Business Maharajas

The eight business maharajas profiled in this book are among Asia's most powerful industrial tycoons. Their combined turnover amounts to a massive Rs 550 billion. Between them, they employ some 650,000 people and indirectly affect the lives of many millions more: Sip a cup of tea, drive to work, listen to music, buy an engagement ring, build a house...and the chances are that in these and a myriad other ways you are using products that they manufacture or market.

By any yardstick, the achievements of these men would rank among the great business. stories of our time. Dhirubhai Ambani created, in his own lifetime, India's third largest industrial empire from a few thousand rupees; the late Aditya Birla set up, on average, 2.3 factories a year for thirty years, within budget and on schedule; Rahul Bajaj expanded even faster than Ambani, moving up to become the world's second largest scooter manufacturer from an also-ran; Rama Prasad Goenka, India's takeover king, built a huge corporation on the foundations of relatively unattractive family holdings; B.M. Khaitan built the world's biggest individual tea empire from a modest holding; Bharat and Vijay Shah put together a string of glittering deals from Surat to Antwerp to become reputedly the world's biggest diamond barons in ten short years; and Ratan Tata inherited a surname and an empire that does not allow for failure....

How did these men build their enormous empires? How do they run them in today's competitive corporate environment? What are their management secrets and how do they hone the corporate instincts that allow them to thrive and prosper even as others fail? What is their vision for the future? Top business writer and industry insider Gita Piramal discovered the answers to these and related questions through exhaustive interviews with each of these men. To round out her profiles, she drew on information provided exclusively to her by the principals, examined company records, interviewed top corporate sources in India. and abroad, and drew on knowledge amassed over years of reporting on Indian industry.

The result is an extraordinarily insightful look into the lives and business secrets of some of India's greatest industrial achievers-men who are at the forefront of Indian business today and who will lead the country's push to become an industrial superpower in the twenty-first century.