More than a decade back while interacting with a group of senior journalists, Anand Mahindra was asked a question on his views on the then-surcharged political environment. Mahindra’s quick response was he got paid to uphold shareholder value, not to air his political views at a public forum. The message is clear: Leaders of private companies should stick to their professional work and enhance shareholder value rather than get embroiled in needless controversies. Today, more than anyone else, Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal needs to adopt this mantra as he seems to have a penchant for avoidable fracas that harms the cause of his business. Ola Electric, which manufactures electric scooters, has been making headlines for manufacturing defects and poor after-sales service. The matter has now reached the consumer affairs ministry as well as the Bureau of Indian Standards.
This was preceded by an ugly spat with comedian Kunal Kamra who took a potshot at Aggarwal on X for poor after-sales service. Instead of responding with humility or even ignoring such snide remarks, Aggarwal got into a slanging match, which led to a slide in the company’s share prices. This wasn’t Aggarwal’s first brush with two-minute fame on social media platforms. Much before this, he snubbed Microsoft’s professional networking site, LinkedIn, for removing his post for violating the platform’s policies over gender pronouns. While LinkedIn was wrong, Aggarwal went ballistic and turned the issue into a conflict between Indian and Western value systems and announced shifting of Ola’s workload from Microsoft’s Azure to his own cloud platform, Krutrim. If the idea was to gain publicity for Krutrim, there were certainly better ways.
Similarly, while launching Ola Maps, he needlessly took a shot at Google Maps, urging developers to desert it. The bravado seemed to have backfired when Ola soon received a legal notice from MapmyIndia for alleged data theft and reverse engineering Ola Maps by duplicating application programming interfaces. Though Aggarwal denied this, the harm had been done. Promoters seeking publicity about their firm’s products is not wrong. But they should talk about the quality of their products and the benefits of using them rather than trying to dismiss competitors’ products. The battle should be fought in the marketplace where consumers decide, and if it happens to be a consumer product, user feedback should be handled with extreme care, even if it comes laced with vitriolic satire.
Perhaps Aggarwal needs to take a leaf out of Mahindra’s book once again. When a consumer recently trashed M&M vehicles on X, lacking in global standards, Mahindra courteously responded that the company had “miles to go” and that “there is no room for any complacency and continuous improvement will continue to be our (Mahindra’s) mantra”. He finished his post by saying, “thank you for feeding the fire in our bellies”. This is how BigBasket CEO Hari Menon recently responded on X when a customer commented on the quality of honey retailed by his platform. “Great brands are built on their ability to listen. A customer recently flagged our bb honey. “It’s not as dark as other brands,” he said. We could’ve thanked them for sharing and moved on. Instead, we ran lab tests, traced the source & got our answer”. CEOs with the humility and ability to listen function better as brand ambassadors of their products than the ones who style themselves as mavericks.