Anand Mahindra, vice chairman & MD of M&M The view from the top floor at Mahindra's corporate headquarters

in Worli has changed dramatically over the past few years, as 40-50 story skyscrapers rise from what was once Mumbai's Mill district. But the dramatic transformation in the skyline from smokestacks to glass and steel is akin to the changes that Anand Mahindra has driven in the company that bears his family name. He speaks to Business Today's Kushan Mitra on transformation, change, management and the new 'Rise' campaign.

What does 'Rise' mean to you? To me the Rise campaign is validation of 'movement marketing', when you see Levi's which is one of the world's most recognizable brands is following almost an identical agenda. So all the talk that I could give about movement marketing and engagement market, where you get people to engage and interact with the company, there could be no better example than a Levi's doing a similar campaign. What do you hope to achieve in the campaign? First of all, we do believe that a company that outperforms is a company that has a core purpose, and the core purpose is the transcending reason why people come to work. They are not coming to work for the next quarter's earnings and so on and so forth, but they are there because coming to work gives additional meaning to their lives. A core purpose we have always had, and the core purpose used to be loosely - 'Indians are second to none' and there was a longer elaboration and narration of that and what it meant. It went back to our founders founding this company in 1945 in flush of India becoming Independent. But as we grew and became global, it became apparent when you have 4,000 Koreans, when you have people in America, China, 1,500 Germans, that kind of core purpose is naturally not something that has a global resonance to it. You cannot expect the German members of our family wanting to come to work to prove that 'Indians are second to none'. So it was a very natural development to evolve our 'core purpose' which finds resonance with our global stakeholders today.

That in essence is when we started looking for a new core purpose. Around that time, (Scott Goodson, Founder) StrawberryFrog, which was an advertising agency recruited by our distributor in the US, came here on a rather mundane mission to discover more about the company. What he (Scott) said was that consumers are looking for companies they can trust; companies whose integrity and ideals they can believe in; companies in which they are willing to become co-stakeholders even though they were merely consumers.

We helped phrase and came up with this whole campaign on how people wanted to shape their own destiny. This was based on a lot of market research with both our current consumers and potential consumers across continents. All of them said that this resonates very strongly, whether it was an affluent country or a poor country, whether in China or America, everybody identified with shaping their own destiny and rising and associating with a company which enabled them to do it. That is 'Rise.' The second part, to pre-empt the next question, two things happened. The first was people asked me, "Anand, do you want this to remain an advertising campaign or do you want this to transform the company?" We decided to evangelize the company and that took us a year. That was done and then we moved onto phase two where we went external, the differentiation in our campaign is that it is not simply an advertisement. We had to walk the talk, we had to ask 'How will we enable people to Rise?' and this is where 'Spark the Rise' comes in. You are using the net and you are using social media to create the 'Spark the Rise' movement. And to prove that our brand, our core purpose, our image of ourselves is truly interactive.

So you will crowdsource your destiny? In a sense yes, but I am only hesitating because 'crowdsource' has become a very pejorative word these days. You are quite active on Twitter yourself I'm not a false person, what you see is what you get.

Do you believe you have managed to 'Spark the Rise' among your employees? I am sure if you were going to take a sample you will find somebody who is skeptical, somebody who feels it is going to be too hard, but that is the world isn't it, democratic. Now if we were to get a 100 per cent answers of enthusiastic people then we must have hyponotised all our employees. That is not possible.

In the last two years, you have acquired a lot of new employees thanks to your takeovers of Satyam, Reva and Ssangyong. Will 'Rise' help them integrate into the organization? You will find that the biggest converts to 'Rise' are the folks at Mahindra Satyam and other folks in IT. It has helped them get a new sense of identity post that debacle (Satyam's collapse in late2009). Out of our 120,000-odd people 65-70,000 are in IT. So the bulk of our community are sold on this and the biggest propogants of Rise in social media.

But what about the international mergers, how tough was integration there? Integration needs a huge amount of time, but frankly that is the fun of doing these things.

Do you feel that over the past few years, with these acquisitions, you have spread yourselves out a bit too thin, because you have entered new markets and acquired companies?

