Satish Mehta

With the fate of Tata Sons and thus that of the entire Tata group dependent on the performance of TCS - the management of TCS has become central to the survival of the House of Tatas.

With poor bets like Air India and insane bets like Tata Digital and Tata Electronics - the Tatas are not a case of execution failure but of pathetic strategy. Something that resonates in other professionally managed, board run, promoterless companies like L&T. Suddenly even a Adani or Ambani seems way more sensible. Niether bid for Air India - Adani smartly bought the airports and has now made a meal ticket out of Air India by servicing their planes. Ambani watches with delight as the rust within kills both Tatas and L&T. I still remember Dhirubhai Ambanis statement “L&T will do best as an arm of Reliance”.

One of the issues that keeps coming up in professional company Board rooms is executive compensation. How much is enough ? TCS, Infosys and TechM are all board run. The CEOs running them have really zero skin in the game. They are executives working for a wage. And whatever more they can make. They don’t share the founders passion and it is really just another job for them.

Finally when Mahindra British Telecon (now Tech Mahindra) was floundering, Anand paratroopers a team from HCL. Vineet Nayyar, CP Gurnani, Sanjay Kalra and Atul Kunwar dropped down out of nowhere to take over the company. It did wonders and they got scale by acquiring Satyam and diversifying globally. CPG was a larger than life CEO (who made the cardinal mistake of not diversifying into data centres and analytics) who did well for himself but not so much for the company.

When ai strikes, TechM will be the first to die. TCS next. Infosys next. And finally HCL and Wipro. That is because TechM and TCS didn’t look after the techies and worshipped the slimy sales guys.

And the salaries reflect that. I looked at the salary sheet for 2023 and 2025 for all executives who drew over Rs one crore.

What stood out is that the TCS CEO draws 378 times the median salary of a TCS employee. And that his CTC has grown 200% in two years.

Now come to the TCS Fellows - the tech geniuses. The PhDs. The ones who are the tech backbone of the company. They are pathetically paid. Typically Rs 3 crores pa all inclusive.

A professor in a third grade govt engineering college in a fourth tier city has a CTC of Rs one crore. All thanks to the pay commission. Good professors in a tier 2 IIT like Ropar make Rs 5 crores pa in consulting revenue. The bright ones get a Padma Sri. So working for TCS is a waste of time for any techie.

So how do you structure compensation ? There is no one answer. But what Anand Mahindra did when he para dropped the leaders - is a good option.

All leadership members get a wage equivalent to what the TCS Fellows get. Say between Rs 2.5 and 4 crores depending on seniority. No one should be paid higher than the top techie. Plus they get esops linked to profit and valuation targets.

Who really runs the world ?
It is not Donald Trump or Putin
But the secret societies and elite clubs
As they always have.

Over the last fifteen years, one of our favourite discussion topics in various investment committees has been, “who actually runs the world”. Of course my Indian friends take it to the next level with “who created the universe and why?”. But for this post let me stick to the former.

For context and one view let me share a recent video which popped up on YouTube. It says Uk ruled the world because the secret societies and elite clubs shifted there. Power moved to the US because some of them shifted from the UK to the U.S. It is a thought provoking watch:

https://lnkd.in/gdwrJJP9

The video is right. The world is run by elite clubs and secret societies. These cults are powered by paper money, opium, defence equipment …. and maybe bitcoin. You rarely see them and most don’t even know about them, leave aside participating in them. If you look hard, you may find some videos on the internet.

It is not a coincidence that the inventor of bitcoin is yet to be found (are you joking?). He disappeared in thin air effectively creating a usd 2 trillion dollar commodity which is supposedly heading towards being the most valuable stock in the world. (disclosure: I don’t own any bitcoins or listed shares). The U.S. treasury is rumoured to be selling gold to buy bitcoin. In the period, gold went from Rs 30,000 to Rs 125,000 bitcoin went from Rs 10 to Rs one crore. That’s 4x vs 1000,000x. 250,000 times the appreciation of gold. The UK treasury too is buying bitcoins.

My introduction to secret societies happened twenty five years ago at a monastery in the Chengdu area of sichuan province - deep in the interiors of China. And ever since I have been fascinated by them. I have had the opportunity of participating in activities of many of them from the Masonic order to the White Brotherhood. Sworn to secrecy and fearful of the consequences of breaking the vow - all I can say is that their physical touch points are the elite clubs. These are member only clubs, entry to which is closely guarded. They are always by invitation and rarely for the masses.

This got many of us thinking. What if we can use the same format to build an elitist club in India for intellectuals, innovators, industrialists, investors and inventors. A club that will predict the future by helping invent it. And fund it by printing our own currency. All in a legal, nation building kind of way. Angel networks try to do this. So do political parties. But all of these lack inner democracy.

And that is how the Bombay Club of 1833 got invented first but closed down in 1958. And then got reinvented as the Bombay Club of 1993 led by Rahul Bajaj to oppose liberalisation. And finally again as

The Bombay Club Ltd

A club of intellectuals like no other in the Global South.