Like official biographies, books commissioned by companies to mark their key milestones often turn out to be too effusive. Doing What is Right: The Crisil Story , brought out on the 25th anniversary of the company, does not entirely escape this trap. The constraints in authoring such books are understandable but the writers, Hemanth Gorur and Sumit Chowdhury of Bangalore-based My Life Chronicles, could have kept the accolades subtle and the writing-style less melodramatic.
In essence, the story of India’s first rating agency is this. Bankers Narayanan Vaghul and Pradip Shah had the foresight in the late-1980s to sense a market need for credit ratings in India. Their gumption in establishing Crisil as the first-mover to offer credit ratings in a regulated market paid off. A company without a promoter in the traditional sense of the term, it survived its birth pangs and benefited from a liberalised economy in the 1990s, when good ratings emerged as an important differentiator amid an increasing number of debt issues. Over the years, new products, innovation, and a reputation for independence and analytical rigour helped the company thrive despite increasing competition.
It today controls about half of the country’s rating business. Leaders such as R. Ravimohan charted out the aggressive growth of the company through acquisitions and diversification into areas such as research. Today, non-ratings businesses account for more than half of the company’s Rs 800 crore revenue. Also, almost half of its revenue comes from international operations. The current management headed by Roopa Kudva continues to deepen and grow various lines of businesses. It has helped the company emerge as a top wealth creator in the stock market over the last decade.
The book chronicles in fair detail important highlights of Crisil’s journey, including the acquisition of a majority stake by global major Standard and Poor’s. The interesting parts of the book are the insights gleaned from peeks into Crisil’s rating committee meetings, where arguments were commonplace but ‘logic’, as the authors claim, ‘won over hierarchy’. Anecdotes showing how Crisil stood its ground under pressure from rated companies and the powers-that-be also make for good reading.
But much of this could have been presented without resorting to literary frills, which also needlessly elongate the narrative. Here’s one instance: “He was bellowing at a decibel level that was definitely a few notches above what a normal human tympanum could take. The equally animated audience was coalescing into insular groups with some heads nodding vigorously and others shaking in contemptuous disagreement.”
In other places, the fiction-thriller style of narrative seems contrived. Consider this description of Crisil taking stock of the 2008 credit crisis: “Their boss was in a pensive mood. Nobody spoke for a full five minutes as the chilled ambience of the room presented an unsettling contrast to the scorching events of the recent past surrounding the global markets.”
An account of Crisil’s strategic decision to venture into SME ratings goes like this: “As his fingers drummed a lost bongo rhythm on the cedar wood oval table, the brown steel-rimmed glasses held their place firmly on the bridge of his nose as his unflinching eyes studied the Chief Rating Officer of Crisil seated across him.”
The liberal use of jargon (“we re-triangulated”) is also off-putting. These distract from what is essentially an interesting tale that deserves to be told — the genesis and growth of India’s first credit rating agency and its transformation into a global analytical company, as it now calls itself.
A simple, anecdote-based factual account, warts and all, would have enhanced readability. A graphical timeline showing Crisil’s evolution over the years would have also helped.
Sure, towards the end of the 135-page book, the authors lay out instances of the company making bad choices, finding itself on the wrong foot, and its ways of tackling these situations. But after the dose of heavy cheering the reader is subjected to earlier on, these seem a little forced. By being reverential, the book, in some parts, probably does not pass one key test on which Crisil prides itself — objectivity.