I think the jury is out on that, but seeing will be believing. When the verdict is that these companies have found their respective niches you can come back to me to agree or not. Will they be challenging? Of course. But that is what I get paid to do, that is to find new challenges. And the last thing I would say is that we are no strangers to turnarounds and we are no strangers to challenges. I am now old enough to have been asked this question many times before. When a journalist asks me this question, I get a sense of dejavu. I believe that we have been there and done that, whether it will all work out we have to wait. It has been 20 years since you took over, happily coinciding with 20 years of liberalization. You obviously did not see Mahindra being so successful 20 years ago? No. What were the challenges facing you 20 years ago and how are they different now? No, I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I came in, knelt down and God told me what the company would be like. There were no heavenly trumpets. When I came in that was the time of the most turmoil for Mahindra & Mahindra. Keep in mind, back then the economy was going through intense turmoil, the vehicle market was going through a prolonged recession both in trucks and in our (utility) vehicles and what got us out of that was the Commander. What got us out of the recession was of course tightening our belts but also the Commander vehicle which turned around the division. But the fact remains that when I came in, productivity was abysmal. If you look at what was happening to our competitors (Premier Motors and Hindustan Motors), some people said that writing was on the wall for us too. So when I came in, there was only one thing I was hearing "this company is going down the tubes, like the other auto companies." That was the environment I was entering, with the economy going to hell. Why should Mahindra survive, when the government was inviting every company in the world to India and liberalization was just around the corner? Even in the tractor business, people were saying that tractors was not a very profitable business.

Honestly, I was worried if the company would survive for one year, let alone twenty. You asked if we are spreading ourselves too thin, but when you have been at death's door, twice over in my case when at Mahindra Ugine (the Mahindra subsidiary where Anand Mahindra started) it seemed that liberalization was going to kill us, you naturally tend to be less intimidated by challenges. How does the acquisition process work at Mahindra? Well, there are two ways. Sometimes they are opportunistic in terms of how these propositions come, and sometimes we are proactive. In both cases the filter is the same, which is the mergers and acquisitions department. The human resources integration challenges are listed right up front. That whole approach now has become a well-oiled machine. So Satyam was an opportunistic Funnily enough, Satyam was a strange mix. I have been on record saying that it came out of a proactive search. The Tech Mahindra board said that they needed to diversify out of the telecom vertical. We tried very hard for another company which subsequently got sold to someone else, and as you are aware in the Indian IT landscape there are very few companies of scale which were in play. I actually did talk to Ramalinga Raju well before what happened and I did not get any answer from him, for now well-known reasons. And after the Maytas thing happened, I spoke to him again, if you recall at Maytas there was a shareholder revolt and once again I got no answer and then in January (2010) it became clear why. And after we were quite happy that Satyam was going to be transparently auctioned. So it was opportunistic in the way the situation developed, clearly that was not part of the plan. But we were in the market for that company and when we had an opportunity to bid for it, clearly we were aggressive. And the same with Ssangyong? Almost the same. So what is happening in the automotive space, with Ssangyong and Reva? While IT might have the bulk of your employees, people in India mainly see your cars on the road. Things with Renault did not work out that well and two-wheelers have been a bit tough The fact is that the joint-ventures worked out very well for us (starting in 1991.) I had done my MBA (from Harvard Business School in 1981) and had enough data points to know that 50:50 joint-ventures do not work. They all have a half-life. We went in there with eyes open. I

negotiated that JV, I told the Ford guys that this is what we want out of this. That is why we insisted that the Scorpio be made at Nashik initially, that is the only way we could learn.

The Mahindra-Renault JV was at a time where everybody knew more about JVs. When we negotiated the JV with Louis Schweitzer, who was then the Chairman of Renault, we actually negotiated an end-point. I have been trying many years to disabuse people of the notion that the JVs did not work because, frankly, you have to understand that the JV is an instrument of growth. It is a well-known instrument in the armoury of multinationals for years. When multinational companies go into a company what do they use a JV for? They use it as a point of entry, sometimes around barriers. They use it as a point of learning. Everybody enters a JV now with 'What is in it for you and what is in it for me' But some JVs last a really long time, Hero Honda for example but then they split up just recently So you should not look at the JV between Hero and Honda as a failure. Hero MotoCorp today is a billion dollar corporation that is going to challenge the world. You won't tell Pawan Munjal that the JV has not worked. Look what he has got out of it. Look what Honda has got out of it. How can you say it did not work? Look at our partners, did Ford get something out of it? Of course. We helped them locate Chennai, we helped them put up the plant and they are a robust competitor today. Renault, the jury is out. But if it works it will be in no small measure thanks to their experience with us. What about the new sectors you have entered in auto like two-wheelers and heavy trucks? The most defensible strategy is where you do many things and the combination of those many things becomes very hard for a competitor to emulate. So, let's put a word - 'Fortress Mahindra'. Fortress Mahindra means that if you go into a certain mobility business where you can share procurement, where you can share research and development synergies, where you can share logistics, where you can share brand, you can share channel and then create a mobility web where it becomes easier to enter a mobility business that somebody else can't and easier to defend when somebody tries to emulate. So, of course it is going to be a challenge to enter the two-wheeler business but arguably if anybody can do it, it is us. So you know what you are doing? We know what we are trying to do, but we are not arrogant enough to say that we are there. And the jury is still out, but in five years time I might meet a journalist who might ask me "You have done well in these two industries but aren't you scared you are spreading yourself too thin?" and I hope this continues.

