Cyrus Mistry was a boardroom warrior, a balancer of reason: Dilip Cherian

Cyrus Mistry, 54-year-old former Tata Sons chairman, was killed in a car crash on September 4. Politicians mourned the "big loss to the business community".

A crisis is like a scalpel. It can slice a powerhouse into a pygmy, or carve a giant out of a gnome. Sadly, crisis too often defines you. So, the extraordinary outpouring of grief on Cyrus Mistry’s death has deified him merely as a bearer of the Tata cross. He was more; much, much more.

Mistry had a rapier-sharp mind, a rare head for numbers, and maven-like management magic. He could discern between earning calls and emotional drivers. For example, he was willing to see that the way the new Tata Chairman, N Chandrasekhar, was running the business recently was how he would have liked to.

Mistry may have had certain emotions about the role he lost, but he was able to work with the fact that performance and earnings were important for everyone, and that Chandra needed to ring-fence himself too. So, when things had come back to stability, he was the first to acknowledge that the group performance was righting itself.

Yet, the transformation that Mistry made, when he was unceremoniously ousted, was just the stuff of corporate legend. Unexpected, given his dominant shareholding, and the dramatic transformations that he had already triggered into a group crying for transformation, Mistry could easily have opted to turn even more reclusive and a purely legal warrior. But he opted for a pugilist stance. As someone who has hand-held CEOs over maybe five dozen crises in corporate India and elsewhere, I can testify that he transitioned thoughtfully, and with deliberation.

The choice was always his, and he opted for the big fight. He recognised that it was not just a fight to protect the rights of his family shareholding. He believed he needed to fight to make a much larger point to the India of the 21st century. This was not his fight alone, he always said, it was never personal vendetta over a power struggle. Neither was it an easy windmill to tilt at, and Mistry was certainly no Don Quixote. He knew what he was tackling, he recognised the awesomeness of what he had to change, the solidity of the Tata image, and his own relatively unknown one, but he chose to go into battle.

The most remarkable thing that one saw instantly as Mistry marshalled his forces to take on what was going to be a life-defining joust was that he was surrounded by extraordinary talent. This is something that those who watched him in his role within the Tatas had already spotted. But what one saw, when enemy fire was encountered, was a sight to behold. In his quiet and discreet way, Mistry straddled the crisis war room like a Colossus.

From management strategists to operational specialists to legal firepower, he had a knack for assembling extraordinary people and minds. Jumping into this melee was not the most comfortable place to discover the man, but discover him, you would have to.

What opened up in the course of the protracted years of battle, was a man who had no intention of projecting himself in the klieg lights, nor hesitation to take orders, and do what was necessary in very often highly time-sensitive frames.

Incisive minds can either be irritable or impatient in a crisis. Mistry was definitely incisive yet patient, and always gentle. Recognising that he was not a specialist at any of the stuff that he was now having to go through, he was willing to listen to advisers. For a start, for example, he recognised that during the days of the white heat battle, he certainly could not stay at his usual haunts in New Delhi. He opted instead for a different location to function out of, and began to function seamlessly in comparatively strange surroundings. A rare skill of plug-and-play adaptability, so rare in wealthy family scions.

This adaptability helped him during his days within Bombay House. The structures there were fairly rigid, and Mistry was able to navigate most of the hurdles that those who were naysayers or of a non-Tata name were worried about. That he encountered the ‘iceberg’ itself was something that could not have been taken into account. Whether it was his youthful exuberance or habitual inability to treat anyone as extraordinary merely because of either rank or status, was something that clearly became the flashpoint.

Though seemly contradictory, he was a man who was always open while staying completely private. As a crisis jockey, one biggest anxiety I have is CEOs who are accessible to the media on WhatsApp. Mistry was unflinching in his ability to respond to those who reached out to him, and learnt quickly how to skirt media baiting him to get a quote. Precision and brevity were hallmarks of his external communications. With teams and advisers, he was willing to examine arguments, reply in detail, never flaunted his erudition, and was tracking global matters even when what seemed to be a local battle should have dominated everything in his attention space.

His extraordinary segue from Chairman to Challenger stirs the word ‘Corporate Hero’ out of obsolescence, a veritable Apollo, with his sense of light, reason, and balance.