It’s the season of pink slips and break-ups -- Of people and portfolios.

French Beauty and cosmetics major L'Oreal is shaking up its local leadership, importing a Frenchman to be the India country manager, pushing the incumbent to become the chairman. For the first time in history, Coca Cola’s India bottler has roped in an outsider, a former Mondelez man to lead the business. Across the Pacific, the makers of Listerine, Band-Aid, Neutrogena, Kenvue – which itself was spun out of J&J in 2023 – also announced the departure of their CEO as the consumer health company undertakes a review of brands and business. Even Kraft-Heinz is breaking up after 12 years of misadventure for the same reason it got merged in the first place: Financial engineering.

But none was as dramatic as the recent CEO whiplash at the Indian arm of Unilever – the legendary laboratory for leadership talent – just months after the impetuous ousting of its global chief executive at the London headquarters. Rohit Jawa’s shelf life at the India corner office -- shortest in its local history – startled the Street, sparking yet again the debate over the suboptimality of short tenures for C-Suits to ratchet up longtime laggards like Unilever or Diageo, like which has also this week saw its CEO exit.

Fundamentally though, these abrupt nature of such corporate announcements, in India and elsewhere suggest a growing impatience within. Corporations spent years and billions bulking up. They expanded in a globalised, borderless world to leverage strength of distribution at scale, market access, technology and talent. But today risks have become predominantly exogenous just as fenced borders, barriers of trade and battles have suddenly upended tried and tested strategies. Big is no longer better, nor is it beautiful. Even industries like FMCG that have hewed to homegrown talent are also being forced to experiment with external talents to re-imagine their portfolio.

That is exactly what Indian corporates like HUL must do too by simply turning to the neighbourhood and seeking inspiration from the once crusty conglomerate from Singapore -- Fraser and & Neave (F&N) and its former chairman Lee Hsien Yang. In 2007, Lee surprised the region's corporate world, and his father, the founding leader of the city state Lee Kuan Yew, with his departure from Singapore Telecommunications Ltd at age 55, after 12 years as its chief executive. In little over a decade, he had propelled Singtel into a trans-continental telecoms heavyweight, grabbing stakes in mobile phone companies in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh and India’s Bharti Airtel.

Lee’s appointment as an outsider to lead the F&N boardroom was simply to shake things up in the then 125-year old colonial vestige that was as confused as it was complex. Fraser & Neave, which was set up as a soft drink company in 1883, after dabbling in printing and publishing, went on to brew beer, bottle soda, make milk, churn yogurt and even run chain of serviced apartments and commercial real estate. When Lee assumed command, F&N Group was more spread out than Singtel. Within 5 years, he streamlined management, sliced and diced businesses, listed some, focused on core operations, capital distribution and then oversaw a bidding war for F&N that resulted in Southeast Asia's biggest corporate takeover. In 2013, Thai billionaire and beer baron Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi paid $11.2 billion for F&N. Shareholders reaped the near five-fold increase under Lee’s watch. That’s value creation.

Following the takeover, Lee’s job was done. So pivoted to regulatory, corporate stewardship and even political roles.

Make no mistake, institutions like HUL, India’s largest consumer goods maker, are not up for sale. But as it welcomes its new CEO, also an insider, it should consider appointing an outsider as a chairperson with an explicit mandate to release shareholder value. Let him plan just for that. If its parent can have one, why can’t the business -- its second largest market – that is screaming for a reboot, have one?

At the HQ, businessman Ian Meakins, a notorious taskmaster, was on boarded in 2023 to add vim to the makers of Lipton Tea and Dove soap as chairman, for his track record to wield the axe at most of close to a dozen enterprises he headed. For example, at building products group Wolseley he promised shareholders that their company “won’t dally too long.”

Unilever in India, much like elsewhere, needs stability along with a recipe to recoup lost ground, market share and sheen to combat the D2C and social media juggernaut. The current structure of having lifers both as chair as well as CEO has made the company flounder. And that’s why the outside-in perspective is essential to bust the company’s too comfortable culture and accelerate change including weighing up potential acquisitions and disposals.

Value creation can lie in both strategically buying and bundling off businesses. Globally industrial conglomerates have been among the fastest to change and adapt to a fast changing landscape with General Electric, Emerson Electric, Honeywell, Siemens, all having moved to separate themselves. Most of them were steered by outsiders – either as CEO or board chair. If Holcim or AkzoNobel can exit India or Citi sell its thriving consumer business in India, spin off Mexico – unthinkable till recently – maybe the route to recovery for HUL will start by taking a bitter, bolder bite and splitting the entire foods franchise.

Chew on that.