So you are not starting with the aim to be number one or two right now? Obviously, we want to be in the top ranking, we would not enter without volumes, but we are in the long-term, we are the marathon runners.

Since you are such a student of management, who according to you is the top management thinker around? You know, I am not a huge follower of management thinkers and I am very skeptical of airport management thinkers, stuff like "What they don't teach you at HBS" a one dollar book that can change your corporation. But there is one person I have always sworn by that is Michael Porter.

Are you worried about the state of the Indian economy right now? I am always worried, I am paid to be worried and the day I stop being worried, shareholders should sell our stock. The question here is, am I sanguine about India and why do I stay here and not give up? It's because I believe India has a shot in this current maelstrom of standing out and in fact living up to this wonderful goal of being an alternative engine of growth for the world. The inflation and the interest rates are going to bite, have bitten already, and those are creating a bit of a brake on the economy. But I believe if the Indian government invests in infrastructure today, it will create growth in a global desert, even though our internal forecasts are for 7.5 per cent. And finally, one bugbear of the Indian economy was oil. That is why Brazil always did better, first because of their lower dependence and now because of their oil finds. But now that one Achilles heel is also being mitigated. So I think if the government is now proactive, if it announces some reforms that are much needed which will signal to the world that the momentum is continuing here, whether it is the DTC (Direct Tax Code), GST (General Sales Tax) or FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) in real estate and some disinvestment, my hunch is that India will stand out.

How Anand Mahindra built his $12.5-billion empire Kushan Mitra Edition: October 2, 2011 Share97 STORY TOOLS

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Anand Mahindra For many Indian businessmen, the reforms of July 1991 spelt the end of a cosy way of life. For Anand Mahindra, it nearly meant the end of his life. Striking workers of the Kandivali factory of Mahindra & Mahindra, or M&M, in Mumbai had gheraoed him in his plant office and were baying for his blood. Mahindra, then 36 and deputy managing director of a company known for its tractors and the Jeep, had said there would be no Diwali bonus unless workers stepped up productivity. Mahindra's ordeal lasted for nearly four hours, before the workers calmed down.

Mahindra, who had been brought in earlier that year from Mahindra Ugine Steel, another business controlled by his family, held his ground and the workers yielded, agreeing to increase productivity. The 1,230-odd workers at the engine factory in Igatpuri, 125 km northeast of Mumbai, who had decided not to make more than 70 units a day even if this left them enough time to play cards, also gave in. Productivity gains ranged from 50 to 150 per cent: Bharat Doshi on the gains after the 1991 strike Three years later, around half that number were churning out 125 engines a day. "Productivity gains ranged from 50 to 150 per cent," recalls Bharat Doshi, Group Chief Financial Officer, who has been with the group longer than his boss.

Today, Mahindra does not worry as much about productivity as about what his next big project will be. Another passenger car, a sports utility vehicle, a truck - or an aircraft? Twenty Diwalis since that day in 1991, the group's businesses span all these - and holiday resorts, financial services and defence. When he does not want to start from scratch - which he did with the Scorpio utility vehicle in 2002 - he buys a company, as he did with the Reva electric car.

EXCLUSIVE: Anand Mahindra on the new 'Rise' campaign / In the past four years, he has acquired Punjab Tractors (doubling M&M's share of the tractor market and making it a global leader), Satyam Computer Services, Reva, two-wheeler maker Kinetic, and South Korea's automaker Ssangyong.

