TATA Log

I wish to share with you all a superb book that I just started reading – ‘Tatalog‘. Today, I completed the first two chapters and am impressed! Written by Harish Bhat, MD of Tata Global Beverages Ltd, and published by Penguin, this is a collection of “hitherto untold…eight modern stories from a timeless institution.”

For readers who don’t know ‘Hindi’ language, ‘log’ is a hindi word for ‘People’. I got drawn towards reading this book only because the foreword was penned by one of my all-time favourite authors, R Gopalakrishnan. You would recall Gopalakrishnan through his bestseller books – ‘The Case of The Bonsai Manager’ and ‘When The Penny Drops’. However, now that I have read the first 50 pages and learnt about the untold story of the ‘Tata Indica’, written so aptly by a Tata insider, I am so looking forward to reading further… about Tanishq, Tata Finance, Tetley, EKA, about ‘second careers of intelligent women’ and Tata Steel.

I will surely come back with a detailed book-review in few weeks’ time for you. Till then, I am leaving you with what Gurcharan Das opined about the book; do note the power of the last phrase:

“This is not a hagiography. In the tradition of the best business books, it teaches something about the way the world works. It explains why the Tatas have endured for 150 years: not because they did not make mistakes, but their errors were portals of discovery.”

 So apt, isn’t it?

I would recommend this to all who follow writings on organization & change and who wish to learn from the massive human effort called ‘TATA’.