Russi, the irrepressible

Partha Mukherjee and
Jyoti Sabharwal
Stellar
Pp: 251
Price: Rs 495

You shouldn’t expect an authorised biography to provide a no-holds-barred account of its subject and this one on Russi Mody, former honcho of Tata Steel, is no exception. Partha Mukherjee and Jyoti Sabharwal have relied more on their subject than anybody else for almost everything that fills up the 251 pages that make up this book—quotes, anecdotes, description of events, etc. That’s not a problem really, considering that the nonagenarian Mody has led a life that has always been replete with colour and controversy. Born into a privileged Parsi family and educated at Harrow and Oxford, Mody had an elitist upbringing and a lifestyle that was always selfindulgent and hedonistic. His iconic and highly successful career—mainly at Tata Steel, where he spent 53 years—was marked by several achievements as well as generous dollops of controversy. In short, his was a corporate inning that was anything but drab or predictable.

Even a mere narration of how Mody led his active corporate life, peppered with his candour and one-liners, can make for an absorbing read, at least in theory. Yet, the authors of this poorly written and indifferently edited tome have managed to botch things up. If the one-sidedness of their account doesn’t irk you, the abysmal prose will. Bad grammar, typographical errors and lazy research make reading it an unwelcome chore.

In 1939, after graduating from Christ Church College at Oxford University, Mody, a self-proclaimed average student and an “extraordinarily ordinary man” joined Tata Iron and Steel Company (as Tata Steel was known then) and rose to become its Chairman and Managing Director. During his tenure, the company grew impressively and Mody, like several other Tata group chief executives, became very powerful and ran his business like an empire. In the early 1990s, when Ratan Tata was anointed group patriarch JRD Tata’s successor, things came to a head. After a public fracas that was uncharacteristic for the Tata group, Mody was sacked in 1993. His exit was also marked by an equally public wrangling for a severance package that many believed was lavish. Incidentally, the book also provides Mody an opportunity to publicly mend his relations with Ratan Tata and he is quoted as saying that “after many years of chilly relationship, I have become friends with Ratan again”.

All of this—the Mody-Tata face-off, a subsequent ill-fated stint as chairman of Air India and Indian Airlines and more—is covered by the authors but with a clumsiness that makes reading The Man Who Also Made Steel tedious and tiring. Reading a book on Russi Mody, whose Falstaffian joie de vivre became a part of India’s corporate folklore, could have been made so much more pleasurable. Was it the lack of time and a looming deadline that deterred the authors from researching their subject a little more? Or was it the paucity of resources? One wonders.

What sort of an experience a buyer of goods or services gets in the process often determines whether or not she will return to the marketer as a customer. It’s a fact marketers have known for decades. So, what does Human Sigma, entitled so to allude to the powerful quality tool of Six Sigma, tell them that they already don’t know? Put simply, it is that the employee side is as important as the customer side in the employee-customer equation, and that most organisations don’t have a structure that deals with both sides of this equation as one. The authors, both consultants at Gallup, argue that the traditional rational-functional model of decision making isn’t suited to deal with the complexities of employeecustomer interaction. Instead of regimenting employee behaviour, manage by outcomes, they suggest.

They also urge companies to liberate (their employees) and not legislate. “The most dramatic increases in productivity occur when companies allow workgroups to choose their own initiatives and focus on them,” they write. The authors even argue that it’s possible to quantify the outcome of the employee-customer interaction.

Marketing guru Philip Kotler calls Human Sigma a powerful new tool “in creating high-value engagements with your customers”. You wouldn’t want to take his assessment lightly.