Mahindra's goal seems to be global leadership for his group, which in 2010/11 reported a net profit of over Rs 4,800 crore on sales of nearly Rs 37,000 crore. In 1991, group revenues are estimated to have been around Rs 1,520 crore, based on a Prowess database search of group companies.

Keenly watching him will be the stock market, which has pushed up his flagship M&M's stock price by 995 per cent since Mahindra took charge, despite two stock splits since 2005. In the same period, the Bombay Stock Exchange's 30-share Sensex, which includes M&M, has risen 794 per cent. In a report prepared after M&M's first quarter results, Mumbai brokerage Kotak Institutional Securities upgraded the scrip to a 'buy', citing robust demand for both the Scorpio and Bolero utility vehicles as well as the new Maxximo and Gio light commercial vehicles. Mahindra's indigenous anti mine vehicle Look back across some 16 years, and the picture was not always so gung-ho. Mahindra's record in joint ventures has been far from stellar. In 1995, hungry for partnership with a multinational that would bring in much-needed technology and management expertise, his group tied up with Ford Motor of the US but the venture petered out in a few years after its first car, the Escort, flopped. Since then, Mahindra has not had much luck with two other partnerships in automotives. M&M's venture with Illinois, US-based Navistar International has not gained traction because of delays in rolling out medium and heavy commercial vehicles and the competition from new, low-cost rivals such as AMW, the Gujarat-based truckmaker. PROFILE: The tweeting CEO Mahindra Navistar reported a loss of Rs 186 crore last year. A bigger setback for M&M has been the Logan, a mid-size sedan that is the offspring of its venture with France's Renault. The car flopped and the partners parted ways after four years of friction. We want to do to regional aerospace what our vehicles have done to rural transport: Hemant Luthra M&M is selling the remaining units as its Verito, while Renault is trying to make its mark in a higher segment with Fluence. M&M's big non-auto joint venture, the one with British Telecom in software services,

forged before Mahindra Ford, had a reasonable run before BT reduced its stake in 2010 to around 30 per cent. Mahindra counts these setbacks among the invaluable lessons he has learnt. "Everybody enters a joint venture with a what's-in-it-for-you-and-what's-in-it-for-me attitude," he says. "[Before the venture with Ford] we had no experience in making a hard-top vehicle, or in modern methods of manufacturing." And then he drops the punch line: "The 300 people who put the Ford Escort together were the first ones to work on the Scorpio. It can be argued that we would not have been able to make the Scorpio without the Ford joint venture." SPECIAL: When Anand Mahindra impressed alma-mater Harvard Business School Click here to Enlarge Even with the Mahindra-Renault JV, Mahindra believes that both companies have benefited from the experience. The story of Scorpio, M&M's big-selling utility vehicle, is now a case study at Harvard Business School, where Mahindra did his MBA in 1981. (He had majored in film-making and photography from the same university.)

In addition to the learning from Ford, Mahindra knew he needed the right people for the Scorpio project. He turned to Pawan Goenka, who had come from General Motors in 1993 as General Manager for Research and Development but was on the verge of leaving. Goenka, a specialist in engine technologies, was riveted by the audacious plan to develop a vehicle from scratch in India and bought into Mahindra's dream. He spent the next few years learning other parts of automotive technology and building a team of skilled young engineers. In 2002, the Scorpio was born at a total project cost of Rs 550 crore. There were many remarkable things about it. First, Indian companies were not known to develop their own vehicles. Second, it was developed at a tenth of the cost that a large manufacturer would have incurred. And, the Scorpio has become a platform, first for the Xylo in 2009 and then for the XUV5OO, slated for launch in India and South Africa later this year.

