The predicament of being ITC chairman

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Editor's note: It’s hard not to compare ITC chairman and managing director Sanjiv Puri to Jeff Immelt. After succeeding the iconic Jack Welch as CEO of American conglomerate General Electric Co., Immelt spent much of his 16 years at the helm firefighting. Not only did he have big shoes to fill, he struggled to simplify the complex conglomerate and cut the dominance of GE Capital—the financial services arm and GE’s cash cow—by launching new businesses that would bring the zing back to GE’s stock. It didn’t work. Shares of GE, once the most valued company in the world under Welch, lost 30% of their value during Immelt’s term. During the same period, the S&P 500 (akin to the BSE Sensex in India) rose by 124%. Peers outperformed GE by a distance.  Puri’s predicament is similar. In 2019, he succeeded the late Y.C. Deveshwar, arguably the most influential chairman that the Kolkata-based conglomerate had in its 111-year history. Today’s ITC is very much a product of Deveshwar’s 23-year tenure at the top. Puri is no Deveshwar, a towering personality whose vice-like grip on …