My previous blog touched upon the saddest moment i came across in my life. I write this blog with a sense of achievment, having personally met and interviewed Shri. Onkar S Kanwar the CEO and MD of Apollo tyres, a US $1.2 billion company. The feeling of exchanging a hand shake with a famous industry stalwart after having to fight for getting an appoinment was nothing short of a dream come true for me.
Thanks to a Macro entrepreneurship project and an amazing faculty in Satya, the platform was set to start making an effort to fix a goal and battle to achieve it by any means. I kept my options open and had a lot of names in mind. One of the names i had in my mind was Onkarji who has been a great example to transformation of a company called Apollo tyres to what it is today. Today the Apollo group boasts of having diversified into the health sector(AHS hospitals) and has a good reputation for their commendable CSR activities.
I got in touch with the top management of Apollo through my uncle who is the Registar of Companies, Kerala. Thanks to his intervention i was able to initiate a dialogue of getting an appoinment to meet Onkarji. After a couple of fixing up and cancellation of appoinments i finally had a date of March 9th, tuesday between 12:30 – 1:00 pm to meet him. I spent the previous day googling and finding out information about Shri. Onkar S kanwar. I had some 5-6 questions framed which i planned to ask him when we meet. But when i arrived i was told that he has just arrived from a conference and i need to be as brief as possible.
I along with my batchmate Abhilash entered the big room where we were greeted by the man himself, who politely stood up from his chair shook hands with us and made us seated. Then he said ‘Yes. How can i help you guys’ with a voice which relly sounded that of a succesful man. I had to spontanepusly decide on shortlisting the 2-3 questions which i need to ask him in the 20 minutes we had. At the end of our meeting Shri. Onkar also politely agreed to contribute some artifacts for the Museum Of Entrepreneur Leadership which our institute Indus World School of Business would be launching at the end of this month. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to Mr. Wahal (Company Secretary, Apollo) and Mr. Pradeep (Head – Secratarial, Apollo) who played a significant role in helping to fix the appoinment. Following are the excerpts from the interview which covered three main areas - his journey as an entrepreneur, main attributes of an entrepreneur and his views on the management education of today.
1) Briefly on his journey of entrepreneurship and story behind the transformation of Apollo to what it is today.
When I came back from the US after my studies I had to start from ground zero. My father was a trader at that time and wanted to get into manufacturing. I was working for a company that was manufacturing equipment for making steel pipes and tubes. That company was very much interested in coming to India. I proposed to them that they should meet my father when they go to India. Americans love to meet marketing people. My father was a self entrepreneur himself and started from almost nothing in hand. He was able to succeed in trading and wanted to graduate to the next level of manufacturing. In the 1960’s India was a regulated economy and everything was controlled in terms of production and distribution. Public sectors and a few private sectors were in the picture at that time. So the government was in the process of issuing licenses. When the American I was talking about visited my father, he was impressed with his leadership and distribution network and wanted to join him. That is how I came and joined my fathers business. Then we acquired the land but did not have license for doing the business. There were a lot of people at that time who would buy licenses and sell licenses while taking the premium for it. That is how we got the license and was also my first experience was implementing a project. Inspite of not being a civil engineer I succeeded in building a factory from nothing to something which became the pride of India. We became the best tube makers in the country. At that time India was importing wheat and green revolution was on. So that is a time when we played a very dominant role in trying to meet this demand of farmers by supplying pipes and tubes. There was also a demand in the oil sector and we had to fulfill that gap. My father was a ambitious man and wanted to do many things. I always believed that even if you have all the people and resources, but unless you have a management bandwidth you will not be able to manage the change. My father was not able to manage the change because when he started the company Apollo tyres, it was also a license brought from another company since we did not have the license in our hand. The factory was started and began to incur losses. Then I came in the scene and said I would like to try my hands on the same and get away from his shadow. I wanted to see my entrepreneurship when we had no money, lousy management and poor products. So there was a combination of factors which I fought including strong unions in Kerala above all. Somehow I had a lot of conviction and confidence and of course god is always with you if you help yourself. They say ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So the first thing I did was to call all the people and asked them to give me a chance to work and see how we can groom this company to a big company not knowing anything about the time it would take. And I asked people who still feel unsettled about the company to leave now. After this a few people left us and quite a lot of them stayed back. I decided to embark upon this journey by going to different colleges in different parts of the country collecting young people and had a good experience in the process. I was looking for people from middle class backgrounds who were willing to look at their parents and say that they wanted to win a job and grow at that job. These people where recruited from places like West Bengal, Kharagpur, Punjab University, Bombay and Tamil Nadu. I picked up around 150 people from various fields and disciplines from management to engineering to accounting. They were put on the jobs and I said ‘Now we as a team need to work and not I’. That was one effort which was made and somehow all of them had the conviction that this guy will be able to deliver inspite of a lot of problems we faced at that time. The rest is all history and we kept on growing the company. In the meantime we decided to get out of Kerala since we had continuous problems as far as this location was concerned. We decided to up a factory in Gujarat which we did in a record time. The kind of confidence and enthusiasm in the team at that time was unbelievable. For the money that was needed we did not go to the institutions but went to the public since we were a listed company. By then company had made enough profits and had enough confidence to grow the business. Whatever money we get by means of depreciation we made sure that we put it back to the company so that we can modernize the equipments. This has been a continuous effort and our zeal has been to grow more and more. Because if you don’t want to grow there is no chance of survival and there is every chance that someone would steal your chair.
2) His take on what should be the attributes of an entrepreneur.
An entrepreneur is normally a controlled freak. He wants to control everything. But as the business keeps on growing you will find it difficult to do it. You need to have a dream and also a team. You must have a plan that you must be able to walk the talk. