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You write that most decisions are about optimising stakeholder interest. How do you balance the interest of different stakeholders—shareholders, employees, franchisees, vendors etc? Take the Covid period, which is a good example in the context of this question. When Covid hit, I had been MD for barely six months. I was staring at the worst quarter in the history of the company though that was not our fault. But because I had worked in the jewellery business for 15 years, I knew that when people are anxious, they buy jewellery in India. That’s because it’s not an expenditure, it’s a store of value. I knew the industry would recover fast.
There was a lot of anxiety around how our company would cut costs and conserve cash. By squeezing employees or vendor partners, the loss the company would have made could have been reduced by 10-20%, which is what many companies were trying to do. But they were not realising the fairness aspect and the practical aspect. The fairness aspect is that in the overall equation when things are going well, shareholders tend to keep a greater part of the prosperity. The employees and vendors get a relatively smaller part though they are the people who are actually working—it’s their innovation, it’s their hard work that creates that value.
The practical part was that if employees, vendors and
