Although privileged, Ratan’s childhood was not happy. His parents, Naval and Soonoo (who was also a Tata by birth) separated acrimoniously when he was seven, and with his younger brother Jimmy he was largely brought up by his grandmother, Lady Navajbai Tata. “She was very indulgent, but also quite strict in terms of discipline,” Ratan recalled in an interview with Business Week. “We were very protected, although we didn’t have many friends. I had to learn the piano, and played a lot of cricket.”
Privately educated in Bombay, Ratan went on to study architecture and structural engineering at Cornell University, learning American ways and campaigning for John F Kennedy’s presidency. He might have stayed there, working for IBM, had he not returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother fell ill.
Though part of the Tata clan, Ratan was only the son of a cousin of the then group chairman, JDR Tata, and he began his career with the family business on the shop floor. By the mid-1960s, however he was running the family’s steel operations.
The Indian steel industry in the 1960s was suffering many of the overmanning and low productivity problems of its British equivalent and Tata had to be ruthless in turning round the company’s fortunes, battling with trade unions, elderly boardroom members and family rivals.
In 1971 he was moved to Tata’s electronics company, then to its troubled textiles group, somehow finding time to graduate from Harvard Business School in 1975. In 1981 he was made chairman of Tata Industries and 10 years later succeeded the 87-year-old JDR as group chairman.
The Tata Group, by this time, was in trouble. It had been asset-stripped by nationalisations and battered by high taxes and over-regulation. Over the next 10 years, introducing management techniques learnt at Harvard, Tata slimmed the group down to 80 companies from more than 250, reducing the labour force by around 40 per cent and selling off millions of dollars worth of non-core assets.
He added car manufacture to Tata’s commencial vehicle production and, as liberalisation of the Indian economy welcomed foreign investment, he negotiated deals with partners such as Unilever, AT&T and Mercedes-Benz. By the turn of the century the Tata group was ready to go on an international spending spree.