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Submitted to, Malati Sriram On 27th Jan 2012 By, Ashiq N K (11067) Deepak Semwal (11072)
AUTHORS OBJECTIVE CENTRAL IDEA AUTHORS INTENT OF WRITING THE BOOK DILEMMA AND SOLUTION CONFLICTS WITH OUR THOUGHT AFFECT ON THINKING RELATING STORY TO OURSELVES LEARNING FROM THE BOOK ASHIQ N K LEARNING FROM THE BOOK DEEPAK SEMWAL REFERENCE
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Authors
Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal take us on the journey of the Nano, from when it was first conceived as a doodle by Ratan Tata at a boring board meeting to enthusiastic owners of the 'lakhtakia' car turning into overnight celebrities. Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal work in the corporate affairs unit of the Tata Group. To the authors credit, they have managed to turn what might have remained a document of academic interest into a brisk narrative, by taking the story beyond the engineering to the experiences and emotions.
Objective
The Making Of The Nano by Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal chronicles that journey to motoring history in a straightforward nuts-and-bolts manner, and justifiably so, as the story of how the worlds cheapest car got made doesnt need any flourishes. What it does need is a thrilling ringside view, of people, places, events, disappointments and triumphs, yet this is where the book sometimes sputters. Small Wonder has laid greater emphasis on practically every aspect of the development from the setting up of the teams to the design to the interiors to various mules and Ratans growing frustration and enormous patience with the project. His uncompromising stance on having four doors and a highly reliable braking system, though he relented on different sizes of tyres for front and back. Or, that the Nano has only 2,000 parts against Tata Indicas 3,000. There are three defining, but disruptive, features of Nanovation: one, the pictures and the design blueprints have been chosen aptly. Two, it has plenty of intelligent trivia scattered through the pages. Sample this: The social cost of road accidents is 3 per cent of Indias GDP. Three, it seems the India edition of the book written by US writers has been to borrow from automobile vocabulary homologated for Indian readers by presenting figures in lakhs and crores rather than the oddity of Rupees million that barely a handful of Indians use. The authors seem to have worked hard on sprinkling a plethora of quotes to connect with specific situations during the development of the Nano. From Albert Einstein to Marilyn Monroe to Benjamin Franklin and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, all have been quoted. But since it has been done every so often, at times, the quotes seem forced. As is the entire concept of trying to take out innovation lessons, which the entire book seems to be devoted to. This effort to extract management lessons out of the development of the car is a laudable effort, but it fails to connect with the reader. Because it is right through the book and almost seems like a boring mimicry. Perfunctorily comparing it with the iPod on one hand and the
Nintendo Wii on the other, with no real insights on the latter two ads no value and serves no purpose except dampening the excitement of the reading. This is not the book you would want to read if your sole objective is to learn about the Nano. For that, Small Wonder is more fulfilling. It does not have the quotes, the lessons, the intelligent trivia and all those sketches. Further, it has few pictures. Nevertheless, it satisfies you more than Nanovation does.
