Dhirubhai Ambani and His Success Mantras

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Few men in history have made as dramatic a contribution to their country's economic fortunes as did the founder of Reliance, Dhirubhai H Ambani. Fewer still have left behind a legacy that is more enduring and timeless. As with all great pioneers, there is more than one unique way of describing the true genius of Dhirubhai: The corporate visionary, the un- matched strategist, the proud patriot, the leader of men, the architect of India's capital markets, and the champion of share- holder interest.

He achieved what almost everybody would consider impossible. In a life spanning 69 years, he built from scratch India's largest privately controlled corporate empire. Dhirajlal Hirachand-better known as Dhirubhai-Ambani would often say that success was his biggest enemy. He was a man who aroused extreme responses in others. Either you loved him or you hated him. There was just no way you could have been indifferent to this amazing entrepreneur who thought big, acted tough, knew how to bend rules or have rules bent for him. He was a visionary as well as a manipulator, a man who communicated with the rich and the poor with equal felicity, who was generous beyond the call of duty with those whom he liked and utterly ruthless with his rivals-a man of many parts, of irreconcilable contrasts and paradoxes galore.

Dhirubhai Ambani expired on Saturday July 6, roughly ten minutes before midnight, at Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital where he had been admitted after he suffered a vascular stroke on the evening of June 24. This was his second stroke- the first had occurred more than sixteen years earlier, in February 1986, leaving the right side of his body paralyzed. At his cremation, the well-heeled rubbed shoulders with the ordinary. No Indian businessman ever attracted the kind of crowd that Dhirubhai did on his last journey. After his cremation on the evening of Sunday July 7, his elder son Mukesh reminded those gathered on the occasion that in 1957, when Dhirubhai arrived in Mumbai from Aden in Yemen, he had only 15000 in his pocket.

He was not exactly a pauper since 15000 meant much more than what the amount means in this day and age. Nevertheless, one could not ask for a more spectacular 'rags-to- riches' tale. The second son of a poorly paid school-teacher from Chorwad village in Gujarat, he stopped studying after the tenth standard and decided to join his elder brother, Ramniklal, who was working in Aden at that time. (Not surprisingly, Dhirubhai ensured that his two sons went to premier educational institutions in the US-Mukesh was educated at Stanford University and Anil at the Wharton School of Business.)

The first job Dhirubhai held in Aden was that of an attendant in a gas station. Half a century later, he would become chairman of a company that owned the largest oil refinery in India and the fifth largest refinery in the world, that is, Reliance Petroleum Limited which owns the refinery at Jamnagar that has an annual capacity to refine up to 27 million tons of crude oil.

When he died, the Reliance group of companies that Dhirubhai led had a gross annual turnover in the region of 275,000 crore or close to US $ 15 billion. The group's interests include the manufacture of synthetic fibres, textiles and petrochemical products, oil and gas exploration, petroleum refining, besides telecommunications and financial services In 1976-77, the Reliance group had an annual turnover of 70 crore. Fifteen years later, this figure had jumped to 3,000 crore. By the turn of the century, this amount had skyrocketed to 760,000 crore. In a period of 25 years, the value of the Reliance group's assets had jumped from 33 crore to 30,000 crore.

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