Azim PremJI on the change IIM-A, CONVOCATION’02

This is very interesting and inspiring speech by Azim Premji At the 37th Annual Convocation 2002, IIM, Ahmedabad 37th Annual Convocation 2002, IIM, Ahmedabad. In this speech he share guiding principles of staying afloat in a changing world based on his experience in Wipro. In this speech he speak about 11 different lesson to learn to adapt change in our life.
(1) Be alert for the first signs of change.
Change descends on every One equally; it is just that some realize it faster. Some changes are sudden but many others are gradual.While sudden changes get attention because they are dramatic, it is the gradual changes that are ignored till it is too late. You must have all heard of story of the frog in boiling water. If the temperature of the water is suddenly increased, the frog realizes it and jumps out of the water. But if the temperature is very slowly increased, one degree at a time, the frog does not realize it till it boils to death. You must develop your own early warning system, which warns you of changes and calls your attention to it. In the case of change, being forewarned is being forearmed.
(2) Anticipate change even when things are “Anticipate change even when things are going right.
Most people wait for something to go wrong before they think of change. It is like going to the doctor for a check up only when you are seriously sick or thinking of maintaining your vehicle only when it breaks down. The biggest enemy of future success is past success. When you succeed, you feel that you must be doing something right for it to happen. But when
the parameters for success change, doing the same things may or may not continue to lead to success. Guard against complacency all the time. Complacency makes you blind to the early signals from the environment that something is going wrong.
(3) Always look at the opportunities that change represents.
Managing change has a lot to go with our own attitude towards it. It is proverbial half-full or half empty glass approach. For every problem that change represents, there is an opportunity lurking in disguise somewhere. It is up to you to spot it before someone else does.
(4) Do not allow routines to become chains.
For many of us the routine. We have got accustomed to obstructs change. Routines represent our own zones of comfort. There is a sense of predictability about them. They have structured our time and even our thought in a certain way. While routines are useful, do not let them enslave you. Deliberately break out of them from time to time.
(5) Realize that fear of the unknown is natural.
With change comes a feeling of insecurity. Many people believe that brave people are not afflicted by this malady. The truth is different. Every one feels the fear of unknown. Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to manage fear without getting paralyzed. Feel the fear, but move on regardless.
(6) Keep renewing yourself.
This prepares you to anticipate change and be ready for it when it comes. Constantly ask yourself what new skills and competencies will be needed. Begin working on them before it becomes necessary and you will have a natural advantage. The greatest benefit of your education lies not only in what you have learnt, but in working how to learn. Formal education is the beginning of the journey of learning. Yet I do meet youngsters who feel that
they have already learnt all there is to learn. You have to constantly learn about people and how to interact effectively with them. In the world of tomorrow, only those individuals and organizations will succeed who have mastered the art of rapid and on-going learning.
(7) Surround yourself with people who are open to change.
If you are always in the company of cynics, you will soon find yourself becoming like them. A cynic knows all the reasons why something cannot be done. Instead, spend time with people who have a “can-do” approach. Choose your advisors and mentors correctly. Pessimism is contagious, but then so is enthusiasm. In fact, reasonable optimism can be an amazing
force multiplier.
8) Play to win..!!
I have said this many times in the past. Playing to win is not the same as cutting corners. When you play to win, you stretch yourself to your maximum and use all your potential. It alsohelps you to concentrate your energy on what you can influence instead of gettingbogged down with the worry of what you cannot change. Do your best and leave the rest.
(9) Respect yourself.
The world will reward you on your successes. Success requires no explanation and failure permits none. But you need to respect yourself enough so that your self-confidence remains intact whether you succeed or fail. If you succeed 90 per cent of the time, you are doing fine. If you are succeeding all the time, you should ask yourself if you are taking enough risks. If you do not take enough risks, you may also be losing out on many opportunities. Think through but take the plunge. If some things do go wrong, learn from them.
(10) Never change: your core values.
In spite of all the change around you, decide upon what you will never change: your core values. Take your time to decide what they are but once you do, do not compromise on them for any reason.
(11) We must remember that succeeding in a changing world is beyond just surviving.
It is our responsibility to create and contribute something to the world that has given us so much. We must remember that many have contributed to our success, including our parents and others from our society. All of us have a responsibility to utilize our potential for making our nation a better place for others, who may not be as well endowed as us, or as fortunate
in having the opportunities that we have got. Let us do our bit, because doing one good deed can have multiple benefits not only for us but also for many others.
@! last
Change is the Only thing that will Never change. So better adapt to it.
If one desires a change, one must be that change before that must be that change before that change can take place.

