His arrival at the top had coincided with the end of JRD's leadership and the dismantling of India's controlled economy.
What he tackled is well known — there were companies that had become fiefdoms; there were business downturns, there were big-ticket acquisitions and finally, as the businesses got bigger, there were controversies connected to shaping the external environment.
Ratan Tata anchored the Tata Group in an era of change. For nothing but his tenure at the top amidst such times, his is a hard act to follow. The group's present turnover of over $80 billion is proof of having weathered this passage and kept its ambition alive.
Why search?
When the Tata Group embarked on a publicised search to net a new leader, I expected an interesting outcome. I felt let down by the succession plan announced recently. It seemed the search had done a Magellan, gone around the world, and landed back in Mumbai.
I remember this search being speculated right from the time the group revised retirement age for directors at its holding company. For me as an observer, it has ended in anti-climax. It is not because of who they chose for successor or that he was already a regular at Bombay House, but because it reflects something of us.
For all the management jargon and corporate-speak thrown around, it appears to me that the clincher for being helmsman in India and Indian business is still family, shareholding and, probably, a sense of the Indian environment. I have no problem accepting that. It is those who are invested in business who fight to preserve it. Others write, like I do. But if so, why go looking for leadership outside at all?
Is it because the accomplishments of the incumbent chairman and the public perception of the Group were such that a picture of far-flung search was needed?
Puzzled still
The strange thing about the current outcome is that it is the unexpected median between the two extremes everyone was prepped for — that there may be a rank outsider at the helm; there may be a Tata.
The emergent median is also interesting in that, unlike the two extremes anticipated, the successor is an unknown quantum for the wider world but known to Tata. Further, when you know the equity stake involved, it is natural for observers to cynically view this result as succession planning in the conventional sense, the search for successor notwithstanding.
Thus, even as the media gets busy telling us who and what Cyrus Mistry is, the totality of this succession can be gauged only when his top management team is also in place.
Right now in the public eye, Mr Mistry is a child of equity holding. He has to prove himself within the larger Tata context (that is, Tata in the world as opposed to the world of Tata) or risk being seen as there thanks to shareholding. That is a clean slate to start off. It is also what typically happens during succession in family businesses. Things change and yet they don't.
Which is why what puzzles me still is — why did they go searching? May be at heart, all businesses are simple and expectations otherwise are the stuff of public imagination and gullibility?
(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)