Son Mukesh, left, and Anil with father and Reliance Founder-Chairman, Dhirubhai Ambani

On June 26, three days after Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani was wheeled into Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital after being struck down by a debilitating cerebral stroke, the company he built from scratch, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), mopped up Rs 100 crore through a 12-year paper. The company raised the money to replace old, high-cost debt. A few days later, even as the 69-year-old patriarch grimly fought to defy the darkness, a leading global petrochemical corporation was holding meetings with the Reliance top brass (sans the Ambanis) for an alliance. A week later, even as the chairman's battle for life raged on, two infrastructure companies from the Reliance stable (Reliance Utilities & Power and Reliance Ports & Technical) placed global depository receipts worth $400 million (Rs 1,960 crore) with 10 leading international private equity investors. These included Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Commonwealth Development Corporation and Axa. It was business as usual at Maker Chamber iv, the corporate headquarters of RIL, without the leader of the dream team.

Indeed, together they formed a perfect fit: The virtuoso with the vision, flanked by his two gung-ho generals, leading from the front, never looking back. Together, they brought alive almost every cliché that lies dormant in management journals, right from a long-term vision to global competitiveness to enhancement of shareholder value. They paraphrased the jargon into numbers: sales growth of 400 times since 1977, a net profit spurt of 900 times, and a mind-boggling 3,300 times appreciation in market capitalisation over the past 25 years. And they've left the rest of Indian industry-the Tatas, Birlas, Thapars and Goenkas-way behind, becoming the only Indian private sector conglomerate to creep into the Fortune 500 list of global corporations (after the merger of Reliance Petroleum with Reliance Industries). All this may make for good reading. But it's also all in the past.

A past glorious no doubt, but one that chroniclers, competitors and investors will forget with ease, and ridicule with pleasure, if that competitiveness can't be maintained, if that pace can't be sustained-if that vision can't be translated into more mind-boggling numbers and rewards for shareholders. Last fortnight, as the life of Dhirubhai Ambani, patriarch of the $13.2-billion (Rs 60,000 crore) Reliance group continued to be on life support, the inquest was on in full frenzy: Do his sons, the Stanford-educated Mukesh (45), and the Wharton-educated Anil (43), have the ability to foresee what few can envision decades down the line; do the Vice Chairman (Mukesh) and the Managing Director (Anil) have the beans to execute vital ventures into telecom, power and oil marketing without their guiding beacon; can the awe and respect that Dhirubhai earned on Indian soil be extended to global shores?

The stockmarkets in true tradition provided only half answers, with the stock of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) duly dipping by some Rs 5 the day after Ambani senior was wheeled into Breach Candy. In the next couple of days, RIL, along with Reliance Petroleum Ltd, (RPL) inched downwards by between 1 and 2 per cent. Clearly this wasn't panic selling, triggered more by sentiment than by fact. It was almost as if the market's main index bowed to the man who is responsible for roughly 15 per cent of its weightage. There was, it appeared, little worry about the group's long-term course. As Pashupati Advani, a BSE broker, points out: "A man who had the vision to build such a large empire would definitely have thought about the future of the group."

As last fortnight's activities at Maker iv-raising of money and forging alliances-indicate, the future is in good hands. To be sure, Mukesh and Anil are no greenhorns at the energy giant. Both have been active participants in the group's heady growth since 1986, when Dhirubhai was first laid down by a cerebral stroke. In fact, the Ambani brothers were inducted into the business much earlier, when they were still in their late twenties.

