It’s mid-morning at the Nestle India office in Chennai, where I am meeting Suresh Narayanan, the genial Chairman & Managing Director, of the company. A bearer walks in with two mugs of steaming Nescafe and biscuits. “Arasu has been with us for 30 years,” Narayanan tells me, turning to him with a big smile, and saying in Tamil, “Arasu, hope your coffee tastes great for our visitor.” 

“Of course,” responds Arasu, with a broad grin.

The Nestle chief believes that this top-down camaraderie in the consumer goods giant, apart from empathy and compassion, has helped it during the difficult pandemic period.

Narayanan, 61, is on a day-trip from Delhi to visit the Chennai region and I am at the Nestle office for a conversation on his 40-year corporate journey, which seemed unlikely when he was studying for his MA in economics and eyeing a career in the bureaucracy. With the pandemic roaring back, an obvious question to ask Narayanan is how Nestle coped the past two years. 

He explains, “Nestle has not been free from crisis; we had our own existentialist crisis, but what has helped us has been the camaraderie. We focus on people, purpose, partnership, planet, but what has driven the fifth P, performance, is the focus on the first four and this alone can pay rich dividends not only to a company that is being a force for good but can also bind people together in a constructive way when difficult times happen. What I would distinguish from other companies is our coping mechanism.”

Sipping our coffee, we dive into Narayanan’s early years, which were spent in places like Dehradun, Joshimath, Nagaland, Bhutan as his father was with the Border Roads Organisation. At a certain stage, his parents decided this nomadic life was doing no good to their only child, so Narayanan was sent to the Rishi Valley school in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. Founded by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthi, the school’s culture would deeply influence Narayanan’s values and outlook. After five years at Rishi Valley, he graduated with an honours degree from Shriram College in Delhi. “I come from a family of bureaucrats and I wanted to be one; it is a typical south Indian thing, if you’re not a doctor or an engineer, you should be a bureaucrat! So I joined the Delhi School of Economics for my Master’s,” recalls Narayanan.

In his second year, Hindustan Unilever came calling to recruit from the DSE. Narayanan hadn’t thought of applying, but the placements committee head urged him to apply. An uncle in the IAS counselled Narayanan to apply and he did, getting through the initial round in Delhi and was shortlisted for the final round in Mumbai. With two weeks to go for his final exam, he requested HUL for an air ticket to attend and was actually given one; unprecedented, he recalls. “In the final round I was told there would be questions around case studies. Honestly, I didn’t know case studies, I know theorems and hypotheses. There was a young lady from IIM Calcutta so I asked her what’s a case study and she was astounded! She thought I was one less a competitor so she explained all of it. I was certain I won’t make it; everyone was so articulate and their IIM time was spent on case studies. I answered quite generally; I don’t get tongue-tied and can give a reasonable answer,” he says. 

To everyone’s surprise, of the 14 candidates, Narayanan was the only one selected by HUL. He dropped all plans of taking the civil services exam and his career path took a different turn.

I ask him if the fact that he’s a rare breed of CEO, who has neither an MBA, nor is a CA or engineer, handicapped him in any way in his career. Narayanan is reflective. “I was a reasonably good student; I always felt that you can try harder to make up for the shortcomings of lack of an MBA. But, remember,” he emphasises, “the base of management is economics, management guru Peter Drucker, had a PhD in economics, and so did Philip Kotler. I realised that those who had strong foundations in economics would do well and I was privileged to have studied at the best school for economics in India; I had Prof Raj Krishna, Dharma Kumar, Prof Sukumhoy Chakravorty, Mrinal Dutta Chowdhury, Kaushik Basu, as my teachers and they were all giants in the field. Prannoy Roy was my tutor. So, I never felt intellectually inadequate or inferior. The hallmark of a great organisation is how it prepares leaders and HUL trained me well, so I am grateful.”

He spent the next 16 years in Levers in various businesses, starting with its animal feeds business in Ahmedabad to the hand-woven carpets exports business and later in its garment exports. He was with Lipton when HUL acquired Brooke Bond and had to integrate both the sales teams. He was picked to be head of five branches. “The sales guys at Brooke Bond and Lipton hated each other; my job in Lipton was to ensure Taaza was on the shelf and make sure Brooke Bond wasn’t and suddenly we had to be one family. I’ve had more than a dozen roles in my 40 years of corporate life, each one gave me a different exposure, different set of problems, many crises; I don’t know if I was blessed or I was chosen,” he says, laughing.

