Tata Sons (India)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are opening up important avenues of value creation inside organisations. Value creation will be strengthened if AI and ML are conceptualised using theoretical anchors rooted in a strong understanding of employee psychology. Organisations need to address anxieties of employees and assure them that AI and ML are aids in improving their productivity. They need to communicate to employees that AI and ML are not meant to displace employees from their jobs. Organisations face another dilemma regarding how to use AI and ML to draw upon the tacit knowledge and judgement of human actors to make more effective business decisions.

The Tata group of companies, which completes 150 years in 2018, traces its beginnings to 1868 when Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the founder, setup India’s first large scale textile mill. It has since emerged to be a global conglomerate with aggregate revenues of more than $100 billion and over 660,000 employees today. The longevity of the group provides an effective counter perspective to the declining lifespan of businesses worldwide—for context, nearly 9 of every 10 Fortune 500 companies from 1955 were either gone, merged, or contracted in 2016 while Tata Steel, Tata Power and the iconic Taj hotel in Mumbai have been around for over a 100 years. This journey has also seen the group navigate multiple evolutions in the operating context for its businesses: setting up industries which contributed to a push for economic self-reliance in independent India, adapting to the post liberalization Indian economy in the nineties, successfully riding out the information technology maelstrom at the turn of this century, aligning to new market paradigms after financial crises of 1997 and 2008 and so on.

This chapter discusses the role of corporate community engagement as a contribution to alternative approaches to capitalism. Against the backdrop of Tata’s community engagement, the chapter will first contextualize corporate community involvement (CCI) in an historical perspective and then move to discussing the core strategic questions. These include the definition of ‘community’, the motives and drivers of CCI, and the role of corporate purpose and ownership for community engagement. The chapter also briefly discusses the relevance of the geographical context and positions the importance of CCI for the wider debate on re-imagining capitalism.