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Note: In an increasingly competitive investment banking market, Uday Kotak has built Kotak Mahindra Bank into one of India's most successful financial advisers by playing to its domestic strengths.
UDAY Kotak, The founder and executive vice chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank, has never been a big fan of received wisdom. A star cricket player in his first year at India's elite Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in 1980, Kotak suffered a head injury when he was hit by a ball and was forced to take a year off from his studies. He worked in his family's Mumbai-based cotton-trading business while recuperating. Seniority, not logic, held sway in the family business, he found. "I saw very quickly that I could not have my way even when I was right," says Kotak. But on graduating at the top of his class in 1982, the soft-spoken Kotak turned down a job offer at consumer goods group Hindustan Lever and joined the family business after his father offered him a small corner office and the chance to pursue...