Corporate India has a succession planning problem. From the leadership questions surrounding Tata Sons to the uncertainty over who could take charge if a company’s most prominent CEO suddenly steps aside, the issue goes well beyond individual businesses. It raises fundamental questions about corporate governance, business continuity and even economic security. Yet, despite the importance of having a clear leadership pipeline, formal succession planning remains uncommon among Indian business families and companies.

In Episode 75 of How India's Economy Works, journalist and author Puja Mehra speaks with Dr. Srinath Sridharann, corporate advisor and succession planning expert, about why Indian companies struggle to prepare for leadership transitions. They discuss the influence of family ownership, the reluctance of promoters to let go, the limitations of independent boards, and why succession planning must extend beyond ownership to management and governance. The conversation also examines examples from Marico, Dabur and the Murugappa Group, and what Indian companies can learn from international practices.

Tune in for insights on why succession planning matters, how weak leadership pipelines threaten business continuity, and what corporate India needs to do to prepare for its next generation of leaders.

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Corporate Governance and Succession Importance

(01:24) The Leadership Pipeline Survival Challenge

(05:34) Cultural Nuances in Global Succession

(09:49) Case Study: Tata Sons Board

(13:30) Framework for Effective Succession Planning

(18:59) Evolution of Indian Corporate Culture

(25:43) Mandating Succession in Listed Companies

(29:20) Institutional Memory and Board Complacency

(31:09) Positive Examples in Indian Business

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript is done by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.

Puja Mehra: Dr. Srinath Sridharann, welcome to the show.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: Thank you, Puja.

Puja Mehra: In recent weeks, we've seen at least two cases where shifts in the boardroom of Tata Suns over the choice of who should lead it, one, and more recently, the confessions made by the Nvidia CEO, both very distinct cases, but both illustrate the importance of corporate governance for business continuity for the economy and even national security when companies are large and systemically important and where it's not very clear who's going to lead them. So, you're the succession planning guru, Srinath.

I want you to help my listeners understand why corporate governance, which is sometimes discussed only in terms of accountability, transparency, and protection of shareholders, becomes important when the question is of the ability of a company to survive a change in leadership or when it looks like leadership may change. So, when something like this happens, why is business continuity not just a corporate matter and begins to be a matter of economic security and at times even national security?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: Sure, but it's a fascinating question, Puja. I think, let's not forget that business or business continuity is all about having the pipeline of very impactful leaders within the business. And for, I think, the history of humankind, so to speak, you saw institutions evolve, you saw nations evolve.

It always had, one, the benefit of having a pipeline of people who could take over from the existing leadership. And if I think theoretically, at least expect a continuous and a smooth transition from one leader to another. Despite all of that, the two examples, let's say the Tata Sons and the NVIDIA, the former being a very institutionally held company, you don't have a one single unique promoter, so to speak, which is the majority of the case in Indian corporate ecosystem.

Over 82% of Indian GDP comes from businesses which are actually family-owned in India, whether they're conglomerate or kirana, 82% of GDP, that's a very sizable population. Whereas in NVIDIA, it's again institutionally held, but we would have never heard of the number two in that company. It's just the founder, CEO, who's been always there, which again, in the Indian context, it's not different.

I mean, you would hear of the founder or the promoter or the family blood, lineage successor, so to speak. They may not necessarily be competent or capable, but because of the lineage, they absolutely inherit what I would call the leadership mantle. To step back to the point, if you don't have the right leader leading the company, the short term might look very good, but the long term, will that company sustain and survive and scale?

That's the biggest challenge. And I think more and more conversations around succession planning need to be done. In India, less than 10% of the families actually do proactive, formal succession planning.

Typically, the myths that I see in the topic of succession planning is they assume real estate, estate planning, tax planning, or writing a legal will for the next generation to inherit, or how to transfer the shares or who will take on a role are succession planning. In my view, it is not so. They're all very important to protect the wealth that they've accumulated.

But the fact is, will this business survive? And what sort of a leader does it need for tomorrow? And henceforth, it's not about today.

And I think that's a very difficult conversation to be had by the patriarch and the matriarch, so to speak. And as more and more Indian companies, large companies are getting listed in the stock exchanges, it is also becoming a fiduciary duty for not only the business families to start thinking about this, but I would suspect that every independent director sitting on those boards have equally fiduciary duty to ask so. But very, very few would actually do that.

A case in point, 64 KMPs died during COVID. 64 KMPs of listed entity. Not one of them had a named successor.

