Taj, Byju's, and the Night Culture Actually Gets Tested

Every organisation has a culture deck. Far fewer have a culture that survives contact with a genuine crisis, and that gap is where the real story of belonging and identity usually lives.

Take two moments from Indian corporate history, roughly fifteen years apart, and the contrast is instructive. On the night of 26 November 2008, as gunmen laid siege to the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, Ratan Tata stood outside the hotel for three days while security forces worked to retake it. Eleven Taj employees died protecting guests during the sixty-hour attack. Within two weeks, Tata Sons had set up the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust, which went on to fund the education of 46 children of victims, cover long-term medical and psychiatric care, and extend support not just to hotel staff but to street vendors, taxi drivers and railway employees caught in the same night. None of this was contractually owed. "We care for our people" wasn't a phrase saved for townhalls at Tata. It was a rule the group actually reached for when the pressure was at its worst.

Byju's tells a rougher story. It was once India's most valuable startup, and between 2022 and 2024 it cut more than 10,000 jobs across several rounds. Some employees found out over a phone call and were gone the same day. A 2023 video of a former employee breaking down over unpaid incentives went viral; The Core later spoke to eleven current and former staff who described a pattern of pressure-selling, and salary deductions handed out with little warning. Academics have since turned the episode into teaching material. A 2024 Emerald Insight case study uses it to walk students through exactly how a toxic culture and a botched downsizing feed each other. Byju's went from a few hundred employees to nearly 50,000 inside a decade, and somewhere in that climb, nobody built the machinery that would have let founder intent survive contact with a manager the founder had never met.

The lesson isn't that one company is virtuous and the other villainous. It's narrower and more useful than that. Culture is not tested by what an organisation says it values. It's tested by what it does when honouring that value is expensive: a market downturn, a funding crunch, a night when nobody can guarantee the building is safe. Tata's response cost real money and offered no obvious commercial return, which is precisely why it became a defining story rather than a marketing line. Byju's collapse wasn't just financial (Prosus, its largest investor, went on record saying company directors had "regularly disregarded advice"), but the human cost showed up first and most visibly in how ordinary employees were treated once growth stopped covering for the absence of structure.

This has a direct implication for how Indian companies scaling fast, and there is no shortage of them, should think about culture, rather than treating it as a wellness-team problem. Culture at fifty people survives on proximity: everyone has heard the founder make a hard call often enough to imitate the reasoning. Culture at five thousand, or fifty thousand, survives only if that reasoning has been written down as something closer to precedent than poster copy. It needs to be specific enough that a mid-level manager three layers removed from leadership can apply it without asking permission, and specific enough that it's obvious when it's been violated.

Here's a simple test any growth-stage HR team could actually run. Pick a hard scenario, a hiring freeze, a funding crunch, a leadership exit, and ask what the company's stated values would require it to do about it. Then go find where that answer is written down. Could a manager three levels below the founder locate it on their own? If the honest response is "we'd have to check with someone senior," the values are still living in people's heads, not in the systems that keep running once the founder stops being in every room. And it's the systems that get tested first when things get hard.

None of this shows up cleanly in an engagement survey. It shows up in whether an organisation, tested at its worst moment, does the expensive thing or the convenient one, and in whether employees, years later, are still telling that story unprompted.