An unusual work setting grabs my attention as I tour the senior executive floor of a financial services powerhouse in Pune.
I am intrigued to see a mini-amphitheatre-style classroom, located next to the more usual suspects—a company boardroom, a directors’ lounge and a senior management dining room.
Many large office buildings have a training room or two, but these are not usually placed in the executive enclave. I soon find out why this one is.
I am on the sixth floor of the headquarters of Bajaj Finserv, the lending, insurance and wealth advisory firm that comprises three companies—the non-banking finance firm Bajaj Finance, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance and Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance.
The primary occupants of the sixth-floor C-suite are Sanjiv Bajaj, managing director of Bajaj Finserv, and a handful of colleagues. Bajaj, 46, is widely regarded as the driving force behind the group’s swift ascendancy in financial services.
Starting from a low base in 2007-08, when Bajaj first entered the financial services business, the company’s revenue has grown to Rs.22,364 crore (the 2015-16 financial year) and profits have grown to Rs.1,863 crore (2015-16). The company is currently valued at over Rs.28,000 crore and has earned a solid reputation among both peers and consumers.
Between luxury and frugality
Bajaj’s office is a contrast between the spacious luxury that often comes with operating in a smaller city, and the frugal décor that might be associated with Marwari parsimony, in terms of inexpensive furniture and art. “The office is modern and airy; there are no solid wood partitions, these are all aluminium panels,” says Bajaj, pointing to the modular partitions.
The desk is “one of the few luxuries I permitted myself”, he says. It is a striking stone, wood and two-tone leather table from Italian furniture maker Poltrona Frau. “It was outside my budget but I know it will last,” says Bajaj.
Bajaj is also managing director of Bajaj Holdings and Investment Ltd, the group’s holding company, which is based in the Akurdi office.
Balancing growth variables
Bajaj Finserv has grown exponentially in less than a decade, and I am curious about the roots of its success. It is perhaps tempting to look at the office’s spaciousness and the business’ fast growth and conclude that both are the results of plentiful investment.
To my mind, however, the office layout and design provide insight into what I believe is the main ingredient for success: balance. In the same way that frugality in office décor and spatial luxury have been balanced in his office space, Bajaj runs his business by balancing key growth variables, which reflects a tempered and measured outlook to business.
First, balancing risk and growth. Bajaj is categorical that “long-term, sustainable, profitable growth” is a fundamental business driver that determines how to choose between risky opportunities and growth avenues. “In each of our businesses, we give up the short-term opportunity if it does not align itself with our long-term requirement, as that only creates noise. We might make money in the short term. But a huge amount of organizational energy and time goes away from the long-term goals,” he says.
This granular approach of checks and balances is complemented by an equally detailed “strategy meet, called the long-range plan, mid year that can run into three-four days for each company. This is when the teams really come up with ideas on where to take the company over the next three-five years. Our future business ideas come up through this plan. We then run pilots on a bunch of them over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months,” he says.
For Bajaj, the combination of risk reviews and future ideation “brings in the ideal balance between a promoter-driven company, where you have the entrepreneurism and speed of decision making, and yet you have the rigour and processes of a multinational company. “The balance of this is what makes us unique. This is a little bit of magic,” he says.
Next, the balance between a focus on tangibles (capital, resources, technology) and a focus on intangibles (attitude, values, ideas). My conversations with chief executives in banking and financial services have inevitably highlighted the vital role of ‘soft’ assets, such as organizational culture, in enabling the firm to deliver ‘hard’ results. Bajaj concurs. While he propagates the uses of technology to remain innovative and competitive, he underlines how vital it is to recruit people with the “right attitude”.
“How do you balance the fact that you don’t take a large enough risk that will shut the company down, but you take a lot of small and medium risks, because otherwise you’re never pushing the boundaries of what is ordinary, to do something extraordinary? This all comes through the attitude of the person,” says Bajaj.
Next, a balance between experience and instinct. When he entered the financial services sector, he was flanked by senior industry professionals, including his uncle and former Citibanker Nanoo Pamnani and core team member Rajeev Jain, among others. Without them, he acknowledges, he might not have been able to scale the business so rapidly. Equally, he has been guided by his own instincts in critical decisions, such as choosing to anchor the business in Pune rather than in Mumbai, or deciding to have a presence in rural markets.
Finally, Bajaj appears to leverage the past while investing in the future: His family legacy of clean governance is evident in his desire to “first run your business with high ethical standards and then build the best-quality business you can”. His decade-plus experience with Bajaj Auto also taught him the value of focus, excellence, disruptive innovation and brand differentiation, he says.
The next step, now, is “to see how the foundation that we’ve built creates a culture that propels itself…. We are hopefully permeating these values down into the organization, so that it’s not a culture of the top 20-50 people, but how you take that to 500 people,” says Bajaj.
A balancing act that might be applicable to any business, not just financial services.
Disclosure: The Bajajs are long-time family friends of the writer, whose mother, Gita Piramal, serves on the Bajaj Finserv and Bajaj Finance boards.
Aparna Piramal Raje meets heads of organizations every month to investigate the connections between their workspace design and working styles. She is the author of Working Out Of The Box: 40 Stories Of Leading CEOs, a compilation of Head Office columns, published as part of the Mint Business Series.
