How do global business leaders manage their time? Very efficiently, if Vinita Bali’s example is anything to go by.
She graciously takes calls from unfamiliar journalists but will not agree to a random interview. She wants you to do your homework and not ask scattered questions but once she begins to talk, there is no reserve and her natural enthusiasm for the job at hand, even if it is just an interview, begins to flow just like her conversation.
This enthusiasm and attention to particularities propelled Bali to a variety of marketing and general management roles in multinationals like The Coca-Cola Company and Cadbury Schweppes PLC in the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, Latin America and the USA, in addition to Britannia Industries Ltd, in India.
The journey across the business stratosphere began when she started her career in 1977 as a management trainee with Voltas Ltd, a Tata company, after completing MBA. In 1980, she joined Cadbury India as brand manager and became the youngest general manager of the company.
What inspires her is not just the brick and mortar aspect of building businesses but human narratives. “When you work with consumer products, you are dealing with retailers and kirana store owners and their lives are touched everyday by what you do,” she says in a voice that is as matter-of-fact as it is warm.
Work and life for her are not harshly divided halves and she says, “Life is a journey of discovery and adventure. There is just so much to do and find and learn and that thought has driven me to work towards a multi-faceted life.”
For over 37 years, Vinita has worked in powerful operative roles in the corporate world but she looks back most fondly at the opportunities she was offered to travel. She says, “It was challenging because I was moving every two or three years. I have travelled to over 70 countries and lived in 6 over 5 continents.”
In 1994, Vinita joined The Coca-Cola Company as its worldwide marketing director, and in 1999 relocated to Chile as president of the Andean Division. In 2001, she was made a corporate officer of The Coca-Cola Company and appointed vice president and head of Global Business Strategy.
In 2005, following 16 years of overseas assignments, as business chroniclers will tell you, Vinita returned to India as MD and CEO of Britannia and during the next nine years, diversified the geographic and product portfolio, steered the company on a health and nutrition course, developed a successful dairy business in India and more than quadrupled revenue.
“Today, I divide my time between corporate responsibilities and development sector. I am on multiple boards that address issues of nutrition and other social concerns like the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). I am also on the advisory board of Cornell University’s Department of Nutritional Science,” she says.
In 2009 ,Vinita created the Britannia Nutrition Foundation to address malnutrition in India and since April 2014, she has moved away from a full-time operational role in Britannia. In 2012, she was selected to the Lead Group of the ‘Scaling Up Nutrition’ (SUN) initiative of the United Nations to help improve maternal and child health and continues to serve in that capacity.
Ask her a question about what it means to be a global achiever in a country where women are denied a right to education and to dignity and she says, “The definitions restricting women were not created by women.”
She also comments on the obfuscation of real issues amid righteous outrage over trivialities. In the wake of the controversy over the BBC documentary India’s Daughter, she says, “We are sidetracking the issue by discussing whether the documentary should or should not be aired. The issue is not the film but that the issues it addresses exist. How does putting the reality on film, make it worse? It is hypocritical to talk about image when the ground reality is damning. Why blame a film for tarnishing the image of the country when it has already been harmed by repeated gender crimes not just in December 2012 but before and since. Women tourists from other countries have come here and have been raped.”
“We need to worry less about the images being painted by the foreign media and more about bringing the perpetrators to book, especially because such incidents are allowed to happen again and again. We have the parents (of Jyoti Singh) asking for justice but they are still waiting. Compare this to the way the case of IMF President Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn was handled abroad after he was accused of a gender crime,” adds she.
As one of the key forces driving the social and gender equality agendas of Care India, she also works at the grass root level and offers a positive story to emphasise that hope is not yet lost.
She says, “In a small village that I recently went to, I heard groups of rural men talking and their conversations were music to my ears as they recalled how they now realise the importance of treating women with respect. How earlier they would hit their wives if they came back from the fields and there was no food. But now, since they have started valuing their partners, life has become more harmonious.
“In the same village, a family has decided to educate their daughter and not to have more children in the hope of getting a son. This shift happened post the gender sensitisation work done by NGOs in the areas. Change is possible if we invest in it. Our real goal should be to change mindsets.”
She is realistic though and adds, “It is a long haul I concede, but we will get there by addressing problems…not sweeping them under the carpet.”
with The New Indian Express
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats