Values in practice: what Tata taught us about building a business

Every company has values. Most of them could be swapped between businesses without anyone noticing. The test of a value is whether it changes a decision that would otherwise have gone the other way, and whether anyone outside the company can see that it did.

That is why the Tata Group has been a reference point for us while building Waterfront. As a former Tata employee, I have been fortunate to live their values and experience how they seep into the decision making; and having grown up in India, I have been quite close to the impact that the group's operations have had on the community.

Ownership that makes the values expensive to ignore

Start with structure, because structure is where values either get teeth or don't.

Tata began in 1868, when Jamsetji Tata set up a trading firm at the age of 29. Today the group reports more than $180 billion of revenue for 2024-25 and more than a million people working across its companies. And today, 66% of Tata Sons, the holding company, is owned by philanthropic trusts that support education, health, culture and livelihoods in India.

Think about what that means in practice. Most of whatever Tata Sons pays out to its shareholders ends up with trusts that fund charitable work. Profit and social purpose are not two columns that need balancing at year end. They are connected by the ownership itself. When the group says it aims to return value to the people it draws from, the cap table backs it up.

We are a small group and we will never have that structure in the near future. But the principle carries. If you want a value to survive pressure, tie it to how people are paid and how the business is owned.

Five values, read as operating rules

Tata publishes five core values: integrity, responsibility, excellence, pioneering and unity. Read the descriptions closely and they are more demanding than the single words suggest.

On integrity, the group says that "everything we do must stand the test of public scrutiny." That is a usable test. Before a supplier negotiation, a pricing decision or a claim in a pitch, ask whether you would be comfortable seeing it reported. It rules things out quickly.

On responsibility, the commitment is to "integrate environmental and social principles in our businesses". Integrate is the important word. It means the principles sit inside the business decisions rather than in a separate report, which is the argument we make about supply chain design generally.

Excellence comes with a phrase that often gets skipped: "always promoting meritocracy." Pioneering asks the group to be "bold and agile, courageously taking on challenges, using deep customer insight." Unity talks about investing in people and partners and building relationships founded on trust.

None of this is exotic. What makes it worth studying is the long public record of a group trying to live by it at scale.

Pioneering includes the bets that don't work

Ratan Tata took over as chairman in 1991, when J.R.D. Tata stepped down, and led the group for more than two decades. Under him, Tata became a global business, partly through a run of large acquisitions: Tetley in 2000 for $432 million, the steelmaker Corus in 2007 for $13 billion, then the largest takeover of a foreign company by an Indian firm, and Jaguar Land Rover, bought by Tata Motors from Ford in 2008 for $2.3 billion.

He also backed the Nano, marketed as the world's cheapest car at 100,000 rupees, or about £1,000. Early safety problems and weak marketing hurt it, and it was discontinued about a decade after launch.

I find the Nano as instructive as the acquisitions. Pioneering, taken seriously, means some bets fail in public. A values statement that only celebrates the wins is not describing a pioneering organisation. The useful question for any leadership team is whether people can take a considered risk, see it fail and still be trusted with the next one.

When Ratan Tata died in October 2024, at 86, obituaries noted his modest, quiet way of living alongside the deals. That consistency between the stated values and the visible conduct of the person at the top is, in the end, what makes values believable to everyone else.

What we are taking, and what we are not

We are not Tata and won't pretend the comparison is a close one. A young group building a business in UK supply chains has different problems from a conglomerate founded more than 150 years ago. Some of what makes Tata distinctive, including its scale, its trusts and its role in Indian public life, can't be copied.

What we can borrow is narrower and more practical. Write values as tests rather than slogans. Put them where money changes hands. Expect pioneering to include failure, and don't punish the people who took the considered risk. And accept that values are judged from outside, by clients, suppliers and the people who work for you, on what you do when it is inconvenient.

Still a long way to go for us, but I'm sure we will be fine if we continue to stick to our core values.