Sunil Sethi: Why family fights are a hit

AL FRESCO

There is the medieval ring of a morality play about family fights. That is why the ongoing feud between the Ambani brothers grips us all. It has many of the ingredients that TV soaps aspire to but can't quite achieve, encumbered as they are by bad scripts, creaky sets and silly histrionics.

At least the Ambani quarrel has qualities of epic scale""wealth, power, glamour and politics of control""not to speak of dramatic highlights like temperamental differences between Mukesh and Anil, links with Parliament and Bollywood or, rather as in a Hindi film, the family matriarch stepping in.

E-mail and SMS have ably assisted in bridging the distance between the cast of characters and audiences. Curious onlookers can now nurse the delightful illusion that they are virtual participants.

For nearly a month now the battle for control of the Rs 99,000 crore empire has touched anyone who matters""captains of industry, politicians, the media, thousands of Reliance employees, and lakhs of shareholders.

Everyone is riveted by how the saga will pan out. Will a successful family partition be effected? Or will the battle drag into the courtroom, that perennial old people's home of quarrelling Indians, where the months dissolve into years and, before you know it, decades ... Will future generations of the Ambani family still be slugging it out as company stocks tumble?

What is about Indian-run businesses that, despite efforts by owners to create independent, professional listed institutions answerable to shareholders, they end up in unedifying displays of washing dirty linen ?

Numerous analysts have attempted to answer the question, the most eminent being the economic historian Dwijendra Tripathi, whose penetrating research debunks some popular notions.

Prof Tripathi shows that contrary to common belief that family-control of Indian businesses has declined since the 1950s, the reverse is, in fact, true. Immediately after Independence it was reckoned that the most prominent Indian business empires rested in the hands of just 18 families.

Family splits became more frequent from the 1970s for a variety of reasons, among the more illustrious break-ups being the Birlas, Modis, Sarabhais, Bangurs, Singhanias, Mafatlals, Shrirams, Thapars and Goenkas.

Despite "loosening financial control over their companies and growing splits," says Tripathi, "the control of business families over the management of their concerns remains almost unimpaired."

He quotes a recent survey that reckons that 461 of the most valuable companies in India are under family control. In fact, he contends that the arrival of government-appointed directors or financial institution representatives on company boards has made but little difference in diluting family control.

In recent examples""for such as Swraj Paul's attempted takeover of Escorts""outside directors have often tended to support the family in resisting corporate raids.

As in a conventional three-act play there is a familiar, often repetitive, pattern to how a family business will unfold over three generations: the founder generally rises from impecunious circumstances, through dint of hard work and enterprise, to establish the family fortune.

Generation next, though better educated and more professional, fall out over the spoils; and the third generation, spoilt or effete from too much inbred control, end up as squanderers.

If the spirit of entrepreneurship is the key to establishing a business, then many of today's most talked about infotech or biotech companies are, essentially, family-run businesses. How else would you define Wipro, Biocon, BPL, or Moser Baer?

Being listed on the stock exchange seems to have little to do with the established pattern of patriarchies (or a rare matriarchy, in Kiran Mazumdar Shaw's case, like the anthropologically odd Indian hill tribe) that the founder-owner establishes.

Indeed, a high degree of education or professional competence seems no preventive to family squabbles even in the handover from one generation to the next.

It is therefore no coincidence that when analysts begin to scrutinise or dissect family businesses they go in search of social reasons""on how the Indian caste or joint family system within communities end up affecting business futures.

But more likely, letting go of a family enterprise may have something to do with something as elemental as a Shakespearean fatal flaw: that all-consuming hubris that clouds clear sight and fogs the future.

And as in the course of a dramatic denouement, decay and disintegration may not be far away. The business family fight has a guaranteed run, and is showing at a Cineplex near you ...