Sumant Moolgaokar Eating With Truck Drivers at Dhabas: The Innovation Habit Behind the Tata Sumo

    The Managing Director of Tata Motors kept vanishing at lunchtime. His executives finally followed him — and found him eating at a roadside dhaba with truck drivers. That quiet lunch habit is one of the sharpest lessons on innovation I know.

    Sumant Moolgaokar Eating With Truck Drivers at Dhabas: The Innovation Habit Behind the Tata Sumo

    Sumant Moolgaokar Eating With Truck Drivers at Dhabas: The Innovation Habit Behind the Tata Sumo

    Every day at lunchtime, the Managing Director of Tata Motors disappeared. His top executives ate together in the company cafeteria — but he was never there. When a few of them finally got curious enough to follow him, they did not find him at a five-star hotel entertaining dealers. They found him at a roadside dhaba, sitting with truck drivers, eating the same food they ate. That single habit tells you almost everything you need to know about how real innovation actually happens inside a company.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    Every trait in Stars at India Inc. has a home on the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework) — the four-sided kite where the top is Success, the left is EQ (Emotional Intelligence), the right is RQ (Relationship Intelligence), and the bottom is PQ (Productivity). Innovation is Trait #8, part of the Self-Motivation cluster on the EQ — left — side. It sits alongside traits like Achievement Drive and Flexibility, because innovating begins as an inner decision — a willingness to go looking for the truth instead of waiting for it to be reported to you — long before it becomes a strategy document or a product launch. You rise on balance across EQ, RQ and PQ, not strength in one alone, and this story is one of the cleanest examples I know of a leader keeping his EQ side strong through nothing more than a daily habit.

    A Name Every Professional Should Know

    Sumant Moolgaokar is not a household name the way some business leaders are, but he should be. He was the Managing Director of Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company — TELCO, known today as Tata Motors. He was also Vice-Chairman of Tata Steel and served as the non-executive Chairman of Maruti Suzuki. In 1990, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to Indian industry.

    On paper, these are the credentials of a formidable, formal, boardroom kind of leader. And by every account, Moolgaokar was rigorous, exacting and deeply respected inside Tata. But what actually made him exceptional was not the list of titles. It was something far less glamorous: his openness to insight from the most unexpected, unglamorous sources available to him.

    The Executive Who Never Ate in the Cafeteria

    Here is how the story goes. At Tata Motors, it was customary for the top executives to have lunch together in the company cafeteria. It was part ritual, part unofficial meeting — a chance for the senior leadership to talk shop, catch up, and stay visibly connected to one another over a shared meal.

    Moolgaokar was conspicuously absent. Every single day, as lunchtime approached, he would quietly disappear. No explanation, no entry in anyone's diary. He would vanish for the length of the lunch break and reappear only once it was over, ready to get back to work as if nothing unusual had happened.

    Naturally, this became a topic of curiosity — and eventually, mild concern — among his colleagues. Some assumed he simply did not want to eat with them, that perhaps he preferred his own company or found the cafeteria chatter unnecessary. Others theorised something grander: that he was slipping away to expensive lunches at five-star hotels, entertaining Tata's dealers and distributors, discussing business over crisp white tablecloths and a menu far removed from what the rest of the company ate.

    Nobody actually knew. And because nobody knew, the speculation kept building. Eventually, a handful of executives decided they had had enough of guessing. One day, they discreetly followed him.

    What They Found

    What they discovered stopped the speculation cold — and, if the story is told rightly, should stop most of us in our tracks too.

    Sumant Moolgaokar was not at a five-star hotel. He had not gone anywhere close to one. He was at a nearby dhaba — a modest, roadside eatery of the kind you find dotted along every highway in India — sitting on a plain bench, eating the same food served to everyone else there. And the people he was sitting with, talking to, listening to, were truck drivers. Ordinary men who spent their working lives behind the wheel of Tata trucks, driving them across the length and breadth of the country, day after day, in every kind of weather and road condition imaginable.

