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The Aditya Birla Group is an India-based multinational conglomerate. The Group has diversified business
interests and is a leading player in all the sectors in which it operates such as aluminum rolling, viscose
staple fiber, metals, cement, viscose filament yarn, branded apparel, carbon black, chemicals, fertilizers,
insulators, financial services, telecommunications, BPO, and IT services. Some 40 years ago the
company began to expand internationally. Over the past eight years, it has become five times bigger
in terms of revenue and three times bigger in terms of EBITDA. Now it has operations in 40 countries
and gets more than 56 percent of its revenue from outside India. McKinseys Rajat Gupta and Suzanne
Heywood talked with Dr. Misra in January 2012.
An interview with
Santrupt Misra,
Aditya Birla Group
HR Director and
CEO of Carbon Black
Perspectives on global organizations
74
McKinsey: How do you connect employees to
the company across so many different cultures?
Santrupt Misra: We have been able to make
the local people feel part of our company very
quickly while preserving what is important to
them. We have awards that honor individuals
and teams from across the world for outstanding
achievement. For example, a lady from Egypt
was honored for her exemplary role in keeping
the plant safe during the Egyptian revolution in the
face of many threats. Similarly, a team from North
America was honoured for technical innovation.
Weve typically held the award ceremony in India
but have started holding it in different parts of the
world. We bring the nominees together, even
the most junior employees in the organization,
whether they are Canadian or Thai or Indonesian
or Korean. And we do a live Webcast to all
employees and their families globally. An equally
meaningful platform is our leadership center in
Mumbai, where many employees attend learning
programs: in the elevator, thank you and good
morning are written in seven languages, so
people dont feel that this is an Indian company
thats only telling me in Hindi what to do. Were
also global in terms of talent development. Even
though many people dont move for personal or
family reasons, all our internal job postings are
made available to all our employees in the world.
So I think they feel if they do want to, they can
move. This can be really helpful. For example, we
have brought young Thai engineers to work in the
remote parts of India for six months on a project.
They go back with tremendous experience and
can talk about how they were part of the activities
and festivals in India too.
As we grow further, we need to become
more efficient in moving knowledge and best
practice around our organization. Part of this
will be accelerating the development of peer
leadership. We are growing as a company more
rapidly than people grow, so we need to develop
more leaders at all levels. Simultaneously, we
need to create a very strong employer brand
so that if we do not manage to develop enough
people, we can hire.
Weve found that this process of connecting
people with the company is a particular challenge
with acquisitions. In an acquisition, you get a
group of people who have a memory and a
history, a pride associated with their organization,
and you get their culture. To integrate your culture
and that new culture of the acquired business in a
globalized context, you have the national cultures
and the organizational cultures, so in effect youre
trying to combine three or four things. Weaning
people away from the way they have done things
or questioning what they have done in the past
is very difficult, and during an acquisition youre
trying to mold the whole organization at the same
time, which is far more difficult. This is one of
several reasons that I think inorganic growth is
much more difficult than organic growth.
McKinsey: How have you used technology
tohelp you operate globally?
Santrupt Misra: Our use of information and
communication technology (ICT) has really helped
us become global. For example, we acquired
Colombian Chemicals six months ago, and the
first thing I established was video connectivity
between them and our locations elsewhere and
mail integration so that they have access to our
portal, our knowledge, our e-learning, and every
other support.
We have to be careful, though, to remain very
responsive locally. There has been a lot of local
empowerment at one level, but with the growth of
ICT we have become more headquarter centric.
Rajat Gupta
Suzanne Heywood
75
This hasnt been a deliberate policy; its just that
people in the distant territories have found ICT an
easy way to kick the ball upstairs. Now we need to
learn to push back, to say dont come back just
because you have access to me. But we need to
figure out how to make sure that empowerment is
exercised within a framework where the risk issues
are well understood.
McKinsey: How do you build connections to
local communities?
Santrupt Misra: In every country we work in,
we become part of the community and we try
to participate physically, not just make financial
contributions. Sometimes it is building physical
assets, like a vocational training center in Thailand.