Mahindra

acquisitions

2007 In July, M&M buys 64.6 per cent of Punjab Tractors for about Rs 1,400 crore. Retains the Swaraj brand and turns the company around in two years. In 2008/09, just before it is merged with M&M, Punjab Tractors reports a profi t of Rs 200 crore. The Swaraj brand has increased its marketshare from nine per cent in 2007 to 12 per cent today. Overall, M&M had 42 per cent of India's tractor market in 2010/11. Selling over 202,000 tractors a year, it is the world's largest tractor company by volume. Farm equipment is the single largest contributor to M&M's revenues. 2008 M&M buys an 80 per cent stake in Kinetic Motors' two-wheeler business for Rs 110 crore. This is run as a separate company - Mahindra 2 Wheelers. In 2010/11, the company had 7.6 per cent of the scooters market, against 4.8 per cent the year earlier. Motorcycle sales have been poor, but Mahindra 2 Wheelers is the fi rst Indian company to take part in the MotoGP motorcycle racing series and has enjoyed some success in the 125cc category with riders Marcel Schrotter and Danny Webb. 2009 Tech Mahindra, which began life as a venture with British Telecom and later became the information technology business of the M&M Group, buys Satyam Computer Services in June 2009 when the government puts Satyam on the block following revelations of an accounting fraud committed by its Founder-Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju. Tech Mahindra pays an estimated Rs 2,650 crore for a 51 per cent stake. Rebranded as Mahindra-Satyam, the new company declares a consolidated net profi t of Rs 225.2 crore for the April-June quarter of 2011/12, its fi rst since the takeover.

May 2010 Mahindra buys a 55.2 per cent stake in Reva Electric Car Co, most of it from Reva's (in the pic) promoter. It also brings in fresh equity. Even though Mahindra-Reva made a loss of Rs 28 crore in 2010/11, Pawan Goenka, President of M&M Automotive, feels that M&M will benefi t in the long run from Reva's electric vehicle technology, and the acquisition will revive M&M's own alternative propulsion projects. Mahindra-Reva plans to launch a new vehicle, NXR, soon. November 2010 M&M acquires a 70 per cent stake in South Korea's Ssangyong Motor Co for about Rs 2,100 crore, including bonds. It is the largest outbound deal by M&M, which now plans to introduce Ssangyong vehicles in India in 2012, develop vehicles jointly, as well as use Ssangyong's marketing and distribution reach in Russia, Latin America and Western Europe to realise its ambitions of becoming a global major. Ssangyong closed the 2010 Jan-Dec fi nancial year with a net loss of Rs 220 crore. Other acquisitions Mahindra Systech has been acquiring automotive component and aerospace companies aggressively since 2003. Several were privately held fi rms and no values were given. Among them: Schoneweiss (axle-beam manufacturer, Germany); Jeco Holding (forgings, Germany); DGP Hinoday Industries (castings and ferrites, India); Falkenroth (forgings, Germany); Stokes Group (forgings, Britain); Amforge Industries (forgings, India); Plexion Technologies (engineering services, India); Metalcastello (castings, Italy along with ICICI Venture); SAR Transmissions (gears, India); Engines Engineering (automotive, Italy); Gippsland Aeronautics and Aerostaff Aircraft Manufacturing (aerospace, Australia).

Anand Mahindra with a Mahindra Navistar truck

The Scorpio "did wonders for the Mahindra brand in urban India", says Mahindra. It also became the group's flagship for expansion into new markets. It is sold in several West European countries as the 'Mahindra Goa' and uses its Scorpio moniker in Africa, where it can be found from Cairo to Cape Town. It might be outsold by the older and cheaper Bolero in India, but combined with exports, some 60,000 Scorpios were sold in 2010/11. Though a plan to sell Scorpios in the US failed in 2010, M&M plans to make a fresh push in the world's largest vehicle market with the Scorpio and the XUV5OO shortly.

More than just sales and profits, the Scorpio platform has given M&M a huge boost as valueseeking customers turn to it. "In comfort, the Innova is far ahead for city driving but the Scorpio scores on mileage and cost, as also service quality at dealerships," says Ravinder Chauhan, coowner of Delhi-based MS Engineering, a construction contractor with Indian Oil. Chauhan's family owns both an Innova and a Scorpio. Back at M&M, Goenka does not personally design vehicles anymore, but is the top dog for the group's automotive and farm equipment businesses. One in two tractors bought today in India is badged M&M after the 2008 Punjab Tractors buy, despite several international players - New Holland and John Deere among them - having entered the market in the past few years. (See Mahindra Aquisitions) Two joint ventures in China, one with Jiangling and the other with Yueda Yancheng, have made M&M not just the second largest tractor maker in that country but also the biggest in the world by volumes. In the US, it sells tractors made by manufacturers in South Korea and Japan under its own brand. Next: Africa and global leadership.

