Abstract
Economic liberalization in India in the early 1990s provided the much needed impetus to private enterprise, bringing opportunities galore with accompanying challenges. While some companies thrived, some barely coped, others simply wound up operations. It is in this milieu that the author presents his research on 23 companies that achieved excellence. What contributed to the success of these companies? What were the defining factors that helped these companies achieve the status of excellence? Are these success stories replicable? Can these factors be identified and collated to create a business model? These are some of the questions that the author has attempted to answer in this book.
There have been several studies on individual, long-standing private businesses, a few select business houses in India, comparisons between private and public sector enterprises and those giving a bird’s eye view of how the private sector adapted itself to the changing economic climate. What sets this book apart is the span, the extent of coverage of information — out of about 7,000 companies from the CMIE Prowess database, the author, through a sound screening process, first identified 144 companies and then sieved them further to get 23 companies, classifying them as ‘being good to excellent’. Of these 23 companies, seven companies were found to be close to or exceed three times the market returns and so were deemed to be excellent. Further, based on an in-depth analysis of performance, the author attempts to explain the factors that contributed to their excellence by using a model with three themes.
It is not just the classification of companies that matters. There have been several periodic surveys that ranked companies based on certain criteria, mostly financial in nature. In fact, the author himself refers to three such surveys. While a list of rankings as the output of such surveys would be of tremendous use in stock market dealings, it would be quite insufficient from an academic perspective. If a student of strategy is looking for an in-depth study on the differentiating factors of such companies, then this is the go-to book. The title ‘Corporate Champions: Excellent Companies of India’ is very apt, considering the fact that the book is really a detailed study of companies that are championing the cause of corporate excellence. As regards students seeking to enrich domain knowledge vis-à-vis strategic management, this book serves the purpose adequately.
The book has certain peculiarities, the first and foremost being its organization into seven chapters that includes one on frequently answered questions (FAQs). While this is quite unusual for a book, one could question as to what is wrong in including FAQs when it is present in almost all websites; the novelty per se should not be a deterrent to the reading experience. The contents of the first chapter titled ‘What is the Book About’ and the FAQs collectively inform the reader on what to expect from this book. However, the downside of this is that there are both omissions and duplications. The author may not have explicitly specified the intended audience in the anticipation that the book would invite a wider audience, but the contents of the book as well as the flow of information actually caters better to a niche audience, the students of strategic management. Also, the author justifies several times as to why certain companies were included and why some were not. This is no doubt a very important point but mentioning it just once would have sufficed. One solution to avoid such problems would be to adopt the general convention of including a preface and having the first chapter titled ‘Introduction’. That way the author’s motivations for this research, the intended audience, the utility of this study and perhaps some additional information could have been a part of the preface; the other details including some of what is covered in the FAQs could have been mentioned in the Introduction, without any duplication.
The amount of research work done for this book is noteworthy. Detailed information on such a large number of companies, especially Indian, is seldom available publicly and this makes this book really valuable. Industry information, history of the companies, business details that cover both operations (for example, the value chain) as well as sales and profit details all find mention. The methodology used for the selection of the 23 good to excellent companies has been clearly specified as also the time frame (1974–2002) and the criteria for the selection. Rather than merely mentioning the details, it is the specificity that is particularly interesting; for example, ‘companies that had cumulative returns at least three times the market over the years’ were considered excellent. Further, the author explains why he considered three times the market value as the parameter. This meticulous adherence to details is something that can be seen in the entire book.
While there are many positives to the book, the same points also work against it. Some of this may be attributed to the distinctive structuring of contents which may have posed limitations. The language adopted in the book is clear and concise and the message is conveyed in a matter of fact manner akin to a classroom lecture. This is perfectly alright for the niche market but if it was meant to reach a larger audience, then the narrative should have been more engaging with perhaps more quotes, bits of conversation, personal viewpoints, etc. There are a lot of graphs, statistics and other exhibits backing the discussion for individual companies. However, a better use of these exhibits, for example, by displaying the comparative statistics of several companies, could have enhanced the visual appeal. The exhaustive research work that was carried out in bringing out this document is evidenced by the literature given in the appendices but this comprises half the book. A concise account of research would have been more effective in capturing readers’ attention.
As mentioned earlier, the author has attempted to give an explanation for the good to excellent performance of the selected 23 companies by using a model with three themes: Strategy, Leadership, and Executive Excellence. The themes themselves and the choice of factors that lend credence to these themes appear very logical and technically sound. Mapping the performance of individual companies theme-wise has led to a lop-sided distribution — the strategy theme is spread over 73 pages, the leadership theme over 46 pages, and the executive excellence is covered in just 21 pages. Though information can be conveyed effectively irrespective of the number of pages, the glaring contrast could have been avoided had the discussion been done company-wise with a chapter integrating the concepts in the end rather than presenting it theme-wise. While the book is content-rich and is indeed very useful in teaching strategic management, the structuring poses limitations on the use of the book. If each company’s performance was explained with respect to the three themes of the business model proposed in the book, following the description of the company data (a part of what is given in the appendices), it would have provided students with 23 individual case studies, all in a uniform format and in great detail with respect to the information therein. It has to be mentioned here that the manner in which graphs, tables and other exhibits have been presented in the book would have been more suitable had the segregation been company-wise and not theme-wise.
An impression one gets on reading this book is that many issues could have been sorted out in the editing stage. For example, the same business model has been given in five different places in the document. The display of the model with highlights in the three chapters discussing the themes (Figures 3.1, 4.1, and 5.1) is warranted no doubt but replication of the contents of Figure 1.2 in Figure 2.1 could have been altogether avoided. If however it had to be retained, it could have been represented slightly differently. Further, while in most cases, the figures are given in ₹ million, in Table D.5, the unit used is ₹ crore. Using the same yardstick throughout the book would have been helpful. Though these may seem to be small issues, it is rather distracting and would have been worth a relook before the book was printed. Perhaps this can still be addressed in the subsequent editions.
The research certainly fills a void in the existing literature and it was a very good idea to showcase it in the form of a book. It is not the formulation of the idea; rather, it is the execution that is in question here. The overall impression one gets in reading this book is that though there is a lot of information, it appears to be somewhat scattered. Had it been structured differently, it would have lent more clarity to the communication of ideas and coherence to the document as a whole. With a sharper editing, the book would have certainly contributed to a much more enjoyable reading experience. Still the book is worthy of mention as regards its contents and it is indeed a great resource for academicians.