Prakash Tandon: The quiet revolutionary behind modern Indian corporate leadership

Tandon helped birth an alternative universe. Across three decades and three institutions—Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), Punjab National Bank (PNB), and State Trading Corporation of India Ltd—he pioneered the then-radical notion that professional competence, not family connection, could open paths to the top.

The lineage he established at HUL turned it into India's “CEO factory", eventually producing executives who commanded the parent multinational itself. The methodologies he introduced at PNB transformed Indian banking from a relationship-driven institution to one based on systematic analysis.

In doing so, this consummate professional, whose career spanned multiple companies, industries, and roles, engineered a quiet management revolution in the country by proving that merit could trump patrimony—that management could be a profession rather than an inheritance.

The story goes that on his final day at HUL in 1968, he made the short trip to the Backbay Reclamation headquarters of the multinational in Mumbai, as he had always done, chauffeured in the company car. When the farewell concluded, he descended to the parking lot, dismissed the waiting driver with a friendly wave, slipped into his modest Fiat, and left. It was quintessential Tandon, a man who'd scaled India's corporate summit yet wore his achievements as lightly as the half-sleeve shirts he preferred.

Professional competence

Born in 1911 to a civil engineer's family in Punjab, Tandon left for the UK in 1929 to pursue chartered accountancy at Manchester University at a time when qualified Indian CAs were very few. He returned in 1937 with his credentials and a Swedish wife, a pairing that would have scandalized pre-independence Punjab society.

In his first job with Unilever in Bombay, he was assigned to advertising despite his accounting qualification and was given a compensation package below that of his British peers. Rather than railing against the inequity, Tandon simply outperformed everyone. By 1951, he'd become Unilever's inaugural Indian director, a first among multinationals in the country. A decade later, he assumed the company's chairmanship, overseeing a transformation in which a majority of the managers were now Indian.

What Tandon inaugurated at HUL extended far beyond Indianization. The lineage he established produced executives like Harish Manwani, who ascended to become Unilever's global chief operating officer, and Nitin Paranjpe, who led the Indian arm before taking on global roles at the parent company. The wheel had come full circle. Indians trained at HUL now led the parent multinational itself.

But Tandon's most transformative work came after leaving HUL. At PNB in the early 1970s, he imported multinational efficiency into India's drowsy public sector. Having witnessed Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Programme through his involvement with IIM Ahmedabad as a founding board member, he instituted similar training at PNB, introducing principles that seemed radical in government banking: continuous recruitment, open-door management, systematic decision-making.

His dictum that “the essence of management is distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant" became gospel for a generation of executives.

In 1974, the Reserve Bank of India constituted a committee under Tandon to examine working capital financing. The resulting framework established credit assessment methodologies based on current assets, margins, and inventory norms that remain foundational to Indian banking. The Tandon Committee report transformed lending from a relationship-driven process to a financial analysis-driven system.

Those who knew him recall a voracious reader whose interests spanned ancient history, Urdu poetry, and classical literature. A small red leather diary emerged whenever interesting information surfaced. He inhabited a modest government flat in Vasant Kunj, piloted his ageing Fiat personally, and never exploited his position for privilege.

Management revolution

His autobiographical trilogy, Punjabi Century, Beyond Punjab and Return to Punjab, captured three turbulent generations from the 1857 uprising through Independence. His later Banking Century traced finance's evolution across civilizations, demonstrating the intellectual breadth he brought everywhere.

When Tandon died in 2004 at the age of 93, he left behind a template for leading with competence, integrity, and unpretentious dignity. The scores of professional Indian managers who followed all walked paths Tandon had cleared. Even those who built their own enterprises did so by establishing professional management structures rather than dynastic succession. When Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai assumed leadership of Microsoft and Google, and when Leena Nair became Chanel's global CEO, they stood on foundations laid by Tandon generations earlier.

In transforming how Indian business conceived of corporate leadership, Tandon helped engineer a quiet management revolution. Corporate India's man for all seasons had become its man for the ages.

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