Stanford Convocation speech BY Steve Jobs’05

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

IIT Convocation Address by Azim H Premji…

This is one of the most inspiring speeches I ever heard. It is a wonderful amalgamation of all ingredients essential for a beautiful and successful life. Many will be aware of it, but this speech should be read by almost everybody. And so I am posting it here. Please put your thoughts too on this as Comments. Here we go:IIT Convocation Address by Azim H Premji, Chairman, Wipro Technologies@!
I am privileged to be with you here today and to share this significant moment of your life.The convocation marks the culmination of all the endless nights you worked through, all the anxieties you have gone through facing one examination after another and all the preparation you have put in, not only to enter this prestigious institution but also to graduate from it successfully. It is no mean achievement.Only a handful of the most talented people in the world have shared this success with you.Let me just say that I am very proud of each and every one of you. I am a little wary about giving you advice-because advice is one thing young people all over the world do not like receiving. I cannot fault you for that. The world does look very different when it is seen with your eyes. You are filled with enthusiasm and are straining at the leash to get on with life.And the world is very different from what it waswhen I was at your age. Never before has the role of technology been so pervasive and so central. The Internet has breached all physical borders and connected the world together like noother force has done before. For the first time, opportunities for creating wealth in India are at par with the best in world. There is no need for you to sacrifice the joy of remaining in your own country any more.
All opportunities are accompanied by their own challenges. I thought I would share with you a few of the lessons I have learnt in my own life, while loading the transformation at Wipro, from a small company three and a half decades back into a global corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange. I hope you find them useful.
Lesson # 1: Dare to dream
When I entered Wipro at the age of 21, it was a sudden and unexpected event. I had no warning of what lay ahead of me and I was caught completely unprepared. All I had with me was a dream. A dream of building a great Organization. It compensated for my inexperience and I guess, also prevented me from being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task before me. What I am happy is that we never stopped dreaming. Even when we achieved a position of leadership in every business we operated in India. We now have a dream of becoming one of the top 10 global it service companies.
Many people wonder whether having unrealistic dreams is foolish. My reply to that is dreams by themselves can never be realistic or safe. If they were, they would not be dreams. I do agree that one must have strategies to execute dreams. And, of course, one must slog to transform dreams into reality. But dreams come first. What saddens me most is to see young, bright people getting completely disillusioned by a few initial setbacks and slowly turning cynical and some of them want to migrate to America in the hope this is the solution. It requires courage to keep dreaming. And that is when dreams are most needed- not when everything is going right, but when just about everything is going wrong.

Lesson # 2: Define what you stand for
While success is important, it can become enduring only if it is built on a strong foundation of Values. Define what you stand for as early as possible and do not compromise with it for any reason. Nobody can enjoy the fruits of success if you have to argue withyour own conscience. In Wipro, we defined our Beliefs long before it became a fashion to do so. It not only helped us in becoming more resilient to stand up to crises we faced along the way, but it also helped us in attracting the right kind of people. Eventually, we realized that our values made eminent business sense. Values help in clarifying what everyone should do or not do in any business situation. It saves enormous time and effort because each issue does not have to be individually debated at length.
But remember that values are meaningful only if you practice them. People may listen to what you say but they will believe what you do. Values are a matter of trust. They must be reflected in each one of your actions. Trust takes a long time to build but can be lost quickly by just one inconsistent act.

