I got an email last week from Kevin Freiberg that an old friend of ours had passed away in India. I say “old friend” even though I never met him. But when you spend three years writing about a man’s life and work, it’s hard to think of him in any other way.

(Above, Kevin meeting with Ratan Tata after the publication of Nanovation.)

In 2009, Kevin and Jackie Freiberg invited me to co-author a book on Ratan Tata, the chairperson of India’s Tata Group. While the company was in his hands, beginning in 1991, the group’s revenue had soared from $4 billion to over $100 billion by the time we finished our book, an amazing feat for an Indian company. But that’s not the story we were there to write about.

Our book was Nanovation: How a Little Car Can Teach the World to Think Big and Act Bold. It was, on the surface, the story of Mr. Tata’s passionate crusade to save the lives of Indian families and their children by getting them off the backs of motor scooters and into the safety of a car, a car big enough to hold a whole family in comfort and a car that they could afford, a car that cost no more than a scooter.

The result was the Tata Nano, a car that sat five people in comfort and sold for only $2,100 dollars.

Think about that for a moment. That means their auto division, Tata Motors, had to figure out how to take 85% of the cost out of a product as complex as an automobile, in an industry where costs were already as low as anyone could get them.

More than the story of one product, Nanovation was a story of radical innovation in search of elegant solutions to impossible problems. The question Mr. Tata was asking everyone in the Tata companies to consider was what you can do to transform your thinking and your leadership so you can deliver great products and services at a fraction of their previous cost.

And if your future depends on creating a culture of innovation, then you owe it to yourself and your people to learn the story of Ratan Tata’s life.

In many ways, the chance to co-author that book was a turning point in my life, one that changed everything and I am so grateful to Kevin and Jackie for inviting me to join them. And I’m grateful to my “old friend” Ratan Tata, for the lessons he taught me, if only at a distance.

Thanks also to the legendary Prakash Idnani who got us the opportunity to write the book.

(This article is also posted on Dain’s website, daindunston.com)

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