A Career in Focus
As R Gopalakrishnan prepares to hang up his boots at Bombay House,
he looks back at his tenures at the Tatas and at Unilever's India subsidiary
and keeps you guessing about the moment he made the switch from ambition to
contentment
In
his early days at Tata Sons, R Gopalakrishnan (52 then) had problems fitting
in. In 1998, the then vice-chairman of Hindustan Lever (HLL), the In dian arm
of foods multinational Unilever, had moved to Tata Sons as executive director
(HLL became Hindustan Unilever or HUL in 2007). The Tata Sons office at Bombay
House was just a 15-minute walk from the headquarters of HLL near Churchgate
but, inside, they were probably a world apart. As a Lever honcho, with few hang
ups, Gopalakrishnan took his time to understand the culture at Tatas -an Indian
employer where the founding father was revered. Gopalakrishnan often questioned
the simple traditions. He need ed a mentor to help him along the way. And he
needed to read up on the Tatas, something the mentor suggested.
Today,
17 years later Gopalakrishnan, closing in on 70, is preparing to retire from
the group. Now he finds it easy to draw parallels between Levers and Tatas and
their founders Lord William Lever hulme and Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata.
“The
founders were only 15 years apart in age.
Both
the groups, Tatas and Levers, have long-term views and are great innovators,“
Gopalakrishnan tells ET Magazine in an interview, to mark the launch of his
latest book, Six Lenses -Vignettes of Success, Career and Relationships. In the
last eight years, Gopalakrishnan has become a prolific writ er, sometimes
drawing heavily on his Tata experi ence, churning out five eminently readable
books on management and history. He is preparing for his third innings, one of
speaking, writing and advising. This metamorphosis from a corporate-go getter,
to a somewhat avuncular, white-haired management guru and thinker, has taken
its time.And in the beginning it was not easy.The Hotshot Recruit The mentor
who helped Gopalakrishnan in his early days was Jamshed J Irani, then managing
director of Tata Steel. Irani recalls that Gopalakrishnan would wonder aloud
why almost everyone had a photo of JN Tata hanging in their rooms. “He asked
why do we want an old man looking at us all the time?“ Irani says. Gopal, as he
is called by colleagues, took a while to understand the reverence. It helped
that in 2001 Irani moved to Mumbai as non-executive director of Tata Sons after
retiring at Tata Steel and the two had offices on the same floor. They became
family friends. It was Irani who advised Gopal to read books on Tatas.
Gopalakrishnan
was brought in by Ratan Tata to help change things at Tatas. He was this mover
and shaker, who was to shake up the status quo. His first goal was to unify the
branding across the group. Gopalakrishnan was the first inductee into Tata Sons
in a long time at the top level. At one point he had been among the
frontrunners for the post of chairman of HLL in India after SM Dutta. However,
he was pipped to the post by Keki Dadiseth in 1996. When he accepted Ratan
Tata's offer to quit as vice-chairman of HLL and join Tata Sons in 1998, it
created a stir. Tata after all was scheduled to finish his executive role at
Tata Sons in 2002, when he turned 65. Was Gopalakrishnan being drafted to take
on the executive role, was the question in everyone's mind, even as Gopal took
on the task of creating a regime around the Tata brand and then subsequently
helped manage group-wide human resources.
That
Ratan Tata carried on till he turned 75 (postponing his own retirement as
non-executive director from 2007 to 2012) and led the group with as much aplomb
as a non-executive chairman, as he did when he was the ex ecutive-chairman, is
another story. By then, Gopalakrishnan had settled into the Tata mould
completely. And maybe the speculation around his being a prospective successor
was misplaced after all. At least JJ Irani thinks so. “The age difference
between Ratan Tata and RG was not enough, so I do not think that was ever
planned.“
Ambition
Versus Contentment
In
his early days, Gopalakrishnan had to make more than one adjustment. One was
about adopting a more indirect and diplomatic line, different from what he
would have done at Levers as the chief executive of various businesses. After
all, now he was a director of the holding company of Tatas with a somewhat
tenuous hold on the group.
Gopalakrishnan
describes his transition in his own words: “I had been an operating chief
executive officer (CEO) at HUL -for example managing director (MD) of Brooke
Bond Lipton India, and chairman of Unilever Arabia. Assertiveness was my
natural style. When I joined Tata, I realised that I should not get in the way
of the CEO just as I did not desire non-executive directors to interfere when I
was a CEO. It was a challenge to change. And change I did -perhaps well to some
and less well to others. Within my first four years at Tata, unfortunately, I
was a participant in the departure of four CEOs, a bit much for a newcomer.
