The Greatest Business Leader I Ever Met

Last week, Ratan Tata passed away at the age of 86. Most American readers will be forgiven for not recognizing his name. Ratan was the CEO of the Tata Group, India’s largest business conglomerate. Comprised of 26 publicly listed companies, the Tatas generate $165 billion in revenue and have a collective market cap of nearly $400 billion. They produce everything from cars to steel to tea and telecom services.

Ratan was a client and friend of mine. Over the last 20 years, I’ve had the chance to spend time with some of the world’s most impressive chief executives. Ratan Tata is far and away the greatest leader I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. He grew his family’s business empire into a global powerhouse while staying deeply humble, future-focused, and devoted to a purpose that was greater than himself.

A Greater Purpose

When Ratan took the helm in 1991, Tata was already a household name in India. The Tatas are members of the Zoroastrian religious minority that had emigrated to India from Iran centuries before and the company had been founded by Jamshetji Tata in 1868 as a trading house. Over the next hundred years, the Tatas built power plants, erected steel mills, started a locomotive factory, and even launched the Taj Hotel in Bombay. They started India’s first airline, which would go on to become Air India.

Throughout that time, the Tatas developed a reputation for doing business in a way that was unlike most Indian companies. They were focused on the long term when others chased get-rich-quick schemes. They were stubbornly honest in a market rife with graft and corruption. And they fought to uplift the lives of workers in a society where exploitation is endorsed by a caste system.

Throughout that time, the Tatas remained focused on creating wealth, not just making money. For them, wealth signified the widespread prosperity and improved living standards that could lift up a country strangled under British colonial rule.

A Relentless Commitment

Ratan’s tenure at the Tata Group wasn’t without its failures. But his vision and persistence carried him through. At the time he took over the company, it was producing cars in a joint venture with Mercedes. Ratan knew that India would only become a global player if they designed and built a car of their own. Moreover, they needed to respond to a flood of American and Japanese cars that were entering the Indian market. In 1998, Ratan himself drove the first Tata Indica off the assembly line. It was a bust. The Indica suffered from major quality issues and sales were far below expectations. Facing massive losses, Ratan decided to sell his car business to Ford. He flew to Detroit to close the deal with Bill Ford, who like Ratan was both the company’s chairman and its family scion.

As he once told me, the meeting was humiliating. Ford asked Ratan why he had tried to start a car company when he didn’t know the first thing about manufacturing passenger vehicles. As Ford saw it, they were doing the Tatas a favor by taking the car business off their hands. After the meeting, Ratan decided to pull out of the deal. Instead, he went back to India and got to work on an improved version of the Indica. And gradually, Tata Motors started to get traction. Version two of the Indica went on to become the fastest selling car in Indian history. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Ford found itself on the verge of bankruptcy. Ratan offered to buy Ford’s Jaguar and Land Rover business units in an all-cash deal worth $2.3 billion. Bill Ford personally thanked Ratan, saying, “You’re doing us a big favor.”

In 2006, Ratan announced his intent to develop a car that cost 100,000 rupees, then equivalent to about $2,500. He wanted to make the roads safer for Indian families, many of whom could not afford a car and instead piled onto scooters and motorcycles. Industry experts laughed at the idea, saying it couldn’t be done. Over the next several years, Tata’s engineers told him the same thing. But Ratan kept pushing. Looking back on it later, he shared with me how dark those days had been for him. It looked like he wasn’t going to succeed. His decision to announce the car ahead of time would make this a very public failure. Ratan told me how even friends of his stopped returning his calls. It was therefore incredibly gratifying when he launched the Tata Nano in 2008. When I asked him what made him persevere through those years, his answer was succinct. “I said we’d do this for Indian families. And a promise is a promise.”

A Hunger to Learn

The thing that most strikes me about Ratan Tata was his voracious curiosity and hunger to learn. I remember one of our first meetings in California, where I was trying to assess the strategic context of an initiative we would work on together. I asked him as many questions as I could. After two hours, I called a time-out. “You know, Ratan,” I said, “I have worked with many CEOs. But I have never worked with a CEO who said ‘I don’t know’ as many times as you do. Most CEOs have an answer for everything! You’ve said ‘I don’t know’ five times in the last two hours. Why is that?” He smiled calmly and said, “Because I don’t know, Dev. And if I say I don’t know, then maybe someone else can tell me the answer. Or we’ll figure it out together…”

Tata was a brilliant capitalist who multiplied the Group’s profits 50-fold during his tenure, but he also made giving back to society a core part of its business model. The parent company of the Tata Group is controlled by a charitable trust that disburses vast amounts to improve healthcare, education, rural development, and to support underfunded entrepreneurs. We spent years together on the goal of finding new ways to eliminate poverty in the developing world.

A genuine business titan has passed. But the lessons he taught us—the lessons he taught me—will live on. Skeptics will say that Tata’s style of leadership may have worked in the Indian context but it isn’t transferable to the cutthroat boardrooms of global companies where CEOs need to ruthlessly focus on immediate results and the bottom line. They’re wrong. We need Ratan Tatas at the helm of companies today more than ever to create true wealth, not just make money. As Zoroastrians say, may his soul reach the highest heaven.

Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates.