Hero worship

Book review of The Making of Hero Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India

The tone is adulatory and each page seeks to portray the Munjal brothers as messiahs to millions over the past seven decades. And then you have a separate chapter titled “Spiritual roots and societal impact” of the Munjals. The Making of Hero … is essentially a son’s glowing tribute to his larger than life father and could have been a much nicer read had the author exercised a little more restraint in expressing his admiration for the subject.
 
The 264-page book is still worth a read because it gives a ringside view of the extraordinary lives and times of one of India’s foremost business families who lived together and scripted a dramatic revolution on two wheels at a time when the business environment was downright hostile. The author, Sunil Munjal, has set the story against the backdrop of what was happening in India and the world at the time, giving readers a perspective on how difficult the situation was for business. 
 
Though the author has taken care to ensure that the role of his uncles gets due prominence, the real hero obviously is Brijmohan Lall Munjal, who never attended college, but thought ahead, anticipated demand, created markets, and set the template for generations of businessmen to follow. 
 
The best part of the book is the fascinating anecdotes, which only a family insider could have provided. For example, consider Brijmohan’s first job in 1938, at the age of 15. It involved parking himself at the sugarcane fields while the harvest was underway and counting the number of bundles being loaded.
 
He did the job for five long years; the next one was that of a clerk at an ordnance factory in Quetta. But the most important thing Brijmohan and his siblings learnt was maintenance of bicycles. The factory imparted training in two kinds of machinery, which prima facie appeared to have nothing to do with each other: Guns and bicycles. The skills the brothers picked up altered the course of their lives. 
 
There is also this amusing story of how Brijmohan and his uncle had arrived at Tokyo airport to meet the Honda brass to finalise the joint venture (Hero Honda). They were obviously expecting a grand welcome. But nobody turned up. Worried, they called the point person, only to be told that they should come to the hotel by bus! At a reception function later, they landed 10 minutes late and were offered no place to sit as the function had started on the dot. The hosts later told them turning up late for any meeting was seen by the Japanese as lack of interest.
 
There’s more. Did you know how the Munjals got the Hero brand name? While Brijmohan’s uncles Dayanand and Om Prakash were packing up to move to Ludhiana during Partition time, one of their suppliers, Kareem Deen, was preparing to shift to Pakistan. Deen manufactured bicycle saddles under a brand name he had created himself. Before he left, the Munjals asked him whether they could use that brand name for their business. He agreed. The gesture was typical of the way businesses were run at the time — on reputation, relationships, and goodwill. The worth and value of brands and patents were not appreciated or understood. And so, with nothing more than a casual nod, Deen’s brand passed to the Munjals. The brand name was “Hero”.
 
The chapter on the making of the brand gives rare insights of a man who knew the pulse of ordinary Indians. Just before Hero Honda motorcycles were launched in 1984, the company came up with one of the most iconic advertising campaigns of all time — The “Fill it, Shut it, Forget it” tagline. According to the mandatory pre-launch tests conducted by the Automobile Research Association of India (ARAI), the CD 100 was providing 94 km to the litre, and the brand consultants were eager to publicise that. Brijmohan, however, insisted that the campaign set a lower mileage promise of 80 km, in order to create customer delight and surpass expectations. Under-promise and over-deliver to the aam aadmi was Brijmohan’s mantra. It worked, and how.
 
There is no doubt that the Munjal brothers built a manufacturing enterprise at a time when money, machines, and technology simply weren’t available. They innovated and developed an indigenous manufacturing system and a foolproof way to manage current assets and liquidity (Just-in-Time). The brothers, who had no formal higher education, devised a zero-inventory management system where the supply chain delivered exactly as much was required on a particular day and not one component more. They never offered advance but made sure vendors received payments without delay. There was no warehouse for incoming or outgoing goods as capital was never enough.
 
The Munjals can easily claim that they were the earliest proponents of Make in India! The book has delightful stories about how Brijmohan had to spend hours to convince his brothers why setting up a manufacturing base was important. The brothers’ reluctance was understandable as technology and capital were scarce in the 1950s. Plus, there were no manufacturing manuals laying out engineering designs and production processes. The Munjals had to wing it and create their own. The brothers would squat in the backyard with the artisans, drawing designs of cycle parts on sheets of paper, and discussing ways of implementing them. The end product was assembled by hand and then put through multiple functionality tests.
 
According to Brijmohan, the milkman should be able to attach his cans to the carrier, and the farmer his basket of vegetables. Durability was another priority and the cycles should be built in a way that they can be handed over from one generation to the other. Given the realities of the time when he said this, there could perhaps be no better business brief.
 
Despite its shortcomings, The Making of Hero…  is a remarkable slice of India’s business history.

The Making of Hero Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India

Author: Sunil Kant Munjal

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: Rs 699