great learning opportunity by itself.
My soft-footed and romanticized notion of the private corporate sector was hugely secondary, based on reading, listening to seminars and lectures and above all stirred up by my urge to explore the unknown contours of corporate realities.
I had worked for a little over two years in RPG Group before shifting to the joint sector Oil Refinery project of Aditya Birla Group with the Public Sector HPCL. Though it too had a traditional family business origin, the RPG culture had transitioned quite significantly into a professional corporate culture.
In hindsight, the striking difference between the two Industrial Houses, the Goenkas and the Birlas, though both had Marwari origins, lay in the level of professionalization they had traversed at the time I joined them.
Both the Groups had their younger scions, trained in top global universities and B Schools, quite open to change. Both welcomed professional managers to join them to help transform in line with the demands of the market and aligned with slow but sure generational cultural shifts.
Rama Prasad Goenka, the doyen of the RPG empire was a pious and well-meaning businessman, who turned more ascetic as he greyed. He left the management of his empire to his two sons even as the businesses were modernising and expanding. Harsh Goenka, who studied at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata went on to pursue his global Master’s in Management at IMD, Luzerne, Switzerland and returned to take charge of CEAT Tyres, developing it into a world-class tyre manufacturer.
In 1992, I joined the RPG family, in Harrison’s Malayalam Ltd, a plantation company headquartered in Kochi, Kerala in which they had acquired controlling shareholding. The imprints of Harsh’s vision and leadership were visible in the Group’s HR and Organizational culture-building efforts. Sanjiv Goenka, the younger brother, at that time, was in sync and aligned well with his brother. Subsequently, the two brothers had to go for a family business split which the grand old man of the family, I am sure, would have been pained to go through. Though I moved from the Public Sector to the private business after nearly two decades, I could transition very smoothly to the new context, thanks greatly to the values and culture of the Group and the mentoring and guidance of a thoroughbred professional like S Samuel heading the HML.
When I shifted to Aditya Birla Group, I was greatly fascinated by the vision, culture and outright simplicity of Aditya Birla, who was an icon of the changing profile of the predominantly family-owned private business in India.
Aditya Vikram Birla, son of the successful textile tycoon, BK Birla also was a product of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata like Harsh Goenka. He went on to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his studies in Chemical Engineering. At the age of 24, he took charge of managing and expanding the textiles and rayon business of his father’s business portfolio. He built up the first India-bred global business conglomerate in the industry with operations in 19 countries. Aditya was a technocrat, visionary and personified integrity and unimaginable modesty.
One thing that struck me was that the BK and Aditya Birla companies meticulously followed tax compliance and unlike many private businesses, prided themselves in being tax-compliant to the hilt.
Aditya Birla’s focus, unrelenting pursuit of goals and hurry to make things happen on the ground endeared him to me and many like me. Though at my level, I had quite a few occasions to interact closely with him and observe his style and commitment, there still was an aura of exclusivity around him as the scion of the legendary Birla family.
Aditya Birla was surrounded by a select group of loyal and committed seniors, with long years of association with the group. Many of the close confidants were from the second or third generation of Birla employees. Loyalty, respect for elders and a veneer of benevolence that flowed down from the Family were hallmarks of Birla culture.
Aditya Birla Group was the most professional of all the Birla businesses. I was a mid-level executive, in my late thirties, and the access I got to the ‘zone of proximity, visibility and communication loop ‘with Aditya Birla and the top executives of the Group was a highly rewarding professional experience. In corporate life learning never stops.
Upon joining MRPL, I was still in the early days of picking up the cultural and professional nuances of the private sector. The unlearning of PSU cultural hangover and alignment to the private business ground realities were still works in progress for me. Frankly, I should have made the move a lot earlier. There was so much to learn and adapt that I saw myself as a novice having wandered into a half-exciting-and-half-intriguing arena with little time to reset my notions and priorities.
As I spent my first few days in MRPL, I picked up my early learning points. Moving from a huge, bureaucratic, insensitive public sector organization to a private company with a legacy culture rooted in family loyalty and traditional values was a very sensitive experience. It could create moments of frustration, self-doubt, accidental mistakes and misreading of signals. There just was no easy way other than to go through the grueling seasoning of emotional and procedural harmonizing with the new realities.
Understanding the new organizational culture means a lot for an employee shifting from a public sector organisation or an MNC to a traditional family business.
The unique Marwari style of accounting and finances was bound to catch my attention as a novice to the Group. Known as the Partha system, it was pioneered and established as a very effective management practice, by GD Birla, the doyen of the Birla clan. A refined and effective Management Information System (MIS), in vogue in Birla businesses and many other Marwari establishments, much before sophisticated computer-based reporting became the norm, Partha is known to have aroused interest and study globally, including by the famed Harvard Business School.
The crux of the system was that every morning the CEO of a Birla entity would get a one-page report showing the net cash inflow from the operations of the previous day. In the analysis that would follow, the top management would examine the composition of the Income and Expenses, Working Capital scenario and Cost Management resilience.
The lesson for all professional managers to be assimilated from the Partha System is that cash is King in business. If there is a net accrual to cash, then the business is sound and efficient. Businesses, big and small, often get into the cash-strain loop and get entangled in a debt trap and mounting interest burden. If only they tracked cash and cost management systematically, such a predicament could have been avoided.
Just as important as the financial practices of Marwari businesses, another key lesson from them is the need to respect and reward loyalty, integrity and honesty. In many traditional Indian business houses, there is a thread of generations of employment, though informal, which is quite strong and effective in employee retention. The system, like the legendary life-long employment in Japanese companies, recognizes and supports loyalty to the businesses and the controlling families.
It was a cultural shock for me to see even senior managers addressing the head of the company as “Babuji”. When I was with the PSU, the bosses were addressed ‘Sir’, in the Plantation Company that I worked for, most professional managers were addressed by first name, a culture more aligned with the industry and its westernized ways. Much later when I worked in a global environment, the Western expat bosses used to make fun of the Indian habit of visible servility to authority and the tendency to address as ‘Sir’ and ‘Mr.’ instead of being on first name terms. Truly, there are many worlds within the corporate world.
Aditya Birla had to take the task of modernizing the traditional business house on many dimensions head-on. Professionalizing while preserving the age-old values that made the business houses what they were was a great challenge for scions like Harsh Goenka and Aditya Birla.
I remember how excited I was to be at the Mangalore airport, accompanying my MD, Jagdish Mehta who had flown in the previous day to receive Aditya Birla. That was my first opportunity to meet him. The love, regard and respect with which the elders of the Group saw Aditya Birla were so spontaneous and forthright that I understood the values of familial bonds, tradition and the power of lineage.
It went to the credit of Aditya Birla as an individual that he radiated an infectious genuineness of purpose and demonstrated innate simplicity and frugality in his personal life.
Aditya Birla arrived in his private jet. His wife, Rajshree Birla and senior company directors accompanied him. He immediately moved to the site and went around the extensive land, full of dust and brisk-paced site grading. He was shown around and explained the location of various facilities that would come up. The passion in his eyes and words as well as his eagerness to see the fulfilment of the dream were magnetic.
At that time, I had no inkling that he was already in the advancing stages of a complicated prostate cancer which eventually worsened and took his life, a few years later, when he was just 53 years old.
After the visit by Aditya Birla, the work at the site picked up and I got immersed in the specific tasks that I had to attend. Land acquisition, government coordination, staff recruitment and procedural compliance on legal and labour-related matters were high on my plate of deliverables.
The next couple of years were hectic and demanding. Not a bed of roses, though. I had my share of anxieties, frustrations and challenges. But amidst all of these, the learning never stopped.
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