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 EducatorsPurchase

Citation:

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

About the Author

Photo
Suraj Srinivasan
Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Business Administration
Accounting and Management

View Profile »
View Publications »

 
Campus Map
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→ Map & Directions
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College