It was rather cute of moderator Paul Beckett of WSJ to introduce Ratan Tata (Harvard AMP, 1971) as the owner of the lovely hotel when a few hundred Harvard Business School (HBS) alums gathered in the Taj Mahal Ball Room Tuesday. The fast at Delhi’s Ramlila Ground lent character to this eclectic huddle of dark suits. On hindsight, it was only natural that Anna Hazare’s collision against corruption became the live case on ‘higher ambition’, headlined in the Harvard Business Publishing book that paid for the red wine. A narrative on 36 business leaders, including Tata and NR Narayana Murthy, who benefitted from such ambition, with wine in our bloodstreams, brought back vignettes of innocent living group discussions we would have in McArthur Hall with only the Charles and a clean white board as our background.

Anna provoked it. It wasn’t every day that Tata, seated amidst a galaxy of talent – Murthy, Anand Mahindra, Anu Aga, Nitin Nohria and Ravi Venkatesan – would admit in characteristic deadpan: India had become more corrupt than before. Only the nature of corruption had changed. From cornering licences you now have to wangle contracts and manipulate the conditionalities. Else, you lose business. In normal times, Tata would say it only in a rarified interview room to WSJ or FT.

Tata must have carried exasperation resonated in the Tata Power annual meeting earlier in the day, where he had told shareholders that the company would chase more business opportunities outside India. The realist would say, Tata is unable to manage the political sharks at home. It wasn’t as if he didn’t try, but his Niira Radia’s striking abilities fell short of the asking rate.

Candour apart, this wasn’t the time and place to say, “guys, I feel awful about it, but I did pay a bribe, just a while back.” Mahindra came closest to admitting he was tempted! The freshly-minted Harvard MBA of 1981 had run into a regulatory challenge, details of which he didn’t really disclose, and his father-in-law counselled him not to bribe his way out. But the old man’s rationale wasn’t the ethics involved. It was a hard-nosed business decision that would save the group a lot of speed money in the long run. “(The bribe seekers) ultimately gave up on us… they thought we were useless,” Mahindra observed, impishly.

The intervention allowed Nohria to point towards the framework itself. “There’s a slippery slope of bribing one’s way out of trouble. It may get you to make a million-dollar company. But you won’t get to a billion.”

Is Anna, unwittingly, making a case for 'Kaun Banega Billionaire’! Well, who knows, Nohria and India Research Centre’s Anjali Raina would soon have Tarun Khanna writing one on NGO India Against Corruption. 

In my worn-at-8-am-open-collar-shirt amidst a hundred Canalis and Versaces, I wondered what they did when the traffic mama stood between them and a million-dollar deal, and only two hundred rupees would shoo the pest away. Or, how ‘higher ambition’ would help my 78-year-old father, when the clerk in Lucknow housing authority called him thrice from Dehradun, for a scrap of certified paper, if he didn’t get his Rs 4,000 commission? Or, when a crew of a sanctimonious news channel showed up at my wife’s Panda Wok, demanding a fake bill.

Mahindra pointed to defining moments in a nation’s life, Anna’s fast being one such candidate. But I wondered how a Lokpal would change the stained fabric of corporate India. It’s all very well to blame netas and babus, but what about ‘babus’ within India Inc.? A CEO and alum I can’t name admitted to me right there that though his conglomerate has a sterling reputation against bribes, he looks the other way when an executive of his files his TA bill. The company doesn’t pay for alcohol, so the executive bills for several kilos of ‘laddoos’! Should he have stated the truth?
And what does one do when business guests have to be taken to dance bars and they expect cash in hand for tips? There are smart bar owners out there now who hand you cash via credit cards: yes, the man swipes your plastic and gives you cash against a commission. The bill obviously doesn’t state that the transaction was to induce the dancing ladies, 20 servings of peanuts is more like it!

Lest this end on a cynical note, Aga, former chairman of Thermax, education activist, and member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, told us that our business “cannot survive in a society that fails and in a country like ours with such huge problems, elementary education, malnutrition and healthcare, among others”. So while we do for our business, if we’re blind to this, our insensitivity will permeate in our business environment also.

“Reach out — not to every cause — but do get involved when there’s something like Anna Hazare’s thing. A cause which you can strongly believe in you, need to have the guts to speak up.” Aga advised. Madam, thanks to the hospitality of Governance Now, this piece is my point of start! I hope your Thermax and those of your friends like Tatas, Mahindras, Microsoft, and Infosys show zero tolerance in their advertisements to media platforms that mask paid news as journalism.
At his station of life, Murthy can challenge us with a simple test: “Ask yourself the question in dealing with customers, shareholders, employees, politicians, bureaucrats and society at large, and then ask if this action of mine going to enhance respect for me?”
 
But is there an answer on Ground Zero?
 
PS: I left Mumbai to be in time for my return flight, but Gajanan Gandhe (AMP, 2009), my batchmate and co-attendee, added to my insight on what I didn’t hear for myself.