Kumar Mangalam Birla: The brand custodian

Aparna Piramal Raje
Mint
23 March 2015

The group chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, Kumar Mangalam Birla’s workplace is a combination of heritage and modernity

A long arched corridor welcomes me to the chairman’s floor at the corporate headquarters of one of India’s largest conglomerates, in Mumbai’s Worli district. These are the offices of the Aditya Birla Group of companies, which has interests in commodities, telecom, retail and financial services, among other industries.

Kumar Mangalam Birla, the 47-year-old chairman, and his team of executive assistants share the floor with his mother, Rajashree Birla, who serves on the board of major group companies and heads the group’s corporate social responsibility efforts.

At home
Although Birla prefers to conduct meetings in a conference room across the corridor, he takes us into his room. I hope to see a personalized workspace with interesting objects, and Birla’s space doesn’t disappoint.

It is extensive, with three distinct work settings — a desk, sofas and armchairs, and a round meeting table (which looks as though it could easily double up as a dining table).

It is aesthetically and geographically diverse, with a mix of European furniture, lights and accessories, Chinese artefacts and Indian modern art, including a painting by M.F. Husain and idols of Hindu gods.

And it combines heritage and modernity. An old-fashioned leather trunk, stained-glass lighting fixtures and a globe are juxtaposed with contemporary furniture and furnishings. There are also several photographs of Birla’s family, including those of his great-grandfather, his grandparents, his parents, wife Neerja and three children, as well as many photographs with colleagues.

The luxurious space reflects Birla’s most visible attributes: his enduring ranking as one of India’s wealthiest and most successful businesspeople, and his century-old Marwari business legacy.

Yet my lasting impression is not of the suite’s grandeur but of its stillness, its calm and collected atmosphere. Perhaps it is the rows of green planters arranged on an adjoining terrace, or the afternoon light filtering in through the curtains, or Birla’s no-rush approach, but the room seems unusually meditative.

Sometimes, the most dynamic people are fortified with a layer of Zen-like calm. Birla appears to be one of them. “I hope that my spaces would relax those who come in here. I want them to look much more like an apartment, as opposed to officious-looking spaces,” he says. Birla adds, “It’s nice to be informal, eclectic, but at the same time it’s a proper work environment. There’s nothing casual about it, it’s not a laid-back kind of space because that’s not the kind of person I am.”

Managing intangibles
The interplay of Birla’s tangible workspace and its intangible work environment is promising. I am curious to understand whether this interplay can serve as a metaphor for his working style, and shed some light on the practical aspects of building intangible assets like organizational culture, which are becoming important value drivers for businesses.

As we speak, it becomes clear that just like any other big business group, Birla operates through a series of “tangible” frameworks and constructs—budgeting and planning cycles, quarterly reviews and strategic decision-making interventions—through which he monitors and manages a group with over 120,000 employees and $40 billion (around Rs.2.5 trillion) in revenue, half of which emanates from operations outside India.

For example, Birla says: “We have a very vigorous process of budgeting, a lot of quality time is spent on thinking the plan through. Then those numbers become sacrosanct.” Or “I am very disciplined about doing important reviews for each business, especially all the large ones, say, about 12-14 of them, I would review every quarter.” He decides his level of involvement with a particular business decision: depending on whether “I need to know and therefore I’m involved, or I believe I need to be involved so that I can guide or add value”.

Yet what seems to animate these management constructs is a series of intangibles: emotional intelligence, spiritual belief and a sense of legacy, as reflected in the photographs, art and objects in his room, each of which hold clues to Birla’s work style.

Emotional intelligence
Renowned psychologist Daniel Goleman says the “most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence”. Writing in “What Makes A Leader?”, published in 2004 in the Harvard Business Review, he explained that emotional intelligence comprised five specific skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.

Birla’s approach to his people suggests that these skills are well honed. For example, when asked about the extent to which he really knows his people, given the size of the organization, he replies: “There are about 100 ‘high-potential’ people on my radar. I would be intensely involved with which assignment they would go to next, what skill gaps they would require to fill in to take on that larger profit and loss, head of business kind of role. So essentially what we are doing is not just working towards the success of the organization, but also helping people, setting them up for success.”

It is an important recognition that organizations can, and should, enable employees to perform, not simply expect employees to do so.

Spiritual belief
The nourishing atmosphere of the workplace can also perhaps be attributed to Birla’s own equanimity. Having studied the Bhagavad Gita for many years, he says: “I’ve come to believe that you do your best and then just leave the rest, as they say. You have to flow. And I think that’s huge because it takes a huge burden off your shoulders. So I don’t carry work home, I don’t keep worrying about it, because my own philosophy is that I really work hard. And everyone here works very hard. And after that, if you worry, does that mean you think you can control everything? You can’t.”

Birla is known to have a long-term approach to business, and is said to think of himself as a custodian of the brand and its values. “My great-grandfather (G.D. Birla) always believed in the trusteeship concept of management, where you are managing as a trustee for shareholders. And I think your personal attributes, especially that of a promoter, do spill on to how the organization shapes up,” he says.

This approach has strategic business benefits, he believes. “I think that promoter-driven companies have an innate ability to take much higher risks, partly because of the fact that you have longer time horizons.”

Birla’s “tangible” stature and family legacy is almost impossible to emulate. His “intangible” working style, however, has much to offer to any manager.

Anniversaries often seem to arrive sooner than expected, and Head Office is no different; it turns 5 this month. Thank you for reading.

Aparna Piramal Raje meets heads of organizations every month to investigate the connections between their workspace design and working styles.