VC & MD, Mr.

Anand Mahindra’s speech

Occasion – Receiving Business India’s Businessman of the Year Award 2007
Date – 19 January 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good evening.

I think there has always been some kind of karmic connection between Business India and me.
Ashok, you were the first publisher to take an interest in me, even if you were just looking to
write about an interesting failure. Pheroza, as you know, your late father was one of my best-
loved mentors. You recently told me that 20 years ago, he was cheering for me to win this award.
When you talk to him in your prayers, tell him he was prematurely optimistic, and I was a bit
slow, but I did get there eventually! And Nazneen, you were the journalist with whom I did that
very first interview ever.

The fact that this honour is accompanied by the esteem and regard of old friends makes it very
special indeed. Ashok, Pheroza, Nazneen, thank you very much.

I also want to take a moment to express my gratitude to Baba Kalyan, Businessman of the Year,
2006, and Chairman of the Jury this year. As you all probably know by now, Baba is not here due
to a helicopter accident yesterday from which he had a providential escape. As the saying goes,
it’s hard to keep a good man down, and since I believe he suffered only a few bruises, I’m sure
Baba will be up and about and back to business in no time.

Now the fact that Nazneen did my very first interview, and also did my Businessman of the Year
cover story brought to mind the words of poet T.S.Eliot:

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”

Wonderful words that describe the circle of life. And I thought I would take advantage of this
award; of this circularity in my own life to reflect on the exploration that has brought me to this
point of arrival, and try to KNOW the place for the first time.

Many people use the metaphor of a journey to describe their personal and professional story. I
prefer to think of my life as a confluence, an incredibly lucky Sangam Triveni, where three
disparate streams came together in just the right way, and at just the right time, to enable me to
make a small contribution. As you know, the Sangam Triveni is the confluence of three great
rivers – the Ganga, the Yamuna and the elusive and underground Saraswati.. In my personal
Triveni, the Ganga has been the story of India herself, the broad, flowing and unstoppable force
that India has become over the last 15 years. The Yamuna, for me, has been the Mahindra group,
which provides me with the canvas on which to try out my skills. And as for the subterranean
Saraswati in my life – well, I’ll come to that a little later.

Somewhere in the early Nineties, India’s economic Ganga changed its course, and I was lucky
enough to join M&M at that point in time, just when this course correction had started. Here we
were, staggering groggily out of the shambles of a socialist economy, entirely unsure of what the
future held or whether we were prepared to cope with it.

But in hindsight, it’s not the obstacles I remember, but the slow and hard-fought battle for self
belief. And this came about by CHALLENGING ourselves and the conventions that surrounded
us.

The old static India will always be associated in my mind with an experience I had when I was a
student in America, attending a philosophy seminar. There were 12 of us students, I was the only
Indian. But it was taught jointly by the the famous philosopher, Robert Nozick and an elderly and
venerable Bengali professor whom I shall leave nameless. Nozick was in the habit of encouraging
free form dialogue and questioning. At one point, after the Indian professor had expounded on a
topic, an American student questioned his premise. The professor shifted uncomfortably and gave
a perfunctory and unsatisfactory answer. The student, quite understandably, persisted and wanted
to debate the issue. All of a sudden, taking us by surprise, the Indian professor erupted with
anger and screamed at the American student: “This is no way to treat a teacher. I have never
experienced such rude behaviour. You have no RIGHT to question me.”

There was a stunned silence all around. It was embarrassing. The idea of being QUESTIONED,
being CHALLENGED, was totally foreign to the Indian professor. I remember wondering how
and when had we become so fossilized. After all, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the principles of
mathematics were certainly not the products of fossilized minds – and to my young eyes,
everything about India in the seventies and eighties seemed to be frozen in time and intolerant of
questioning.

That was thirty years ago. Last week, ladies and gentlemen, an Indian company questioned all
automotive design conventions and launched a car that everyone said couldn’t be made!
So the Ganga has obviously flowed a long long way. And I feel very privileged that India’s need
for course correction coincided so well with my own natural inclination to question and make
change.

The next stream in my personal confluence, my Yamuna, is the Mahindra Group. In the
symbolism of the Triveni the Yamuna represents the path of karma or action. And ‘action’ is
certainly a good word to associate with our group.

I am not going to inflict the excruciating details of our transformation on you. Instead, I want to
focus, on what I believe always were, and still are, Mahindra’s SECRET weapons. And all these
have to do with the culture of the firm. Not about Business Process Reengineering, but about
hearts and minds.

What I found at the M&M I joined was an incredible ‘Can do’ spirit. A feeling that when the
going gets tough, Mahindra gets going. I think that this spirit owes a great deal to the prevailing
sentiment and folklore in the company, that the history of Mahindra is a microcosm of the history
of India. That we share the same horoscope. After all, our company was born in 1945, infused
with the ideals and aspirations of an imminently independent India. And our path closely tracked
India’s path, from initial entrepreneurship, through paralysis imposed by socialism to a
painstaking reinvention motivated by economic reform.

At every step of this journey, we knew that if we could survive and win, then India certainly
would, and conversely, we delighted in every victory for the country, because we knew that if
India won, we too would win. This can-do culture, imbued with a sense of greater purpose,
continues to help make miracles.

That culture is reinforced in great measure by the accompanying culture of professionalism and
empowerment.
I would like to illustrate that attribute by just one potent story.

