In his New Year address to the 2.56 lakh employees of the group across 100 countries, Mahindra said in spite of all the problems brought about by the pandemic last year, “some unexpectedly great things had emerged from what seemed like an impossibly bad situation”.

Drawing parallels to the development of COVID-19 vaccines, in which researchers and regulators have fast-tracked the vaccine development process to 10 months which otherwise takes 10 years, he said there are lessons for the group to learn from it in terms of following purpose-driven business, rebooting and re-evaluating.

“I think the first important learning from that story is that the day of the purpose-driven business has arrived,” he said adding manufacturing the vaccine is a true purpose-driven business, which is gaining currency now but the group has been at it since 1997. “Just think, until this year, do you know the average time it took to develop a vaccine 10 years. Yes 10 years. And yet, thanks to this crisis, we have today developed not one but three effective vaccines, within 10 months!” Mahindra added.

The group also emerged stronger by adopting a similar approach, he reasoned.