Tata Company Quotes

For Tata Motors to fulfill the requirements of its customer value proposition and profit formula for the Nano, it had to reconceive how a car is designed, manufactured, and distributed. Tata built a small team of fairly young engineers who would not, like the company’s more-experienced designers, be influenced and constrained in their thinking by the automaker’s existing profit formulas. This team dramatically minimized the number of parts in the vehicle, resulting in a significant cost saving.

At that point in time, Gokul Rajaram was a legendary éminence grise in the ad-tech world. The so-called godfather of AdSense, Google’s secondary gold mine after AdWords, Gokul was a constant presence on the conference circuit, and an omnipresent adviser or investor in just about every advertising technology company worth talking about. He too had come to Facebook via a small acqui-hire, though really that had been just a career breather between his time at Google and his hiring at Facebook. University at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), followed by an American MBA, he was your standard-issue Indian techie, and probably that country’s most valuable export after steel and Tata Motors. “What’s the first thing you would change about Facebook Ads if we hired you?” There was about as much polish and prologue to Gokul as that of a North Korean diplomat. “I’d build a conversion-tracking system. It’s unbelievable you don’t have one yet.” A conversion-tracking system is software that tells you if an advertisement has worked in driving a conversion (or “sale” in marketing-speak), and lets you retweak your marketing campaigns based on performance. An ads system without conversion tracking is like a car without rearview mirrors; nay, it’s like a car without even rear or side windows. All you can see is forward, merrily driving along, not even understanding what’s behind you or what you just ran over. It’s a danger to yourself and others, and it was a sign of just how out-of-touch Facebook Ads management was that this somehow never got prioritized. From Gokul’s smile the conclusion was clearly . . . right answer! And so the conversation went, traversing various potential aspects of the Facebook Ads system, and what the company needed to build. It was a giddy Gokul—I’d soon learn he was almost always giddy—who escorted me out the door. The boys and I had arrived separately, assuming we’d get out at different times, and separately did we go back to the GrokPad. There, we compared notes. MRM and Argyris weren’t exactly rousing in their reviews of the experience. In fact, it was clear that the fascist vibe the company gave off had very much rubbed them the wrong way. They had never really liked Facebook, as either product or company, going back to our visits to their developer events. The daylong hazing had done nothing to charm them.

I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.

When Operation Flood was sanctioned I knew that it was a massive and extremely complex operation and we would need all the help we could possibly get from all quarters. It was in this connection that, one day, I called on J.R.D. Tata, Chairman of one of India’s largest industrial houses, one known for its commitment to quality and for its patriotism. I met him and explained to him the entire concept behind Operation Flood. I told him that such an enormous task would be extremely difficult to pull off alone and I requested him to spare six managers from the house of Tatas for one year, to help us improve the nation’s dairy industry. I could pay them only public-sector salaries, but within that, I assured him, I would pay them the best that I could. At the end of that year, his managers would return to his company, far richer for their thorough understanding of cooperatives and of agriculture. I was confident that it would be an extremely valuable experience for his managers. J.R.D Tata listened to me very patiently and then told me that since this was not a decision he alone could take I would have to present it to the board. I agreed to do so and met the board and once again explained the intricacies of the entire project to the members. They, too, listened very politely, smiled and nodded. But that is as far as they were prepared to go. To this day, I do not know whose decision it was, but we were loaned not even a single manager from the Tata Group. After all, would it have so adversely impacted the Tatas if they had deputed six managers to the NDDB and that, too, for a brief period of one year? The incident left me with a bitter taste and justified my belief that, in the ultimate analysis, the corporate world and the cooperative world are distinctly different. I

Ratan Tata was already well known in the investment community, but it was a new and interesting experience for me. Inevitably perhaps, on the road show we were always being compared and evaluated against Infosys and a lot of complimentary things were said about Infosys. Although we were competitors, to hear good things said in international forums about an Indian company made us very happy. When Ratan Tata returned from the road show he wrote a leter to Infosys’s management saying, ‘I must tell you that I felt so proud that here is an Indian company which is considered a benchmark in governance and transparency.

During Dorabji’s leadership, three hydroelectric power companies, two cement companies, a large edible oil and soap company, an insurance company and an airline were added to the Tata group. Dorabji’s role in building the Tata empire is often glossed over, perhaps because he was overshadowed by two particularly charismatic individuals—his predecessor Jamsetji and his successor JRD.

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Jamshed Irani, former CEO of Tata Steel, who turned the company around in the late 80s and early 90s by engaging the entire organization in a culture of innovation. One of the ideas that emerged during his tenure was Tata's practice of giving "Dare to Try" awards for innovative ideas that were operationally unsuccessful. Failed ideas teach us what does not work and provide us the opportunity to think critically so that the next idea has a better chance of success.

In the Cheshire town of Northwich, not far from where the brine comes out of the ground, you will find another part of this salt diaspora, an old ICI site run these days by Tata Chemicals, which also owns British Salt. That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.

Ratan Tata speaks of JRD’s business ethics. One of India’s best known tax consultants, Dinesh Vyas, says that JRD never entered into a debate between ‘tax avoidance’ which was permissible and ‘tax evasion’ which was illegal; his sole motto was ‘tax compliance’. On one occasion a senior executive of a Tata company tried to save on taxes. Before putting up that case, the chairman of the company took him to JRD. Dinesh Vyas explained to JRD: ‘But Sir, it is not illegal.’ Softly JRD said: ‘Not illegal, yes. But is it right?’ Vyas says not in his decades of professional work had anyone ever asked him that question. Vyas later wrote in an article, ‘JRD would have been the most ardent supporter of the view expressed by Lord Denning: “The avoidance of tax may be lawful, but it is not yet a virtue.

As narrated in his autobiographies, Tata was first educated in Kota. He and his siblings had to shed all their clothes and bathe outside the house to ritually cleanse themselves after returning home from the company of ‘lower caste’ students at the village school.

When I graduated from engineering college in 1971, T.A. Pai of Manipal suggested to Tata that I should join as a management trainee in a new company in Bombay that a friend of his had launched. When Tata asked me, I politely declined the offer because I desired to be based not too far from the jungles I loved. In hindsight, often wonder where my career would have taken me had I accepted Pai's offer: the aforementioned friend was the entrepreneur Dhirubhai Ambani who was just beginning his meteoric rise, perhaps with some help from Pai. I am glad I did, because my life would not have been the wild and wonderful one I have enjoyed in the five decades since.