It was a mix of business and pleasure for a select gathering at The Chambers as Suhel Seth held forth on his latest book, Mantras For Success — India’s Greatest CEOs Tell You How To Win (co-authored with Sunny Sen; Rupa Publications), for An Author’s Afternoon, presented by Shree Cement and Taj Bengal, held in association with t2, Prabha Khaitan Foundation and literary agency Siyahi. Starting with why he wrote this book to how he picked his 21 CEOs, Seth also touched upon corporate practices, the “mayhem” in CSR and why businesses must be allowed to fail. Here are excerpts from Suhelspeak, in his trademark tone and tenor.

Chronicler of the times
There are very few books written on corporate India. Even fewer on people who make corporate India. People who run companies believe that if they talk they will be under some kind of scanner, and as you know we live in notorious times.... If you look at the Americas, both Latin and North, you will see a lot of books being written on the corporate world there, because it serves as an encouragement, as an inspiration and more importantly, it is an effective chronicler of the times. 

In this book, if you read some of its stories, let’s say of Sunil Mittal or Ratan Tata, it’s not only about what they feel but... also why they got into the business, what were the fears.... It’s a very interesting analysis of what we are going through in India. There are anecdotes or essays around Kumar Mangalam Birla and the challenges he faces — being a Marwari and running a global business and wondering whether to serve Butter Chicken in Australia at his staff canteen. These are real issues. 

The good thing was that one used one’s relationship with each of these people to get them to write. It is impossible otherwise to get Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani in one book.... I had a very softly pointed gun towards their head saying — look, there is a deadline... (laughs). 
The only Calcuttan who features in this book is Sanjiv Goenka. As I say in the opening essay, it was important for me to decide who those great CEOs were. It’s my call because it’s my book. If you want AC Nielsen’s opinion, ask AC Nielsen to write a book! The moment you get into lists, you destroy the soul of what you want to write.... One other thing I also mentioned in the opening essay is that I have purposely chosen only Indian CEOs, in India. 

So it was interesting when Arun Jaitley launched the book in Delhi on April 8, in the first row there were two global Indian CEOs — Arun Sarin, who ran Vodafone, and Anshu Jain, who runs Deutsche Bank. Both of them asked, ‘We are not in the book?’ I said, well, you have to read it to find out why. Because then it does not stop. Then I have to include Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) or Indra Nooyi, much as I hate Pepsi. I hate Pepsi because I am involved with Coca-Cola, no other reason (laughs). 

It was important therefore to decide a couple of things. So, what we decided were as follows — it had to be contemporary CEOs. We did not want to profile the dead and the gone. So J.R.D. (Tata) is not in the book, nor is Ghanshyam Das Birla. We wanted people who were representative not just of industry but of the nuances of industry. So there are people who represent today’s India, whether it is an Aditya Puri running HDFC Bank or Rahul Sharma of Micromax or Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal.

Gone girls
It was damn difficult to find women helming corporations who actually stood out. The only person who came up to scratch was Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon). See, Chanda Kochhar  (MD & CEO of ICICI) and all were inheritors.... So it was very, very tough to find women. 

This is where I was a bit surprised. In many industries, especially in what I would call the digital space, I would have imagined more and more women to be right up in front. For instance, I have never understood why a woman never started Myntra or a Jabong or why a woman does not head Amazon India. We have discovered that 67 per cent of online visitors are women. Let’s assume that only 40 per cent buy. It is still a very substantive number. 

Now Amazon India has got a woman as a fashion editor — Anisha Oberoi — but that apart, nothing. We don’t have a homegrown version of Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) yet.

Involve, inspire, incite
The book is not meant to be instructive. I don’t believe people engage with books through instruction. You have enough of them in your textbooks. It is meant to involve, inspire and incite. 

It’s meant to involve you with what is happening around us. Industry touches us in every way. Rahul Gandhi is an absolute idiot to say that business is irrelevant. After all their family has made so much money off businessmen.... Attacking business will hit him hard in years to come. 

I think it’s important to understand that you got to be involved, not just with the idea of India but with the idea of business in India because they are the ones to produce jobs. What’s the point in saying 20 million skilled people by 2020 when you don’t have the jobs? 

