Life in a goldfish bowl

Life in a goldfish bowl can be tough, especially for shy goldfish. There’s no escaping the eyeballs. Goldfish will be watched indulgently as they surface for food, anxiously when they sink listlessly to the bottom of the tank, and alertly when they flap about too much. Enjoying pride of place in the living room means there is no room to hide. So when big businessmen and enterprises say that they want to filter who watches and how they are perceived, in reality, they have as little control as poor flaming orange goldfish.

The latest flapper in the bowl is the Tata group that is asking its firms to re-evaluate engagement with media organisations that it labels biased. It’s a game with dreadful consequences which sends a poor signal to investors and global businesses. It also erodes the vast cache of goodwill the group has enjoyed.

Let’s go to the nub of the matter. The Tata chief has been in the news in the last few weeks for a wide range of issues, mostly though on what he categorises as an invasion of his privacy. Few people grudge him his point of view: that private elements of conversations between him and a lobbyist he employed should have stayed private. Such snatches of conversation are not the business of a nation — in all fairness, only conversation which shows that some people tried to shape public policy to their advantage is. Thousands of minutes of taped talk between dozens of players, mostly media itself, were also made equally public.

Still, Ratan Tata, by virtue of being who he is, had the nation’s ear when he chose to speak on it. Almost every publication gave him top space when he expressed anguish over how the media was running amok in a ‘banana republic’ type of situation that seemed to overlook the wider issue of an incoherent telecom spectrum allocation policy. In short, he had a widely chronicled chance to speak his mind.

Several weeks later, the Tata group, it seems, has decided collectively that it will avoid media it dubs as biased. The aloofness includes cutting off advertising to them. That’s a much flogged horse — firms can choose how they spend their advertising money, with much the same ease as you and I can choose which hotel to stay in or which airline to fly. The hotel may not be the biggest and best, but hey, it’s where I want to spend the night.

For the Tatas, the distancing becomes dangerous, if and when they choose not to invite some members of the media, when publically disclosing information in a press conference, call or statement. In one fell swoop it changes the dynamic from public to selective disclosure. For a group whose firms are listed, that poses a serious perception risk.

The Tata group is no longer just a large Indian company playing a round of neighbourhood cricket. It’s a global corporation that sells much of the tea and salt lining supermarket shelves in the UK, the steel sold in Europe and the luxury cars cruising in Shanghai. Better still, when Tata gets stood-up on the site for the Nano car project, the Gujarat chief minister’s lifeline is a phone call away. It’s a group with considerable heft. When it speaks, it gets heard.

To then conduct its business with the media by disengaging, because they have presumably been unfair, shows the gawkiness of a teenager, not the gravitas of a rainmaker. Such behaviour could divorce it from savvy investors who take these issues seriously. Firms globally, be they banks that provide funding, investors that buy shares, or even private equity players, look at corporate behaviour closely, especially how a respected company conducts its public business and how it chooses to hold its head high. For the Tatas, that has to come from rising above the perceived bias, not falling victim to it, tough as it may be.

Anjana Menon is executive editor, NDTV Profit. The views expressed here are personal