And if you haven't learned from that, I mean, when are we going to learn?

Puja Mehra: My God, I wasn't aware of that. But is there a role for law here? Or do you think this is a matter internal to corporate India?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: So I think the law is already clear. The law that governs the listed entities is to have adequate succession and which is what is the mandate of what we call the NRC, the nomination and the remuneration committee, which by regulation is headed by an independent director. But let's step back and kind of look at it.

If the company is majority owned by the promoter or the promoter has significant minority and influence or even the board appointments, how independent is the actual board? And can the board actually go and ever ask the chairman or the promoter saying, hey, you're ageing? And what about your successor?

And so while theoretically they sound good, practically, I think there are lots of constraints. So I almost little cheekily call it the Indian mythological phrase, Markindeya syndrome. Each of us think we're immortal.

We'll always be 16 and we will stay forever. Unless we bring in individual accountability for some of these, I don't think we will move ahead with succession planning at all.

Puja Mehra: Are there some international best practises or gold standard examples that can help us here?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: Sure. So I mean, different countries have their own cultural nuance and have built what is right for them. Of course, to be fair, we can't just copy and paste the Western playbook and say, hey, this is what we do in corporate governance.

Hence, we should do this in succession planning. A classic example, Japan. Japan by law, it's very, very common for the business families if they don't have a son, they actually adopt the son-in-law as the son.

So the son-in-law changes the surname and continues as a successor. So you have some companies which go back even 300, 400 years of lineage. If you look at the Western world, let's say the US and the UK predominantly and more so US, the listed entities are very clear that they're institutionally held.

I mean, even in this NVIDIA's case, the moment the founder made the disclosure, the board, by the way, on that board, except for the founder, everybody else is an independent director. I mean, I can't expect or imagine that scenario in India for a very, very long time ahead. So the independent directors actually ran this meeting, called for an investigation, all of those.

So succession planning is also very cultural. If you look at the, let's say the Nordic countries, they take it far more seriously. They stick to the terms.

When I say the term, the tenure of two terms of five years each and all of that, they don't sidestep and come back to the company again through the back door, calling themselves as non-executive advisor and stuff like that. In India, we keep doing that. I think the best practise is, I think I would go back, since we are also talking about the Indian culture, almost there are enough instances in our own folklore, so to speak, that there is a time and place for everybody and everything.

So at what time, when do you retire? And of course, I will suddenly hear some of the critics in the readers or the listeners to actually say, listen, 60 is no time to retire. I agree, because it was brought in Germany at the concept of formal retirement.

In today's time, people do live till 85 and 90. What do you do? And I always go back to question that.

We are the only, I think, demographic pattern where 80 crore Indians, individuals are less than 35 years of age. Do we have sufficient bandwidth for them? Do we have jobs for them?

That's the largest question for corporate India to question. Despite the fact that corporate India, the formal sector is less than 15% of the total economy, so to speak, and the number of jobs. So I think very clearly what does one do, which is why I think when I look at the public sector governance, for all the criticism and the critique that it invites, I think sometimes based on the rules and regulations they face, they at least will know that at the age 60, they will retire.

In the private sector, let's say even in the most regulated sector, the BFSI, you have found CEOs go back to their board almost unabashedly, gone back to the regulator asking for an extension of tenure for the sitting MD, which in my instance only shows that they did not prepare for succession planning. If you knew that this MD was for a five-year term, and the moment you appointed, the second or the third year, shouldn't you have started looking for a successor or grooming them internally? It's a failure of the board, which is why I always say that it's very difficult to go and talk to the superstar CEO syndrome, which board member would dare to go and talk to them and say, hey listen buddy, you're going to retire in the next two years, we are going to find a successor.

So unless we can solve some of these cultural nuance, otherwise little cynically, I think succession planning is so popular in the last two years, it must be the most trending hashtag after what we saw strategy, ESG, DEI, resilience was a term during COVID. Succession planning, I think it is still a misnomer because it involves a lot of difficult conversation. How do you ever go and tell a promoter or a very popular CEO that I'm going to actually evaluate your competency or your successor's competency?

Tough conversation, Puja.

Puja Mehra: Let's take the example of the Tata Sons case. Why do you think the Tata Sons board did not think sufficiently about who may succeed Mr. Chandrasekhar going forward? Maybe right now, maybe five years later, I'm not even going into that question, but why did they not take up this?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: Yeah, I mean one, I can't speak for them, but if I were to as an outside commentator and somebody who understands this subject, let's go back to the history of Tata Sons. When you look at them, the previous chairpersons were legendary. I mean, almost 50 years of tenure was between two chairpersons, JRD Tata and Mr. Ratan Tata. Very larger than life. And let's not forget that they did go through grinds of turning around the companies, group companies, selling group companies, fighting the Satraps who did not want to toe the line, so to speak, the institutional line. And they faced all of that.

