Following in the footsteps

Mentoring is all about picking up a right brain and spotting a ear to listen. Suresh G. Kare, Chairman, Indoco Remedies, was lucky that he found both in his daughter Aditi Kare-Panandikar, who is now also Managing Director (MD) of the company he founded.

It is very clear that the pharma industry, like most sectors, is facing tougher times today. During the year 2013-14, Indoco clocked a 15.44 per cent growth, with the total income amounting to Rs 72946 lakhs as compared to Rs 63189 lakhs in the previous year. With Profit Before Tax (PBT) at Rs 7211 lakhs as compared to Rs 4837 lakhs in the previous year (a 49.08 per cent increase), Indoco has managed to increase PBT and Profit After Tax (PAT) mainly due to reduction in input and other costs but there is no doubt that the general slowdown in global economic growth combined with more stringent regulations in India are a double whammy.

But in tune with the company’s tagline of ‘Constantly evolving. Consistently excelling’, both father and daughter, along with the management team seem confident about their strategy for the future.

Parents, the natural mentors

Suresh G. Kare

It all started at home for Aditi. She grew up observing a father who is considered a visionary in the Indian pharma industry. Her entire childhood and growing up years were a learning process for her. School and college taught her text book lessons whereas her father taught her from the book of real life experiences.

Aditi says, “Parents are the greatest and most natural role models that children learn from and mimic as they grow. Growing up, children are exposed to the outside world, the extended family, friends, teachers, etc., in whom they then try and find mentors or persons to idolise. In my case, I was very fortunate to have found a mentor in my father. The early childhood nurturing continued through my school and college years and later at work as well.”

She adds, “The greatest benefit of having a parent as a mentor is that the learning never stops. To be able to observe at close quarters, a father in professional capacity and a boss in personal life has been an invaluable experience. To date, my ability to switch hats from MD of a company at work, to a mother, wife, homemaker, daughter and sister at home and vice versa is entirely because I had the opportunity to see my father balance his work and home very successfully.”

Lessons to remember

The real life lessons that Aditi learned from her father proved instrumental in grooming her into a successful entrepreneur. She has spent enough time as MD of the company but this journey was never a cake walk as one would have thought. However, thanks to her father’s mentorship, Aditi managed to sail through difficult situations independently.

“Benjamin Franklin’s quote, ‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn’, has been used much too often. But frankly it embodies Kare’s mentoring to the core. His mentoring has been more of a coaching of the mind than for a specific situation and that I am most thankful for. Today the business environment for the pharma industry is extremely dynamic. To survive and grow in these times, quick decision making and judgement coupled with a deep understanding of one’s business are a necessity. I give a lot of credit to my father for how he groomed me within the organisation,” says Aditi.

According to Aditi, her father has some great personal qualities like a great work ethic, passion for excellence, high moral standards and respect for the individual. These are qualities that never go out of fashion for any leader.

Still a mentee

“Normally one hears of friction amongst two generations but it is this largely adaptive mentoring adopted by my father that has allowed our relationship to grow from strength to strength.” Aditi Kare-Panandikar, Managing Director, Indoco Remedies

After a successful stint of many decades, Kare passed on the baton to Aditi and now she has stepped into the shoes of a mentor to her staff. However, Aditi believes that learning is a continuous process and one really does not ever stop being a mentee. Even today she continues to be mentored by her father as the situation demands. As she says, “Like everything else, our mentor-mentee relationship too has evolved over time from a very telling style adopted by him in my childhood to a selling style in my teen years to participative in my youth to that of complete decentralisation today. Normally one hears of friction amongst two generations but it is this largely adaptive mentoring adopted by my father that has allowed our relationship to grow from strength to strength. For me it has meant a selfless and unconditional lifelong presence of a friend, mentor and guide.”

According to Aditi, an in-depth understanding of your organisation is key, if you have to command respect from and earn the trust of your employees. Both these are fundamental for any good leader. Aditi’s stint of two decades at Indoco in various capacities and across most departments before she was appointed the MD of the company inculcated leadership qualities in her. Today, life has come a full circle for her as she herself takes on a mentorship role.

Aditi opines, “The principal job of the MD of any organisation is to manage it effectively and drive the people within to achieve the set goals and desired objectives. Strategic decision making, leadership and team building gain primary importance and success is largely dependent on the leader’s ability to create followers. In that respect, I guess an MD is a mentor of sorts.”

People look at Kare as Aditi’s mentor, however, she believes that his mentorship role was never ever confined to her. From a handful of people he started with in 1963, the Indoco family today encompasses over 5500 people, who look up to him for inspiration. Aditi infroms, “Kare’s greatest strength is his ability to carry people along. This has resulted in creation of successful management teams at every level at Indoco. Today amongst the senior management, besides Sundeep Bambolkar, Joint Managing Director, who has worked with Kare for over three decades, there are many others at Indoco who have benefited from his mentoring and have successfully risen in their career.”

Steering the next gen

The highlight of Kare’s mentoring is he never tried to fit Aditi into his own image. Rather he gave her the opportunity and the space to create a niche for herself. Kare goes down the memory lane to describe how for Aditi, pharma was always the first choice as a career.

Kare narrates an interesting story about Aditi from her childhood. He says, “As a child, Aditi was keenly interested in business. Once, while driving past an MNC office in Worli, she had commented that one day she wanted to see Indoco become larger than the MNCs in India. She would regularly accompany me to our Andheri manufacturing plant and sometimes sit on the packing lines, on the laps of the packing girls. Her relationship with the company had started back then. Having shown a desire to join the business, it was but natural for her to pursue an education in pharmacy.”

He adds, “During vacations, she would work in the quality control laboratory to get a first-hand experience of an industrial lab. When she decided to pursue further education in the US, she chose to do her masters in pharmaceutical administration at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Being fiercely independent by nature, she refused to let me accompany her on her journey to the US. It turned out to be a very exciting trip, which she later related in a letter to her mother and me.”

As managing people was the most important skill required to manage a corporate, Aditi majored in HR Management and returned to India in December 1992. She joined Indoco in January 1993.

“I have always been more of a friend than a father to my daughters. That has made it easier to talk freely and discuss things even if there are disagreements. In our family, dinner time would be an interesting and eagerly awaited time of the day, when we would deliberate upon matters relating to Indoco. This camaraderie that we shared helped in a big way and the generation gap was never an issue,”points out Kare.

Challenges for Aditi

The old days of the 1960s when Kare started his company were quite different. The company was a small setup and was still to carve a space on the larger canvas. When Aditi came on board, she found herself at the helm of a stable venture but one that faced challenges of a different order. It needed to grow to the next level if it was to face future challenges.

Kare informs, “When I took over as MD in 1963, we were a small company with an annual turnover of Rs 3 lakhs. There were only 30 employees and mounting losses. In the early days, my main challenge was finance.”

He adds, “By the time Aditi joined, the company had become relatively financially stable with a presence across the entire country. On her very first day, en route to office, I told her that she would experience a very different Indoco from what I had experienced in my initial years. I had the liberty of making mistakes and getting away with them while she did not. A mistake made by her could cost the company dearly and hence it would be her responsibility to make correct decisions. I told her that in order to maintain a sustained growth, it was important to aim at growing at a rate twice that of the inflation rate in the country.”

Aditi always understood the limitations of expansion in view of the not so comfortable financial position of the company. However, both father and daughter agreed that they had to grow consistently to maintain a respectable position in the Indian pharma industry.

“Her biggest challenge was to increase the per man yield, which at that time was low as compared to other fast growing pharma companies. For a sustained growth, the company required to invest in R&D and international business. Accordingly, our R&D centre at Navi Mumbai came up in 2004. By this time, Aditi had a firm grip on the company’s business. She ensured that we had a well equipped centre manned by highly qualified scientists and state-of-the-art equipment.

I strongly believe that R&D is the backbone of the pharma industry, especially when it comes to exports to the highly regulated markets of Europe and the US. Expanding R&D and the international business are going to be Aditi’s main challenges in future and I mentored her accordingly,”opines Kare.

Women power

India is a country where women empowerment is a widely debated topic. When asked about Aditi’s emergence as one of the leading women entrepreneurs in the country, Kare shoots back saying, “In our family, we never discriminated between boys and girls. Girls were always encouraged to take on responsibility and leadership roles.”

Kare has full faith in his daughter’s capabilities and Aditi has also always proved herself equal to the task. Kare says, “ When it comes to entrepreneurship and management, I consider women equally capable as men, sometimes even better. Aditi is well respected by all employees at Indoco, which speaks volumes of her acceptance as a leader. I have full confidence that under her able leadership, Indoco will grow to become a leading pharma company in India, even internationally.”

Aditi as a mentor

Today Indoco has world class infrastructure and various international approvals for its different facilities. However, Kare thinks that besides having qualified staff to run these facilities it is also equally important to retain this human strength which is going to be the most challenging task for his daughter.

“Indoco has always valued inter-personal relationships when it comes to employees. During my 52 years at the helm of affairs at Indoco, not a single day was lost due to industrial strife. The credit for this goes equally to both the employees and the management policies of the company. I always tell Aditi that this will be the greatest challenge she will face at all times and it will be her responsibility to maintain and carry forward the culture of the organisation which is the key to its sustained growth,” Kare signs off.

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