Giving Indians wings Millions of utility vehicles and hundreds of thousands of tractors wearing the Mahindra badge dot the country's roads and farms, respectively. Will Mahindra one day similarly own the skies? In 2008, Systech, the components arm of the Mahindra Group, bought Australia-based GippsAero. The Gipps Airvan, an eight-seater by GippsAero has had limited success since the acquisition, with about 60 planes sold last year. In 2007, M&M had bought Bangalore-

based engineering services firm Plexion, which had several aeronautical experts in its ranks. This led to a 2008 tie-up between M&M and the National Aerospace Laboratories to build a four- to five-seater aircraft, the NM-5. It is expected to take its first flight before the end of 2011. The prototype is being developed at GippsAero's facilities in Australia. Hemant Luthra, President, Systech, says the experience of making aircraft will also help it gain business in the burgeoning civil and defence markets for aerospace components. Anand Mahindra believes Indians would take to the skies in droves if flying became affordable. The NM-5 achieves to do just that, with a target price of around Rs 2 crore. The catch? India's civil aviation rules prohibit a single-engined aircraft from carrying four or more fare-paying passengers. That is why the Airvan and the NM-5 are not in Indian skies as yet. But Luthra is confident the rules will be changed, and Mahindra's vision of thousands of Indians crisscrossing the country in small planes will come true.

We have appointed only six people from here in Ssangyong and the CFO is the only top Indian there: Pawan Goenka Each of M&M's automotive acquisitions over the last three years was significant in its own way. Reva, the Bangalore manufacturer of electric cars that it acquired for Rs 150 crore, is a technology play. "They have competent technology, a well-regarded product and ambitious plans. But they did not have the resources to go forward," says Goenka. The beginning has been good. Soon after M&M bought Reva, the government announced tax breaks for electric cars, something that Chetan Maini - whose dream Reva was - kept moping about but never got. To be sure, there has been no such happy beginning for Mahindra Two Wheelers, the new name given to Kinetic. While overall scooter sales doubled last year, they still account for just a fifth of total two-wheeler sales in India. And, Mahindra motorcycles - the company launched five models, including relaunches within a year - has not taken off even though the market is growing and the brand is backed by Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, actors known for their Midas touch in movies and endorsements.

...we would not have been able to make the Scorpio without the Ford joint venture: Anand Mahindra In a recent interview to a television channel, Mahindra agreed that he came into the market with the wrong product, but vowed to strike back with a relaunch soon. The really big bet at M&M is being played out in Seoul. China's Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, or SAIC, had acquired 49 per cent equity in South Korea's Ssangyong in 2004. But sales collapsed as fuel prices shot up, emission standards in its export markets became stringent, and the global financial crisis erupted. Faced with strikes and unable to cut costs, Ssangyong filed for bankruptcy in January 2009. SAIC diluted its holding to 3.79 per cent in July next year. When M&M first announced its intent to acquire Ssangyong, it was not without reason that its shares fell. But unlike Tata Motors' acquisition of Britain's Jaguar Land Rover, or JLR, in 2008, which took time to turn operationally profitable and left Tata with a pile of debt, the Ssangyong deal was smooth. The target was free of debt, its operations profitable and it trimmed its workforce before M&M came in. And M&M paid $463 million - some 60 per cent less than what SAIC had paid in 2004. Now, Mahindra's task is to win over the unions. "We have appointed only six people from here in management roles in Korea, and the chief financial officer is the only top Indian executive," says Goenka. The idea is to get the Ssanyong employees to believe in themselves. Of the 120,000 vehicles Ssangyong produced last year, 65 per cent were exported. But it is not just entry into new global markets, M&M will also develop all major platforms in the future with Ssangyong and plans to start selling products from South Korea in the Indian market next year.

As Mahindra strives to get Ssangyong back on the rails, he can take inspiration from his success with Satyam Computers. Tech Mahindra, the Mahindra-BT joint venture, won Satyam in an auction by the government, which had taken control after Founder and Chairman Ramalinga Raju was accused of overstating key financial numbers. Mahindra had actually reached out to