And when you look at that, that larger than life image was probably to an extent carried forward by a former chairperson, Mr. Cyrus Mistry. Of course, we're not getting into the controversy that what happened to him was very unfair, according to me, because he was also a minority shareholder. But if you look at the current chairperson, does he share the same larger than life gravitas and personality?

And I would beg to differ and assume no, he does not have that. And two, you also have to remember that last year, Mr. Noel Tata had asked this question about the performance of the chairperson of Tata Sons, that so much money had been lost and various businesses were bleeding, which is why in one of my columns, I had asked this piece, where is the relevance of Tata group companies? Because the world is changing, you need to keep updating your portfolio company, so to speak.

If you think the Tata Sons as a holding company is like the common thread, the holding company, they need to realign their portfolio to how the markets are changing, the consumers are changing, and where is your capital going to go? So which means that at some point, you'll have to shut units, start new units and all of that. If you ask me, I don't think they've done that very well for the stature that they have.

And legacy alone cannot save you from bad market valuations. Legacy alone will not give you cutting edge talent. So that's the second point I want to talk about.

If you look at the previous chairpersons, they all of them had a dream team in the whole core. I mean, if you look at Mr. Ratan Tata's dream team, you add Mr. Gopalakrishnan, Krishnakumar, Isha Toussaint, I mean, and stalwarts like them, each of their dream team were stalwarts, who could almost solve anything from growth problem to scale problem to crisis issues and so on and so forth. Where is that dream team today in Tata sense?

And I think a larger conglomerate, again, it's a concentration risk. If everything has to be done by only one individual, you anyway have a large succession problem staring at you. So I'm not surprised that the board kindly, after accepting a chairperson's resignation, to appoint the same person, I mean, while the legal experts and the regulatory experts might come in, I think it's very poor taste, that you were almost lazy, not searching for a successor and you appointed the same person.

And I'm not commenting on the politics of it. I'm sure, I mean, it's politically completely loaded, the corporate politics and the political politics as well. But I think it is very poor, lazy stance on succession plan.

Where are those talent bench strength? Today, for example, if they were to list in the DRHP, how many, where are those six or seven stalwarts or KMPs will they show? Saying that this is my whole core, I'm listing this, these are the big hitters.

I mean, you need big hitters. Where are they? So I think there would be, I think, a talent discount that they will have to face for the short term.

Puja Mehra: As somebody who understands succession planning so well, what would you recommend? How should companies go about it? What is good succession planning?

What does it comprise?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: So I would always say succession planning is do it when you don't need it. It's like saying I'm going to buy an insurance policy or health insurance policy when I don't need it. It's an insurance policy.

It is to ensure that in a crisis, in a bad zone, you are still stable, your company is still stable. But again, we must remember the analogy of peacetime soldier and wartime soldier. So is your CEO, is your CXO bench strength peacetime soldiers or wartime soldiers?

In a very stable market, I might have a great dream team which is achieving 10% growth and whatever. But let's say a new competitor comes in. Do they have the guts and the aggression to take charge and take over and still maintain that track record?

And I think these are conversations which I would expect today's boards to actually debate and discuss, which means you're not actually doubting the capability of a current CEO and team. But the reality is these scenario conversations are absolute must. They become far more complicated when the promoter's son or daughter is involved in that hot seat because you can never have that conversation with the promoter saying, hey, your son or daughter are not necessarily wartime soldiers.

You still have to make them look good. So I like this phrase which the Chinese use, Puja, they call it saving face. How do you save somebody's face and how do you give them a graceful exit or a graceful alternate?

You can't say that you're not a great leader, but you still have to find sources. So whenever I see a lot of attrition at the senior level in some of the groups or very consistent regular exits, in my mind it is saving face. You're saving face for the promoter and getting rid of the professionals.

You can't fire the promoter or the promoter's children. So these are conversation to be succession is always test, am I being relevant and am I being significant in the markets that I serve? This is a simple two phrases I use, relevant and significance.

Otherwise, why are you in this business? I'm naturally asked always this question saying, does it mean that I must have a large market share? And I tell people, not really.

