My picks for the year include Quintessentially Tata by Syamal Gupta and Big Billion Startup by Mihir Dalal.
Syamal Gupta holds two records in India’s contemporary corporate world. By coincidence, the recent much-lamented demise of FC Kohli of TCS fame was preceded by the passing away of tea baron BM Khaitan. Both Kohli and Khaitan were nonagenarians. Syamal Gupta is an early bird in this respect. An alumnus of Imperial College, London, he joined the House of Tata in 1955, indeed a long time ago. Happily for family, friends and admiring former colleagues, Gupta is very much with us. Little doubt he is India’s most senior retiree. That’s his first record. The second one is subjective. A star performer in the Tata Group, Gupta was still in his thirties when handpicked by JRD and fellow top brass to lead Singapore-based greenfield project Tata Precision Industries Pte Ltd, the maiden major overseas industry established by the Tatas. With candour and humility, Gupta confesses how “to have Tatas repose their confidence in me filled me with zeal to rise to the occasion.”
The author’s autobiography now moves on to describe how both he as well as his employers trod the learning curve with wary steps. Singapore, he recalls, “had no raw material and even drinking water had to be imported. There was no major infrastructure, foreign exchange was restricted, the stagnating economy of the 1960s suffered chronic labour problems.”
This book is one of my chosen picks of the year because Gupta writes with complete transparency, weaving insights and anecdotes on the various ways the Tata Group tackled and overcame problems it hadn’t prior clues how to handle. Tata Precision, for instance, was mocked for thinking of setting up its works on a possible site at Jurong on individual plots on offer from inexpensive 15,000 acres of marshy land earmarked by finance minister Goh for a proposed industrial arena dubbed “Goh’s Folly.” When Goh miraculously changed Jurong to the glamourous place it is today, the sarcastic sobriquet became “Goh’s Glory.”
Though friends had been urging him to write for years, Gupta refused since he is an engineer not a writer. Fortunately for Indian industry he changed his mind and contributed an illustrated gem to the country’s management literature where business autobiographies belong to a rare genre. Industry players often have too many skeletons hidden in their cupboards. Gupta has none. Tata affairs are in litigation so I make no comment on the Group. Syamal Gupta’s book deserves to be widely read.
Reviewer Sujoy Gupta
My second pick is Big Billion Startup by Mihir Dalal. In India’s famously porous business media, there’s very little that remains secret for long. The whole place leaks like a sieve. That’s why I tend to squirm in irritation to get a promising book with “The Untold Story” emblazoned on its cover as this one is. Flipkart, of course, remains India’s most stunning e-commerce venture of the 2010s. With co-founders Binny Bansal [b. 1982] and Sachin Bansal [b.1981] resigning jobs with Amazon to invest Rs4 lakhs to set up Flipkart in 2007, Amazon’s daredevil homespun competitor was born. (For the record, the two Bansals aren’t related. Fellow IIT alumni, they’re friends.) Amazon India was already settled in Bangalore since 2004.
Author Mihir Dalal explains the flavour of the day with brevity and clarity. India, he recalls, was an “unrealized market.” Once India opened its economy in 1990s to overseas investment, foreign brands and retailers swarmed the country, “buying into the notion that hundreds of millions of Indians were raring to devour all kinds of consumer goods after decades of forced socialist deprivation.” The book bristles with such nuggets from contemporary e-commerce history. It whets readers’ appetites to know more. So what happened next? How did it work out in renascent India for megacorps Amazon and Walmart vis-a-vis humble parvenu Flipkart?
Mihir Dalal provides clues in teasing, tantalizing fashion. Flipkart, he says “struggled internally with the problem that blights every fast-growing internet startup: chaos.” Flipkart’s muster roll of employees grew to several thousand in 2011 with offices in Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.. Only two years prior, the roll for 2009 was fewer than 100!
Yesteryear’s startup was now a full-fledged company. It was time to solve a slew of day-to-day problems: octroi holdup at state borders, warehousing software playing truant, packaging bottlenecks during demand spikes, keeping tab on inflow of cash on delivery – an endless list.
I’m not a nuts-and-bolts guy but, mercifully, the narration here isn’t boring. Excitement focuses on Flipkart’s amazing bottom line. Gross sales of Rs 10 crores in 2010 more than quadrupled a year later! Dalal exults: “Flipkart was hurtling from one milestone to another, month after month, demolishing barriers, becoming stronger and greedier for more.” And next? In 2016-17 on revenue of Rs 19,854 crores, Flipkart’s fairytale loss was Rs 8,771 crores. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and Walmart head Doug Mcmillon stepped in as contendors for Flipkart. The fight was chilling. Walmart won. Don’t miss this book.
Sujoy Gupta is a business historian and biographer.
