There is no business like good business. Former Managing Director and Board Member of Britannia, Vinita Bali, talks a little of business, being busy, and the life beyond with DW.
T he one enriching aspect about the life of a journalist is the sheer variety of people one gets to greet and meet. It makes the particular profession worth its salt. For non-misanthropes, there’s an added bonus; it gives a window into individual traits, quirks, occasional oddities that make each human being unique. At the time when this interview was being conducted, the writer was pleading (we do plead often as we almost always run behind some scheduled deadline) two polar opposites to answer her frantic calls, SMSes and emails. One of those resulted in a conversation conducted at 1.20 am (a career milestone), and the other came in a form of a crisp mail response (received in the mid-afternoon) which not only stated time and date for the interview but also the precise duration of the said event. American author H. Jackson Brown Junior, best known for his inspirational books, had once famously written, “Do not say you do not have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” The outgoing Managing Director and Board Member of Britannia, Vinita Bali, would heartily, emphatically agree. She has been given the same number of hours as any other professional. Yet, she manages to pack in so much into that one day—like sardines in a tin box—that one is seriously impressed.
One could dismiss Bali’s ability as effective time management but her skill is a telling sign of yet another capacity; to concentrate and then de-focus when need be. Bali does not multitask. She manages one thing at a time, giving it her complete concentration, and then switches just as quickly to another with equal, determined deliberation. It is as if her left and right brain are synchronised. In the days of her youth, she was one of those wonder girls who managed to be an avid sportsperson playing hockey, basketball and badminton, attend her classes, go on to her kathak lessons afterward, participate in debates at school all the time keeping her respectable grade intact. “My father was brilliant academically and he was good with numbers. My mother, too, was academically sharp and also incorporated music, performing arts and poetry in her schedule. I say that I inherited my left brain from my father and the right brain from my mother,” says Bali. And that insync right and left brain has made Bali not only one of the most successful businessperson in India, it has also made her one of the most powerful social influencers battling malnutrition across the world.
She has worked for over 35 years, including 17 years of overseas assignments in a variety of marketing, sales and general management positions with MNCs like Cadbury Schweppes and The Coca-Cola Company. She has lived in the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, USA and Chile, apart from India. At the peak of her career, Bali was ranked 18th among the world’s 50 top business women by The Financial Times (2011) and in the same year, received the Forbes Leadership Award. Bali had joined Britannia in January 2005 after her equally illustrious stint with The Coca-Cola Company. She joined at a turbulent time when there was no designated Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer after Sunil Alagh left as MD. During her tenure the Company saw its fastest growth, she set up greenfield units, reduced cost and inducted new talent. Britannia’s net profit jumped from `105 crore in FY 2007 to `259.5 crore in FY 2013. During the same period, top line increased from `1,514 crore to `6,136 crore. All this from a woman to whom “corporate life happened”.
“A corporate career was not something I had planned. I always wanted to relocate, to experience new cultures, even if it meant travel to a new city in India. That is why I went to Mumbai for my MBA, after having lived in New Delhi during school and college. The corporate world has certainly helped me to enrich my life and make it more fulfilling. I have lived and worked in six countries on five continents, and travelled to approximately 70 countries and most importantly, experienced a diversity of cultures,” says Bali.
there was a time when Bali was keen on joining the Foreign Service after graduating in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College. “I needed a Master’s Degree before I could write that exam. So I experimented for a week with Delhi School of Economics and Jawaharlal Nehru University to do an MA in Economics. I also made it to Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, (which my parents were not too keen to send me to), and Jamanalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. I believed that living in Mumbai for two years would be fun and that led to JBIMS. The plan was to write the Foreign Service exam after the MBA. However, as it happened, I got a job offer from Voltas even before I completed the course. Voltas gave me a wonderful break. And together with my team we launched Rasna, which became an instant success.”
We had to intervene here; Rasna’s not just a success. It is a three-decade-old brand and a part of every Indian’s childhood. How did it feel to be the person responsible for bringing it to the world? “Rasna was not my idea. I had joined the pharmaceutical and consumer products division of Voltas and the idea was to identify innovative products of individual entrepreneurs and get them to the market, which meant the entire gamut of consumer research, positioning the idea, communication, distribution and selling ” she corrects us. “Areez Khambatta was the inventor of the product.”
