Shorn of the fluff and fancy talk, business is about making money. The more, the better. Businesses which do not make money and fall by the wayside also serve a purpose. They are illuminating examples—posthumous tutorials to entrepreneurs on not dreaming the wrong dreams. Even more educative are businesses which teeter at the brink, and before the last ball is bowled, fight back spiritedly, and like a story scripted by Tilak Varma, claw their way to victory. In 2021, Dev and Pragya Chatterjee wrote Meltdown—a book that was grabbed greedily because some of us are closet sadists and love reading details about other people’s misfortunes. Now, the duo comes back with fightback stories—India Inc’s Greatest Turnarounds.
The book deals with five companies—ranging from Tata Steel and Larsen & Toubro at one end of the pack to financial services firm Religare at the other. The information provided is informative rather than explosive. It has been put together cogently to give you a full map of the journey—the high-points, ‘U’ turns and dead-ends. Take the case of Jindal Steel, a company that can claim it was handed bad cards. Its plant in Toranagallu, Karnataka, based on the much-touted Corex technology came a cropper the day the unit was inaugurated. Apparently, the engineers did not expect it to rain (somewhat surprising, since Karnataka is not exactly the Thar desert). Later, the court stepped in and cancelled the allocation by the state government of two coal mines. But Jindal Steel rebounded smartly.
The other steel company in the book, Tata Steel, holds in its hands both a priceless legacy and the burden of its own glorious history. In the early 1990s, it was becoming clear that the plant at Jamshedpur had to shake itself up. “If we do not transform soon, then we will have to turn the plant into a museum and make money by selling tickets,” Ratan Tata was warned. Change does not come easy to a legacy brand. But the company overcame its traditional inhibitions and managed the transition with ‘modernisation of the mind, apart from modernisation of the plant’. The plant is now touted as one of the country’s lowest cost steel producer. Fans of Brand Tata will applaud.
At Religare, the boardroom battles read like a thriller, replete with cloak, dagger and more than the usual quota of villains. Promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh (the Ranbaxy brothers) seemed to have set the trend for others at the helm to follow. A US-based Indian businessman offered to help a lady in distress—chairperson Rashmi Saluja. But he faltered when it came to the crunch. You would think that the redoubtable Ms Rashmi would still win the day. But a twist in the tale at the AGM saw arch-rivals Burmans (of the Dabur Group) pulling the carpet from under her feet. Turnarounds cannot be said to be complete until the t’s are crossed.
Sometimes, the battle depicted in the book may not be the one you have in mind. Raymond, for instance, had a palace coup that grabbed everyone’s attention. But the book turns the spotlight away from the family feud to focus instead on matters of business. It narrates how the textile company recovered from the bruising aftermath of the pandemic to regain its composure as the ‘complete man’.
In the case of L&T, the ‘turnaround’ which the book talks about had little to do with finance. The company was fighting to preserve something with greater nobility quotient—its identity. With A.M. Naik as its face and feisty champion, it retained its distinctive identity as a professional company able to shape its own destiny. That victory was accompanied by a re-engineering of the organisation as Naik set in motion the wave which brought current chairman and managing director S.N. Subrahmanyan to the crest.
The book is steeped in business reporting, with Dev having had a ring-side view of enterprises grappling with existential crises of all shapes and sizes. The research put in by the Chatterjees is commendable. There is so much background information about the organisations that you sometimes wonder if such depth of detail distracts from the essential turnaround. But I guess the writers were keen to build ‘atmosphere’.
Apart from telling us stimulating stories of fightback, the Chatterjees also call for a more mature attitude towards business. The fault, dear reader, lies with us. As a nation, we ‘celebrate success but demonstrate a low tolerance of failure’. Worse, failure is often hijacked as a lesson in moral science. When we see tycoons in trouble, we can’t help saying ‘serves them right’, for we believe God does not approve of opulence and looks favourably at us, the middle class.
India Inc cautions against such a line of thinking. It points out that even middle class wellbeing is at least in part due to some business or other having succeeded. We ought to be grateful. The piquant saying in Hindi puts it best: we shouldn’t spit on the thali we eat from.
INDIA INC’S GREATEST TURNAROUNDS
By Dev Chatterjee and Pragya Chatterjee
Published by Jaico Books
Price Rs499; pages 215