Word: ratan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wouldn't expect the head of Tata group, India's largest conglomerate, to say the rich are boring. But Ratan Tata comes close. Acting rich doesn't interest him. "I've never had the desire to own a yacht, to flaunt," he says. Nor does the Prada-wearing class excite him as a marketing opportunity. China and India, with their growing ranks of tycoons, should attract multinational[an error occurred while processing this directive] businesses, not because of the spare million in a few fat wallets, he argues, but because of the spare change in a billion slim ones. "Everyone...
...range from a host of Tata educational, health and scientific institutes that dot India to the Ganges River's giant mahseer fish, saved from extinction by a Tata-funded breeding program. The group's corporate piety extends to the boss's pay. Though the business house carries his name, Ratan Tata merely draws a salary from Tata Sons. And while hardly poor, he takes personal modesty seriously. Tall, guarded and retaining the outsider's accent he picked up in an earlier life as a trainee architect in the U.S., he is famously private. He lives with his two German shepherds...
...after independence in 1947, the group came to symbolize all that was bad about Indian business. It lost its airline and insurance arm to nationalization. To avoid giving up more to the Congress Party socialists who ruled India for half a century, J.R.D. Tata, a distant cousin of Ratan Tata, emphasized individual companies over the group, keeping the conglomerate's stakes small and demanding little coordination. Meanwhile, shielded from competition by the restrictive bureaucracy of the "license Raj," Tata's companies became bloated and calcified. "We weren't driving ourselves hard enough in a protected environment," says Ratan Tata...
...Ratan took over from J.R.D. in 1991. India was beginning economic reforms, and, with state-sponsored monopolies on the way out, the new chairman saw the need to overhaul the firm's culture. He raised the conglomerate's stake in all its companies to a minimum 26%. And he ordered each to meet performance targets to be first or second in its industry, and to meet quantified goals for leadership and innovation or be sold. Most shaped up. Tata Steel, for example, shed half its 78,000 workers between 1994 and 2005 using retirement and voluntary redundancies to lower costs...
...group's corporate piety extends to the boss' pay. Though the business house carries his name, Ratan Tata merely draws a salary from Tata Sons. And while hardly poor, he takes personal modesty seriously. Tall, guarded and retaining the outsider's accent he picked up in an earlier life as a trainee architect in the U.S., he is famously private. He lives with his two German shepherds, Tito and Tango, in the same second-floor apartment in Bombay that he has kept for 20 years. He is one floor below his stepmother, and neighbors say they have never known...