The Phantom Strikes

The Phantom strikes

It isn’t just the Rolls Royce that has made much of its quietness in motion. Much, as in its monikers of Phantom and Ghost and its famous David Ogilvy created advertisement.

The legendary headline to the 1958 print ad said: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. The Subhead line read: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it – it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.

Of course, the Lee Falk “Ghost who walks” inspired imagery in the Rolls Royce model names, the somewhat horse and carriage reminiscent rounded lines, and the advert that talked of tick-tocking clocks and miles per hour, all belong to a bygone era. One in which the “Roller”, under British ownership, exuded occasional, if nostalgic, whiffs of Empire, despite the dwindling number of its anachronistic takers.

Significantly, this iconic British marque built at Crewe in the Midlands, associated with royalty and the “toff” for so long it seems like forever; still makes aircraft engines on its own. The auto manufacturing however has been hived off to BMW, the German car maker from Bavaria, which also once made aircraft engines but now only has the blue and white propeller on its much admired logo.

But BMW too, while extensively reengineering and restyling the Roller into tank-like toughness and Teutonic performance, has daintily retained the ethereal model names and the je ne sais quoi Greek mythology classicism of the “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood badge, now retractable to elude souvenir hunters, vandals and the gritty cynicism of modern times.

With this combination of old world class and Butch new, improved, performance, the Phantom can outgun several serious sports cars, despite weighing in at over two tons without any armour plating. Likewise, the slightly smaller new Ghost for those who want to drive themselves.

Which brings me to the reclusive billionaire with built-in state-of-the-art stealth features undetectable on most radars, known as “The Phantom of Bombay House”.  I write of Mr. Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry and his long road journey to the takeover of the iconic Tata Group. He too oozes stateliness and good manners while being a proven quantity over decades at or near the top of Indian business and industry.  

Mr.S.P. Mistry has been closely associated with all the major construction emanating from the Tata Group for decades. He has been an inner circle intimate of JRD Tata and an avuncular and consistent presence for his successor Ratan, not to mention all the other Tata satraps. Mr. Mistry has quietly sat on the boards, or in the Chairman’s office, of several Tata companies at the same time, for decades together, in addition to having his own name plate formally and informally at the board table at Tata Sons for just as long. But despite his biggest single private shareholding at some 18.5% in the Tata Sons holding company, Pallon, as his friends call him, has been careful to eschew petty ambition while diligently minding the store.  

Even now, at around 80 years of age, in technical retirement certainly, the elder Mistry is still a major force at Bombay House, despite his innate humility, warmth, human touch and signature low-key style. But underneath this silk and velvet, is a clear cut and long term strategist that has at last executed a plan of action begun in 1930, when his father, the heir apparent Cyrus Mistry’s grandfather, acquired 12.5% of Tata Sons by buying out the then Tata lawyer’s holding.

In the 1930s it was a very different kind of Phantom and Ghost, that rolled around in the heat and dust of princely India, besides featuring anthromorphically in hit films like “The Yellow Rolls Royce”. But undeniably, the Rolls Royce motor car’s survival to date owes much to a nimble evolution from its walnut and burl dashboards and picnic hampers that has cast many of its contemporaries into the outer darkness of museums sighing with times past.

The naming of the 43 year old Cyrus Mistry to the top job at Tatas’ is significant for its signal of an astute and hard-nosed makeover not unlike the one made to the Roller by BMW, signalling both modernisation and continuity, and recognising, as Ratan has done throughout his tenure, coinciding with the beginning of India’s liberalisation, that competition, not protection, is here to stay.

The Tata Group, grown out of the pre-independence ethos, consolidated throughout the Socialist era and brought into its own since 1991, has a long way to go in its transformation into a global behemoth. And this particularly as the balance of power is beginning to shift to Asia in terms of China and India and also to the other BRICS countries. What is certain is that America and the West will have to share a lot of power and pelf in the future.

Cyrus Mistry will have the time, over 30 years per the terms of tenure at Tata, God willing, and given the determination and vision demonstrated by outgoing Chairman Ratan Tata, like JRD before him, he will take it to the heights of achievement and excellence befitting the refreshed TATA logo.   

 Cyrus Mistry has already taken the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, albeit in conjunction with his father and elder brother, into very impressive multi-billion dollar growth, branching out into a conglomerate on its own, embracing manufacturing, services and engineering, from its roots in A grade civil construction going back to his grandfather’s days.

The time has come to continue the kind of dynamism and courage that has marked the latter half of Ratan Tata’s tenure, when he came into his own after successfully subduing considerable internal challenges to his leadership. Cyrus Mistry is lucky to be inheriting this legacy of consolidation. All he has to do now is leverage the considerable strengths of the Tata Group in an era where India itself is destined to become a leading nation and economy.

There are great opportunities in areas that are yet to be thrown open to the private or collaborative joint sectors, particularly in the Defence Industry, but they are coming because of irresistible geopolitical pressures and threats that need urgent action. Such private-public-international collaboration, inclusive of both organic and inorganic growth, as demonstrated in the Corus and Jaguar/Landrover acquisitions, has the potential to catapult more and more companies in the Tata Group into the upper reaches of the Fortune 500.

All Mr. Mistry needs is a hunger and stomach for visionary growth and he has certainly demonstrated this characteristic already, if on a smaller canvas.

(1,100 words)

24^th November 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "With sleeves rolled up" on November 29th, 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com