Have you ever asked yourself this question: How does a telephone instrument vendor goes on to become the country’s biggest mobile phone operator? Or for that matter, how does a bicycle maker in a small town Ludhiana become the world’s biggest two-wheeler manufacturer; an airport trolley operator in Hong Kong, India’s biggest private airline operator; the son of a Kolkata scrap merchant the world’s biggest steel manufacturer?
Come, think again.
We are not talking about impossible dreams. The one common thread that runs across this year’s winners of The Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence — Sunil Bharti Mittal (Business leader of the year), Brijmohan Lall Munjal (Lifetime achievement), Naresh Goyal (The emerging company of the year) and Lakshmi Niwas Mittal (Global Indian of the year) — is their quest for individual and organisational excellence. For, dreams get real when, and only when, the dreamer excels in his calling.
What makes them?
For all the management lessons on how to make it big, the answer’s simple. For, as Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, the planet’s third richest man, said the other day, at the ET Awards in Mumbai: “To dream and reach for the sky is good, but at the same time it is equally important to keep your feet on the ground.” That’s Lesson 1 for those in search of Excellence.
Management gurus Thomas J Peters and Robert H Waterman, Jr, pointed to simple facts of life that made for Corporate Excellence in their best-selling book of two decades ago: In Search of Excellence — Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. “One of the main clues to corporate excellence has come to be incidents of unusual effort on the part of apparently ordinary employees. Excellence also comes from a sustained exceptional financial performance,” they said. Now, just look around your immediate corporate environment. Not too many examples abound. Why? Years of licensing restrictions, capacity constraints, bureaucratic red tape, high incidents of taxation and lobbying in New Delhi’s corridors of power sapped the energies of India’s biggest business moghuls from reaching global heights. Result: They were into too many small businesses at the same time, without making it good in any. Unfortunately, 15 years after reforms, most of them are yet to come out of that stupor. Those who did, like Messrs Brijmohan Munjal, Sunil Mittal and Naresh Goyal soared to kiss the sky. As for Lakshmi Mittal, it took him to explore foreign shores to make it big in the global arena because, for three decades, his native land had no opportunity to offer.
Let’s take the Munjals. For four unending decades, the Hero group patriarch had to hammer his way up to emerge as the world’s biggest bicycle maker in a country where pedal pushing for long was the common man’s mode of transport. And yet, he figured nowhere in the top echelons of corporate India. That was well in the 80s when licence- permit raj ruled. But once the restrictions were gone, it took him only 10 years to emerge as the world’s biggest two-wheeler manufacturer, beating partner Honda in the race for global market share.
The Munjals didn’t need to bank on management superstars to emerge world beaters. At best, they needed a global mind to put to test. And they made do with ordinary folks in the ordinary town of Ludhiana to beat the best in global business because of their passion for making it big. And that passion blossomed once the curbs were gone. Ditto with Sunil Mittal and Naresh Goyal. Neither of them needed the best B-School tags to come on top. They remained on the fringes as long as the government wouldn’t let go. But once private initiatives were allowed in the telecom and civil aviation sectors, they let their ambitions soar. And there was no looking back to their past.
They also kept their balance sheets clean and healthy, never raiding company profits for personal enrichment. No asset stripping. No cash transfers into personal accounts. Personal enrichment logically followed the strength of their bottom-line performances.
Peters and Waterman say excellent companies also nourish individuals who believe so strongly in their ideas that they take it upon themselves to damn the bureaucracy and manoeuvre their projects through the system and out to the customer. In doing so, quality and service become the hallmarks of excellence. They all tap into the deepest needs of hundreds of thousands of people waiting for their products. Brijmohan Munjal and Lakhsmi Mittal wove amazing success stories around themselves, even as lesser mortals failed, by reaching the right product to the customer at the right point in time. But that’s not all. As Times Group managing director Vineet Jain pointed out in his address at the ET Awards, Mr Munjal’s excellence should not be judged by his being the largest bicycles and motorcycles maker in the world, nor Mr Lakshmi Mittal’s in being the world’s largest steel maker. Those two eminences, in their ways, demonstrated to the world how excellence could be achieved by transcending the restrictive the stranglehold of belief, dogma and narrowness by freeing the mind from the prisonhouse of national and regional boundaries. They freed their minds from credal adherence to what had been bequeathed to them from the past.
Both Mr Munjal and Mr Mittal came from families that had been severed from their roots by the Partition. And yet, both transcended the geographical boundaries of their birth by emerging global winners. How did they do this? They did this by freeing their minds from the Given. Nobody had to tell Mr Munjal, that dominance for him did not have to remain confined to being the world’s largest bicycle maker. It was he and only he who needed to transcend the barriers of the mind to emerge as the world’s biggest two-wheeler manufacturer as well.
Likewise, some 30 years ago, when Mr Mittal left home for Indonesia to acquire a small foundry in that country, he not only transcended the geographical barriers of his nation, but even transcended the barriers of race, creed, caste and comfort to look at the entire world as his oyster, building the foundations of his transcontinental steel empire. Down the ages, men and women who have had the vision to look beyond the obvious, are the ones who have always stood up and been counted. Because, excellence, to them, became another word for knowledge.
So, what’s knowledge?
Knowledge is not the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Knowledge is the vision to anticipate tomorrow. Knowledge is an insight into the unknown.
Winners see knowledge, not as progress from untruth to truth. They see knowledge as scaling up from a lower truth to a higher truth. By perceiving knowledge on that plane, they no longer frown upon yesterday with disgust or disdain. All that they do instead, is see knowledge as a staircase with various landings. And they can ascend and descend those landings according to the circumstances of their being is what makes them excel.
This is why, as Mr Jain pointed out, it is no longer important that Mr Sunil Mittal, was the biggest vendor of telephone instruments yesterday. Or that he is the country’s biggest mobile phone operator today. For all we know, he may eventually quit the mobile phone business tomorrow, having already sold 10 per cent of his stake to Vodafone, and emerge as the country’s biggest vegetable exporter in the days to come — he has already tied up with the Rothschilds to export fresh vegetables to Europe. What Mr Mittal did yesterday, or what he does today, or even what he may be doing tomorrow, is not excellence. Excellence, for Mr Mittal, is his ability to transcend the various landings on the staircase of his life at will on the power of prior knowledge.
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