Jamshed J Irani, who had been managing director of Tata Steel for close to a decade and was serving as a director on the boards of Tata Steel and Tata Motors, stepped down on June 2 on reaching 75 years, the mandatory age for retirement for Tata Group directors.

Irani was also a director on the board of Tata Sons, the group holding company. Another Tata Sons director, NA Soonawala, had retired last June. Ratan Tata, Tata Sons chairman, retires next year, and a five-member panel is in the process of identifying his successor.

Irani, credited with transforming the erstwhile Tata Iron and Steel Company (Tisco) into a nimble-footed organisation through an company-wide quality movement and business excellence, also championed the issue of climate change. He joined Tisco as an assistant to the director, research and development in 1968 and was appointed general superintendent in 1978, general manager in 1979, president in 1985 and managing director in 1992. He retired in 2001 as MD, but continued as a director on the board.

In a recent issue of Tata Review, an in-house journal of the group, Irani says, “I cannot claim that I made any great changes, but Tata Steel was always looked upon as the father of the quality movement in the group. I did one important thing in Tata Steel, though. I felt we needed to show our commitment to quality and not just talk about it; we needed people dedicated to the cause. So we formed a team in the office of the managing director and people were given proper training; their only job was to drive quality and business excellence in the organisation.”

Born on June 2,1936, Irani obtained his master’s degree in geology from Nagpur University in 1958. Thereafter, he obtained an M.Met in 1960 and a PhD in 1963 from the University of Sheffield, UK. He began his career in 1963 as a senior scientific officer at BISRA, Sheffield, where he rose to the position of head, physical metallurgy division.

Irani, who draws inspiration from former US vice-president Al Gore on climate change initiatives, is well known for his sharp wit and sense of humour when highlighting industry issues. “Climate change is a far more difficult subject to grasp than business excellence,” he said in a recent interview. “You can see the results of quality and business excellence in products or people; the reaction time between doing something and getting the result is short. In climate change it could be 50 years, and most people are not interested in what will happen five decades hence, mostly because they think they would not be around to witness it.”

Irani was on Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd (TTML) board from December 2002 to August 2005. In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him honorary knighthood (KBE) for his contributions to Indo-British trade and co-operation. In 2007, he was honoured by the President with the Padma Bhushan for his services to trade and industry.

Tata Group in April this year has lowered the retirement age of the non-executive directors of all Tata Group companies to 70 from 75.

However, it had mentioned that non-executive directors who have already crossed 70 would stay on till they reach at 75 following the old rule that was laid down in 2005.