    This was not a one-off visit or a publicity stunt. It was a habit — a quiet, deliberate, unannounced routine that he had clearly been keeping for a long time, without a single person in his own leadership team knowing about it until they went looking.

    Why a Dhaba, Not a Boardroom

    The obvious question is: why? Why would the Managing Director of one of India's largest engineering companies choose a roadside dhaba over a boardroom, a dealer meeting, or even a formal customer-feedback survey?

    The answer is simple, and it is exactly why this story belongs in a chapter on innovation. Moolgaokar wanted feedback — but not the polished, filtered, carefully-worded feedback that tends to travel up a corporate hierarchy by the time it reaches the top. Reports from regional managers get summarised. Dealer feedback gets softened before it reaches head office. Engineering reviews get framed in technical language that can hide as much as it reveals. By the time a real, on-the-ground problem with a Tata truck reached Moolgaokar's desk through official channels, it had usually been rounded off, reworded, or quietly dropped altogether.

    Truck drivers had no such filter. They were the people who lived with Tata's vehicles for ten, twelve, sixteen hours a day. They knew exactly which part rattled loose on bad roads, which gear was stiff in the monsoon, which cabin design made a twelve-hour drive miserable, and which small fix would make their working life easier. And because Moolgaokar was sitting across from them at a dhaba table, not across a boardroom table, they told him plainly — no corporate language, no softening, no fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

    He would listen, take mental note, ask follow-up questions, and take their suggestions back with him. Over time, this fed directly into how Tata's engineering and product teams thought about quality and design. Small changes — the kind that never make it into a press release — began improving the trucks that thousands of drivers depended on for their livelihood.

    Small Changes, Compounded Over Years

    This is the part of the story that I find most instructive for professionals today. Moolgaokar did not walk out of one dhaba lunch with a single breakthrough idea that transformed Tata Motors overnight. That is not how this kind of innovation works, and it is not how it worked for him either.

    What he built, meal after meal, year after year, was a steady, compounding stream of small, thoughtful improvements — each one rooted in a real problem faced by a real user, not a hypothesis dreamed up in a strategy meeting. None of these changes were individually dramatic. But strung together across years of consistent listening, they built something dramatic: a level of product trust and engineering credibility that helped grow Tata Motors into the industrial giant it is today.

    And there is a lovely, very Indian postscript to this story. When Tata Motors launched one of its most iconic SUVs, they named it the Tata Sumo — "Su" from Sumant, "Mo" from Moolgaokar. It remains one of the most recognisable vehicle names in Indian automotive history, and most people who have driven or ridden in a Sumo have no idea it carries the name of a man who earned that honour, in part, by eating at dhabas with truck drivers.

    Innovation That Doesn't Look Like Innovation

    When most professionals hear the word "innovation," they picture something big and visible — a new product launch, a disruptive piece of technology, a bold strategic pivot covered in the business press. Moolgaokar's story is a useful correction to that picture. Innovation is not only about inventing new things. It is just as often about making small, deliberate changes to how work gets done, based on insight you had to go and find rather than insight that was handed to you.

    The habit itself was the innovation. Not a single idea he picked up at the dhaba, but the decision to build direct, informal, judgement-free channels to the people who actually used what his company made — and to keep using that channel, quietly, every single day, regardless of how senior he became.

    This is where the emotional intelligence angle becomes clear. It would have been easier, and more comfortable, for Moolgaokar to eat in the cafeteria with his peers every day. That is what status and seniority usually pull a leader toward — staying among equals, protecting the dignity of the position. Choosing instead to sit with truck drivers, day after day, required a kind of humility and genuine curiosity that has nothing to do with strategy decks and everything to do with character. Daniel Goleman's writing on emotional intelligence describes this same quality — the ability to set ego aside in service of a clearer, truer picture of reality. Moolgaokar lived it at a dhaba table, long before anyone was writing books about it.

    What This Looks Like in Your Own Work

    You do not need to run Tata Motors to apply this. Ask yourself a version of Moolgaokar's question in your own role: who is closest to the actual problem I am trying to solve, and when did I last go and sit with them directly, without a formal meeting invite, without a filtered report in between?

