Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” says Karambir Kang of Indian (Taj) Hotels, who became a legend after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Kang’s is, perhaps, the most defining quote in Shashank Shah’s 444-page seminal tome Win-win Corporations. At the start, the book, overweighed by pre-publication endorsements, could be mistaken for a treatise on Corporate Social Responsibility, now fashionably called Stakeholder Relationship Management. A few pages down, one thinks it is probably an Indian version of Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence and Jim Collins’s Good to Great and Built to Last fused into one. However, after going past the somewhat stretched and self-congratulatory prologue, one realises its much wider sweep.
Shah’s book, unquestionably a product of passionate and painstaking research, sits at the intersection of strategy, brand, vision and values.…