Stick to, you have amazing boutique companies which are extremely profitable, whose return on investments, return on equity is extremely high. So you will have to pick the market that you understand very well and so, let's say classic banking sector, right? I mean, there are banks and more banks and yet, where is the innovation in product?

You almost have on the asset side and the liability side, almost the same kind of product. Everybody follows the market leader on the private sector as well as public sector. But can you be a very regional and a very boutique bank and yet be profitable?

Yes, we have some of those examples in our midst. You can be a regional bank, you don't have to be a pan India with having branches everywhere. So the succession planning must start very, very early.

So I use this three-letter framework called OMG. Succession planning is not only for the ownership, the O, it is also for M, the management and it is also for G, which is the governance part of it. It's a myth that when some of the board members tell me, the CEO reports to them and I tell them, no, your role as a board member, the CEO does not report to you.

The role of a board member by law and regulation is very, very different. The roles that we play, I can never know more than the CEO or the MD of a company, operationally, tactically, strategically about that business, even though I sit on his board. The reality is I do a fiduciary responsibility that I'm supposed to bring to that table.

So I think it's very interesting that the OMG part, if we can solve, typically I find the Indian business promoters assuming that M is given because my children will follow and take over from me. They only worry about O, which is why I'm extremely worried whenever wealth managers and bankers start speaking about their succession planning experts. I kind of get very worried for their clients they serve because they might do tax planning and wealth planning.

They can never talk about business continuity. They can never talk about the board continuity because you can't change the board overnight. You also need institutional memory to stay forever.

That's because the Indian corporates are very low on the knowledge management side. We hardly archive and document things. If today we have to go back and look at each of our conglomerates who have existed at least for 40 years or 50 years and say that where is that institutional memory and can you show me all of those archives?

It doesn't cost anything much for them for their balance sheet size. Can they get a couple of historians to actually think and sit and document everything? The failures, the lessons, all of those.

I think it's a very rich repository. Some of the families including the mid-sized companies and smaller, let's say regional businesses are actually doing this very interestingly. It's the conglomerates and the large companies which are forgetting that they have more institutional memory that they're losing.

So to me succession planning is across these three layers. The ownership layer, the management layer and the governance layer. Assuming for the fact the generational shift also will need cultural shift within.

Your owners are changing and your customers are also changing and are you speaking a new language and it takes time.

Puja Mehra: Do you think the culture is evolving, corporate culture is evolving because all said and done India's corporate sector, corporate culture is fairly young relative to other countries. Is this something that will take time and is work in progress maybe?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: I don't think Indian corporate culture is young necessarily for the simple fact the Indian enterprises have existed for very long. But in the modern corporate avatar of let's say under the companies act, they might be far younger. And if you also remember Puja, almost every decade or two there is a huge culling out of companies who fade away to oblivion simply because they did not reinvent himself.

And that is also part of poor or lack of succession planning. You did not see that coming and you thought that you are the satrap of that sector and you simply vanished because the market changed. You did not reinvent yourself.

So we assume that these are only milestones like let's say the pre-liberalisation in the post and then the startup community and disruption so on so forth. It is not so. Almost every decade we are seeing something massive stripped in promoters just disappearing because they are irrelevant anymore.

That's why I use that word. Are you relevant and significant?

Puja Mehra: Is it because more than corporate culture we've had a trading history? We've had people who've been traders more than sort of in the corporate setup.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: I think the recent times if I look at let's say the last probably 35 odd years of post-liberalisation, there are a couple of trends which are easy. Post-liberalisation you had first generation entrepreneurs who became phenomenally successful. That's one.

They realised that it's not the licence raj alone. At the same breath I'm also saying licence raj has not disappeared in India. It has taken different avatar.

I mean we should not be delusional about it. Two, I think the next generation of some of these entrepreneurs have been educated in the modern style and format not only in India but also abroad. So since the 90s you had probably the top 5000 families, business families in India across not just listed.

I've sent the kids abroad for education. A lot of them had also exposure to how the rich investor community works abroad. That's two.

The third one I think very clearly is has that changed the way they think? No. I call it with all due respects I think the lala system has not disappeared so I call it the modern lala.

They have the best of education, best of experience and exposure but have they changed their psyche around how to deal with people who work with them or for them? Not necessarily. If you look at all of this yes we still have the trading instinct.

I think there are fantastic outliers though. Outliers as in who think about being the karta of the enterprise or the empire so to speak. But one thing phenomenal that takes my breath away Puja across Indian business ecosystem is the ability to take risks, ability to make long-term bets on their businesses.

