R. GOPALAKRISHNAN is an author, speaker and corporate advisor, with a career spanning over 50 years. He spent 31 years in Hindustan Unilever Limited, where he rose to be vice chairman, followed by 19 years in Tata Sons as a director. He now serves as non-executive chairman of Castrol India; an independent director of Hemas Holdings PLC, Sri Lanka; executive-in-residence of S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai and distinguished professor of IIT, Kharagpur. He has authored nine books so far, notably A Comma in a Sentence, Six Lenses and Doodles on Leadership. SUSHMITA SRIVASTAVA has an inordinate passion for teaching, executive education, research and consulting. After completing her fellow programme in management from XLRI, Jamshedpur, she left Tata Steel to join SPJIMR, Mumbai, as Associate Professor in HRM and OB areas. Her areas of interest are Leadership and Change Management, Talent Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship.
Companies and businesses can be built into great institutions, which are more than engineered processes; they are living organisms with emergent conditions, which bring an institution alive. However, few entrepreneurial leaders break the mould of prevalent thinking and set an organization onto a growth trajectory. They operate with the rainforest rules, which are different from the model of cultivated agriculture based on control, efficiency and replicability. In the rainforest, you accept the environment and within that, you seek effectiveness and novelty. The narrative of Biocon, India?s first and only modern bio-technology institution, led by its founder, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, an accidental, yet immensely successful entrepreneur, resembles the application of these rainforest rules. This book is a first-hand account of how Biocon evolved to become an exemplary institution valued at $6 billion, with 11,000 knowledge workers. In a series of personal interviews with Kiran and her team, the authors trace the options that opened up during Kiran?s journey, how she made her choices and the outcomes that impacted the growth trajectory taken by the institution. How Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw ?Fermented? Biocon is the third book in the series, Shapers of Business Institutions, which offers instructional and inspirational perspectives for aspirants in the fields of management and entrepreneurship.
