What Natarajan Chandrasekaran must do next at Tata
India’s largest business is best run as a holding company, not a national monument
FACED with complexity humans often resort to a heuristic, a rough mental template that gets the job done. That could come in handy at Tata Group, India’s largest business, whose dizzying mix of scale, palace politics and sense of moral purpose defy any categorisation. Tata’s boss, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, known as Chandra, has been in the job for a year. He spent 2017 pepping up morale and extinguishing fires. Now he must squeeze Tata into a new strategic framework that clarifies its structure and purpose.
Is it a 150-year-old national monument, a philanthropic vehicle or a conglomerate? In Schumpeter’s view Tata should instead be positioned as a holding company—like Berkshire Hathaway but minus the personality cult and with Indian characteristics.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Tata’s next chapter"
Business February 10th 2018
- The next generation of wireless technology is ready for take-off
- The release of Samsung’s boss leaves South Koreans exasperated
- Airbus executives get swept away by a corruption investigation
- Mining firms are dismayed by a new Congolese mining law
- Creditors call time on China’s HNA
- How a brothel owner created the world’s biggest industrial park
- What Natarajan Chandrasekaran must do next at Tata
More from Business
What do Joe Biden and the boss of Starbucks have in common?
Both are grappling with gloomy consumers at home and trouble abroad
How not to name a new car
Companies that get it wrong risk both derision and outrage
Meet the Swedish firm trying to shake up heat pumps
It sees a big opportunity in an old technology