The Tata Way
October 20, 2014 Leave a comment
Have you ever wondered what makes a business last many generations? If so, the Tatas can teach you some things.Tata began operating as a trading firm in 1868.Today,the business consists of round a 100 professionally managed companies. Read the essay below by Ratan Tata to get an idea of the attitude that builds multi-generational businesses:
“I believe it’s really important to have companies survive over the longer term. I hate to see major corporations disappearing from the scene because someone has cashed out, because the managers have been unable to escape their comfort zones, or because boards have not been sufficiently nimble to change with the times. When these things happen, decades of effort and innovation go to waste. It’s bad when businesses don’t fight it out, whether the enemy is a competitor’s new product, an industry-transforming innovation (such as transistors), or the impact of something clearly outside a company’s control (like climate change). Read more of this post
While in San Francisco in 1970, Anita Roddick visited a tiny hippie shop on Union Square owned by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, two sisters by marriage.It was a fun place, offering “biodegradable” shampoos and lotions made with avocado, cocoa butter, and cucumber, packaged in small, round plastic bottles with hand-written labels that were refillable at a discount.The store carried freshly made glycerin soaps scented with strawberry and lemon and perfume oil redolent of gardenia, woody sandalwood, and honeysuckle. It was housed in CJ’s, a car repair garage so the two founders cleverly named it The Body Shop.
A young sheep named Stella takes off on a holiday after graduating school, hiking on the Inca trail in Peru, where she meets a handsome alpaca named Alejandro.The two woolly animals have a whirlwind romance, thereby setting the stage for How Stella Saved the Farm, the new novella from Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. But this is no Mills & Boon romance.It is a parable about managing innovation in organisations.As you read it you will recognize familiar people and situations from your life.
” The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.” – J Paul Getty
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