Raju just weeks before the scandal broke. "He did not respond," he says, tongue in cheek, "for now very-well-known reasons." We took difficult decisions at Satyam but we made sure that everybody was kept informed: Rajeev Dubey Apart from dealing with tax issues, handling employee morale at Satyam was the biggest challenge. As Rajeev Dubey, M&M's head of Human Resources, says, Satyam employees had no idea what the future was going to be. "Yes, we had to take some difficult decisions, but we made sure that everybody was kept informed; communication was vital." No one will talk about it, but the next step in harvesting synergies among the Mahindra group tech businesses is to combine Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam in the future. A management consultant who has worked with Mahindra closely says he has not seen an Indian businessman with "a better left brain, right brain" combination - creativity in business combined with a feel for numbers. In 2000, when Indian groups started buying global assets, the Mahindra group was much smaller, with revenues of about $1 billion. "Not only was he smaller than the Tatas or Birlas, his family's shareholding in group businesses was relatively low making him more vulnerable than them," says the consultant. The consultant, who works at a US management firm, requested he not be named. This explains the heightened sense of caution with which M&M goes after acquisitions, especially those with a higher degree of risk or of a size that may be difficult to digest. An example is the group's decision to drop out of the race to buy JLR. The Tatas, who had deeper pockets, bagged it. A strategy Mahindra uses to pare risk is to rope in private equity, as in M&M's acquisition of Italian auto component maker Metalcastello along with ICICI Venture. So too, it acquired Australian airplane maker GippsAero along with Kotak Private Equity. A takeover tycoon he may be, but Mahindra is not done with entering new areas on his own. Looking at the promise in defence equipment, M&M has developed an urban patrol vehicle, the

Marksman, based on the Scorpio. Kutub Hai, a former Brigadier, who is the Chief Executive of Mahindra Land Defence Systems, a joint venture with British Aerospace, says the company can hope to get up to 20 per cent of the $100 billion defence market in the coming decade.

The rise campaign Rising to the top How Mahindra's 'Rise' campaign came to fruition

In mid-2009, Scott Goodson, the founder and creative head of StrawberryFrog, a boutique American advertising agency, met Anand Mahindra in Mumbai. Mahindra had appointed Global Vehicles as distributor for its Scorpio sports utility vehicle in the United States, and Global had roped in StrawberryFrog.

Goodson, who specialises in 'movement marketing', wanted to understand what Mahindra & Mahindra was all about. He had been surprised by what he found. Most Mahindra's managers, he noted, felt they were working for a higher purpose but seemed unable to articulate it. Goodson told Mahindra boldly, "You yourself do not understand what kind of company you are running."

Following months of research and interviews with all stakeholders, the 'Rise' slogan was born. It emphasised three core principles - accept no limits, think alternatively and drive positive change.

But Mahindra wanted this to be more than an advertising campaign. "Our core purpose earlier was to prove that Indians are second to none," he says. But later M&M, having acquired thousands of employees in Germany, Korea, China and elsewhere, needed to redefine this.

Mahindra admits that not every employee will buy the 'Rise' idea. Surprisingly, employees of Mahindra-Satyam were the biggest supporters of 'Rise', presumably because they had suffered a serious identity crisis when their company's founder perpetrated a scam.

Ironically, Mahindra's plans for a US launch were scuppered by legal issues with Global Vehicles. So while StrawberryFrog never got around to doing the advertisement it was intended to do in the US, it has done a massive campaign in India.

Even more bullish is Hemant Luthra, President, Systech Sector, who heads the group's component side and oversees the entry into aerospace. In 2007, he masterminded the acquisition of Australia's GippsAero, which makes small commercial aircraft. Luthra has also taken the company into a joint venture with National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore, to develop a small aircraft. Scheduled to take to the air soon, it is expected to be priced at Rs 2 crore. The cheapest such offering in the market today costs Rs 5 crore. "We want to do to regional aerospace what we have done to rural transport," says Luthra. Mahindra shares his vision of scores of small planes taking off from towns across the country, with fares slightly higher than the highest railway fares. That would fit in with M&M's new campaign: 'Rise - No Limits, Positive Change, Alternative Thinking'.

Mahindra's 360-degree view of life - he has 350,000-plus followers on Twitter and adds 2,500 every week - had management thinker C.K. Prahalad, about a year before he died in April 2010, dub his sprawl of businesses 'Fortress Mahindra', an empire that spans not just a hundred countries but has valuable links in multiple industries. Despite aggressively expanding the contours of his conglomerate - he prefers to call it a federation - Mahindra, now 56, makes you feel that he has not really forgotten the day he was confined to his office 20 years ago. "When you have stared down the abyss, you get a sort of confidence," he says.

Edited by Suveen K. Sinha and Somnath Dasgupta