Dhirubhaisms - V

The power of being positive put Reliance where it is today.

Frequent readers of this column must be aware of the Dhirubhaism series with which I regularly intersperse this column. Every Dhirubhaism column is often met with a phenomenal outpouring of requests asking me to mail not just the current Dhirubhaism, but the previous one as well. So much so that I have introduced a link in my site so that readers can access any of their favourite Dhirubhaism whenever they wish! A few readers have even suggested a handbook, so to speak, of how Dhirubhai handled various issues and difficult situations. This was the trigger I was waiting for. Now you can walk into your nearest bookstore and ask for Dhirubhaism "" The remarkable work philosophy of Dhirubhai Ambani. Mukesh Ambani has written the foreword. It is a slim volume published by Tata McGraw-Hill "" a collection of 15 of my favourite Dhirubhaisms "" and it would probably take the average reader about an hour-and-a-half to go through them all. Reading it is the easy part, trying to inculcate them into our lives is what will be the rewarding aspect of the experience. Even if one or two Dhirubhaisms can be adhered to regularly, you can see your life changing quite dramatically, just as Dhirubhai's life did. So here's Dhirubhaisms - V to whet your appetite till you can procure your very own copy!

Dhirubhaism:
Be Positive
The more you know about Dhirubhai's life, the more you will be surprised to know the enormity of the odds that he faced in the process of building Reliance. Yet, he never complained.

We all knew about the endless licences, the red tape and the bureaucracy that he had to wade through to get one project going. Yet, we never heard him grumble. Not once did he complain about the country's lack of infrastructure (an issue that was very close to him) or the lack of systems and processes or hostile business environments.

Not once did we hear him threaten to relocate in friendlier countries abroad. It was almost as if he accepted the inadequacies of the day as a given and tried not to let what was missing stop him from getting what he wanted.

"I consider myself a pathfinder. I have been excavating the jungle and making the road for others to walk. I like to be the first in everything I do," he cheerfully declared in one of his speeches. I guess he was always a pioneer at heart and maybe it was this adventurous spirit that gave him the wherewithal to take inadequacies in his stride.

When he required funding for the expansion of his mill and the banks turned him down, he didn't waste time grumbling about their lack of vision. Instead, he quietly found a way out for himself. He went to the masses. It was a road that would eventually change the landscape of the Indian stock market and reward millions.

In the eighties, when he needed licences for the first of his backward integration projects at Patalganga, the licence raj was in full reign. But Dhirubhai did not let the needless tediousness of setting up projects stop him from dreaming big. He dealt with the red tape in his matter-of-fact way and focussed on his business.

His positive attitude was so rewarding that not only did it benefit him, he helped rewrite the economic future of the country.

It would have been easy to join the rest and blame it on circumstances. Instead, he went ahead and built world scale capacity plants like the 10,000 tpa PFY plant at Patalganga when the market in the entire country was only 6,000 tpa! He continued to build plants with enormous capacities, setting his sights clearly on the world market.

He invested in India at a time when most people were reluctant to do so. His story is an illustration of the power of a positive attitude, and Reliance is its towering proof.

His philosophy was breathtakingly simple and very fundamental "" like the one outlined above. But if it can be fully incorporated in our lives then we would be living up to Dhirubhai's belief when he said, "If one Dhirubhai can do so much, just think what a thousand Dhirubhais can do for this country!"

The best tribute we can pay this truly extraordinary man is to work towards becoming Dhirubhai ourselves, to discover the Dhirubhai within all of us...

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