It is difficult to give up power. It requires enormous courage to give it up, especially when the going is good. It comes ever so naturally only to a few. Late K.S. Narayanan was an exception. Upon touhing 60, he quit as managing director.
“In a company where every employee is expected to retire at 60, it does not seem fair for an MD to hang on any longer than that,” he said in his book “Friendships and flashbacks — my life and times.”
To step back and cede active control to the new order — even if it meant passing on the baton to one’s offspring — revealed the aligned mindset of a confident entrepreneur in Narayanan. His thought process, perhaps, became the guiding fulcrum subsequently for his sons to build the Sanmar business around.
Negotiating skills
His negotiating skills with bankers were legendary. The manner in which he navigated The India Cements and Chemplast out of trouble was well-known. Little known, however, was his rescue act for The Music Academy, which is considered the Mecca of Carnatic music. When the academy ran into financial trouble in the late ’60s, there was this suggestion to turn the Academy into a cinema hall at least for a part of the year! At the prodding of Late T.T. Krishnamachari, Narayanan successfully negotiated with the Indian Bank an easy repayment scheme for the institution. That saw him nominated as a patron of the academy.
In the post-IPL (Indian Premier League) era, cricket has become a religion for every countryman and corporates vie with one another to get a piece of the cricketing action. In former times, however, only a few like Narayanan suo motu nurtured cricketers and cricket. There was no quid pro quo. The Chemplast-sponsored Jolly Rovers even today remains an iconic name in the cricketing map of the city of Chennai.
It requires a law to enforce CSR (corporate social responsibility) these days. But Narayanan and his ilk, too, served. And, they did it quietly without much ado. “I was no flower cultivated in the hot house of management school,” he narrated in his book. For him, it was learning by experience. And, he laid much emphasis on family values. That, perhaps, goaded him to embark upon on an ad hoc style of helping students by serving vaara saapaddu (weekly food).
Subsequently, this was extended to fee sponsorship. Since then, the Narayanan clan and the Sanmar Group have gone on to consistently contribute to social causes, including for of education and health.
As he elucidated in his book, his managerial skills were acquired in the ‘school of experience.’ To put it in the words of a Sanmar insider, “He (Narayanan) was a management guru with dozens of management textbook rolled into one.” The HR (human relationship) skills assiduously built and practised by him, perhaps, were primarily the reason for the Sanmar Group to successfully carry forward many a joint venture in a marriage of happy co-existence. Even as the Sanmar fraternity celebrates the birth centenary of Narayanan on January 30, the way the group suo motu undertook to pay up every depositor of Overseas Sanmar many summers ago when the industry was going through trying times, showed the ethical standards set by him.