The other is incite. You must incite people into thinking beyond the manner in which they think. I was addressing 7,000 students in Bangalore, night before last. I said the problem is we have disengaged with the idea of India. We have become patriots rather than nationalists. There is a distinct difference. Even our old introductions to other people is either based on caste, linguistically or on regional specifications, it’s never on the India we have inherited. 

I’ll do a quick test. If I ask you who is the Vice President of India, you won’t know. But if I ask you what is Hrithik Roshan’s pet name, you will! That says a lot about us as an evolving society. 

The third is inspire. We don’t have iconic leadership anymore.... What has happened post-2G is that we see a complete dip in Indians trusting business. And everyone got touched by it. Ratan Tata got touched, Anil Ambani got touched.... Obviously some of those jokers went to jail.... But what’s going to happen now? 

So when there is a trust deficit, when there is a respect deficit... see, more important than trust is respect deficit. After J.R.D. and to an extent Ratan and now Anand Mahindra, we don’t have corporate leaders who we respect. 

There are no corporate statesmen in India, which is a very strange situation. You may not agree with Jeff Immelt selling off GE Cap recently, you may not agree with what happened with Jack Welch (of GE) but you still salute them and respect them. You respect Sandy Weill (of Citigroup). But here there is no respect left for industry, because industry has not chosen to market the good it has also done, and I don’t mean to use it facetiously. 

Now Biki Oberoi is 81, he is in the book. He told me, ‘Why do you want me to do this?’ I said, ‘For the simple reason, no one knows what the hell you are doing. Everyone is looking at you through the prism of your hotels. But if your hotels are all about humanity, if your hotels are about service, if your hotels are about implanting the Indian hospitality imprint, then why will I not talk about what drives you? And people want to know why an 81-year-old guy is still so driven.’ 

[At the Delhi book launch] Jaitley said a very important point. He said, ‘Look, everyone says why are you after business? Keep government out. And yet, when industry screws up, the first people you come rushing to is the government for a bailout. You can’t have a marriage of convenience.’ 

The freedom to fail
Vijay Mallya is a very, very dear friend, but I completely disagree with the way he has behaved with his employees. I disagree with the way he ran the airline (Kingfisher). I used to be on the British Airways global board at that time and I told him, ‘Don’t start an airline, you’ll bleed.’ He said, ‘Ah, bullshit!’ 

Having said that, businesses must be allowed to fail. We cannot hold Mallya responsible because he failed. One of the things I have mentioned in the opening essay is that Indians are very unforgiving of failures. A guy fails, his entire past record will go for a toss. So you will forget that Mallya inherited half-a-brand business and built it into a humongous business [United Spirits] for which Diageo paid him over $2 billion. 

We are unable to engage with the idea of failure. One-two people in the book have talked about failure. Sanjiv Goenka has done a remarkable thing, where he said, ‘We had lots of issues with certain Spencer’s stores and we shut them down.’

That’s brave in an Indian context.... 

Build a nation
Flipkart has actually said, to hell with it, for two years we are not going to list. We don’t want to be subjected to quarterly probes. So, in this kind of environment, what role does industry play? To my mind industry has to play the role of nation-building. I think Indian industry has been woefully inadequate when it comes to nation-building. The CSR (corporate social responsibility) that they have engaged in is pathetic. 

Last Sunday I was with the Odisha chief minister, and he said, ‘They (industry) want to come here, they want to set up a humongous plant and they want to build one school and one infirmary.’ Who are you fooling? CSR as community engagement must be defined differently. The moment you do CSR which is linked to your business, it is not CSR, it is a business imperative. 

In that context, a fact that is completely unknown is what the Ambanis have done. Today, the only Braille newspaper in India is produced by Mukesh Ambani’s wife (Nita). Did you know that? No. When the Uttarakhand tragedy happened, they spent Rs 124 crore within four days. No one knows because they have come to be known for other things. 

The fact that Anand Mahindra supports 27 Nanhi Kali schools and the initiative is humongous. Not known. Now there is a contradiction. I have often asked these leaders, why don’t you talk about all this? You get to be known for all the other stuff. You do not inspire people. People think you all are robber barons. People equate you with cronyism. 

And to my mind there is a book waiting there, as how Indian industry has taken an initiative in certain areas, but there is complete mayhem. 

