Challenges of Collective Leadership

In 2014, K.P. Ramesh, founder-chairman of the KPRT group1 seriously started thinking about his successor which would be effected in 2020 when he would turn 70. As always, he wanted to start the homework early on, and wanted to devise a succession plan that would maintain continuity of business and family legacy. Though he had three equally capable next generation members, the dilemma was to whom among them to handover the leadership mantle. Among the equals, he could not anoint one individual to be ‘more equal’ than the others. An alternative that crossed his mind was to evolve some form of collective leadership mechanism. But how? Will it work? Ramesh struggled to find answers to such questions. Hyderabad based KPRT group was a large player in India’s infrastructure sector, with interests in power, road and airport businesses. Ramesh’s entrepreneurial journey had been long and interesting. During the 1980s, Ramesh and his three brothers continued the trading business that they had inherited from their father, but later added two spinning mills and a steel rolling mill to their business. Unlike his brothers, Ramesh dreamt big, and amicably separated with them in 1988. Since then, the group had seen tremendous growth.