How did Dhirubhai learn to think big?

What do you call a man who hates to lose? A winner? That is too easy, too glib, and buries the story. All Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani ever wanted to be is the biggest there ever is, the best there ever was. He wanted a piece of the action — preferably all of it. If others wouldn’t let him in, he would create his own turf and own it all.

Ambani is actually a businessman, but his career is so extraordinary that he is more than just a businessman, more than even an industrialist.He is a folk hero to millions of Indians, even those who are not businessmen, or do not aspire to a business career.And that is why Dhirubhai Ambani is so special, just as Mahatma Gandhi was something more than a politician and Indira Gandhi was more than a prime minister.

These people are not born every day. I rank Dhirubhai along with the Gandhis, because all of them moved the entire country in a certain direction. Without the Mahatma, we would still be under the British. Without Indira, the country would have been torn apart into quasi independent fiefdoms, the kind we had before the Britishers arrived here. And without Dhirubhai, we would not have learnt how to think big, not in terms of a small factory here and there, but in terms of giant plants, as big as anywhere in the world and as modern as they come. Dhirubhai taught India to think big, because, as he used to say, ours is a big country and if we do not think big, we shall never be able to attain our potential.

It is not easy to think big in India. We are so worried about the next meal that there is no time for anything else. For the last thousand years we have not thought big at all, though the Marathas under Shivaji did try. We can think only of the next meal, the next pay cheque, the next job, the next election. We can never think of the day after tomorrow, let alone the year after tomorrow, or the generation after the next. We are so poor that everything tends to be short-term, small and trifling, and almost always temporary and short-lived.

How did Dhirubhai learn to think big? He was a son of a village teacher in a small place in Gujarat and was sent to Mumbai as a boy of fifteen or so, as there were no jobs for him in his village. He was then packed off to Aden, where he worked on as a petrol pump attendant. Later, he went on to East Africa where he also worked in an oil company, also as an assistant before he returned to India for good.

Hundreds of Indians must have done the same thing. But you don’t hear of anyone, except Ambani. I know at least two persons who also worked on petrol pumps and later became company executives. Ambani also could have become one.But he didn’t. When he returned to Bombay, he started his own yarn dealership, in a small 10 by 10 room in Mulji Jetha market, for which he paid an exorbitant rent of 150 rupees a month, just because it had a telephone.

As a yarn merchant, he used to go from one dealer to another and also to purchase agents of the big textile companies in Mumbai, most of whom have now shut up shop or gone bankrupt. Ambani still remembers them and calls them his sheths. But how is it that Dhirubhai went on to chemicals from textiles, and from there to petrochemicals and then to oil exploration?

Ambani was thinking big even when he was small. His company, Reliance Industries, went public in 1977, if I remember right, when the turnover was around Rs 100 crore, not a great deal of money even 25 years ago. This was about the time I met him for the first time. He was still a small man, though he was being watched carefully by people in Mumbai. But what I remember about him is that he was thinking not of his 100-crore business, not how to make it to 200 crore, but, believe it or not, how to take his company to the top and overtake Tata Steel, then the biggest company in the private sector, a position it had acquired after over sixty years in the business. He was not only thinking big, he had solid plans to go big and push ahead of Tata Steel. I still have a copy of a xeroxed table he had prepared with projections of likely sales of leading Tata companies, including Tata Steel and Tata Engineering, which were the leading companies then.He had projections for his own company, Reliance, and he had said that he would catch up with them in six or seven years time. The timing is not important. It is the thinking behind it that is. For Ambani, textiles was only a beginning of his dreams.He had worked out in his mindscape what he would do five, ten, fifteen years from now, and he had formed a complete strategy for doing what he wanted to do.

Dhirubhai was never a big talker. But after a good lunch of curried prawns and rice, and some icecream for dessert, he would relax in his office, and he would talk about this and that, until it was time for him to go back to work, or for me to leave. He was then still in textiles and did not have a single chemicals plant. I asked him how he knew so much about the synthetics industry and all those chemicals with fancy names which only a qualified chemicals engineer would know. “It is simple,” he would say. “I meet lots of people and read lots of literature. And I know exactly how to go from this to that point, and do what I want to do.”

Ambani rarely talked about money, though that was supposed to be his forte. He was known in the market as a financial wizard. He raised Rs.7,500 crore in all for his business, huge amount even for a man like Ambani.

The only person who comes close to Dhirubhai as a great achiever is surprisingly a Tata- not JRD but the great Jamsetji Tata, whom he resembles in many ways. Both started as yarn dealers and both spent their earlier years in a foreign country - Tata in Hong Kong and Dhirubhai in Aden and East Africa. But they did not follow the same business route. Tata started at the top with a steel plant in Bihar and a hydro-electric installation near Mumbai. Dhirubhai started at the bottom with a small weaving mill and ended up with an oil refinery. Tata did not live long enough to do what he wanted to do, but men after him have gone on with an engineering plant in Bihar which uses Tata Steel’s products. Dhirubhai is now a petroleum man, not a textile man, for textiles account for only 2 per cent of his total turnover of over Rs.60,000 crores.

But there the resemblance ends. Tatas took nearly a hundred years to achieve what they did. Dhirubhai, twice as big, took just about 40 years to do what he has done. The Ambanis are now nearly twice as big as Tatas and growing also at twice their rate. Where did Dhirubhai learn to think big? He did not learn anything from his business contemporaries because there was nothing to learn. I think he was born thinking big. It was second nature to him, otherwise how could a man in a 10 ft by 10 ft office hawking yarn end up as the owner of a huge petrochemical plant and an equally huge oil refinery? He was a restless soul who simply had to do what he did, because that was his compulsion. Everything else came afterwards, as it does when you know what you are going to do, though not how you are going to do it.If the first half of the 20th century belonged to Tatas, the second half belonged to Dhirubhai Ambani and if he lives long enough, the first half of the 21st century will also belong to him. Dhirubhai Ambani is indeed a man of two centuries!

Source: Free Press Journal

Friends, Get Ready To Invest..

Few years back, I used to read spam emails about "India would become Super Power by 2050 and there will be something called "Harra Patta" (antonym of US Green Card and work permit for India).



I guess friends"Time has come". Not because that we have done something really big,smart or wonderful. But the world has screwed up "Big Time". Few countries have declared Bankruptcy and some are on the verge of doing it.

Thankfully and fortunately we are not export oriented countries like China, Japan, Taiwan or anyother Asian countries. An Indian economy has 80% internal usage and only 20%export based. Hence India is mostly dependent on its own production and consumption.

Another blessing in disguise is the CPM being part of the government did not allow Congress to do much so-called reforms and hence our banking system is not directly impacted by the financial turmoil across the globe.

Now NRI's all across the globe are looking for safe placements of their money, forget about the returns. If Indian banks can tap in that mammoth amount of quality FDI funds and that too is available for real long term tenure, we should be able to solve some of our liquidity problems.

Moreover, government needs to do more by dropping the CRR rate more, increase Pension, Insurance etc groups participation more in the stocks (remember this should be temporarily -otherwise we might end up like US today).

Indians on an average have savings of 35% of their income (for e.g. service class has 12% provident fund,around 10% in Insurance premium by them or by their companies and assuming another10% savings in their bank accounts).

One better thing is that our industries/companie s have not been performing like in US or other parts of the world. They were making profits till the last quarterly results.In the worst case their profits will be hit in this and few next quarters but they will not be locked down or will file for bankruptcy as in US.

Our Forex reserves are still over US $280 Billion.

We can re-build our Nation sooner andfaster than anyone else. It is not the time for Panic (or panic selling)!