Yes sometimes it can go wrong but I think if you leave it to a professionally run, professionally owned, institutionally led board company will they take some of those risks and bets? No I don't think so. You need the I think the audacity, the positive audacity of a promoter to say I am betting on this.

Classic example, telecom sector. Do you think the Jio or Airtel of the world would exist if the promoters did not push through? Not at all.

It wouldn't have existed. Let me do a counter here. We have had MNCs in India for over a century.

Nestle's of the world, Hindustan Lever's of the world. Look at the growth rate and look at the growth rate of the D2C brands. The D2C brands which did not exist 7 to 10 years ago, today they have been growing phenomenally well.

Yes we can always argue that the capital of the race, all of that is far humongous and some of them are not listed. But what does it show? The very fact that Colgate Palmolive took a stake in such a D2C brand to help them think through modern distribution channel in digital way is also an indicator that the old school doesn't work.

Nestle when it did succession planning and brought leader from outside despite the fact that there are probably over 50 Indian leaders in the Nestle global system also shows that why? I mean to me it's still a question mark saying that you could have brought somebody from India who knows India far deeper with the digital ecosystem and all that. So I think we also tend to kind of hero worship the MNCs in the western world in the name of corporate governance.

Yes to be a fact I always say that their governance because they have the benefit of having started probably 100 years earlier or 50 years earlier. At the same time they don't have the aggression to say that I want to grow at 20% not at 6%. There's also a difference.

So I think we'll have to do trade-offs and I think as an Indian investor if I were to look at some of these, I think most of us I think all of us who are about 25 years of age I always say that we are living in borrowed relevance. If 70% of India is less than that age and we claim that as demographic dividend and what are we living for the next generation. So a classic case in point however uncomfortable this question might be.

If I am nearly 65 or 70 from a non-technology background and I'm say I'm a great child accountant or a lawyer sitting on a listed company board and that company is spending thousand crores on capex on AI. Am I the guy to ask that question or do I need a younger one? When I have some conversations with younger founders of unicorns, it's phenomenal.

In their mind if you have to be a CDO you have to be less than 35 because the technology has changed. So I cannot say I grew up in the cobalt fortran and the mainframe era. That's technology that's not digital.

So some of these shifts however uncomfortable are to the promoters they will have to bring it and I think the new age ones are doing phenomenal job there. So are we trader? Are we entrepreneur?

Are we capitalist? I think some of our businesses are absolute capitalists. Some of our businesses are capitalists with a tinge of socialism and I think sometimes we have catchphrases like CSR to airbrush them.

Puja Mehra: You know I thought it was very interesting that the Divideo board a statement they gave about how US national and economic security is paramount to the interests of the company's shareholders and the company itself. The western world may also be going back to the heavy hand of the state and in fact all the controls over ship supplies probably have something to do with what happened at the company. We don't know for sure but that's the accusation.

So this brings me back to my question of is there a role here for the law to say that you know this is the retirement age or perhaps you have to plan for succession because otherwise this is a huge economic risk. We don't want to expose the economy to these kind of risks.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: I mean it's an interesting question. My answer has to be a little controversial. So the point is this right in India we almost hero worship CEOs who return a great profit for us or who we have seen on the news forever when we grow up.

So there is a I think a natural society FOMO about that particular individual if that individual is not there which is to me very unfair. It also shows very poor succession planning and the lazy one at that. NVIDIA's case is applicable to probably over two-third of Indian large listed entities.

I mean if that CEO were to disappear tomorrow or have a health issue or pass away where is the next line and I think if you're very serious about it we'll have to act. So it's no different from can the law expect let's say at least the listed entities to have a sealed envelope with two names as a drop dead successor for every CEO and do it annually. Every year that let's say when you're doing the annual appraisals and all that the same NRC can put it in the sealed envelope and keep it and probably the listed regulated entities like banks, insurance companies, asset management can leave that with the regulator.

Is it possible? Yes. But then this is where it brings me back to that question.

If this were such an important strategic one why are they not doing it? Why do you need to wait for the law? It's a good practise you can still do it yourself.

Puja Mehra: In fact my question to you is that you know we don't even see the markets pricing in this risk of no successor being very obvious. We don't see markets punishing companies where they don't see a succession line or planning. So the concept seems to be sort of out of sight out of mind.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: I mean very fact that a Indian promoter has to write a formal will and keep it ready to avoid succession battle was learned by us only 20 years ago. And I go back to the succession topic saying that if only when I wrote my book Family and Danda I actually cheekily said I didn't have to write this book if all of us followed the Mahabharata. I think that's the first battle for succession planning.

