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BUSINESS TODAY MANAGING TOMORROW SERIES An Ode To Entrepreneurship On November 30, Business Today launched the first of its four-part series titled India Inc.: The Next Big Leap focused on Indian entrepreneurial talent. An account of the defining moments of the event held in Mumbai to mark the occasion.
The defining moment of the evening was there, halfway through guest-of-honour Anil Ambani's speech. ''Even as we celebrate the accomplishments of successful companies in the past 10 years, the time has come to move on, to the next phase of economic growth-the next decade. So far, India has implemented the relatively easier task, such as removal of industrial licensing, opening up of imports, and the reduction of import duties. The more difficult, and painful steps such as capital account convertibility and labour reforms are still to follow.'' Ripe stuff that, and epiphanic of the occasion. The evening of November 30, saw Ambani release the first of a special four-part series published by Business Today titled India Inc: The Next Big Leap. The series is part of Business Today's tenth anniversary celebrations (your favourite magazine turns 10 in January 2002). Appropriately, for a magazine that was born at the dawn of the open-market era, the first of the special issues was on entrepreneurship. Captured in its pages were forty entrepreneurs who had blazed their own unique paths in the first 10 years of reforms. Some of them had built on existing foundations, others has recreated businesses that had fallen upon hard times, and still others had simply done their own thing-but they all had one thing in common, the spirit of enterprise. Although Business Today is headquartered in Delhi, it was evident right from the time the series was conceptualised that the launch had to happen in India's entrepreneurial capital Mumbai. Apart from the release of the special issue itself, the evening's function included talks by four of the entrepreneurs featured in the book (five, if you include Ambani), Kotak Mahindra CEO Uday Kotak, Bharti Enterprises CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal, Kinetic Engineering Joint Managing Director Sulajja Firodia Motwani, and the GVK Group's G.V. Sanjay Reddy. The event itself was attended by the movers and shakers of India's corporate world and as one wag was heard remarking, ''never had so many cover stories been featured in the same magazine.'' A random sampling: HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh, DSP Merrill Lynch Vice Chairman Shitin Desai, Zurich Asset Management Company's CEO S.V. Prasad, Pradeep Lokhande of Rural Relations, Euro RSCG's Ishan Raina, nutritionist and entrepreneur Anjali Mukherjee, JM Morgan CEO Nimesh Kampani, M&M's Arun Nanda, Ranbaxy's Malvinder Singh, auto designer Dilip Chabbria, and designer Anand Jon.
But the evening wasn't just a page three corporate happening. There was soul food for the brain too. Getting Underway The evening began with an introductory address by Business Today Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the India Today Group, Aroon Purie, which dealt with the changes the Indian economic environment has witnessed in the past decade. All of us take these changes for granted, yet having them expressed in numerical terms served to indicate their magnitude. In 1992, India had three car manufacturers; in 2001 it has 13, who between them, offer customers the choice of 43 cars. In 1992, India's forex reserves were $2.2 billion; today, the number stands at $43 billion. ''The 90s belonged to the breed of entrepreneurs who created opportunities and made things happen,'' said Purie. If Purie had summed up the changes wrought by the decade that was in clinical fashion, then it was up to Anil Ambani, the managing director of Reliance Industries, to explain how the way companies do business has changed (he did say something about Business Today, like Reliance, coming from behind and establishing a leadership position, but we'll save that for the advertisers). A company's strategy and corporate planning, he said, was earlier taken care of at Udyog Bhawan and Shastri Bhawan, not in its board room. And decisions on which industry to enter, what equipment to buy, which technology to use, where you could set up the plant, and how much you could produce, were made, not by the company, but by the government. The first 10 years of reforms, Ambani added, had changed the topography of Indian business. Close to 60 per cent of India's top companies by market capitalisation in 1991, had vanished from the honour's list. And old fortunes had been destroyed, but new ones had been made. ''Some attributes that have characterised successful companies in the past decade are clearly long-term vision, global competitiveness, commitment to international best practices, adherence to the highest international quality norms, excellence in overall management, commitment to people and society, and above all, a focus on overall shareholder value enhancement,'' said Ambani. He then went on to list the attributes relevant to qualify in the race for global leadership: scalability; ability to implement plans; innovation, adpatability, and responsiveness; and professional management. ''The qualification to manage companies is neither a surname,'' said Ambani, ''nor the absence of one. I am no less a professional if I drop my Ambani surname. This is equally true of other professionals present here with the Purie, Kotak, Mittal, and Firodia surnames.'' 1 | 2 |
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