Why Even VIPs Falter Without Hunger

The recent statement by Dilip Piramal that VIP Industries faced a “management crisis” for years is more than a single company’s misstep.

It is a lesson, writ large, on what happens when businesses lose their hunger. 

When a promoter accepts that the business stagnated and struggled to attract and retain professional leadership, it is a quiet confession that the hunger to evolve had long since been replaced by complacency. His own hunger, and openness to embrace change, as the key shareholder, and the person in charge of the business.

But then, this is not about only this company. Often behind such media statement lies an even starker truth: the promoter’s luxury of being distracted, their time, wealth and insulation, often masks the real cost of procrastination. While the business drifted into irrelevance, it was shareholders, employees and consumers who paid the heavier price for indecision.

Markets change, consumers change, competitors sharpen their playbooks, and new ones emerge faster than you can innovate. Yet what too often decays silently is leadership itself. 

Family-run businesses sometimes mistake legacy for leadership and inheritance for competence. The idea that stewardship is an heirloom ignores the harder truth that skill, vision and the restless curiosity to keep pace with change come not from bloodlines but from discipline and exposure. 

When that hunger is absent, no amount of historical market share or family surname can protect against decline. In every market, the currency of relevance depreciates faster than balance sheets show, and it is seldom the promoter who feels its sting first.

This story is not unique. Across India’s family-controlled firms, especially with every successive generation, the value destruction is rarely sudden. It is usually the outcome of years of vegetation, when promoters and Boards fail to renew themselves, miss consumer shifts and neglect to invest in new capabilities. Over time, inertia becomes the biggest shareholder. 

Succession in family businesses has always been fraught with egos, ambition and the painful arithmetic of capability versus entitlement. Even in ancient texts, the Mahabharata reminded us that dynastic succession invites conflict, jealousy and a contest between legitimacy and competence. In modern times, patriarchs still grapple with the same dilemma, now under the gaze of institutional investors, regulators and minority shareholders who expect professional governance, not merely family control.

Indian business families must take succession planning seriously, and do so proactively, not merely during a crisis, or after one. History shows that family surnames and lineages can keep an enterprise afloat for a while, but never forever if there is no hunger left for the business itself. 

This is a lived reality across generations of Indian firms, where the refusal to plan beyond the patriarch has often eroded value silently before markets wake up to it. I have written at length about these patterns, and what they demand of next-generation leaders, in my book Family and Dhanda because succession is actually a test of purpose.

The question of Dharma is as relevant in a Boardroom as it was on a battlefield. A promoter must ask whether their duty lies in protecting personal pride or ensuring the company thrives beyond them. True succession planning demands ruthless honesty about who is fit to lead, even if it is someone outside the family. It means grooming leaders early, exposing them to risk, failure and reinvention, so they can keep the enterprise relevant.

Much of what destroys value in business rarely comes from external shocks alone. It is often the quiet erosion within, when promoters forget their true Dharma. 

Their responsibility is not merely to preserve capital but to renew purpose, not merely to defend legacy but to nurture leadership, not merely to hold power but to question whether they remain its rightful stewards. The Dharma of a promoter is to stay restless, to adapt before the market compels them, to place the enterprise above ego, and to ensure the organisation remains relevant beyond their own shadow. 

Yet there is an equally uncomfortable question that Boards themselves must confront. Do any directors truly have the gumption and gravitas to challenge a larger-than-life promoter when it matters most? In promoter-owned and promoter-managed enterprises, even with listing requirements and corporate governance codes mandating independent directors, is it not a fallacy to believe that independence is absolute and untouched by the promoter’s influence? That remains the unspoken challenge of modern-day business maharajas: in the absence of genuine independence, who will dare tell the emperor when he has no clothes?

Hunger cannot be willed into the next generation, but it can be nurtured by example. Promoters who remain intellectually restless, who question their own decisions and seek talent sharper than themselves, build organisations that adapt and endure. When that hunger is absent, even the strongest brand can drift into irrelevance.

At its heart, corporate stewardship is about ensuring that the enterprise remains hungrier than its founder. That, perhaps, is the real Dharma of a promoter.

That is why it is worth asking: do today’s business patriarchs still have the humility to step aside when needed, or do they remain hostage to the illusion of indispensability? Do they spend more time nurturing real leadership depth, or defending past choices that no longer serve the market? Are they willing to see beyond the comforting echo chamber of loyal advisors and family, to ask who could truly take the business further?

That’s why even the modern-day Business Maharajas don’t stay as Rajas when whom they perceive wrongly as their Prajas, consumers and other stakeholders, no longer relate to them, and when they no longer have businesses to run. 

It is in the act of questioning one’s own relevance, rather than assuming it, that businesses rediscover the hunger that first made them great.

Ultimately, the hardest question a promoter or Board must ask is whether they have become caretakers of history rather than architects of tomorrow. The market remembers those who built, not those who merely inherited. Hunger is not an ornament for strategy decks but the first principle of survival, and no enterprise, however storied, is exempt from its demands.

Who will save the modern-day maharajahs from themselves?