Sanjiv Mehta’s scintillating and analytical book, A CEO’s Brew, is a corporate handbook. Having interacted with him during my five years as a Senior Advisor to HUL (2018–2023), I have seen firsthand his keen eye for making on-the-spot assessments to harness individual strengths for organizational success.
The book serves as an indispensable practitioner’s playbook, offering significant takeaways for leaders at all levels:
- Leadership Philosophy: Ambition tempered with humility— “humbition”—is the new leadership norm, and failure must be viewed not as the opposite of success, but as a stepping stone to it. His hiring framework relies on the “6-8-10” principle: hire 6 people, pay them like 8, and expect the productivity of 10.
- Winning in Many Indias (WiMI): Grounded in the reality that India’s consumer base spans “haves and have-nots,” Mehta shifted HUL’s strategy from a generic national average to localized “de-averaging.” By replacing the legacy 4-branch model with 14 distinct, homogenous clusters, HUL hit regional competitors head-on with WiMI. I estimate this strategy contributed to 1/3rd of HUL’s growth from 2016-2023.
- Agility & Market Execution: Mehta advocates moving from “where to win” to “how to win.” Under his leadership, HUL achieved phenomenal reach across India’s 10 million mom-and-pop stores via 3,000 distributors—reaching 3 million directly and 5 million through wholesale. Operational innovations like “Nano Factories” (agile, multi-product manufacturing units) and “Project LiveWire” (a centralized data repository), Shikhar app for the retailers redefined market intimacy and speed. A perfect store, as he notes, is one where “the shelf speaks to the shopper.”
- Values-Led Crisis Management: Living by the principle “If we look after our people, they will look after our business,” Mehta’s leadership during COVID-19 was extraordinary. HUL scaled sanitizer production 100x, launched over fifty new product and pack innovations to cater to the rapid changes in demand, distributed 5 million PPE items, and procured 5,500 oxygen concentrators globally for public use in India.
- Scale, Growth, and Impact: Over his 10-year tenure, HUL’s turnover more than doubled adding ₹31,000 crore with Surf Excel alone becoming a $1 billion brand and market cap soared 5X to over ₹6 lakh crore, making it the 5th most valuable company in the country. On the sustainability front, HUL’s water conservation initiative reached 14,000 villages creating 2.6 trillion litres of water potential, while the “Suvidha” a pay-for-use urban hygiene project established centres across the slums in Mumbai, including Dharavi. As President of FICCI and to envision the future, he collaborated with McKinsey and 200 CXOs to craft “India@100” strategy.
Mehta is a leader driven by passion and purpose—he truly means what he says. When a large pending project materialized through my enablement, he called me to Mumbai just to offer a warm, personal hug in his office.
For MBA students, faculty, and corporate executives alike, A CEO’s Brew is an essential read on navigating a career from start to finish. Brewing excellence is an art, and Sanjiv Mehta shows us exactly how it is done.