Central Idea
A promise is a promise. This is what Ratan Tata said when everyone around him was
sceptical about his promise of delivering a car for just 100,000. Once upon a time there was a dream born of the vision of Ratan Tata to enable middleclass Indians to have a safe and affordable means of personal mobility, to break the shackles of the mind and go where no one had gone before, to create a motor car that would be more than just another automobile. This book tells the story of how that dream was realised. This is the story of the Nano, the Rs1-lakh wonder, and how it came to be. The book starts by giving an insight into how Ratan Tata conceptualised the idea that the company should start working on a car that would be a replacement to the scooter for the middle class and emerge as a safer and affordable means of personal mobility. It tells us how a core team was formed with Girish Wagh as head of the Nano project and how each development was measured and reviewed by the chairman himself. The whole idea was to have technically and ergonomically the best and optimum design without sacrificing safety norms. The making of the Nano has been a struggle and a vindication, a long, arduous and expensive endeavour to cope with a wide range of problems. This, then, is also the story of how Tata Motors, the company behind the project, overcame the limitations imposed by conventional technology and traditional methods of manufacturing to craft a motor car that has changed the automobile world. When Ratan Tata, head of the Tata group of companies, uttered the words A promise is a promise at the first unveiling of the Tata Nano at the Delhi Auto Expo in 2008, it was a telling expression of the effort that had gone and would continue to go into creating the famous Rs1 lakh car. There are nuggets of trivia (some of the names considered for the car were Nio, Inca, Eon and Atom) but its the accounts of the people of hours spent on a shop floor in Pune relentlessly whittling down costs, of being mobbed by angry protestors in West Bengal, of being shunted around the country leaving behind irate families that make this an interesting story. The problem is, there arent enough of these. And so, what could have been a dramatic retelling remains a passive read. The Nano emerged from the vision and as the book reveals doodles of Ratan Tata. But while the book continually emphasises Ratan Tatas involvement and management of the project, his voice is absent. You want to hear more from the man who even chose the 2001
Space Odyssey theme that would play at the cars unveiling; about his fears, his beliefs and his thoughts. But you dont. And this is, perhaps, the books biggest flaw. The launch of the Nano is a contemporary story that will find many interested readers. This book depicts that "Nano" is not just another "Cheap" (in fact cheapest) car but it is outcome of "value engineering" and "cost targeting" (understanding what customer really wants in a certain module and eliminating everything else). It honestly accepts that key to control "value" of an automobile is not any technological breakthrough but many small improvements. I now understand that "Nano" methodology does not just mean the "stripping down of vehicle cost" but it also does mean innovation in manufacturing and planning set up, supply chain, inventory control, supplier management (less # of suppliers with more long term profit sharing and hence ownership and risk sharing). The term Gandhiyan engineering is really suitable for this approach. Indian entrepreneurs finally have understood power, importance and contribution of young design engineers and it shows that their talent has been explored very well. I hope Tata Motors continue on this path. It is too early to say if Nano will do the same to India as FORD's model T did to America. But one thing is for sure that Tata Motors has found recipe for competitive car design and value manufacturing organically on their own with very smart foresight form their chairman Ratan Tata. This seems true start of "self help" practiced by very successful OEMs around the world. I will not be surprised if Tata motor launches 'distributed manufacturing' in the near future The cost factor could have ended up being an albatross around the Nano development teams neck were it not for the level-headed manner in which the impediments arising from it were handled by Ravi Kant and Girish Wagh, the two leaders of the project. I used to tell the team not to bother too much about cost, says Wagh, that the critical part was solving whatever engineering problems we faced and then addressing the cost issue. I didnt want people to get bogged down and defensive about things. Keeping up with and working on the suggestions Ratan Tata had whenever he visited Pune to review the projects progress was another matter. The chairman took a particularly keen interest in the cars styling, and his promptings tended to get Wagh and his boys worried because they inevitably meant an increase in cost. This was par for the course in a development programme where every penny counted, but that did not make it any easier for the Nano team. It got to a stage where Kant had to intervene. He pulled aside Wagh one day and said, Dont get stuck on one rupee and five rupees and ten rupees. Execute whatever he wants on styling and we will see how to compensate on the cost elsewhere. Ratan Tata himself was acutely aware of the cost pressures on the team. Ideas from his end usually came with a question: Girish, I know you will say this is going to increase costs, but can you do it nevertheless? Wagh was never in doubt. I would say, Sir, you tell us what you want and well take care of the cost. My team did not always take kindly to me saying such things. The way they figured it, this did not help them keep costs in check. To me, though, it was clear that Mr Tatas forward-thinking suggestions had to be accommodated; thats what the customer would want and no one understood the customer better than the chairman. We had to banish this image that Tata cars had of not being good enough in their initial run. A far greater challenge was controlling cost at a time when the prices of commodities and raw material were going through the roof, especially during the
four-five years leading up to the Nanos launch in 2009. To add to the troubles, some of our cost targets were not well-defined, says Wagh. This was due to the evolutionary process through which the design and development of the Nano happened, and there was nothing we could do about that. We had a lot of iterations at the layout level, the aggregate level, with subsystems and components to see how best we could cut costs. How much was all this worth? I reckon our efforts brought overall costs down by 25-30 per cent. There was no breakthrough innovation that made this cost saving a reality. Rather, it was a series of minute improvements even engineering boffins might labour to find interesting that did the job. We finally found a solution that may not have achieved our objective to the fullest extent, but we got one that was acceptable, says Wagh The book takes the reader through the roughest patch that the Nano project faced from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand in Gujarat. The Tata group had chosen Singur to fuel industrial revolution in the belt and generate employment for the local population. It was, however, taken off-guard when the move boiled into a political battle. When the lives of the employees were endangered, Ratan Tata decided to shift the plant from Singur. The shifting of the Nano plant from West Bengal to Gujarat was a tough call on part of the Tata group as it had already made huge investments in terms of manufacturing facility, vendor base and delivery schedule. The book also provides an insight into how the Gujarat Government supported the whole project and appreciates Chief Minister Narendra Modi for running the State like a professional chief executive of a company.
