Chennai January 14, 2014: In London for a training programme, R. Gopalakrishnan, the then Vice-Chairman of Hindustan Unilever Ltd, encountered a cultural challenge. An American colleague, watching Gopalakrishnan ignore the fork and use his hands to eat, said it was an appalling custom. Unfazed, he replied: “I’m not sure into how many mouths this fork has entered.”
Now Director, Tata Sons Ltd, Gopalakrishnan, has faced many such questions and is sure that cultural chronicling — be it that of a person, family, or a company — will help forthcoming generations know how their predecessors lived their lives. He calls it Sanskar, the act of recording history in oral and written media.
At a function organised by Madras Management Association and Coaching Foundation India Ltd where Gopalakrishnan delivered the second Raghu Pillai Annual Memorial Oration in memory of the retail pioneer, who died in April 2011, he said that for a company knowing what its founder stood for is paramount. William Hesketh Lever, the founder of Unilever, at the age of 26 thought of the idea of wrapping a bar of soap with paper so it stays fresh. This led to the Sunlight Soap, the birth of a company that went on to become a prosperous multi-national. Lever also bought 56 acres of land to build homes for his employees. Gopalakrishnan said the entrepreneur was remembered as a “man whose ruling passion in life was not money or power but the desire to increase the well-being of people.”
Similarly, Jamsetji Tata, Founder of Tata Group, had said: “What Tata earns should go back to the people.”
But can ethics hold ground in an age of profit maximisation? Gopalakrishnan replies in positive: “I do work a lot to make one more buck for my company, but when I rest at night it is with the knowledge that my employer distributes a lot of its profits to the community that bought its products.”
He said two-thirds of Tata Sons is held by charitable institutions. Other ways of building a long-lasting company are to be conservative with finance, learning to adapt to change, and consistently pursuing an ethical goal. Gopalakrishnan unveiled his fourth book A comma in a sentence. The book is a record of the last 200 years of his family, its living conditions, and “how his grandfather coped with his problems.”-Business Line