Lesson #3: Never lose your zest and curiosity
All the available knowledge in the world is accelerating at a phenomenal rate. The whole world’s codified knowledge base (all documented information in library books and electronic files) doubled every 30 years in the early 20th century. By the 1970s, the world’s knowledge base doubled every seven years. Information researchers predict that by the year 2010, the world’s codified knowledge will double every 11 hours. Remaining on top of what you need to know will become one of the greatest challenges for you.
The natural zest and curiosity for learning is one of the greatest drivers for keeping updated on knowledge. A child’s curiosity is insatiable because every new object is a thing of wonder and mystery. The same zest is needed to keep learning new things. I personally spend at least ten hours every week on reading. If I do not do that, I find myself quickly outdated.

Lesson # 4: Always strive for excellence
There is a tremendous difference between being good and being excellent in whatever you do. In the world of tomorrow, just being good is not good enough. One of the greatest advantages of globalization is that it has brought in completely different standards. Being the best in the country is not enough; one has to be the best in the world. Excellence is a moving target. One has to constantly raise the bar. In the knowledge-based industries, India has the unique advantage of being a quality leader. Just like Japan was able to win in the overseas market with its quality leadership in automobile manufacturing, India has been able to do the same in information technology. t Wipro, we treat quality as the #1 priority. This enabled us not only to become the world’s first SEI CMM Level 5 software services company in the world but also a leader in Six Sigma approach to quality in India.

Lesson # 5: Build self-confidence
Self-confidence comes from a positive attitude even in adverse situations. Self-confident people assume responsibility for their mistakes and share credit with their team members.
They are able to distinguish between what is in their control and what is not. They do not waste their energies on events that are outside their control and hence they can take setbacks in their stride. Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Lesson # 6: Learn to work in teams
The challenges ahead are so complex that no individual will be able to face them alone. While most of our education is focused in individual strength, teaming with others is equally important. You cannot fire a missile from a canoe. Unless you build a strong network of people with complimentary skills, you will be restricted by your own limitations.Globalization has brought in people of different origin, different upbringing and different cultures together. Ability to become an integral part of a cross-cultural team will be a must for your success.

Lesson # 7: Take care of yourself
The stress that a young person faces today while beginning his or her career is the same as the last generation faced at the time of retirement.I have myself found that my job has become enormously more complex over the last two or three years. Along with mutual alertness, physical fitness will also assume a great importance in your life.
You must develop your own mechanism for dealing with stress. I have found that a daily jog for me, goes a long way in releasing the pressure and building up energy. You will need lots of energy to deal with the challenges. Unless you take care of yourself there is no way you can take care of others.

Lesson # 8: Persevere
Finally, no matter what you decide to do in your life, you must persevere. Keep at it and you will succeed, no matter how hopeless it seems at times. In the last three and half decades, we have gone through many difficult times. But we have found that if we remain true to what we believe in, we can surmount every difficulty that comes in the way. Perseverance can make miracles happen.

Lesson # 9: Have a broader social vision
For decades we have been waiting for some one who will help us in ‘priming the pump’ of the economy.The government was the logical choice for doing it, but it was strapped for resources. Other countries were willing to give us loans and aids but there was a limit to this.
In the millennium of the mind, knowledge-based industries like Information Technology are in a unique position to earn wealth from outside. While earning is important, we must have mechanisms by which we use it for the larger good of our society.

Through the Azim Premji Foundation, we have targeted over the next 12 months to enroll over a million children, who are out of school due to economic or social reasons.I personally believe that the greatest gift one can give to others is the gift of education. We who have been so fortunate to receive this gift know how valuable it is.
Lesson # 10: Never let success go to your head
No matter what we achieve, it is important to remember that we owe this success to many factors and people outside us. This will not only help us in keeping our sense of modesty and humility intact but also help us to retain our sense of proportion and balance. The moment we allow success to build a feeling or arrogance, we become vulnerable to makin bad judgments.

