Reliance storm story: From Business News India
Nobody has ever built an industrial empire from textbook principles alone. Often, it is very basic guiders behind great corporate success stories. Infectious impatience is one such Mukesh Ambani's mantra, which also explains the rapid rise of Reliance.
Make money without investing INFECTIOUS IMPATIENCE. These are the two magical Reliance words that have seen it grow from a single Dhirubhai Ambani-created industrial entity into multiple megacorps, now spearheaded by split brothers Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani. When a company scales up to this amazing level in only few decades, it leaves you scratching for an answer: How did they make it big, this big? After all, what they did could have been done by many of their corporate rivals. The people they got, the machinery they bought, the strategy they adopted were all within the reach of many of their smaller and bigger competitors when they were at the modest level of entrepreneurial operations. What did they do differently that took them to where they are today?
For an answer, there had to be something that set them apart and it couldn’t have been anything big known in terms of strategy and approach. Most such successful companies have — we have all known — deep down one or two very basic guiding principles of operation. And, that takes them to the heights that they reach, powered by the distilled success mantra.
The stupefying attainments of Ambanis’ ventures have always intrigued industry watchers and reams have been written on what made them tick. But most seem to have missed the point that it wasn’t any big business formula, but, at times, only innocuous-sounding two-word guiders that propelled them.
Recently, after Mukesh Ambani piped Aziz Premji as the richest Indian, I was going through some archives and, while doing so, hit upon a speech that Mukesh Ambani delivered at the Stanford University. In that speech, he spoke of “infectious impatience” and how it has helped the company get the work done in half the time it would take most others to achieve.
Here was a clue to the great Reliance story. In Mukesh Ambani’s catch-phrase — “infectious impatience” — is hidden the whole company’s approach to conduct of business — how it defies the stereotype standard practices to create its own out-of-the-textbook space; how it is open to creating unspecified, own rules of the game for quickly attaining what they want to.
Impatience is an outcome of restlessness. Restlessness is the outcome of an incubated idea. Once the idea virus gets in, it leads to restlessness and action. The ideated person may even yell, shout and scream over others to actualize the conceived idea. The shouted upon person will pass it on to the others in the chain. The impatience of one person gets enlarged and, next, the entire associated work force gets reverberating and the work gets rolling faster than it would have otherwise.
While most companies — which compulsively value order, punctuality and discipline — would be loathe to tolerate such restlessness and impatience, the Ambanis saw the productive side of the seemingly negative fallouts of employee restlessness and encouraged people to get on their toes for the job. They always have this knack of breaking the mould and creating an environment for achievement, which doesn’t always follow the standard and accepted rules. That’s what has made Ambanis, Ambanis.
They see the connect between disruption and creativity and developed a system to mange it for huge gains.
Ambanis: United in ties, divided in business
