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I was a man in a hurry because I knew that the company was in a financial crisis. We had huge piles of imported raw materials and an equally large pile of unsold stock, all of which was hypothecated against loans from banks. There was a very small cash balance and even paying for essential materials and monthly wages required a lot of planning and juggling. The first priority was to get our products to sell better. Despite all the claims made by our US collaborators about the reliability of their tyre design, I became very sceptical about it. One of the major problems with our tyre at that time was that over eight per cent of the tyres we sold were returned by customers under “adjustment”. In the tyre industry there was an agreed policy among manufacturers and distributors that if a customer found a defect in a tyre he could return it to the manufacturer and receive a new tyre by paying a small amount proportionate to the extent of tread worn out during use. This had to be assessed by a local group of the tyre manufacturers’ salesmen in each region. We had the highest level of adjustment to be paid for in the industry. No business can afford to refund eight per cent of sales value towards a defective product. Our competition had less than one per cent adjustment liability.

Apart from the financial loss, an equally serious consequence was the lack of confidence in our product. When a truck-driver got stranded with a tyre whose tread had gone off the carcass, he was losing time and money. Our competitors made sure that the dealers and customers knew all about our quality problems. There was no way to hide it. I discussed the problem of quality-tread separation, bubbles on the tides, fraying of the fabric inside the tyre, etc. with the American technicians and their Indian assistants. The Americans were very defensive about their tyre design. After all, they had been building tyres for fifty years. But some of the Indian engineers, now, began to speak up about the possible differences between our tyres and those of the competition. I began to understand more about the design of tyres and after a few more days of discussion and analysis it was obvious to me that while the Americans were rightly proud of their design record in the US, they had not taken into account a few fundamental differences in the local conditions. First, Indian roads were much worse than US roads. So the tyre had to take greater punishment both inside and outside. Second, the Indian truck operator had to overload at almost a hundred per cent above the declared loading capacity of the vehicle in order to make any profit. So it was no use basing tyre design on standard vehicle capacities.

These facts pointed to a total change in our designs. The Americans were scared to make any changes. In their highly centralized system of hierarchical controls, no changes in design could be made locally without authorization from Mansfield, Ohio. I knew that it would be impossible to go through that loop because people, back in Mansfield, would be too proud and rigid to admit that their design had been wrong for the past two or three years, and was causing one of the major problems facing the company. Mammen, whom I had briefed, understood the need for the change, but he was concerned about whether our changing the design unilaterally would provoke the collaborators to withdraw the brand name ‘Mansfield’ as the changes would not adhere to their design. One of the Americans might have mentioned this possibility to him. But I argued that the survival of the company was our most important objective. If we did not change the design, we were playing a losing game and the longer we waited; the brand name would suffer further and become a symbol of failure and losses. I was all for an immediate change in design. We were responsible to turn the company around for a vast majority of share holders.

I decided to place my reliance on the young Indian engineers because they seemed much brighter and, in any case, the Americans could not act without a green signal from the home office. The Indian engineers were asked to dissect the tyres of each of our three multinational competitors and study their designs. Their tyres were tested on our tyre-testing wheel to determine which one performed best. It was found that the Firestone tyre performed best and had the least weight, which meant it cost the least to manufacture. As there were no patent rights in tyre design I told the engineers to copy their design and build tyres for testing. The results were encouraging and we gradually switched over to the new design for tyre-building.

By the end of 1964 our adjustments had come down to less than five per cent and were still going down as the stock of old-design tyres were getting replaced by new ones. A few months later we were at two per cent and confident that we could reach the industrial average. It was another bold change that set the company on the path to revival.

Mammen is a gifted artist in addition to being a businessman. One of his special interests was in advertising and promotion. When I joined MRF, Lintas, which was Lever’s own agency at that time, was brought in as MRF’s agency. I used to sit in on meetings with Lintas. One evening the Lintas Manager, Ramesh Khanna, was discussing with us various possibilities for a logo or symbol for our tyres. He began to articulate some of the possible attributes that could be derived from the name “Mansfield”. He said that it sounded masculine and could symbolize strength and muscle. As the evening progressed and that line was explored further by Khanna, came up with the concept of a “Muscle Man” to represent Mansfield. 

Excerpted from Page 91-93 of ‘To Challenge and To Change’ by T. Thomas