HAVELLS
THE UNTOLD STORY OF QIMAT RAI GUPTA
Anil Rai Gupta
Penguin Books India
281 pages; Rs 599
Biographies can often be boring because many of them treat their subjects with undue reverence. If a biography is written by the subject's son, it surely runs the danger of becoming a hagiography. Anil Rai Gupta, author of Havells: The Untold Story of Qimat Rai Gupta, seems aware of that pitfall and, to his credit, the book goes much beyond being just a son's homage to his father.
The book does have its fair share of "homage" by listing the "greatness" of QRG, as Qimat Rai Gupta, former chairman & managing director of Havells, is popularly known, and how he turned around the author's life "with his magic touch" and so on. But that is understandable; QRG did live an extraordinary life away from the limelight. Born in a low-income family of Malerkotla in Punjab, he started his professional journey by managing a small kerosene shop at a place called Chawa Pahal on the road to Ludhiana and left behind a Rs 17,000 crore empire when he died at the age of 77 in November 2014.
But the son has not shied away from writing about his famous father's failings as well - one of them being his obsession to micro-manage things till the very last day. Sample this: the author says after the Sylvania experience - Havells had come close to disaster after the acquisition - QRG's need to be firmly in control at all times began to assert itself. Despite his failing health, "he became sterner, impatient and a kind of a control freak".
Later on, the author says he had to "extinguish his ego altogether" in order to learn the tricks of the trade from his father. QRG obviously had no regrets about his overbearing presence and summed up his leadership style thus - shikar jab tak khud nahin maro, woh marta nahin hai, which roughly means to really get the job done, you have to do it yourself. He obviously couldn't care less if textbook leadership books frowned on such homespun wisdom.
There is also a frank reference to the fallout between QRG and his elder son, Ajesh, who was the heir apparent of Havells. At a time when talking about family splits is a strict no-no for his peers in Indian industry, it's refreshing to read Mr Gupta's account of why QRG and Mr Ajesh fell out, their contrasting operating styles and how dual centres of power created leadership confusion.
The little details contribute to the interesting read - for example, QRG, the book says, would often overstate his style of open leadership and insist on talking to his wife on the speakerphone in the presence of half a dozen people. It also talks about how QRG's wife became an expert in fixing dislocated shoulders. Once in the midst of a dealer conference in Frankfurt, he dislocated his right shoulder. "My mother asked us to form a human curtain around him and quickly put the joint back into the socket. QRG went on to address 400 delegates after that," the author writes.
Much has also been written about QRG's obsessively low profile and how there was a grand leadership design behind that strategy. The book punctures that theory by stating upfront that his relative obscurity was not by design or plan - it was forced on him because of ill health.
Where the book really comes alive is when it talks about QRG being among the first to realise that electrical products would evolve from a commodity-like market to one in which brands would become all important if you want margins. So he outspent his rivals on brand-building and was probably among the first Indian industrialists who bought a brand and not the factories of Havells.
The result of that foresight is best explained by the fact that at the time of his death, the market cap of Havells was Rs 18,000 crore. Of that physical assets were just Rs 1,500 crore or so; the rest was the brand value of Havells. In other words, from 1971 to 2014, he drove the worth of the brand from a few lakhs to Rs 16,500 crore. Also, he decided to offer quality products even if it meant consumers had to pay premium prices. This was again going against the grain of the market where the basic rules of the game at that time were to sell at rock bottom prices, attain volumes, and operate at wafer-thin margins.
The Untold Story is an interesting account of the life of a rank outsider who built a formidable empire from scratch. And the author tells the story as it is without any pretensions - that's the book's biggest strength. Somewhere in the book, the author quotes a letter from an uncle that QRG preserved to the last. Sent from Kolkata (then Calcutta), the letter says - "Here notes (money) fly in the air. All you need is somebody to reach out and pluck them from the air".
As the book shows, QRG must have absorbed each and every word of that letter.