Between Britannia, Coca-Cola, Cadbury and the rest of the equally daunting brands Bali has handled tough jobs—wait, no she has not. For there are no tough jobs in business, only challenges that must be overcome. “I really did not think of any job as a challenge. Every problem is a part of the job and you have to address it. As a business person, my focus is to deliver profitable growth and competitively superior performance. Whether I am selling a soft drink or chocolate or biscuit, the task is really is to get more consumers to buy my brands more often. For that, the brand has to be relevant and meaningful and offer the best value satisfaction to consumers and through that route, higher profit for the company. I believe people in the corporate world sometimes tend to dramatise things. Our task is very simple. Business is about getting consumers to prefer and buy your brands in preference to other alternatives and ensure that you have a business model that supports this—whether it is an insurance policy, a two-wheeler or an edible product,” she says with a chuckle.
“The purpose of business is to create and sustain consumers by profitably commercializing opportunities and to work in a manner that is responsible towards its various stakeholders and creates value for all of them,” she clarifies. For the industry veteran that she is one is tempted to ask what for her is good business—the word that has been the mantra for most of the multinationals around? Bali would perhaps like to emphasise that only a good business is successful business because one cannot divorce a company from the society and consumers it serves. “For me, good business is responsible business. It is not about corporate social responsibility, but simply about corporate responsibility, which is sustainable”.
It was perhaps this belief that led to Britannia introducing fortified biscuits, “to be a small part of the solution to address the pervasive micro-nutrient deficiency we find especially among children, who are under-nourished or malnourished”. Britannia was also the first bakery firm to eliminate trans fat from its biscuit formulations.
Remember the bit at the beginning? That bit about the crisp email, the scheduled date and time? And that bit about the discipline to stick to that schedule? All that, and successive victories, had an unconventional beginning—the arts. Years before people starting to talk of a “fad” called liberal arts, years before they started to take that fad seriously and see it as a necessity, Bali was, thanks to her parents and her own initiative, learning to play the sitar, dance kathak and watch as many plays as she could. Sometimes she also donned the paint, if she could. At the beginning of our talk, I had asked about her mentors and was surprised to find that most of them were artists–dancers, classical musicians, and sports stars. Sushma Seth, Zarine Chaudhuri, and Barry John were her elocution and drama teachers in school and an inspiration; she admires her sports teacher and her Kathak guru and the many artists she has met over the years, for their dedication, passion and quest for excellence. The admission was so surprising that it led to a comment and elicited a laugh from her. Why would I believe that corporate people need to have mentors from the financial field?
“People think the arts are only about inspiration and creativity. But all great art fosters a sense of discipline, dedication, devotion, practice and application, all the qualities one needs to succeed in any kind of business. I get inspired by excellence—whether in a painting, a photograph, the sports or the arts. “I have no single mentor or a coach,” she says. “I am an eclectic person and a perennial student. I love to work, I love to travel. I love the theatre and despite a hectic work schedule, I have always attempted to keep pace with these interests. There is only one life we remember and it must be lived fully,” she says.
Work and play intermingle in her life. A work-life balance means how work fits in her life and not how life fits in her work. It is not only the arts that have a fond place in the heart of Bali, fighting malnutrition—not just in India but across the world—is a cause that she would like to dedicate her life to. She is one of 27 global leaders working with the United Nations on the “Scaling Up Nutrition” movement that 50 countries have signed up for, as they work assiduously to reach their Millenium Development Goals.
Vinita has received several awards, including The Economic Times Award for ‘Corporate Excellence 2009- Business Woman of the year’, The Teachers Leadership Award in 2009, The Asian Centre for Corporate Governance & Sustainability Best Woman Director Award- 2010, the Forbes Award in 2011, The Bombay and Bangalore Management Association Awards in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Vinita was ranked 18th among the world’s 50 top business women by The Financial Times in 2011 and has been on the Business Today list of powerful women for several years.