The Portfolio Book Of Great Indian Business Stories

How did Dhirubhai Ambani build a polyester plant in record time? What made JRD Tata launch India’s first airline? How did Vijay Mallya wrest control of Shaw Wallace from Manu Chhabria? Why did Bhai Mohan Singh fall out with his favourite son and lose control of Ranbaxy? The Portfolio Book of Great Indian Business Stories contains excerpts from a selection of the finest business books published by Penguin Portfolio. This anthology features snippets from the lives of some of the most eminent business leaders India has seen—M.S. Oberoi, Ratan Tata, Aditya Birla and Rahul Bajaj, among others. There are tales of outstanding successes, crushing failures, extraordinary challenges and relentless determination, some of which chronicle the times when these legends were just simple businessmen trying to make a mark. The grit and ruthless persistence of these men defined who they were and the legacies they left behind.

This book is an intimate and a rare collection of more than 30 stories of top Indian business leaders about how late Professor CK Prahalad inspired and guided them through their most painful journey after the 1991 Economic Reforms. Most of them, who didn’t think they could survive the MNC onslaught, went on to build profitable global enterprises. At a time when most business and management ideas are getting debunked CK’s radical approach to strategy, managing people, leadership, teaching, and life, will continue to be relevant and will interest business leaders, entrepreneurs, policy makers, students and the academia around the world. The first edition, published in 2014, covered a wide area and was perceived as CK’s biography. This edition covers more business pole-vaulting stories with a separate chapter on India’s mammoth potential to become a global leader in healthcare. This book is an invitation to celebrate and learn from one of the world’s greatest management thinkers. “CK was gathering us like a shepherd would gather his flock and was essentially bent on chastising us for what we hadn’t done and how we could do.” Anand Mahindra, Chairman, Mahindra Group

Peter Church OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of New South Wales, a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Sydney and a Master’s of Law degree from the University of London. He has spent almost all his career working and living in the Asian region as an international lawyer and corporate adviser. He is the founder and chairman of AFG Venture Group (www.afgventuregroup.com), a corporate advisory firm with operations in Australia, South-East Asia and India and is Special Counsel to Blake Dawson (www. blakedawson. com), a leading Australian law firm with activities in a number of Asian jurisdictions. He was awarded the OAM in 1994 for his services towards the promotion of Australian business in South-East Asia.

Is Shah Rukh Khan an effective actor? Is Naresh Trehan an effective doctor? Was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam an effective nation builder? Are you an effective person? In this book, bestselling author T.V. Rao studies and analyses effective doctors, actors, civil servants, social workers, educationists, nation builders and entrepreneurs. Some of them seem to go beyond the tenets of effectiveness and shine out as what the author calls Very Effective People and Super Effective People. His diverse examples and cases range from A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Devi Shetty, Anil Gupta to Kangana Ranaut, Sachin Tendulkar, Anupam Kher—to ordinary people whose lives are no less effective. Hugely readable, with self-assessment tools at the end of each chapter, Effective People will propel you to leap forward and discover the best in you.

This is a riveting account of the life and work of the Govindram Seksaria ‒ industrialist, philanthropist and a member of the New York Cotton Exchange ‒ and ties together several strands of a seminal period in Indian and World history. Seksaria, lived in a historically defining era, his life straddling epochal events: two world wars, the Great Depression in United States, India's freedom struggle against the British Raj, and the growth of Indian industry. Seksaria, who was born in a family of small traders, never travelled abroad and spoke neither English nor Hindi ‒ only Marwari, and was at the time of his passing, at age 58, one India's wealthiest businessmen. He donated liberally to the freedom movement and built not only an industrial and trading empire but also hospitals and educational institutions as well. He pioneered girls' education in an era when few others did. He commanded a large following among industrialists, politicians, traders and friends. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Mahatma Gandhi, at differ times, sought his sage advice. Throughout his extraordinary life in business and philanthropy, Seksaria never gave a press interview or delivered a public speech.

“Encouraging the MSME entrepreneurs and youth to create big, sustainable businesses and generate employment through their work is the core objective of writing this book” Today, India is a land of great opportunities and will remain so for next three or four decades. Yet we don’t have as many globally competitive enterprises and are struggling with unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. Why? Entrepreneurship can be one of the effective responses to these challenges and opportunities. Entrepreneurs create jobs, develop innovative solutions to address the need of the society, they increase GDP and thus attract lot of foreign investments and can help this nation in a significant way. Business Stories is a book with sixteen such stories of successful MSME enterprises that has achieved meaningful success in relative shorter time span and has the potential to grow exponentially in the years ahead. They also have the potential to inspire and guide millions of existing and aspiring entrepreneurs and youth of this wonderful nation.

The Golden age of Indian industry, as it now seems in retrospect, lasted from 1951 to "62. and industrialists of the lime were not afraid to think ahead and plan big. Among the entrepreneurs who led this Industrial resurgence, four were particularly outstanding, G.D. Birla, Walchand Hirachand, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and, J.R.D. Tata. Gita Piramal, author of the acclaimed Business Maharajas, sensitively recreates the Lives and Times of these four titans of industry. She draws upon hitherto untapped sources of information to Sketch her profiles, making htis perhaps the closest Look at these legends this fair. Thought provoking and incisive. Business Legends is a compelling Account of ambition and achievement.