 "Nirmalya Kumar")
A day after the Indian Hotels board backed Cyrus Mistry, Nirmalya Kumar, a member of the Group Executive Council (GEC), till it was disbanded recently, penned a blog detailing how he got “fired”.
Last Monday, Kumar was facing a panel of 100+ students and managers who were participating in a Tata-sponsored competition, when he got the news that Cyrus Mistry was “replaced”. The programme was wrapped up early and Kumar skipped the dinner following it.
“Back in my apartment trying to get information from the company with little success. At 9:00 pm, I get a call from a colleague, with whom I had worked very closely and got along famously as we were often on the same side of arguments. He informs me: “It is my unpleasant duty to say your services are no longer required”. No explanation. I query does this mean I do not need to show up tomorrow morning? Receive an affirmative reply. That’s it. It’s all over in a minute,” Kumar’s blog post read.
Kumar, a professor of marketing and director of Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School was appointed to the GEC in 2013.
Kumar, as mentioned in the post, was leading a group-wide initiative that focused on data analytics. A new company was set up and a team of 70+ people were working on this venture.
“I was fired for just being there at my position — working intensely and extensively with Cyrus,” was how Kumar reasoned being “fired”.
Mistry, who was appointed as Ratan Tata’s successor in November 2011, set up the GEC in 2013 with a set of young leaders to provide strategic and operational support to the chairman.
It subsumed the Group Corporate Centre and the Group Executive Office from the earlier regime and became a bone of contention among the old guards within the group.
Apart from Mistry and Kumar, there were four other members in the GEC: Mukund Govind Rajan, Madhu Kannan, N S Rajan and Harish Bhat.
Bhat and Mukund Rajan, however, were old hands in the Tata group. The outsiders, apart from Kumar, were Kannan, who was chief executive of BSE Ltd, and N S Rajan, who was partner and global leader-people and organisation at Ernst and Young.
While Kannan's role was to lead business development and public affairs, N S Rajan was leading the strategic function of human resources.
N S Rajan tweeted on Saturday: “If you insist on a policy of exclusion, you may kindly include me out ;)” among many other tweets, but whether it had any link with the Tata-Mistry spat or the GEC is not known. He also shared Nirmalya Kumar’s blog post of social media.
The GEC was disbanded the same day that Mistry was voted out by the Tata Sons board as chairman.
Tata Sons, however, said on Friday that Mukund Rajan would continue to be responsible for ethics and sustainability and would take additional responsibility of overseeing the operations of overseas representative offices of Tata Sons in the US, Singapore, Dubai and China.
Bhat, in addition to his responsibilities for marketing and customer centricity, would be responsible for managing the Tata brand. In the interim, he would oversee the functions of strategy and business development.
Though Kumar has not taken names, but he has written about the reaction at the “top of the pyramid”.
“With three exceptions, the many CEOs and top executives I worked with closely for three years went silent. I wonder what it is that the more we have, the more we become prisoners at the thought of losing it, rather than having it set us free. The lesson for my team was clear. I told them these people have made it to the top. They know how the system works. When in future anyone mentions me, please don’t say anything positive. Throw me under the bus to gain credibility in the new regime. It’s my parting advice,” the post said.
