The Responsible Business Model: Perspectives from the Tata Group

Abstract

The Tata group of companies, which completes 150 years in 2018, traces its beginnings to 1868 when Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the founder, setup India’s first large scale textile mill. It has since emerged to be a global conglomerate with aggregate revenues of more than $100 billion and over 660,000 employees today. The longevity of the group provides an effective counter perspective to the declining lifespan of businesses worldwide—for context, nearly 9 of every 10 Fortune 500 companies from 1955 were either gone, merged, or contracted in 2016 while Tata Steel, Tata Power and the iconic Taj hotel in Mumbai have been around for over a 100 years. This journey has also seen the group navigate multiple evolutions in the operating context for its businesses: setting up industries which contributed to a push for economic self-reliance in independent India, adapting to the post liberalization Indian economy in the nineties, successfully riding out the information technology maelstrom at the turn of this century, aligning to new market paradigms after financial crises of 1997 and 2008 and so on.