    If you manage a sales team, when did you last sit in on a real customer call instead of reading the CRM summary? If you lead a product team, when did you last watch someone use your product without a facilitator's script, instead of reading a satisfaction score? If you run operations, when did you last walk the shop floor and talk to the people doing the work, rather than reviewing the weekly report about the work? If you are a manager of any kind, when did you last have an honest, informal conversation with the newest, most junior person in your team — the person closest to the customer, the machine, or the problem — rather than only hearing from the layer of people reporting up to you?

    Formal systems — surveys, dashboards, quarterly reviews — matter, and no organisation can run purely on dhaba conversations. But formal systems are built to summarise, and summaries lose texture. What Moolgaokar understood, decades before "customer obsession" became a management buzzword, is that some of the most valuable insight in any organisation is sitting one level below where you usually look for it, and it is available to anyone senior enough to set aside their comfort and go find it.

    Why This Story Belongs Next to Every Big Innovation Example

    It is easy to read stories of massive, headline-grabbing innovation — a company reinventing an entire industry, a team pulling off an against-the-odds turnaround — and conclude that innovation is only for the boldest, biggest moves. Moolgaokar's story is the necessary counterweight to that. He did not reinvent Tata Motors in a single stroke. He built a habit that quietly, consistently fed real insight into an enormous organisation for years, and that habit shaped a company — and gave a legendary SUV its name.

    If you want a fuller picture of what innovation looks like at the other end of the scale — a team using a structured five-step method to rebuild an entire strategy from scratch — read the companion story in this chapter, Sri Lanka's 1996 Cricket World Cup Victory, where Edward de Bono's TOLOPOSOGO framework and a set of bold tactical changes turned a team written off after a disastrous 1992 campaign into world champions. Between the two stories, you get both ends of what Innovation on the Winning Kite actually asks of you: the courage for the big, visible bet, and the discipline for the small, unglamorous habit that nobody else even notices you keeping.

    The Question Worth Carrying With You

    Every professional eventually reaches a point of some seniority — a title, a team, an office slightly further from where the real work happens. The test of your Innovation trait, in Moolgaokar's terms, is simple: does distance from the ground floor make you more comfortable, or does it make you go looking for the truck driver's table? Stars, as the traits in this book describe them, are the ones who keep going looking — quietly, consistently, without needing anyone to notice.

    Want to build this trait — and the other 24 across the Winning Kite — inside your team? Explore Avinash's Signature Programs or browse all corporate training topics, and get in touch through the contact page.

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why did Sumant Moolgaokar eat lunch with truck drivers at dhabas?

    Sumant Moolgaokar, Managing Director of Tata Motors (then TELCO), wanted direct, unfiltered feedback from the people who actually drove Tata trucks every day — what broke down, what worked, what could be improved. Formal reports from dealers and engineers couldn't give him that. Truck drivers eating at roadside dhabas could, so that is where he went.

    What is the connection between Sumant Moolgaokar and the Tata Sumo?

    The Tata Sumo, one of India's most iconic SUVs, was named directly after him — "Su" from Sumant and "Mo" from Moolgaokar. It was Tata's way of honouring a leader whose hands-on, ground-level approach to feedback and problem-solving shaped the company's engineering culture for decades.

    How is this story an example of the Innovation trait?

    Innovation isn't only about inventing brand-new products — it's also about small, deliberate changes to how you gather insight and improve what already exists. Moolgaokar didn't wait for feedback to travel up through formal, filtered channels. He went out and got it himself, directly from the end user, and used it to make small but compounding improvements. That is innovation in its most practical, repeatable form.

    Where does Innovation sit on Avinash Chate's Winning Kite framework?

    Innovation is Trait #8, part of the Self-Motivation cluster on the EQ — left — side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). EQ, RQ and PQ together lift the kite toward Success; Innovation is one of the traits that keeps a professional's EQ side strong.

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