Ratan Tata shares ten principles for business success, emphasizing direct communication with employees, trust as the foundation of sustainable business, and ethical values in every transaction. He cites the Indica, an all-Indian car that captured 20% market share, as proof that Indian manufacturing could compete globally. Success, he argues, should be measured by positive impact, not personal wealth.
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He's an Indian businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He was the chairman of the Tata Group, a Mumbai-based company, from 1991 to 2012. The current revenues of the Tata companies taken together are over $100 billion annually. He's Ratan Tata, and here are his top 10 rules for success.
Far more is gained by walking on the shop floor and talking to the people and trying to communicate. One of my weaknesses has been, I think, I've never communicated enough or adequately with our people. Partly because I'm a shy person, and secondly, because I didn't realize the importance of communication. But I think communication with the employees is an exceedingly important function that any company chairman has to, has to do and be visible in that sense. The great successes, the large companies of this world, and there are many and many successful companies, or are they the companies that took chances, where individuals started in garages, where ideas were born, Where did Microsoft, where did Apple, where did Amazon, where did Google, where did Facebook come from? They came from ideas that people felt something could be done and that they could make a difference. I probably would not have returned to India except my grandmother fell ill. So I came back because she was ill. Had I stayed in the United States, my life probably would have been very different. I was very happy there and very comfortable. I had a very satisfying job. And when I came back here, the first— I mentioned the first 8 years were frustration. My masters thought that the best way to teach me how to operate— I don't think anyone at that time had thought that I would be Mr. JRD Tata's successor. So I was on the shop floor shoveling limestone, working the furnaces, and I kept asking myself, "Why am I doing this?" And so perhaps looking back, the most significant incident in my life was just my obstinacy to remain here rather than to go back.
My view is that trust is an underlying foundation for the way people look at you, people look at your business, people look at the way you operate your business. Trust is the basis on which you live by your contractual obligations, and I think trust is more important than anything else. Your psychological bond with your customer and your, your worker and your stakeholders in general. I think without that, you run the risk of, of being a superficial business entrepreneur. Based on criteria which are not, in fact, truly fundamental to the manner in which you do business. Because globally, Indians, whether government or businessmen, don't quite have the reputation of being the most ethical, fairly or unfairly. I don't know whether one can generalize, but I would just say that if you don't have trust in your partner, in your worker, in your management, and vice versa, if there's no trust in the person at the top, either for what he or she stands for or what their value system is, then you have a business that supports that level of trust or lack of trust, and that goes all the way to the consumer. He doesn't trust you for what you provide him, he doesn't believe in your claims, and you have in fact a poorer form of business. And yet ethics and values becomes a very major part of it.
If you think you cannot make a difference, I'd say you very well can make a difference if you so desire.
That you are humble as you look forward. If you speak or sit next to a Nobel laureate, he never tells you that he won a Nobel Prize.
Other people tell you. So Let humility be your best. I don't know, one hero I've always had who no longer lives has been John Kennedy. Oh yes.
Of course, I was very much in the US at that time.
That person stands out still as very much my hero at that time and continues to get me emotionally nostalgic about the days I— that I was there.
I mentioned when you took over that many external observers there thought you had large shoes to fill in taking over from your uncle. Now with another transition of power, Cyrus Palonji Mistry has his own large shoes to fill, that of yourself. I wonder what advice you would give Cyrus as he takes on his task as chairman.
I've told Cyrus that he needs to be his own person, that finally it was something I did. I realized the shoes I had to fill were far too big for me to mimic the person I was following. And I just decided that just be myself and do what I thought was right would be the way to go. I've told Cyrus the same thing. I think he, he should feel that he is being his own person and let his personality and his conscience, if you might, drive him.
And you shouldn't merely consider yourself successful based on the prosperity you gain for yourself, but you should go home at night feeling satisfied if you have made a difference.
That difference is something each one of us can make.
We'll have failures and we've had frustrations, but it's a continued commitment that we have to the world around us.
My own personal feeling is that it is not a threat, provided, provided It is looked at as a driver for competition and a driver for innovation on the part of an Indian company. I'll take the automobile industry as an example. Despite the fact that we produce about 2 million cars a year, there are only two manufacturers, true manufacturers of Indian cars. That's Mahindra and Tata. Every other international manufacturer is here in one form or another. Yes, there are disadvantages because scale, etc., is far bigger in the foreign manufacturers, but if you look before that, the 50 years of automobiles, we had 2 manufacturers who never increased their production for more than 50,000 cars. Who never changed their model, who never innovated, who never gave the market anything other than what they produced, and the market just bought what they— you waited 7 years for a car, 10 years for a car. So, if you look at the two examples, has India benefited? I would say yes. Do the two Indian manufacturers gain anything from this open market? Yes, because we are driven to compete with those people. The day we look at that they are meant to drive us out, I think we as a nation would lose out. All of you are being trained to be innovative and hopefully outdo the MNCs when they come here. It's our job as employers to encourage you to do that, to encourage you to break new ground, to think out of the box. And it's for you to do it and for us to support it. So I don't think we should look at MNCs as a threat. I think we should look at them as a motivator to be more competitive and beat them.
The greatest pleasure I've had is trying to do something that everybody says could not be done. I'll just share perhaps, perhaps a moment in time which I will always cherish. I decided that India could produce its own car. Everybody, my friends overseas in the automobile business, said that this couldn't be done. We had to go through collaboration to get know-how, get technology. But we undertook to produce this car. You saw images of it in the video. It was called the Indica, and we produced it in India, totally of Indian content. As we got close to putting it in the market, my friends in India somewhat distanced themselves from me. Otherwise known as distancing yourself from failure. And when the car came out, I suddenly felt that I didn't have a friend in the world and that all the warnings that people had given me were probably going to come true. But the car did come out. It did earn a 20% market share, and we showed that we could do something. Throughout, throughout the time I've been involved in business, there hasn't been anything that has equaled the excitement, the reward, and the exhilaration that the car industry has provided and can provide.
Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because HiLow asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you. Leave it in the comments, I will join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.
