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July
-August
2010
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"In September last year, my colleague Rachna, our photographer friend Kunal and I went to Aditya Birla Group’s South Mumbai office. We were interviewing Kumar Mangalam Birla for a coffee-table book. The Birla name, mythical as it is to the Indian mind, reverberated in the chairman’s imposing chamber—only to be tempered by the chairman himself with a demeanor that would have sat as easily on a consummate Zen master. At the head of 130,000 employees, together pulling in $29bn in revenues across 25 countries, Birla was the proverbial man of few words. Our questionnaire was quite ‘informal’, trying to tease out the man behind the chairman, maybe get something colorful. His answers though gave us just about enough to draw a strictly satisfactory picture—articulate but completely shorn of frills. Sitting in front of him, I realized that he must have said these things a hundred, two hundred times in his life; that no matter how ‘informal’ one tried to be, it must be quite a challenge for the chairman of the Aditya Birla Group to get excited about the media any more.
Thirty-five minutes and a breezy photoshoot later, I remembered I hadn’t given him my business card. “Your company publishes The Smart Manager, right?” he asked, glancing at the card. “Yes,” I said, “and we would love to…” Before I could complete the sentence, Birla had already written down the contact details of Dr Pragnya Ram, Group Executive President – Corporate Communications & CSR, on a post-it and handed it to me. “Please email Dr Ram. Tell her that I want to write an article for The Smart Manager and request her to organize it. I enjoy connecting with your readers and have been meaning to do this for a while...” The November 09 issue of The Smart Manager had Birla on the cover, with a seven-page article (‘Redefining Entrepreneurship’) written by one of India’s busiest captains of industry. There were still no frills, but I had to happily correct my opinion on what the ‘media’ represents to the Birlas of the world.
This is the story I wanted to share with you in my first editorial for The Smart Manager, because it best conveys how I feel as I write it. That this issue also happens to be the one in which we celebrate our cofounder Professor Nitin Nohria’s ascent to the chair of Dean, Harvard Business School, as seen by Dr Gita Piramal, only adds to the feeling.
There will be more on the contents from the next editorial. For now, this story alone will do."
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