Dream with eyes open

This is a compilation of 13 lectures delivered by celebrity managers, industrialists, bureaucrats, activists, artists and diplomats. Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), a state-owned company, organised these lectures for its top managers and is also responsible for the book's publication.

Not surprisingly, three of the lectures in this book were delivered by Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, Petroleum Secretary S C Tripathi and Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi, whose other claim to fame is that he is Tripathi's predecessor. In their lectures, Aiyar waxes eloquent on his special brand of secularism and atheism, Chaturvedi makes a valiant attempt at charting the growth path for GAIL and Tripathi extols the many virtues of a public sector undertaking (PSU) in India even as he bemoans the lack of responsibility among its managers. So much for public sector autonomy!

Of course, these are also the lectures that you could simply ignore. Even the piece from GE-India chief Scott Bayman has management clichés in plenty. Here is a sample: "Integrity means always, always doing the right thing ... Informality is not generally seen as a particularly important cultural characteristic in most large organisations. But in GE it is more than just being on a first name basis."

Then there is a list of a dozen vision statements (be the best, apply the best technology, make people a source of improvement, etcetera) which a good company should always keep in mind. This one comes from U Sundararajan, former chairman and managing director of BPCL. With such pearls of wisdom greeting you in the first two chapters, you might wonder what the book's editor actually meant when he said in the preface that the lectures were the "fertile, highly original and ... futuristic thinking of some of the finest management and business brains that India and the world have produced."

What, however, prevents the book from becoming a complete wash-out are the two chapters devoted to the lectures delivered by Anil D Ambani of Reliance Industries and Sunil Bharti Mittal of the Bharti group. Ambani is simply outstanding because of the way in which he brings before you the vision of his father, Dhirubhai Ambani. And unlike others in the book, he relies purely on anecdotes. A few examples will help illustrate the point.

Dhirubhai Ambani's obsession with size is well-known. It was purely on his insistence that his two sons were forced to raise the Jamnagar refinery's capacity from the originally planned 9 million tonnes per annum to 27 million tonnes. That, Anil Ambani says, was possible because his father could dream with his eyes open, unlike most others who dream only when their eyes are closed.

There is a nice little anecdote about Dhirubhai Ambani's insistence on increasing the strength of the foundation pillars of the Jamnagar refinery to withstand an earthquake that measured 8 on the Richter scale. His sons were comfortable with a foundation pillar strength that could withstand a quake measuring 6 on the Richter scale, since earthquakes with intensity of more than 5.5 had not been experienced in that area for the previous 75 years.

But the father was adamant even though it would have cost a few thousand crores more. On January 26, 2001, when an earthquake hit the Bhuj area with an intensity of little less than 8 on the Richter scale, Dhirubhai Ambani called his younger son just to remind him about the futility of worrying about a few thousand crores on issues of security and future. The refinery escaped the quake. Anil Ambani's piece has many more such anecdotes, one of them pertaining to the group's telecom plans.

Sunil Mittal is more restrained and less dependent on anecdotes. But the manner in which he outlines the core values of wanting to dream big makes for a rivetting read. At one point he elaborates the need to eliminate negative energies from any successful organisation. He cites his only meeting with the Daewoo chairman to prove his point. The lessons that Sunil Mittal learnt that day continue to guide him even today and should be useful for all managers.

The broad objective of the book is laudable. Some of the other lectures, like those delivered by photographer Raghu Rai and environmentalist Sunita Narain, will touch your heart. But the book fails to live up to expectations, perhaps because several of the lectures are indeed "mundane".

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LOOKING BEYOND
DARING TO THINK, RARING TO ACT

Edited by Inderjit Badhwar
GAIL in association with Excel Books
Price: Rs 250; Pages: xii+188