One of India’s most familiar global business leaders, Ratan Tata, has died at 86. As the head of the Tata Group, which runs over 100 businesses ranging from the manufacture of Jaguar Land Rover to Tata Steel, almost 660,000 people work there and generate over $100 billion in revenue annually. Jamsetji Tata founded the group in 1868, and it operates in a number of industries, including automobiles, steel, aviation, and salt production.

Ratan Tata believed in the use of business to make the lives of people better. The holding company for the Tata Group is Tata Sons, for whose majority a charitable trust owns shares and serves causes that are good. As wrote Peter Casey, who wrote a book on Tata, shows how Tata connected business to charity.

He was born in the year 1937. Ratan Tata belonged to a Parsi family, which was perhaps one of India’s best-educated and most successful groups. Ratan Tata’s parents separated when he was in his childhood. His education went to Cornell University in the U.S. where he graduated in architecture. During his stay in America, Ratan Tata learned to drive as well as how to fly an airplane. While flying, there were several times when his engine failed on him.

In 1962, when his grandmother fell ill, Ratan Tata went back to India. Then, JRD Tata, a relative, told him to join the Tata Group. He treats JRD as a great mentor, more like a father and brother. He first worked in one of the group’s steel plants and gradually became a technical assistant. By the end of the 1970s, he was already working on two other companies in the group that were doing disastrous-the one he managed to reel back into profitability.

JRD Tata chose Ratan Tata to head the group in 1991, criticizing the move as nepotistic when the latter’s predecessor was in place. Under his leadership, Tata Group began to spread its wings all over the globe when it acquired Tetley Tea, Corus Steel, and Jaguar Land Rover. Some deals worked like a charm, while others, like the telecom venture that failed, were heavy on the cost side.

One proud moment for Tata came in the year 2000 when Tata Group bought Tetley and emerged as the second-largest tea company in the world. Even when a journalist asked Tata whether he felt proud that an Indian company was acquiring a British brand, Tata refused to boast about it while remaining humble.

Failure to produce the low-priced, safe car-the Tata Nano-didn’t work well with Tata. Launched in 2009, it was an instant hit due to lower pricing than other brands within its class. However, as other issues of production and marketing came into place, it could not sustain an advantage over others and lost out to them. Tata later even commented that it was a mistake to tag it the “world’s cheapest car,” because nobody wanted to be seen plying something with that tag.

As a businessman, Tata was humble all his lifetime. After the 1989 strike at one of the factories he owned, he was of the view that the company may have started taking its employees for granted. In 2009, Tata said that his dream for India is for everyone to have an equal opportunity, considered purely by merit, to succeed. He ensured that success and self-reliance came on the basis of evidence and not on display of wealth and success.