Pradeep Kakkar (environmental activist) : 
I want to ask about your selection of people. One of the things you said is that you wanted people who made it on their own and sitting in Calcutta, where we are all aware of the contributions of CESC, I don’t see Sanjiv Goenka as someone who has done it in his own right. 

Suhel: That is also what we felt, initially, after I had done the selection. There is a gentleman called Sunny Sen, who was doing all the research for the book. First, CESC was not an inheritance product. R.P. Goenka was vehemently opposed to CESC. He was vehemently opposed to its acquisition. He said, ‘This is a dead project. It’s a distribution company. It will never make money.’ 

In the mid-1990s, the company was almost on the verge of shutting down. Sanjiv Goenka took a punt and said, ‘No, I can turn this business around.’ Remember, almost all blue chip companies within the RPG group were sitting in Mumbai under Harsh’s (Goenka) charge. What Sanjiv did brilliantly was that not only did he turn that around, he transformed CESC from a distribution company to also a generation company. 

Secondly, Sanjiv again took another calculated risk, which will earn him more money than CESC will, he bought Firstsource (Solutions Ltd). 

The third, which very few Marwaris do because of a conservative outlook, he flipped Saregama. He shut down all the stores, he moved Saregama from a brick-and-mortar business to a completely digital platform and actually took the lead over all the other players. 

K. Mohanchandran (former GM of Taj Bengal): One of the criticisms of your books, like Get To The Top or this one, is that they have skimmed the surface, they are not books that have dived deep.... 

Suhel: I am not a deep-sea diver. You know I have to make books interesting. Ultimately books have to be read, they haven’t got to be put on shelves, which is why I never write a coffee-table book. Other than your mother who will die holding it, no one else will read it. If I do a deep dive, then a deep dive would not allow me to cover more than three CEOs. 
Suppose you were to do a deep dive on Ratan Tata. Ratan took over the group in 1990 and left in 2014. In that span he completely altered the house of Tata, whether it was the logo, whether it was the royalty payments, whether it was restructuring group policies, then acquisition of the companies and the selling off of companies.... You need about 100 pages on just that. 

So to answer your question specifically, that deep dive will be my tell-all book... which is going to be on my life, after which I will escape to the Fiji Islands because there will be so many people gunning for my ass. Here I will talk about how judges are bribed, how ministers have mistresses, how we are paying for the mistress’s mineral water! That book will sell in millions while I will be sitting on an island sipping Pina Colada, reading t2 on my illegally smuggled iPad. 

Nayantara Palchoudhuri (president, Indo-British Scholars’ Association): What about leadership styles? Did you find a lot of difference? 

Suhel: That is a great question! Leadership articulation is different but styles are more or less similar. I still remember, we were on the 18th floor of Tata Centre and Russi Mody said, ‘Bloody MBAs!’ I said why? He said it was MBWA — management by walking around! I said, ‘But everyone loves you!’ He said, ‘Yes, that is because I listen to all the b*****ds and do exactly what I want.’ So I said, ‘Then it is important for you to show that you are listening to all of them.’ 

So dictatorship of a benevolent nature is a great virtue. You can’t be listening to everyone. The greatest federalist I have ever seen, almost to frustration level, is Anand Mahindra. I have not seen a man who delegates as much as he does. He will not take a decision, even though he is convinced, without getting the CEO of that business on board.... The other guy I have seen operationally is Mukesh Ambani. Mukesh will only have a five-minute meeting, where he will ask you two questions — ‘How big will we be, one or two?’ If you tell him two, he will say, ‘No, for one how much?’ One day I said, ‘What is this number one and two... in India?’ He said, ‘Globally.’ 

Sundeep Bhutoria (of Prabha Khaitan Foundation): Is there any CEO who you wanted for this book but he didn’t want it?
Suhel: Abhi woh din nahin aaye (smiles)! No, no one. In fact, it was very interesting because it was just one email that went out and one or two people wanted a phone call, but many of them we were meeting in any case. It was a quick book. We started in September (2014) and the book was ready by December. And then I was travelling and didn’t have the time and then Jaitley was travelling... so that is why we pushed back the Delhi launch to April 8.

Pictures: B. Halder