No one person can fill chairman M.R. Jaishankar’s shoes, admits Nirupa Shankar, executive director, Brigade Enterprises Ltd. “It would require an army to do that!’ she says, as she and her sister Pavitra Shankar, also an executive director, get ready to take over the management of the Rs1,850-crore construction and hospitality group. The ‘army’ exists, she points out: the siblings have other core team members to help them shoulder the responsibility they will bear, when they take on more onerous leadership roles as promoters of the company and the second generation of Brigade. That is just how the group has been structured: while its shareholding is largely family-owned, Brigade is a public listed company, with professionals managing its day-to-day activities. “We hope to carry on the various traditions, culture and core values set by our founder and carry out his vision and mission for the company,” adds Pavitra. “Our focus will be on exponential growth, along with customer centricity.” While Jaishankar has always made sure the buck stops with him, he has taken care to groom both his daughters to succeed him when he retires. Additionally, as they point out, there is a phalanx of professionals: veterans like Pradyumna Krishnakumar and Amar Mysore in the chairman’s office, along with the CXOs and heads of the various departments, to help them. “Brigade is in safe hands with the next generation of leaders, including Pavitra and Nirupa,” says Jaishankar himself. “They are all well-qualified, knowledgeable, committed, extremely smart and hard-working.” With the freedom he had given his daughters to run the domains they oversee even under him, he has segregated their lines, with Pavitra overseeing the residential portfolio and Nirupa looking after the office, retail and hospitality portfolio, comprising the annuity-yielding projects. “We are so busy managing our own portfolios there is no chance to step on each other’s toes,” Nirupa says. “We might have different methods and approaches to business but, when we keep the core values of the company as the guiding principle to our decision making, the resulting outcomes are fairly clear.” Both also have different levels of exposure to the group as they have taken different paths. Nirupa spent eight years in the US and worked for a few years in risk advisory consulting, returned to Bengaluru in time to grow the group’s hospitality vertical, spending the next eight years focussed only on this. Pavitra was in the US for much longer, over 17 years, but worked in a related business there, too: she was with a real estate private equity firm and simultaneously ran Brigade’s US sales arm, too. “There is a lot of learning, whether each one’s experience is within the organisation or outside it,” Nirupa explains. “They are different kinds of learning – but all of it can only benefit the organisation through diversity of thought and experience.
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Jaishankar says the next generation is well qualified