Harnessing Disruptions to Build Sustainable Brands: Session by Mr Harit Nagpal

“If Industry and Firms start to look at life from consumers’ perspective, they would do better than looking at their technology, product, and its constituents” remarked, Mr Harit Nagpal, the Managing Director and CEO of Tata Play, in his session at Jio Institute. 

In an interactive session with students, Mr Nagpal discussed the role of disruptions in life and business with the help of various case studies. He gave some examples of disruption that he had experienced in his two decades worth of business world experience: The story of how his grandfather traded sugar as a retailer at wholesale prices and grew the business by selling the sacks, T-series starting in the streets of Delhi as cassette sellers by making copies from records from the US, the role of him at Orange, a telecom provider, in harnessing a disruption such as the Bombay floods ’05 into a brand building opportunity and so on. 

He moved on to describe how firms have adapted to planning for the “expected unexpected” to the “unexpected unexpected" post the COVID-19 era, with disruptions now happening frequently and taking a much shorter time to affect more than half of the masses. He opines that the basic principles of business don’t change over time and the business leaders can either use the existing disruptions or create new ones, to grow and sustain the business. 

Mr Nagpal laid out a step-by-step process on how to handle disruptions: A customer-centric approach, building a sustainable differentiator that is rooted in the processes, increasing the market pie and innovating around your strengths. He left the students with a simple Mantra in business, that he had followed over the years, “Easy and Simple to deal with processes and Useful & Inspiring Innovations”. 

The session helped future business leaders of Jio Institute, understand how disruptions in a volatile world, can be harnessed effectively.