Dhirubhaisms-IV

Ambani Sr's ability to bet on his people paid him back hundred-fold.

The Dhirubhaism columns seem to be great hits every time they appear. I have written three of them and yet it looks like the more I write, the more my mail box gets flooded by requests for insights on Dhirubhai. All I can say is that it demonstrates that Dhirubhai's visionary skills and techniques were way ahead of his time and their relevance seems to be getting truer with every passing year!

Dhirubhaism:
Bet on your people
I met Dhirubhai in 1975. A year later, I took up his offer and joined as advertising manager for Reliance Textile Industries (as it was called in those days). Within four years, he gave me some seed money and asked me to start an advertising agency of my own! That was Dhirubhai.

That was the way he bet on us "" his people. He took a four-year-old in the profession (in any other company, I would have been treated as a "junior") and put me in charge of his money and a brand new company! Not only did he put me in charge, he trusted me completely. The only mandate he gave me was "" "produce the best possible textile advertising". He set no financial targets, nor did he police me or demand daily reports. As I would often tell my team at Mudra, he handed me the treasure, complete with the lock and the key.

In fact, it was his philosophy of betting on his people that laid the foundations for the gigantic empire that Reliance is today. When he set up Reliance Naroda, all that he had with him was a small team that possessed little technical know-how. But Dhirubhai's ability to hand over complete charge to the people he picked for the job paid him back a hundred-fold. The reasoning is simple: When some one places their entire trust in you, you will try everything in your power (and beyond), to assure the person that he made the right decision by putting you in charge.

There were times that the responsibility felt tremendous when he handed it over to us. But his reply "" "No is no answer" "" would make us think again. His belief that we were more than capable of handling the job would fuel us with the determination we needed to complete it.

Admittedly, Dhirubhai was a shrewd judge of character and calibre. He could see skills in us we never knew we even possessed. But his perceptiveness was only one half of his winning formula. It was his courage to bet on his people that was the other crucial component.

I realised what an important role courage played when, as chairman of Mudra, I decided to adopt this philosophy. The stakes are tremendous when you do so. For instance, when we decided it was time to take our creative work on Vimal to the next level, we did not approach the tried and tested superstars of the advertising world. We went to relative newcomers who showed promise and gave them the freedom to experiment. It is a daunting task to take the money of your most valuable client and entrust it to a hitherto untried talent. But the passion and the joy that they invest in your work is unparalleled and I have never regretted any of the bets that I have laid. Clearly not all my bets have paid off. But the rewards of the ones that did far outweighed the losses.

This philosophy of Dhirubhai's was very similar to all of his other beliefs. It was a simple viewpoint. It took tremendous courage. And it had spectacular results.

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