Once Anil returned from Wharton, he was pushed into the deep end at Reliance's Naroda (near Ahmedabad) textiles unit, and Mukesh cut his teeth at the group's Patalganga plant immediately after his stint at Stanford. Since then, they watched, and duly picked up every skill in their father's book. "If you ask me what are two biggest attributes the sons have picked up from their father, one is the importance of understanding the mind of men, and the second is the importance of understanding the need for a competitive advantage," says Gita Piramal, author and avid Reliance watcher. Piramal says there's little doubt that Dhirubhai was ahead of the Indian corporate pack by at least 25 years. And that's exactly what one section of Reliance watchers feel will be a tough act to duplicate. "A visionary isn't born every day. And they're certainly not passed on from one generation to another," explains a Mumbai-based consultant. Indeed, the sheer presence of a Dhirubhai on all systems would be good enough to make a difference to Reliance's destiny. But so could the perfect execution of the blueprint chalked out by the patriarch. And, so far, it's this ability of the two brothers to implement their father's vision, by working in collaboration, that's helped Reliance speed ahead. For instance, the emphasis on size, when few understood its merits, has paid off handsomely. It's this ability to "think, plan and act big," as Anil Ambani once put it, that has helped RIL hold its own in a market that's truly global today.

THE AMBANI FAMILY: Dhirubhai with, second from right, his wife Kokilaben, daughters Dipti and Nina (centre) and sons

Today, RIL is second largest manufacturer of polyester (filament yarn and staple fibre) in the world. The other area where the brothers have earned their spurs is in project implementation, completing every project on time (if not before), within stipulated costs, something that you can't say about most of corporate India. In many ways the Reliance of today is in stark contrast to the house that Dhirubhai built. For one, it's professional, and the Ambanis aren't averse to boasting about the quality of management. "It's no more the traditional Indian family business. Informality is minimal, with all processes being codified," says a consultant who's worked with the Ambanis.

Whilst Anil is the public face, and the financial brain (he was largely responsible for selling Reliance's 10 per cent stake in Larsen & Toubro at a close to 50 per cent premium to the market price), Mukesh is the hands-on manufacturing and operations man. More significant, though, is the allocation of responsibilities by the two brothers to a cluster of some 50-odd cherry-picked lieutenants. These are people who've earned the Ambanis' trust and who've proved themselves at project execution. And, yes, they're all professionals. For instance, there is no family member residing at the Patalganga, Hazira or Jamnagar sites. Even at the most recent addition to the fold, IPCL, Mukesh Ambani may be the Chairman, but one S.K. Anand is the operations Director. The brothers Ambani will need all the experienced hands on board. For, although Reliance today may be head and shoulders above the rest, the competition in future forays promises to be fiercer than never before. In telecom, which could prove Reliance's most ambitious gambit yet and where the Ambanis will burn Rs 25,000 crore in five years, they have to contend with a revitalised Tata group, which plans to invest Rs 15,000 crore in basic services and building a national backbone for voice and data services.

Then there's also the financial muscle of multinationals like Hutchison and Singapore Telecom (with Bharti) to contend with, as there's the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL). Whilst Reliance's competitors may finally be in a position to come up with the first real threat to the Ambanis' dominance on the operations playing field, they also appear to be scoring valuable points with the powers that be. One of Dhirubhai's core competencies in the licence raj era was his hefty political clout, which helped him snare many a manufacturing licence. Today, many other promoters seem to have perfected the art of influencing government policy and, at times, at the expense of Reliance.

That the Ambanis may have lost their most favoured status in political circles was beginning to show when they lost out in the disinvestment race for IBP and VSNL. Then last year, an inquiry in Parliament was kicked off when a 1,600-page report written by a parliamentarian accused the Ambanis of using Reliance Petroleum to divert over $200 million of publicly-raised money into privately-owned companies. And a few months ago, Reliance officials were accused of violating the Official Secrets Act. Ambani watchers stress that Reliance today is no more a group that relies heavily on political patronage for profitable growth. The Ambanis themselves maintain that the dominance created by the group has more to do with the endeavours in the post-liberalisation period than those pre-1991. But the brothers will be the first to agree that if Reliance is today an Asian-if not yet a global giant-it has everything to do with the vision of a petrol pump attendant in the sixties. Today, the dreaming might have stopped but the dream still lives on.

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