It’s a story told to me by Bharat Doshi, group CFO, who is here tonight. It’s a story all my
colleagues at Mahindra know well, because I use it so often.
Bharat tells me that some years ago, he was approached with a highly lucrative job offer—a
salary several times what he was then getting. They pursued him intensively, and finally when he
kept refusing they said, we suppose you won’t leave because you’re close to the top management,
obviously referring to the family. Bharat said he tersely replied: “I AM the top management.”
This, I believe, is my prime task as a CEO. To make EVERYONE in the company feel and
believe that they ARE the management.

The third aspect of our culture, which we have assiduously built up in the last two decades can be
encapsulated in just 4 words – departing from the format. We DEPARTED-FROM-THE-
FORMAT when we made the Scorpio. A vehicle that would take a half billion to a billion dollars
to develop in the west was not supposed to be developed in a 120 million dollars.

When we were stuck with 1000 acres of land outside Chennai for an Industrial park which never
took off, we again departed from the format, reinvented the project and used the land to build
India’s first private sector special economic zone.

We tried our hand at budget hotels and enjoyed modest success, but discovered that it was
fractional ownership of resorts that would make the pleasure of a holiday affordable to a much
wider group of Indians, and today, it’s our fastest growing business.

And honestly, every one of our seven business sectors can relate a similar story.

In fact I think it’s wonderfully appropriate that Business India has today, departed from their
conventional event format, and not requested a minister to preside over the ceremony but
managed to get Arun Sarin, a role model from the Indian managerial diaspora to accept the role.
Thank you Arun for being here. I’m honoured to be on this platform with you.

But there is a converse mantra to departing from the format an that is--Do NOT depart from your
values. Cynics believe that values are a frill, an add-on, a nice-to-have. My experience has been,
over and over again, that core values are the bedrock on which you build a sustainable business.
At Mahindra, we have a built in core values compass in the person of my uncle Keshub
Mahindra. There are many things about Mahindra that make me proud, but Uncle Keshub, it is
your unflinching adherence to core values that makes me PROUDEST of all.

And now for the third stream of the confluence – the Saraswati. The Saraswati runs deep and
invisible and symbolizes knowledge and enlightenment. There are many people in my life who
have been the strong and deep flowing current that has propelled me to whatever success I have
achieved. My parents who grounded me with strong values and then gave me the freedom to fly,
who never blinked an eye when I departed from the format to study film instead of engineering,
and who encouraged me to explore all paths and never to fear failure.
My wife, Anuradha, who embarrassed me when we were both students in Boston, by getting
better grades in her management course than I received. Anu, I still haven’t forgiven you for
that! But thank you for having been an unconditional supporter, a trenchant critic and an
insightful advisor all rolled into one. More important, you have taught me that the most important
skill we must possess is of nurturing—and applying that not just to our children but our
colleagues at work as well.

My Uncle Keshub who has taught me that principles and pragmatism CAN go together. You keep
threatening to retire, but let me tell you that no amount of awards will fool me into believing that
I could have gotten here without the benefit of your wisdom and guidance.

All my colleagues-here today in strength--who have given far more than I had any right to ask of
them, to bring the Mahindra Group to where it is today.
I was looking for a way to express my thanks in a way that would not be perfunctory or sound
like a cliché. And I remembered this excellent phrase one of our American managers in our U.S
tractor business once told me. He said: “When you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence, you sure
as hell know he didn’t get there by HIMSELF! This turtle considers himself amazingly lucky to
have been in the right place at the right time, with the right people. I owe a deep debt of gratitude
to my fellow travelers at Mahindra who are here in strength tonight.

And finally I’d like to share some thoughts on where we’re headed from here. If Mahindra
follows India, then obviously I need to have an idea of where India is headed. At a recent
conference in Delhi, I claimed that our country today has three great strengths that make it a ‘3-
D’ economy. Firstly her DEMOCRACY, raucous chaotic but effective, which makes her both a
desirable ally and a good investment destination. Secondly, her DEMOGRAPHY, her youthful
population, which makes her desirable both as a supplier and as a potential consumer market.
And lastly her DURABILITY. In the volatile South Asian region India is a beacon of stability
and a model for change without chaos.

Let me add some more letters into this alphabet soup. I would like to claim today, that Indian
entrepreneurs today enjoy 3-C’s , which when placed in the context of the three D’s that I just
cited, will make Indian companies extraordinarily well placed to become global players.

Firstly Capital, to which we finally have access. The three D’s I spoke of earlier, when combined
with reforms, have made us a magnet for global liquidity, and we suffer no shortage of the fuel
needed to grow our companies, both domestically and internationally.

Secondly, Competence, in the form of a whole new generation of highly educated, adaptive and
experienced managers. People like Arun and Indra Nooyi have proven that there are no glass
ceilings in the world that can contain them. There are many more like them right here in India,
who are ready and willing to steer Indian corporations successfully onto the world stage.

And thirdly, Critical mass. With consistent economic growth, the Indian market is maturing into
one of the largest and most robust in the world, and this provides us with the opportunity to build
world scale businesses in our OWN backyard, which then serve as a springboard to global
markets.

As a result, there is the same sense of excitement of infinite possibility that existed when we first
got independence, and as we struggle, we are indeed beginning to know ourselves and our
potential for the first time, and for once, we suffer no lack of self belief.
So, in closing, in order to support the metaphor of circularity, I’d like to quote T.S.Eliot again
from a poem that he wrote about a hesitant individual who thought:

“There will be time to wonder,

Do I dare, Do I dare?
Time to turn back and descend the stair…
Do I dare
Disturb the Universe?”

For us in India, there is no such diffidence, and there will be no turning back.
India and Indian companies, including Mahindra, will continue ascending the staircase and
continue aspiring----to Disturb the Universe.