After a short stint with Colgate where he moved to from Levers, Narayanan joined Nestle in 1999 as executive VP (sales). He was in Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2011 with all the chaos in the country. “I was Chairman & CEO of Nestle in North Africa, Libya, Sudan and Egypt, based in Cairo. My office was not far from the centre of the action, Tahrir Square. It was exciting and tense moments.” Nestle had fairly large operations in Egypt and number one in many categories. “We invested more in five years than we did in the past 50 years and the company grew by 25 per cent in each of the five years. Crisis was an opportunity.” 

From Egypt, Narayanan headed to the Philippines, one of Nestle’s largest and most prestigious markets. But, in four months, in August 2015, he was sent to India to handle the Maggi crisis. No conversation with Narayanan is complete without asking him about how he handled it. So, I ask him what his learnings from the crisis were.

“The most important lessons for me are the power of purpose, sincerity and people. We have always been an honest, ethical company and my job as a leader was to communicate that. Often, perception is reality. The perception was that initially something was wrong and we took our time to respond. It was a perfect storm.” The crisis, he says, also gave Nestle an opportunity to strengthen the company, become more inclusive and approachable. “I met people from media and all walks of life to explain our point of view and that reflected in performance. When I took over the share price was around ₹5,000, today it’s over ₹19,500,” he says.

Wading into the Maggi crisis was not a difficult decision. As he says, he owes a lot to the company and to the Nestle team. “My initial career in Nestle took off because of this team; my credibility was built by them. It was their hour of crisis and it was my duty to come and help them. Another lesson for me was you need a certain wisdom and maturity to take on roles at such junctures; may be if I was 40, I would have reacted differently. I was in my mid-50s, when you don’t worry about consequences, you do what is right, not do what is right for you.” 

Narayanan says in the Covid situation, why some organisations floundered is seldom because of poor strategies or execution but is often because leadership does not have the depth, maturity and perspective to look at the larger issues in life and managing business, rather than managing themselves and their fortunes. “Your people will remember you on how you managed the larger cause; for me these are useful lessons,” he adds.

Where does he find his inspirations, I ask him. “One is my wife, Rajitha, she’s the one who keeps my feet firmly planted in my ground, and my daughter, Avanti. My parents were also a big influence and so were my paternal and maternal grandmothers, they were inspiring; the whole values of human relationships, I learnt from them. My paternal grandmother would also say ‘times will go, but words will remain, so speak with care’. And, my mother was a master story teller; she could articulate many stories.”

A quick, working lunch of masala dosa, idli, vada and sweet pongal is served by Arasu and his team and we dig in. I ask Narayanan about Nestle’s strong rural foray in the past few years which has seen 25 per cent of its sales come from rural India. “We are strongly putting behind a strategy and execution which is getting into 120,000 villages, and into more tier 2 and tier 3 towns, tailoring our portfolio, putting more feet on the ground, all that will continue. I see that line gradually starting to move and this gives me confidence that the time for Nestle has come in the minds of the (rural) consumers. It’s not just an urban phenomenon; today in smaller towns, people know Maggi, Kitkat and Nescafe and our nutrition brands, and that’s heartening as with the post-pandemic, quality of nutrition, longevity, safety and reputation of brands is very important,” he explains.

I ask Narayanan about his love for dohas (Hindi couplets). “My doha passion came from my love for Hindi, it was almost my first language in my initial years. I can attribute my love for dohas to my Hindi teacher in Rishi Valley, a venerable gentleman called Mishraji. All the dohas that I sometimes recite are those that I learnt 45 years ago and remember. In fact, he used to compose his own and woke us up with a doha in the morning at the hostel,” recalls Narayanan nostalgically. 

I ask him to recite one of his favourites and he readily obliges with the doha by his school teacher, that woke up students.

“Uth Jaag musafir ,bhore bhayee, 

Ab chhain kahan jo sowath hai! 

Jo sowath hai,so rowath hai, 

Jo Jagat hai –so pawat hai! 

Uth jao bhai! “

(Wake up, awake, dear traveller, It is no more the time to sleep at day break, The one who still sleeps, will only weep. The one who awakes, stands to gain, So get up, dear brother ….awake). 

On that note, I bid Narayanan goodbye, bringing our lengthy conversation to a close.