and such other events. The book focused on the point of view of Ravi Kant, vice chairman. Even the foreword is contributed my Mr. Ravi Kant himself. A little research over internet revealed that this book was first circulated inside Tata offices in a compact little form which was around 40 pages thick. After the book got enough media attention it was published publicly. We also noticed repetitions all along the way. One sided accounts of the disputes were presented even in the Singur issue, no view was presented for the people who were against the land acquisition. The book concern itself with mostly senior-level employees, the book is as much an ode to the Tata Motors Chairman and the automobile company as it is about the Nano. The book talks about how employees had to move at short notice, children had to change schools mid-term and the whole operation had to be shifted in record time. The stories are touching but then so would be those of farmers who, today, are left without land, without jobs and without hope for a redressal of their grievances. It could have been told in a better, neutral way which would appeal to a wider audience and provide a critical thinking into whole procedure .Such a way would point out design loopholes and things such as technical compromise which resulted in fire cases and land acquisition. There is even a contest which states grab a copy and win a Nano on the cover of the book, which seems suspicious and publishers effort to ramp up sales. There were several things in grey also, like Trinamool Chief Mamta Banerjee was not shown as a complete naysayer but little is said on the subject by the book. There was some ambiguous information too. In his foreword, Ravi Kant, Tata Motors vicechairman, says that there were 1,000 people involved in the Nano project, whereas the book mentions a figure of 500 people. The book also mentions that the Nano has a variable transmission instead of gears, while the opposite of that is true. These kinds of factual errors should not have been present in the book which was written and approved by the insiders. Ratan Tata was always present in the book but his views and opinions about various matters were missing. It would have been good to listen to the man whose brainchild was The Nano.
Affect on Thinking
Nevertheless the book has affected both of us in great ways. This book emphasizes creative thinking. Einstein once said Imagination is more important than knowledge .Great men lives by this principle. Like Henry ford dreamt of creating an mechanic mode of transport, Ratan Tata thought of a revolutionary car which would change the face of automobile industry, an idea which nobody dared to think, let alone make it happen. Such are characteristics of great men who grow and nurture trees under which countless men will rest. Mr. Ratan Tata is one such man. The book also teaches us value of perseverance. The whole organization never felt helpless and tired after taking so many setbacks. As said in movie Rocky It does not matter how hard you hit, what matters is how you rise with a blow after falling . Every time they faced tough times, Tata returned back stronger than ever. Be it design, be it Singur, and be it fire incidents. Another lesson to be learnt from the book is having good, hard working and intelligent people around you, who can transform the idea or a dream. Tata had such people all around them. People like Ravi Kant, Wagh, Vikram Sinha and many others are crucial for the success of a project as ambitious as Nano. The book also teaches us that profit is not the sole objective of business. We have to continuously grow ourselves and face challenges that come. Had Ratan Tata been looking to increase sales, probably he would not risk huge amounts of time and capital into Nano project which was not looking even viable before trying to go extra mile to achieve it. Talking of travelling the extra mile, we have one more lesson from the Nano story. Tata was always prepared to do something extra. They did extensive research, excellent public relations and carved out a product which justified the hype surrounding the Nano.
The book also tells us that nothing is impossible in this world if we have a positive attitude towards life and people all over. These are some of the lessons which can be applied to everybodys life.
Reference
Small Wonder: the making of the Nano By Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal http://www.tata.com http://www.businessworldindia.com/