EPL's Anand Kripalu shares his life lessons
At the Bombay Master Printers’ Association's Print Summit 2025, Anand Kripalu, managing director and global CEO of EPL, delivered the keynote address. He shared five lessons he has learnt from his decades-long career. He reflected on his time at Unilever, Cadbury, Diageo, and EPL; and how his experiences at those companies shape the way he looks at problems.
16 Jan 2025 | 370 Views | By Anhata Rooprai
At the 17th edition of the Bombay Master Printers’ Association, Anand Kripalu, managing director and global CEO of EPL, delivered the keynote address. He began by talking about Steve Jobs’ famed commencement speech at Stanford University, which ended with the phrase, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” He reminded the audience that Jobs highlighted three things in his speech, most importantly, connecting the dots.
On that day in June 2005, Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
So, Kripalu took the audience through four formative experiences from his career.
Revitalising Unilever East Africa
The first was as the managing director for Unilever East Africa. Kripalu recounted how this operation had been losing money every year and had not grown for a decade. Doug Baillie, then the regional head at Unilever, told Kripalu, “Anand this is our last chance. You turn this business around or else we will shut it down.”
When Kripalu landed in Nairobi, he realised that everyone there had the mindset of a victim. They externalised every problem. Kripalu said that everyone there blamed the GDP, the economy, the lack of freedom given to them by their seniors, or something else.
Then, Kripalu decided to travel across the length and breadth of the East African countries — Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. He said, “I visited people's homes and talked to them. I sat with consumers who earned less than USD 2 a day and understood the trade-offs they make.”
He added that he had covered more ground in those countries than many of the locals. “I had been to the length and breadth including places where they say you will not come back alive in Nairobi. I said, I am going and I will go and sit in consumers' homes and talk to them.”
Slowly, Kripalu started earning the respect of the people there. He was no longer perceived as a foreigner who had come there telling people what to do. After this, Kripalu and his team designed a comprehensive program to restructure the cost base of that business.
Kripalu said, “We unveiled that plan to the company and created a scorecard to ensure that everything we said is measurable. So, I introduced the red, amber, green, which many people are familiar with. But, amber is a hiding place, as I have learnt in life. What I learnt from managing the RCB cricket team, is that in sports, there is no amber. You win or lose. It is either red or it's green.”
The scorecard was put in place to measure what they wanted to get done. The business started turning around.
But it started turning around and at the end of the year, that business was delivering double-digit growth and turned profitable. But you know what is the most rewarding thing for me is that this double-digit growth was sustained for a decade thereafter. Right? After that, I lost track of what they were doing.
For a decade thereafter, even though I chose to leave Unilever at that time at the end of one year. And you know why that happened? Because people have started believing in themselves and saying, I will take charge of my destiny and I will do what needs to be done. Right? That was the real shift that happened.
The Cadbury story
In November 2005, Kripalu joined Cadbury as a managing director for the Indian subcontinent. This was soon after the company’s infestation crisis. Worms had been found in the chocolate bars sold in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration seized the products, and the company’s sales dropped by 30%.
Kripalu said, “Packaging saved the day. That magical combination of a tangible difference to the packaging and the endorsement of Amitabh Bachchan saying I am personally assuring you I've been to the factory,
I've checked the quality standards and it's safe to put into your child's mouth. Because this is a product you put into your child's mouth! What will you buy and put into your child's mouth if it's going to have creepy crawlies coming out of it?”
Kripalu noticed that India’s economy was opening up but Cadbury was not celebrating. “Our ambitions and our numbers were exactly the way they were over the past decades. So what did we do? I felt we needed to grow much faster.”
He set a lofty goal for the company, that it has to grow 20% per annum till 2010. He took many difficult decisions to bring this to fruition. “We killed a third of the brands. Half the number of SKUs in that company. Half the number of innovations in the pipeline. We focused on just one or two real innovations and pecked the bank on them."
Kripalu said, “They were Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, which is a multi-thousand crore brand today; and Oreo. Both those brands were launched at that time. In eight years, that business delivered a CAGR of 25% topline and 25% bottom-line.”