Anil Ambani Convocation address @ ISB’04

I have the rare privilege and honour of being part of two convocation functions on the same day. What I thought was that I will not talk about leadership or leadership styles because over the last one year as you have been through the program, you have had enough of showcasing of everything that potentially I learnt, and that, you have learnt at businessschool.It really is a strong endorsement to the fact that just 125 years ago, Sarojini Naidu, one of our greatest leaders, orator, poetess, was born in Hyderabad,in 1879, had to travel to Madras to pursue her school education. Therewas no education infrastructure in Hyderabad at that time. But, today of course, amongst many things, Hyderabad also boasts of ISB.This then takes my thoughts to women in business and politics. Sarojini Naidu played a key role in the freedom movement of the country. And today, in a vast number of states we have had women Chief Ministers.We have had women Prime Ministers, not only in India but, even in Egypt.Then why is it that we do not have them well represented in thecorporate world . And, it starts with the fact that we do not have enough women entering business schools. I was looking at the statistics which showed that close to 17% of the graduating class today comprises of women. Let’s just compare this to a lesser known school called Harvard. In the class of 2005,more than 35% of the graduating class is women. More than double and,the class size is much much larger than where we are today. I said, a lesserknown school called Harvard, primarily because, I believe, Rajat comes from Harvard and I come from a better known school called Wharton.
So, I clearly believe that women, and especially young women have a verylarge responsibility and have to aim for the future.The second thought that really struck me was, the power of youth. It isthe young power of India that has really put India on the global map. Whenwe talk about IT and IT enabled services, the average age of the peoplewho are serving that sector is 26. Why is it that the best and the brightestof our people don’t want to join politics? Is that changing?And, I feel that it is changing. Let’s take a look at newer entrances to Parliament. Sachin Pilot, a Wharton MBA, Omar Abdullah, Jyotiraditya Scindia, an MBA from Stanford. These are all people who are turning to politics. And maybe their fathers have been in politics so they are turning to it but after their education, they really had the choice of every possible alternate career they could think of.And why do we need young blood in politics? I recently looked at the Lok Sabha website, 72% of the members of Lok Sabha are over the age of 50. More than 50% are over the age of 60. More than 25% are even older. Let’s contrast that with 75% of our population really being under the age of 40. And as all of us put our heads together, we are talking abouteffectively running organisations in the future. Can all of us really excel in what we are doing? But we don’t have an inducive, vital and a booming external environment. So, can we truly grow? Can we truly evolve simultaneously both internally and externally? In this case, internally I mean,institutions, organisations, companies and corporations and externally, I am referring to our political environment. I do see this as a challenge thatall of us will have to face.
If there was one thing I would like to do with the advancement of technology, is to rewind, and instead of graduating in 1982 from Wharton, graduatein 2004 with all of you. The world has changed and so has India. Theopportunities and linked with them, the challenges, the threats are sodifferent that I could not have imagined in my wildest imagination, whenI graduated from Wharton that this is where our country is really goingto be. So, I believe, that all of you are very privileged children of godthat you are here at one of the most exciting times that this country hasseen and India is clearly on its way to gain its rightful place of being an economic superpower. All of you are already armed with a lot of detailed understanding and a lot of management and organisational techniques thatare really needed in the new world. But let me make a few observations.
Compared to the past, all of you will live much longer. This is the contribution of rapid progress made by science and so all of you are going to have a much longer working life. Also, you are living in a borderless,seamless techno world where opportunities really know no boundaries.This is the era of intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is king. And with these challenges and these new evolutions what you should be ready with is, competition, at the individual level, at the family level, at the institutionallevel, at the country level and this is no longer local, global or regional.The longer working life, will also mean that career planning and choiceswill have to be made many times as you grow 70 and 80. So, I don’t believe, that there is going to be retirement at 50 or 55. This means that skills will get redundant extremely fast and they will have to be replaced as quickly. This will undoubtedly put tremendous pressure on each one of us. Lifestyle change, faster pace of living puts tremendous pressure on individuals and creates both constructive and destructive tension leading to high stress. So the importance of mental and physical fitness and a balanced life, I think, will also be extremely important. I would really be failing in my comments today, if I didn’t share with you what I call, “Conversations with Dhirubhai”. Because if it was not for him,his vision, his commitment and his dreams, Reliance, my brother Mukesh and I would not have existed.
