Dabur India: Growing Professional Management from Family Roots

Suraj  Srinivasan; Namrata  Arora; Jonah  Goldberg

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2019

Dabur India: Growing Professional Management from Family Roots

by Suraj Srinivasan, Namrata Arora and Jonah Goldberg

Abstract

The case opens in December of 2018, with Sunil Duggal, the CEO of Dabur India (a multinational consumer goods conglomerate with a focus in Ayurvedic products) contemplating who should succeed him at the head of the company. The new CEO will have been the first since Dabur completed its transition from family management to professional management in 2002 and, though publicly listed, the majority of the company’s shares were still owned by the Burman family, who founded it in 1884. The case then describes how the Burman family grew the company until the mid-1990s when professionalization began. The case explains the various obstacles and difficulties that the company overcame in the process of professionalization and explains how the family came to step back from the business. It specifies the nature of the family’s involvement during Duggal’s tenure as CEO as the company expanded across the globe, and then it closes by returning to the question of what a professionalized, multinational family business should be seeking in its next CEO, sixteen years after it last confronted such a decision.

Keywords: Family Business; Management Succession; Multinational Firms and Management; Business Growth and Maturation;

Language: English

Format: Print

23 pages

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Citation:

Srinivasan, Suraj, Namrata Arora, and Jonah Goldberg. "Dabur India: Growing Professional Management from Family Roots." Harvard Business School Case 119-089, March 2019.

Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2019

Family Matters: Governance at the Zamil Group

Christina R. Wing, Suraj Srinivasan and Esel Çekin

This case focuses on a large Saudi Arabian industrial conglomerate and family business Zamil Group’s corporate and family governance journey. The 12 sons of the founder led and grew the group successfully after taking over from their father in 1961. The secret to their success was to arrive at all decisions with a consensus, although each had their own approach to dealing with issues. In the mid-1990s, they hired world-class consultants and created manuals and guidelines for governing the business and continuing the growth of the Group’s assets. They were the model for running a family business in Saudi Arabia. However, the increasing number of family members in the group—84 third-generation and 162 fourth-generation members and the upcoming fifth generation—created challenges going forward. They wanted to ensure that the governance principles they had created would evolve and develop in line with the changing dynamics. The upcoming generations did not have jobs waiting for them in the family business simply because they were members of the Zamil family, and not all of them were motivated to remain invested in the businesses. The second-generation and senior members of the third-generation wanted to make sure that they balanced the needs of the business and those of individual family members. They sought to put mechanisms in place that would keep the shares of the business in the family so as to avoid diluting the family’s ownership as they diversified the asset portfolio, addressed diverse risks, and catered to the consumption goals of the next generation. This might mean that the Group would eventually move from being operators to becoming financial investors.

Keywords: Family Business; Governance; Organizational Structure; Values and Beliefs; Steel Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Middle East; Saudi Arabia; Bahrain;

Citation:

Wing, Christina R., Suraj Srinivasan, and Esel Çekin. "Family Matters: Governance at the Zamil Group." Harvard Business School Case 620-009, August 2019. View Details

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As JOE & THE JUICE began its rapid U.S. expansion in 2017, its founder and CEO, Kaspar Basse, fretted about how he could keep his employees feeling like they were doing meaningful work. Founded in 2001, JOE & THE JUICE had always focused on making healthy juices, banning prepackaged or processed foods, and providing meaningful work for front-line food services employees. To instill employees with a sense of ownership, JOE & THE JUICE had developed a transparent promotion and compensation scheme, a rigid training program, and an explicit promise to promote only from within (the CFO was 31-years-old and had spent a decade working at the company). On the other hand, employees were encouraged to make the juice bars their homes. There were no required uniforms or scripts on how to interact with customers. This strategy had led to great success in Europe. In a decade, JOE & THE JUICE had spread across the continent and was immensely profitable. But as it moved into the United States and prepared for a potential IPO, the company began struggling to retain talent and worried about how it could successfully import its internal culture while maintaining its rapid growth.

The case discusses the measurement of social and environmental impact at Ambuja Cements, one of India’s leading cement companies. Ambuja is a leader in CSR activities and is attempting to quantify its impact, both positive and negative, using the “True Value” framework developed by the global accounting firm KPMG. True Value is an innovation in this area and tries to measure the financial cost and benefits of social and environmental impact and provide a standardized comparison across different kinds of social and environmental activities and their impact. The case allows students to discuss the challenges in measuring social and environmental impact and the pros and cons of quantifying the same in financial terms. The case elicits discussion surrounding the following questions: How do we develop a framework to measure the financial cost and benefits of social and environmental externalities? What are the challenges of doing so? What do we need to do to improve our ability to measure social and environmental impact in financial terms? How will such measurement be useful? Who will it be useful to? The case concludes with the CEO of Ambuja deciding whether or not to publicly release the “True Value” of the company.

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Dabur India: Growing Professional Management from Family Roots

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