Maybe that fact caused me to moderate my style.“
Irani
notes that Gopalakrishnan was very good at putting his point across in a
diplomatic manner. “There were some responsibilities at Tata Sons which we
handled jointly.Whereas I would be aggressive about my views, he would always
be very gentle, polite and diplomatic. This is something I learnt from him and
it added a layer of refinement to me,“ Irani says. While Gopalakrishnan agrees
and explains why he took on this cloak of amiability, not everyone thinks it
was the right thing to do. Says a senior honcho at the Tatas who does not want
to be named for this story: “Since the group human resources reported to him, I
had approached Gopalakrishnan, requesting his intervention at the company I
worked, but he did not want to do that.“
Gopalakrishnan
says that maybe the way he played his innings at Tatas can look different, from
different angles, depending upon the lenses being used to view it, leading us
on to a discussion on Six Lenses. In the book Gopalakrishnan speaks about how
one can look at life through six different lenses. It also in a way answers the
question on whether RG achieved his full potential at Tatas.
He
writes: “Every life must be driven by ambition. Yet everybody must also lead a
life in perfect contentment.There is a natural tension between ambition and
contentment. Sometimes the balance tips towards ambition, especially when one
is younger. At other times, especially when one is older, the balance tips
towards contentment.At the end of any life, the cup of accomplishment and
contentment are both half full.“ He continues in the next paragraph: “It is
every ageing person's deep desire to die peacefully, having lived a life of
fulfilment and contentment. But to judge whether the life has been fulfilling
creates its own dilemmas of judgment. Do you need to be well-known, even
famous? Can an `ordinary person' live as fulfilled a life as a `famous
person'?“
Luck, Life and
Ratan Tata
While
`success and fulfilment' is the sixth lens in Gopalakrishnan's latest book, the
fifth one is luck. He says: “Let us see what happened with me in Levers when I
was to head the Saudi Arabian company Unilever Arabia. The day I landed in London
in 1991 to take over, the first Iraq-Kuwait war started. US started bombing
Iraq. Then in a month it was over.The Saudi government invested heavily to
pump-prime the Saudi economy and as a result our company prospered and I was
seen to be delivering growth. Was it luck or coincidence or just my hard work?
I did not bomb Iraq and neither did I invest in the Saudi economy, and yet I
reaped the fruits.“
To
prove his point on luck, Gopalakrishnan provides another example in the book on
how chance interventions by JRD Tata had a profound impact in the career of JJ
Irani. Gopalakrishnan himself loves to talk about younger professionals he has
spent time with who have done well later. He names Sanjiv Mehta, managing
director of HUL, and D Shivakumar, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo India as well as
R Mukundan, MD of Tata Chemicals, among many others. “I love to think that I
have run a few laps with them on the tracks in the past,“ he says.
However,
in the last 17 years, if Gopalakrishnan has constantly run laps alongside one
man, it has to be former chairman of Tata Sons Ratan Tata. Gopalakrishnan
praises Ratan Tata's ability to often take a contrarian call. Then he comes up
with a more thought through assessment of his former boss: “My overarching
impression of Ratan Tata is his character. It did not matter whether one agreed
with him or not on a particular point, but he always demonstrated character.“
As
Cyrus Mistry was anointed the chairman of the group back in 2011, the
retirement age for non-executive directors was rolled back to 70 from 75, to
give a freer hand to the new chairman. Irani and Tata had retired at 75 in 2011
and 2012. However, RG will hang up his boots at 70. His roles as custodian of
brands and head or human resources have already been taken on by Mukund Rajan
and NS Rajan, respectively. On the brighter side, this early retirement allows
him a fair amount of time for a third innings.And RG plans to join new company
boards, teach, write and go on speaking assignments.
There
will be a basketful of stuff that RG will carry away from his Tata office when
he leaves, and one of them will surely be his nameplate on his door at Bombay
House. In fact it is just a letter G that hangs on the door.“One of my farewell
memorabilia from HUL was the `G' sign. I think it was meant to be a
paperweight. I used it on my door instead of on my table. HUL officers had
their full name on the door, Tata did not have any name, and I perhaps
subconsciously did a half-way house.“ That is one more sign of a man who tried
his best to fit in.
ETM
29NOV15
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