 "<b>Lunch with BS:</b> Pawan Goenka")
Goenka, who is Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M)'s first executive director-appointee since 1992, says he doesn't understand the term work-life balance. "If I enjoy what I do, everything balances out. I take work - and not tension - home on Sundays," he says. In any case, he believes there are no shortcuts to success. "When Goddess Lakshmi comes to your door, you should be there to open the door for her. Otherwise, she will go away," he says.
His steady rise up the M&M ladder over the past 20 years makes it evident that Goenka, 59, has walked the talk - a reason Goddess Lakshmi seems to have made his home in Juhu her permanent residence. He, however, hasn't compromised on two things: taking a week's holiday every year with his wife, a cancer patient counsellor, and watching Bollywood blockbusters, if not every Sunday, whenever it's possible.
We are at the private dining room overlooking a manicured garden on the seventh floor of Mahindra House in Mumbai's Lower Parel - a venue Goenka chose simply because he doesn't have the time to follow the standard "Lunch with BS" format of choosing a restaurant for us to host him. In any case, he jokes, this is as good as going out since even the elevator works only till the sixth floor.
The food is well laid out on the rather huge table and though he is a strict vegetarian, there is chicken tikka and Thai chicken curry for us. As we nibble on the starters, Goenka says an important leadership lesson he has learnt is that one should know how to compartmentalise their various tasks for the day. That's the reason he can seamlessly divide his time between apparently unrelated businesses such as bananas (M&M is into branded fruit business) and trucks. "When I am having lunch with you, my entire focus is on you. But I will forget all of that as soon as I move to the next meeting," Goenka says. We are a little disconcerted, but our host quickly puts us at ease with another example: when he is thinking auto, then the problem with tractors does not divert his thoughts (Goenka is also M&M's president for the automotive & farm equipment sectors.)
Though he is no longer responsible for the day-to-day operations of any of the six business groups ("my main job is to ensure that I don't become a bottleneck for any of the business heads reporting in to me"), the variety and spread of M&M's operations and locations requires meticulous planning, so much so that his review meeting calendar for the entire FY15 has already been frozen and almost every minute of these meetings is planned well in advance. We now understand why he is so fond of the compartmentalisation theory.
The food tastes more like home-made delicacies but Goenka is a frugal eater. His principle of making the best use of available resources is evident from the fact that after a mechanical engineering degree from IIT Kanpur, he went for his masters at Cornell, where he worked on a thesis on lubrication in artificial hip joints. The choice was forced since that's where the research assistantship jobs were and he didn't want to let go of the money. Goenka, however, used that knowledge to good effect in his job at GM since the principles of lubrication, he says, are the same in hip joints or bearings in automotive applications. During his 14-year-stint at GM, he developed a software package called FLARE, which earned him huge recognition.
In 1993, he went by gut feel to join M&M, about which he knew nothing at the time, and didn't negotiate on anything except his car - the company was offering an Ambassador but he wanted a Contessa and finally settled for an NE 118. Though he is glad his instincts paid off, Goenka admits it was a huge risk since no one would have imagined then that the Indian auto industry would go through such a spectacular makeover. But the story Anand Mahindra (now M&M chairman) sold him made it worth taking that risk. Mahindra told him M&M had three options: either get out of the auto business and focus on tractors and other things, become a licensee of a big multinational, or develop its own auto capability. But he was inclined to choose the last one and asked whether Goenka would be interested in that kind of a job.
The vision of building an independent automobile capability by developing in-house R&D capabilities was something he didn't want to pass up. "Bolero or Scorpio, for example, were the most exciting projects with which any automotive engineer could think of being involved. Our team was involved in everything, from market research to design to setting up the plant," says Goenka. One of his earliest contributions was creating an integrated product-development organisation, and structured methodologies, introducing discipline to product development in India.
Goenka is generous in giving credit where it's due - "Anand has been an enabler in whatever role I have played so far and has given me the breathing space to work independently". For example, he says the chairman wouldn't mind even if he doesn't call him even for an entire month.
One of his pet theories is that the R&D lab is the most important thing for an auto company and he stands by it. No matter what you do afterwards, you can't fix a poorly-engineered product. You can, of course, destroy a well-engineered product by doing other things wrong down the stream, he says. He also dismisses concerns about M&M's sliding market share in the utility vehicles (UV) segment, because nobody can sustain a 55 to 60 per cent share forever since new competitors have come in. "We will never get back to 55-60 per cent market share but our target would be to keep it always above 40 per cent. That's excellent - don't forget that the UV segment grew at about 55 per cent in 2012-13. So while our market share went down during the year, our volumes went up by 35 per cent," he says.
But isn't M&M spreading itself too thin by trying to straddle the entire spectrum from two-wheelers to commercial vehicles to tractors to other unrelated businesses? Goenka dismisses such concerns saying while each business requires different strategies since the target customers and the competitive landscape are different, what lies underneath is the common M&M fabric. While each business requires different positioning and go-to-market strategies, at the back-end it is a different story. "Our focus is to leverage synergies across multiple fronts - sourcing, logistics, IT infrastructure and talent management. Thanks to synergies, we have now become a formidable force when it comes to procurement, manufacturing, supply chain and brand spends," he adds.
As the steward serves rasmalai, Goenka recounts what is clearly his favourite story. Long ago, he had told his mother to watch a TV interview of his. During the commercial break, she casually switched to another channel only to see another of her four sons - a reputed doctor based in Kolkata - giving an interview. "Till her last day, my mother would narrate the story to everyone she met. The pride in her eyes is a memory I treasure," Goenka says. For once, he has forgotten the compartmentalisation theory.