Calling It A Day

Y.C. Deveshwar at ITC and A.M. Naik at L&T have built a legacy any corporate leader would be proud of. Then there are others whose initiatives are still in the process of bearing fruit.

- E. Kumar Sharma

ANYONE WHO HAS MET BOTH Y.C. DEVESHWAR, synonymous with ITC, and Sanjiv Puri, the new MD & CEO, knows that they are strikingly different – physically that is. And as Puri takes the mantle from Deveshwar, to expect him to slide effortlessly into his mentor’s giant shoes may be unfair. But, thanks to some early thinking by Deveshwar, it may not be very difficult either. Deveshwar has, for the past few years, been involving Puri closely in strategy making and grooming him for February 5, 2017, the day Deveshwar, then 70, quit the executive leadership role and Puri took over as the CEO (he was re-designated as Managing Director effective May 16, 2018). For Deveshwar, who joined ITC in 1968 and has over the 21 years that he has been at the helm turned this tobacco company into an FMCG giant, passing the baton successfully to Puri might count among his biggest successes.

And this is exactly what he, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and Harvard Business School, who led Air India as Chairman and Managing Director between 1991 and 1994, shares with another icon of corporate India — A.M. Naik — who took L&T from a ₹5,000 crore company in 1999 to an over ₹1,20,000 crore engineering conglomerate. Naik, too, has been able to successfully pass on the baton to S.N. Subrahmanyan after spending years grooming him for the top role.

Beyond Tobacco