What Gave Ratan Tata Great Pleasure

'I get enormous pleasure from seeing the uplift of an underprivileged or poor person.'
'I feel elated when I walk on the street and see someone who pushes a handcart talking on a cell phone.'
A revealing glimpse from Peter Casey's The Story of Tata: 1968 to 2021.

All Photographs: Kind courtesy Confederation of Indian Industry/X

As a member of the Parsi community, Ratan was raised with a strong bias in favour of helping the poor.

"I believe that we, that is, Indian industry, should have the responsibility of doing something for the traditionally deprived, but quotas are not an answer."

"What is needed is to give people an equal opportunity, which they do not have today. And I think that equal opportunity will not come from quotas; it will come from having more primary schools for them, perhaps finding solutions that will enable their families to send them to school, instead of leaving them in a situation in which they have to pull them out of school to send them to work."

"I believe that equal opportunity will come from creating vocational training for them so that they can master a trade."

In the recent past, Ratan has proposed government legislation 'to help create enterprises... run by the underprivileged.'

For instance, he suggests requiring 'industry to buy 5-10 per cent of their raw materials and components from companies run by underprivileged entrepreneurs, subject to quality and price being equal. That would be a healthy thing because we would then be creating enterprises, creating genuine prosperity. You buy from them and they become useful citizens and they grow.'

Indeed, under Ratan's leadership, Tata Tea sold "our entire plantation in south India to our workers. What we have now is a company owned and managed by workers, and we buy tea from that company."

Ratan admits that there were sceptics "who felt that we were making losses in the plantations and we passed on our losses to our workers. What has actually happened is that once the workers became owners, the plantations made a profit."

It is a "true win-win situation on both sides. In time, we will have some very prosperous individuals who will own a piece of a tea estate or a set of tea estates. They will make their own destiny ... And if they become really wealthy, I think all of us at Tata Tea will be extremely happy."

In this, Ratan speaks from personal feeling: "I get enormous pleasure from seeing the uplift of an underprivileged or poor person. I feel elated when I walk on the street and see someone who pushes a handcart talking on a cell phone. Prosperity is spreading."

When asked about the people who have shaped his thinking, Ratan generally mentions J R D Tata first. Others include the capitalist philanthropist Chuck Feeney; John F. Kennedy ("I never met him but his thinking influenced me in many ways"); Henry Schacht, chairman of Cummins and Lucent Technologies; MIT professor and founder of the Bose Corporation, Amar Bose; and Jean Riboud, the French socialist, World War II-era anti-Nazi resistance leader, and chairman of Schlumberger, the largest oilfield services company in the world.

"There's a common thread these people share-strong values. They have the integrity of a high order and a very forceful social consciousness in terms of what their corporations do. In addition, they are warm, thoughtful and caring human beings."

Besides individuals with these qualities, Ratan admires "people who are very successful". To this, he adds an important caveat: "But if that success has been achieved through too much ruthlessness, then I may admire that person, but I can't respect him."

Of all the personal qualities Ratan values most, the one business demands most, is what he describes as a "self-imposed ... framework of ethics, values, fairness and objectivity". Ratan warns that "you cannot impose [such a framework] on yourself forcibly because it has to become an integral part of you".

It is something that "has to go through your mind at the time of every decision, or most decisions".

It requires you to ask: "Does this stand the test of public scrutiny in terms of what I said earlier? As you think the decision through, you have to automatically feel that this is wrong, incorrect, or unfair. You have to think of the advantages or disadvantages to the segments involved, be it employees or stakeholders."

Add to all of these qualities, one more. Call it a drive to create complete perfection.

"I often get frustrated by acts or implementations that are incomplete or imperfect, where I feel someone has not thought something through and has just done the job mechanically ... I appreciate a person who does a little bit of overkill, even though it is not necessary. I get very, very frustrated and upset if someone does things in a sloppy manner."

Ratan describes himself as "a bit of an optimist". He is a believer "in evolution rather than revolution", and he never feels that something can't be done.

"It may take a little time and may not happen quite the way you wanted it to, but I always feel that it can be done. I am a moderate risk-taker, but I am not risk-averse, nor am I a gambler. If I believe in something, I pursue it vigorously."

His personal satisfaction is bound up in the achievements of the Tata companies. "What would really make me happy is to have people say that we are a group that provides value for money and that our customer sensitivity is very high. In other words, I have no desire to strive to necessarily be No.1 in size. But being No.1 in quality and No.1 as a corporation in its human and business practices would be really great."

In terms of his own legacy, he would like to be remembered as "someone who succeeded in an environment of change, and upheld the value system and the ethical standards that our group was built on".

His great "satisfaction" in having presided over corporate growth "without crossing the line that distinguishes ethical practice from some of the things we see around us today."

If this sounds like a relatively modest aspiration for a life's work, it is in fact, both modest and highly ambitious.

To consistently succeed as leader of both an unabashedly capitalist enterprise and an uncompromisingly ethical enterprise is, in the context of the history of business, an extraordinary achievement.

But under Ratan Tata, it really happened.

• FAREWELL, Mr TATA

Excerpted from The Story of Tata: 1968 to 2021, by Peter Casey, with the kind permission from the publishers Penguin Random House India.