Tata Motors’ Karl Slym: A corporate rarity who also loved bollywood

Slym was that corporate rarity: easily accessible, witty and almost self deprecating.Reuters

FP Sindhu Bhattacharya Jan 27, 2014

If there is one thing reporters covering the auto beat in Delhi will remember most about Karl Slym, it is his easy smile. He was leading General Motors in India till 2011 and was one of the few people who had moved to the corner office without letting it affect their affability. Slym was that corporate rarity: easily accessible, witty and almost self deprecating. He used to take mutiple barbs of scribes about GM's tepid performance in India with equanimity, admitting that the Chevy brand had miles to go before it could aspire to greater volumes. His witty one liners often had us in splits.

Slym left GM to become Executive VP at the three way joint venture he helped forge in 2011 but returned to India in August 2012 to take up the very challenging but prestigious role of leading Tata Motors. On Sunday afternoon, Tata Motors announced his untimely demise while on work in Thailand.

"Tata Motors deeply regrets to announce the untimely and tragic demise of its Managing Director, Karl Slym, in Bangkok earlier today. Karl Slym was in Bangkok to attend a meeting of the Board of Directors of Tata Motors Thailand Ltd," the company said in a statement this afternoon. It appears as if Slym fell from a hotel floor in Bangkok but whether this lead to his death is still unknown.

A former colleague remembers Slym as someone who made even juniors feel at ease. Slym would make the insurmountable odds of turning around Tata Motors sound almost easy but in the last few weeks, he had turned down some interview requests saying unless results are visible, there was no point in saying the same thing in the media. He wanted to let his work do the talking. One look at his Twitter handle will tell you that he tried to interact with anyone and everyone who had a word about Tata Motors, its products or its future.

He was deeply interested in India, its car market and its movies. A profile Forbes magazine did of him in May last year lists his interests as travelling, bollywood and cricket.

With Slym gone, Tata Motors now has the unenviable task of finding a replacement. Its domestic passenger vehicle business is in tatters and Slym had begun to mend it with a multi pronged straregy and help from some of his former GM colleagues who were brought in at key positions within Tata Motors. He had set a turnaround target for the domestic vehicle business by 2016-17 by when brand new vehicle platforms would have been in the market. A story by DNA newspaper earlier this month shows how Tata Motors' share of passenger vehicle business shrunk from 14% in FY11 to 8.7% (April-November) this fiscal. From being a leader in the SUV market, it easily ceded its position to Mahindra & Mahindra as new product pipeline dried up, diesel vehicles lost their appeal and competition continued to innovate.

Now, not only should Tata Motors continue with the blueprint Slym had already readied, it is even more imperative for the company to get an MD with a long term vision and abundant patience to achieve the painful turnaround of its domestic vehicle business.

Tata Motors said on Sunday that Managing Director Karl Slym had died in Bangkok after a fall. Slym, 51, was in the Thai capital for a Tata Motors Thailand board meeting, a company spokeswoman told Reuters. A post-mortem report was due on Monday, she said, but gave no further details. Karl Slym. Reuters "The company shares in the grief of Karl Slym's wife and family at their irreparable loss," the company said in a statement. Slym had worked for Tata since October 2012.