In Conversation with our Managing Director
and CEO, Sudhir Sitapati

Think local, Act global is the third. One of the first structural changes I made was setting up a Global Category Team. As part of this shift, we have a centralised strategy, product development, innovation, and brand communication for our three core categories (Household Insecticides, Hair Colour, and Air Care), while keeping market development or category development and brand building, advertising, P&L, etc., local. This allows us to increase the rigour, objectivity, and consumer focus on activities that are particularly strategic and long term in nature—distinct from daily operations.

We are doing this in areas where we see high fungibility across geographies and therefore, greater efficiency and effectiveness from a global approach. The rest of our portfolio, which is largely Soaps in India and Dry Hair in Africa, tends to be local businesses, operating mostly in one geography, and we don’t see the benefit of globalising them. We remain choiceful on why to globalise, and which parts of our portfolio and functions will benefit from this globalisation.

The fourth is Tomorrow before today. Often consumer goods companies get caught in a ‘today’ culture. Take forecasting. You forecast for ambition, and when you are not able to achieve it, to somehow make up for it, you compromise on the ‘tomorrow’ often just through media cuts. The big change we are trying to introduce is that while we have an ambition (double-digit volume growth in the medium term), our forecasts are always going to be for the reality on ground. We will hold our sales system responsible for delivering on a real forecast, and more senior management will be responsible for delivering on the ambition—decoupling ambition and forecasting.

And the fifth and last is, Better from within, Different from outside. The best examples are of the bets we are taking on people. When we set up a Global Category structure, we promoted Robert Menzies, who previously worked as the Head of Strategy at Godrej Industries and the Head of GCPL’s E-commerce business in India, as the Global Head of Category, Innovation, and Strategy.

We appointed Somasree Bose, who had 18 years of experience in GCPL as the Chief Marketing Officer, India. Thomas Dawes, who had been working for 10 years at GCPL as the Chief Creative Officer of BBLUNT, was appointed as the Global Head of Equity and Communication, to lead advertising on global brands. Amit Jain, who had spent 10 years at GCPL, was heading Customer Marketing in India and we expanded his role to include Sales Development. But where we found that we did not have internal talent, we hired from outside.

In Africa, where the business has turned around considerably, the role of the CFO is crucial. We appointed Adesola Sotande-Peters in the role, who has previously worked at multinationals like Diageo and Unilever.

I have spent nearly a quarter of my time travelling across India, Africa, Indonesia, and the USA, meeting our people and sharing in their stories. This was my induction to Godrej and what makes our legacy so powerful and unique. We have an incredible team, deeply committed to our company, values, and ambition. So, underlying all of our business ambitions is our continued commitment to fostering a values-based culture and organisation—what we call ‘sprinkling some people stardust’—making GCPL a place where great talent wants to come to work and thrive.

Tough Love is at the heart of our employer proposition. We will nurture and bet on potential and internal talent. Developing best-in-class functional expertise is a big part of this, so this year we are doubling down on functional capability building. This includes creating global learning agendas and getting global experts to train our teams.

I am personally leading the work around building Marketing capabilities; Dharnesh Gordhon, Business Head of Africa, USA, and Middle East, is working on Sales capabilities; and Pallavi Wad, Head of the India Manufacturing and Supply Chain Organisation, is leading Supply Chain capability building. Given our operating model and global presence, there are great opportunities to build global careers and experiences across multiple emerging markets.

We are also restructuring to build an organisation that is more empowered, lean, and digital. What this means for our people is richer, more meaningful jobs, with more empowerment. For our top talent, we will offer the high velocity that is made possible by our growth ambitions. We will match this with market-leading opportunities for value creation through our performance-linked rewards schemes. This is part of a more holistic benefits proposition, including best-in-class wellness and medical support and flexible work options.

Being diverse and inclusive is core to who we are at Godrej, emphasised by our values of Trust and Respect. Like with our sustainability commitments, we believe that the next phase requires us to shift from a ‘do no harm’ approach to a ‘proactively do good’ approach. Our change agenda must be sponsored by our leadership team through accountability and role modelling.

So, we are having critical conversations to make leaders more mindful of the power that resides with them as change agents, not only for Godrej, but also for our world; inspiring them to be better allies to women, persons with disabilities, individuals from the LGBTQIA+ community, and other under-represented groups in the mainstream workforce.

Climate crises is a critical concern, not only for us as businesses, but also as individuals securing the future of our world. We need urgent action. The IPCC report reaffirms that we must reduce our emissions by more than half by 2030. Only then would we be within the safe threshold of the 1.5-degree Celsius global warming limit by 2050. But none of us has done enough, and in the current scenario, we are poised to reach the limit a whole decade sooner.

At GCPL, we recognise that we need to do much more and are stepping up our commitments. We already source over 30% of all our energy from renewables. We have reduced our emissions by almost half from 2010. We recharge more than 1.9 times the water we use, and we send zero waste to landfill. We will now aim to be Scopes 1 and 2 carbon neutral by 2025. We have set science-based targets in line with the initiative to help limit global warming well below 1.5-degree Celsius. In the first half of fiscal year 2023, we will publish the roadmap to meet our science-based emission reduction targets.

A big area of focus is making products greener by using the life cycle assessment (LCA) approach to understand the environmental impact of our products across their entire lifecycle from sourcing of raw materials right to end-of-life or disposal. As of 2021, we have conducted LCAs for more than half of our products by revenue. The findings help us determine the environmental hotspots or areas of concern. These serve as the starting point for our greener product initiatives.

Let me share the example of how our R&D team has worked on reducing the environmental impact of Goodknight Gold Flash. The technology used in the wick was imported at a high cost from a monopoly vendor. In addition, the wicks were made from non-biodegradable and non-reusable material. The team saw this as an opportunity to develop an indigenous wick that could deliver the same efficacy at a better cost and with a lower environmental impact. The new 100% biodegradable wick is a GCPL-owned, patented indigenous formulation. It is not dependent on a single vendor, is at par with Gold Flash’s efficacy and longevity, is 70% cheaper than the imported wick, and reduces our plastic usage by over 300 tonnes a year.

We are also working on finding and testing alternate packaging materials and increasing the use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic to move away from virgin plastic. Apart from just ensuring regulatory compliance with extended producer responsibility (EPR) plastic waste management guidelines, we are innovating on formulation, design, and delivery models to lower our plastic footprint.

We will continue to increase transparency in our ESG reporting and disclosures, reaffirming our commitment to true sustainability. We have also built on our learnings from the last decade and renewed our sustainability vision for the next 5 years to continue building a more equitable and greener world.