Transforming Diageo India
Diageo had just taken control of United Spirits (USL). Kripalu was approached to lead the integration in India. He said, “This is a category that a lot of people will speak badly about in the day but will quietly come home to in the evening. On the other side, there was Diageo, a great company with great values. It was an industry that had a low per capita consumption. I felt like it was one of the biggest and most exciting opportunities in the larger consumer goods space in India. So, I took the plunge.”
Kripalu's leadership at the company involved an overhaul of the business, addressing legacy issues and operational inefficiencies. Upon his arrival, the company faced numerous challenges, including a long list of qualifications in their audit report.
At the time, Diageo owned 150 brands. He said, “We focused on a few of them with sharper positioning and sharper advertising. We put an innovation structure in place to create excitement in a category that actually, had been boring.”
Recognising the industry’s lack of innovation, he introduced an innovation structure that injected fresh energy into the market. He also shifted the sales strategy from a push model to a pull model, turning stores into brand-building hubs with appealing point-of-sale materials and packaging.
Kripalu pointed to another major change, “We transformed the cost base of that business. We had 94 factories when I started. I ended with 47 exactly half.”
He made it a point to prioritise ethical marketing. McDowell's Diet Whisky had promoted misleading claims about weight loss. “To call it diet and say you will lose weight is pushing the truth a bit too far, right? So we killed that multi-million case brand.” In place of such tactics, Diageo campaigned with road safety and corporate citizenship, cultivating a more structured and inclusive corporate culture.
Under Kripalu’s leadership, the company made significant strides in gender diversity, “Diageo today has more than half its leadership team as women and one-third of the top 50 as women in the alcohol industry, where you would think it is the hardest to get women to come along.”
Despite the challenges of operating in a highly fragmented market, particularly within India’s state-regulated alcohol industry, Kripalu’s efforts laid the groundwork for Diageo’s success. He said, “My time at Diageo was spent constructing the runway and repairing the engine so that the plane could take off one day.”
Leading EPL through crisis and sustainability
Anand Kripalu's role at EPL, which is where he currently works, presented unique challenges compared to his previous experiences. When he joined in August 2021, he was confronted with a crisis involving commodity shortages, supply chain issues, energy costs, and significant wage inflation, particularly a 40% increase in Germany post-Covid.
He said, “We had to focus on cost and ensuring that customers are served. I said that it doesn't matter what happens to cost, but let’s just make sure we control the cost while serving customers well.”
Despite lacking expertise in packaging, he set a clear vision for the company: to become the most sustainable packaging company in the world, rather than striving for size or profitability. “We’re in plastics. Plastic is a bad word in many parts of the world. Like alcohol. But you can do it responsibly. I think that's the real question. Today, I believe that the business is well on its way on that journey, building on the rich legacy that the promoters built.”
Under his leadership, the company has recovered from the crisis and expanded its global footprint. EPL employs over 5,300 people from 25 nationalities and serves 80 countries across five continents. The group manufactures eight billion tubes in a year. That's one tube per person on this planet.
Anand Kripalu shares five lessons from his extensive career
Setting the right ambition: Ambition is the starting point of anything and this is one of the most important decisions leaders must make and the leadership team must make. Kripalu said, “If you plan to grow at 5% then you take certain decisions. If you plan to grow at 20% you take quite different decisions. Ambition is the starting point.”
The power of focus: Kripalu said, “Perfection requires focus. It requires mastery. It requires huge time and attention and there’s no time to do more than one.” Kripalu pointed out that if you tell people to do things that keep them busy but make no difference to the business, they will do it. The real difference is when you get them to focus on things that will transform the business. He said, “Doing a few things is so much more impactful than doing many small things. Because the latter only keeps you busy.”
Growth through internal effort: Kripalu highlights the importance of internalising credit for growth, as external factors such as GDP and the economy can’t always explain performance. He said, “As they say, success has a thousand fathers, failures have none. Never be a victim. Focus on your circle of control, not your circle of concern.”
Culture drives performance: According to Kripalu, culture is what unites people during crises and creates a sense of ownership. He said, “We used to say in Cadbury we have purple blood running in our veins. This is my company. I can't leave. I have to stay and fix it and be part of the solution. Only culture can do that.”
Winning the right way: Winning ethically is paramount. Kripalu stresses the importance of managing with conscience, ensuring decisions are made with integrity, and businesses are led in a morally responsible way. He said, “When I manage a business I manage it through conscience and that forces me to stay and do the right thing.”