India’s Business Icons Have a Succession Problem to Solve

India is generous with expanding its legion of business icons. Every year brings fresh rankings plastered around the business press, celebrating vision, resilience, and the ability to build something of consequence from nothing. However, this list does not introspect on what will happen after the icons who made it to the lists retire. Influence that cannot outlive the person who wields it is not actually influence but a long-running public appearance.

A Gap Hiding in Plain Sight

Even as it remains underdiscussed, the scale of the problem is still well documented. Family enterprises account for roughly 79% of India’s GDP, one of the highest shares globally. Yet a December 2025 report from Entrust Family Office found that fewer than half of the business-owning families have a formally documented succession plan.

An HSBC Global Private Banking Survey report released in May 2025 offers a more granular picture. 88% of Indian entrepreneurs say they trust the next generation’s ability to manage wealth, but 45% do not expect their children to take over the business itself. Only 7% of heirs feel any obligation to do so. In other words, trust in the next generation has not translated to a plan for them.

Delaying the Succession Plan

Deloitte’s 2025 survey of Indian businesses, part of a global study of 1,587 firms, found that leadership transition consistently rated among the hardest challenges founders face, even as these companies post steady revenue growth and aggressively expand globally.

The reluctance is rarely about capability and is more about control. Founders who spent decades building an enterprise around personal judgement often struggle to formalise decision rights that were never written down because they never needed to be. The result, seen repeatedly across industrial groups in Mumbai and Delhi, is that succession is treated as an event to be managed in a crisis rather than a capability to be built in advance.

The Kotak Counter-Example

An illustrious example that runs counter to the trend is Kotak Mahindra Bank, which announced a formal succession plan in 2024. Uday Kotak, the founder, MD, and CEO of the bank, formally handed the chief executive’s role to Ashok Vaswani, a professional banker with no promoter lineage.

Yet, it was notable precisely because it was unremarkable in execution. The bank had prepared the market, the board, and the balance sheet well in advance. The lesson generalises beyond one company. Succession planning is not a concession that founders make when they run out of energy. It is a governance discipline, no different from audit or risk oversight, and it is measurable well before any transition actually happens.

What Ranking Should Reward

India’s leadership rankings currently reward visibility, notably deals closed, valuations created, and quotes given. They should also reward what is harder to see, namely, the depth of a bench, the clarity of a succession timeline, and the willingness to delegate real authority before it is forced by circumstance. A leader who cannot be replaced has not built an institution. They have built a dependency. The next generation of Indian rankings would do well to ask not only who is powerful today, but also who else in that organisation could run it tomorrow.

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