Kumar Mangalam Birla on Governance

In January 2023 Birla's children Ananya and Aryaman Vikram Birla were appointed directors of Grasim, Hindalco, Aditya Birla Management Corporation and Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail — a formal succession signal placing the fifth generation on key operating company boards while the founder remained group chairman.

Birla contrasted traditional command-and-control hierarchies, where information was power and seniority was measured in years, with what he saw as the unavoidable need to change because the business context had shifted. He kept the family legacy of values, trusteeship-based management and long-horizon thinking, but re-engineered the operating culture to be meritocratic — a multi-ethnic, multi-dimensional group of 136,000 people across 42 nationalities on six continents.

For Birla, professionalisation means more than hiring top talent — it means a culture that stokes entrepreneurial drive, fresh thinking at all levels, and a learning organization creating value for multiple stakeholders. Leadership, in his framing, must be inclusive and have a penchant for collaborative and innovative solutions to keep the group's companies, products and services on customer radars.

Birla positioned the Aditya Birla Group as a 'testimony to the manner in which a traditional Marwari business empire has transformed into a modern-day business group,' embracing top professionals worldwide while remaining deeply rooted in traditional values. The framing explicitly rejected the binary of tradition-versus-modernity, arguing the best family businesses selectively retain and re-engineer simultaneously.

Birla's emphasis on 'big bets on people' — providing unparalleled opportunities, dynamic challenges and a professionally rewarding environment — positioned talent investment as the precondition for the group's expansion. In a competitive world, he argued, high-performing teams and individuals supported by a strong performance culture are the cornerstones of all the group seeks to achieve.