Mahindra: More Than Tractors; Tata: More Than Cars For China

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Mahindra is a major player in agriculture, and China is a favorite trade target of Donald Trump. To see the TV ads, one would think that Mahindra owns the family-farm market space. And, while China's Tata manufactures low-cost vehicles for an emerging Chinese middle class, neither is what it might seem to be.

Tata is a traditional multi-capability consultancy that appears to take as a religious position the theology that IT is relatively everything. It takes the Big "X" model, and moves it to Mumbai or Chennai or Bangalore or New Jersey—wherever.

Mahindra, on another plane, provides evidence of incipient maturity in the financial community. CFO Magazine in 2016 posited, thanks to insights from Mahindra & Mahindra, that flexibiity in working relationships can be as important as flexibility in devices for ordering, feedback, and supply chain execution.

Further, the Tractor Team disses the more traditional role of accountants, recommending that the pocket-protector posse become innovation leaders, and transform themselves into value creators, possessing both functional expertise and business understanding.

Accountants will become redundant, with copmuters doing the grunt work.

So, a next generation of financial professionals becomes thought leaders—and influencers. 

Can they, will they, pull it off?  Or, are they so hard-wired that dreams of glory—and power—are really delusions from the minds of born managers?