It was not done and then there was a battle and we haven't learned as human vices, greed, jealousy, lust and so on and so forth has it changed in the last 10,000s of years? No it has not. So the reality is are we waiting for a major crisis out in the news for us to change or for us to make it into law?

I think no not really. I see a lot of business families going through the same bitter disputes and battles within the family and sometimes it becomes I mean there are as we speak there are at least 10 different listed entities whose family disputes are actually in the courts of law in India, large groups as well. So it's not as if they're not fighting and I think more importantly the economic depletion of that time if you're a promoter and fighting a battle and it's going to take your mind space, you're being very indifferent to your minority shareholders but again this is where I have this question.

What are the proxy advisory firms doing about it? Isn't it an important question for them to ask? What are the mutual funds doing about this?

Isn't it an important question for them to ask when they take positions on those companies? And very importantly what are the board members in those companies have to ask? Again the board members I don't think have such an independence of mind because the corporate India is very ruthless.

If you ask such a tough question you're soon labelled as a difficult director and other board roles quickly shut down for you.

Puja Mehra: And in fact this isn't limited to family-run or family-dominated businesses. We are seeing it happen I mean even Ratan Tata did not plan adequately for succession in his group.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: So I mean Tata's don't have succession planning in my mind. I mean the depth of talent that they should have they don't have even at the board level they don't have and again most of the bulk of Indian companies don't have it at all. If somebody something were to happen to the top person today what will happen to them?

I mean to your case in point about the law regulation stipulating to them and the Indian board still while they speak much about stewarding future role and proactive role they're only sticking to the base of governance which is compliance. Everybody claims we are complying but that's a floor that's not the ceiling that's not the standard. If you really are good about corporate governance and you want to do social stewardship rise above that.

So I think that's where the largest and which is why I said earlier I think sometimes the public sector governance seems better because you know at age 60 they retire. I mean yes there is also huge lobbying for the retired one to have sinecure and come back in different avatar. But that's much smaller than the private sector one.

The private sector one the large institutions in India which were also institutionally had no promoter they have had the managing directors stay back almost forever despite health issues. Why? Where are the investors not asking those questions?

Why are the regulators I mean regulators can't kind of intervene there unless there's a major issue with the company. But I think it also does disservice to a line of saying that the next 50 leaders would have assumed that at age 55 they will get to the next promotion and hopefully get a board seat by the time they retire. It doesn't happen.

So this is why I go back the individual flaws or vices or need for their own larger than life image hurts a lot of people. Very few actually think or introspect on that.

Puja Mehra: On the other hand do we have any shining examples of Indian companies that have managed this well?

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: So I think quite a few. If you look at let's say the Marico example Mr. Harsh Marivala stewardship brilliant on this right. The succession he did it very very well that it is professionals who will lead it on.

So he did that OMG and he came from a family where he moved away from a joint family of traders and set this up. Brilliant example. If you look at let's say the Burmans the Dabur family early in mid 90s they were one of the first Indian conglomerate to get a non-family professional CEO for their whole group which is phenomenal and they've always held that.

I mean no family member actually goes and does the executive role so to speak. So there are enough examples again in Murugappa group which now is splitting but the fact is it has been a continuous lineage of eight generations where every family member had to go through a specific amount of education formal education and then start from the grassroot level and grow up the rank of course they could have done better with dealing and allowing for women within the family to take the role and we saw that battle play out. So allowing for the idiosyncrasies here and there I think there are quite a good examples of how to allow the family members and what is the base minimum standard for a family member to be qualified to be even in the reckoning for leadership role. It's not as if genetically just because you are my son you would always get the CEO role.

They had to earn that so to speak. So again that's a very tough conversation for any parent and promoters are also parents. So how do they ever ask that question is my son or daughter competent.

We still see the bias towards or against women played out in Indian business families. They don't get the roles. You'll be shocked that there are still communities and companies which actually formally do a separation agreement between the daughter and the son where the daughter or the the worry is the son will be overshadowed by the son-in-law.

So they have actually a non-compete between the son and the daughter in certain lines of business and I'm not talking about the large conglomerates. I'm talking about even the smaller companies, even the unlisted companies. They don't want the son-in-law to compete with the son in the same industry and people will say oh this is how our culture is.

This is what our community or the caste follows. So these are inherited one. I don't think modern education has fixed any of this.

Puja Mehra: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking us through this.

Dr. Srinath Sridharann: Thank you Puja.