Being rebellious teaches you a thing or two about following your own path, challenging the status quo, and driving change. For over three decades at the Mahindra Group, Anand Mahindra has been doing just that
Anand Mahindra has never been a fan of the status quo, pretty much all his life. Back in his teenage years, Mahindra almost joined the Communist Party of India as student protests erupted at the illustrious JJ School of Architecture where he was studying architecture. Sporting long hair, a headband, and his T-square, Mahindra would go around the flora fountain in Mumbai as part of JJ School’s protest to be brought under the accreditation system.
Then fate intervened, and soon, Mahindra was off to Harvard College to study liberal arts, where he majored in filmmaking and photography, quite unusual for the heir to a fledgling business empire then.
“I suppose when all of us are growing up, we do have a rebellious person inside us,” Mahindra told the Ministry of Human Resource Development in 2019. “We need to feed that. I did not want to end my life where no matter how successful I was in business, (people shouldn’t say) he inherited everything and that his parents gave him everything on a silver spoon. I didn’t like that idea and so I wanted to do something in such a different area where nobody could say that my parents helped me, which is why when I did films.” Mahindra then went on to do a film on the Kumbh Mela.
Mahindra, who was born to industrialists Harish Mahindra and Indira Mahindra, then went on to study at the Harvard Business School before joining Mahindra Ugine Steel Company Ltd in 1981. Three decades later, Mahindra took over as chairman and managing director of the Mahindra Group, before becoming the non-executive chairman in 2020, handing over the day-to-day running of the group to a professional management led by Anish Shah, the current MD and CEO of the Mahindra Group.
“One of the reasons we had succeeded and thrived over the past 75 years was that we were good at introducing change in the right measure at the right time,” Mahindra said in 2019 when he appointed Shah as MD and CEO.
(This story appears in the 15 December, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)