I recall, it was 13th of December 1982, when I landed back in Bombay,now Mumbai, after graduating from Wharton. I ran through some summer school, summer program and graduated in 14-15 months. Though I wasclass of 1983, I graduated actually in 1982. So on arrival, when I met him,I told him, look dad I have become an MBA and am just going to takea break as I have really worked hard. He said to me, I am very happy,I am delighted that you have accomplished this. But since I didn’t go to any formal school or college and I don’t have any degree, why don’t you tell me from your learnings at Wharton, what does an MBA stand for?I thought that’s a rather simple and easy question. It’s Master of Business Administration. He said in his imitable style, his interpretation of an MBA was ‘Mane badhu avde chhe’. Literally meaning , ‘I am know all, I know everything’. He said, you are entering India and you need to Indianise your MBA. I said, fine, I am going to work here and naturally that should not be a very big issue.He said, did they at Wharton school teach you of custom duties? About excise duties? About income tax? About sales tax? About Parliament? AndI see in the audience, a former member of the Parliament, Shri. Kamal Choudhary, whom my father knew well. And he said, do you know what is the zero hour question? What is the call in attention motion? What is the starred and unstarred question? He said, if you don’t get to know all these things, let me assure you that all your formal education is not really going to help you. You need your practical Indian MBA and I am going to go and create that environment for you so that you can get that.He then went on to ask me, saying, tell me as you are a fresh MBA, just entering corporate life, what is the definition of a leader? I said, I have really forgotten all my books back at Philadelphia and I have really no interest today to talk about theoretical definitions. He said, no, it’s pretty easy for you if you just admit that you don’t know what the definition is. I said to him, okay, let’s assume that I don’t know the definition, why don’t you tell me since you have all the answers to everything, what is a leader?
He said, in his very simplistic style, “A leader is a person who can attract
followers, if you think you are a leader, please look back when you are walking. If there is nobody following you, you are not a leader of any type”.Very simplistic but very deep rooted meaning.
He then went on to say, you are entering Reliance. I am the trustee of over lakhs of individual shareholders, who are the real owners of Reliance. Anil,you have really a choice. You have a choice to demand respect or youhave a choice to command respect, you choose. You can demand respect being an ‘Ambani’, you are ‘Dhirubhai’s son’, so people will have to listento what you say. Or, you can command respect on the basis of your skills set, your attitude, your upbringing, and your knowledge on issues. And that is what will carry people with you. But you still have that choice to make as you enter corporate life. And I would highly recommend to you that you command respect rather than demand respect. These were very simplistic messages to me. But given to me more than 25 years ago are still very deep in my mind, in my heart, in my soul.I asked him, everybody tells me that your father is a great visionary, can you explain to me, what do you think is your definition of a visionary? He looked at me and said, I don’t even know if you will understand what I am going to say because you are an MBA, and I am a MABF. I looked at him with some puzzlement and said, I have heard of FRCS, MBBS,MBA, B.Com, B.A, LLB, but, I have never heard of MABF, what is that degree? As I was aware that he had no degree. He said, it was ‘Matric Appeared But Failed’.
He then went on to say, Anil, I am very very grateful to god. He was a very strong believer in god. God has been very kind to me and he has given me the power and the ability to dream. But, this difference between your dreaming and my dreaming, is very simple. Everyone of us dreams but there is a small difference between the way we dream. God has given me the power to dream with my eyes open. Dreaming with my eyes open I have a better chance than you to convert my dreams into a reality. For you dream with your eyes closed, you have a lesser chance to make it into reality but a higher chance to convert it into a nightmare. He said, everybody talks about ‘Karma’ and everybody talks about destiny but let me tell you that destiny, fate is not a matter only of chance, it is also a matter of choice. And in my father’s words, for all of you and for all of us in India, I believe, that if you can dream it, you can do it.
Thank you.