In Egypt, there are no adequate community toilets,
so I am trying to take an Indian organization that
puts up cost-effective public sanitary facilities to
Egypt to work with the government on public toilet
facilities. And after the floods in Thailand we were
providing tarpaulins from our factories and we sent
our electricians to repair electric connections.
McKinsey: How does your global scale help
you with customers?
Santrupt Misra: Whenever our customers have
been in need in their country, we have been able to
use our global presence to provide them support
and services from other locations, sometimes at
significant cost to us, just to make sure that our
customers understand we are a global company.
To give an example, when the Egyptian revolution
happened and there was no transport and ports
were on strike, we offered to bring our customers
materials from Thailand and India to make sure
there were no stockouts at their end. We made
sure that our shipments from the factory were
there, ready to be delivered whenever the port
was open for a couple of hours. We were able
to master the new logistics process internally
very quickly. Being honest, staying in touch with
customers, putting the sales and marketing
people in touch with their counterparts in other
regions, and moving people quickly lets us help
those customers.
We have always been comfortable delivering
products and customer service through our own
people, our own channels, our own networks. As
we expand, though, well need to be able to rely
on third parties, partnerships, and outsourced
services. So were reimagining what we need
to do within the organization and what can we
deliver on behalf of the organization through a
network of partners. We have to figure out how
we create an integrated system that allows
us to deliverthe services and products to our
customersefficiently.
However, we are already able to manage a lot of
supply chains very successfully: for example, our
pulp comes from South Africa and from Canada,
gets converted into fiber in India, Thailand, and
Indonesia; then the yarn is manufactured in seven
other countries; and fabric is made somewhere
else again. So we have been able to integrate
and manage supply chains across multiple
businesses. We also have strong relations with
global customers and with global suppliers
people who supply us pipeline equipment,
motors, and even IT. We not only deliver
products but also access products and services
seamlessly across the globe.
McKinsey: How will you know when youve
become a truly global corporation?
Santrupt Misra: One metric is the proportion
of our revenue that comes from outside our
country of origin. Our revenue base is already
fairly dispersed across different regions of the
Perspectives on global organizations
76
globe and about 58 percent of our revenue
comes from outside India. A second metric is
diversity of employees; currently only about 28
percent of our employees are outside India. We
operate in 40 countries and have people from
37 nationalities working with us, but we need to
be still more diverse. Id like to see 50 percent
of our people be non-Indians by 2015. More
importantly, we will know we are more global
when our top 100 managers include people
from at least 20 nationalities; today there
are 7 or 8. The same is true of shareholders.
The last and most important criterion is how
widely our corporate brand is recognized by
key stakeholders around the world. That is the
ultimate test of the global nature of a company.
Santrupt Misra
Education
PhD in Public Administration,
India
PhD in Industrial Relations,
Aston Business School, UK
Career highlights
Aditya Birla
(1996present)
CEO, Carbon Black Business
(2009present)
Global Director, HR
Employment history with J.K.
Group, Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Hindustan Lever Ltd.
Fast facts
Dr. Misra is a director on the
Aditya Birla Management
Corporation Private Limited
Board. He is also a member
of the boards of the Aditya
Birla Science and Technology
Company Ltd., Alexandria
Carbon Black Co. SAE., Thai
Carbon Black Public Co. Ltd.,
and Alexandria Fiber Co. SAE.,
which are part of the Aditya
Birla Group
Dr. Misra has received
several awards including the
Role Model & Exemplary
Leader Award at Asias Best
Employer Brand Awards 2010,
Singapore
He also holds multiple
fellowships including:
Fellowship of the National
Academy of Human
Resources (NAHR), US
Fellowship of the All India
Management Association
(AIMA)
And he is an Eisenhower fellow
Dr. Misra has published a book
and several articles. His areas
of interest include organization
development, change
management, management
training, and leadership
Rajat Gupta is a director in McKinseys Mumbai office and Suzanne Heywood is a principal in
McKinseys London office.
Copyright 2012 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.