The reason why so many business leaders and ministers of a certain era were in tears at the loss of this legendary figure was because there was an asset at stake far more important than money: his word.
Essentially, it boils down to two different value systems. In RNT’s India, you build something for the long term, money is a byproduct. In the other India, you make money at all costs. If something gets built, that’s a byproduct, maybe even an accident.
The day the news broke of RNT’s passing, I was working with a 24-year-old social media guru whom I’d recruited over other applicants. He gave me his word that we were going to have a lifelong collaboration – only to stop returning my calls. A week later, he sent a cryptic WhatsApp, ‘Leaving for the US bro’.The idea of trust that great business houses like the Tatas are associated with should be a simple enough thing in business. I do a job. I send you an invoice. You pay me.
In the other India, you do the job. You send the invoice. Then the client starts haggling, lying, making up reasons not to pay you, delaying. A basic thing like following through from word to deed becomes the most valuable Indian business asset because it is so rare.
In RNT’s India, an employee was loyal to an organisation and the company treated the employee like family. They grew together. In the other India, as I recently witnessed in a hip Bangalore tech company, an employee started looking around for other opportunities on Day 1 of joining. And the employer had a team of people incentivised only to reduce increments and employee costs. This fabulous concoction of mutual distrust led to attrition rates of 50%. I was introduced to a ‘veteran team member’, a 32-year-old who’d been given a corner glass office, almost enshrined in a glass tomb for spectacle like Lenin, because he’d been with the company for over five years, a phenomenon as rare as a Yeti spotting.I’m not advocating, like some drunk uncle, that the old great Indian business houses were better somehow than GenZ innovation in a different tech-driven world. A lot of the suit-wearing, hierarchical deference – calling people sir and ma’am – layered bureaucracy, doing facetime (not FaceTime), sycophancy, would be considered dinosaur-like in the age of the Zomatos of the world. However, there were things in RNT’s India – the idea of trust and permanence, of loyalty and principle, which the age of billion-dollar-valued ecommerce India can learn from.
Like most of us, I’ve been watching RNT’s old YouTube clips and reading quotes to understand what an institution-builder he was. Post the whole Tata Nano controversy, RNT said – and I paraphrase – that he wanted to invest in West Bengal. Not because they’d done some elaborate market study on profitability vis-a-vis geography, but because he liked the-then CM, the late Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and believed in him. That’s all it took: faith in a man.
In Tata’s India, you took a bet on an instinct because you believed in something. And it was all-in.
I recently spoke at a business school about choosing comedy as a career. During Q&A, a young man asked me, ‘Sir, big comedians are now making crores. You must have seen that and decided to get into comedy.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s other-India thinking, so I delicately rerouted the answer to say, ‘No, I got into it because I loved doing it and believed in it’.
‘Sir, that’s all?’
Ratan Tata would have said, that’s not all. That’s everything.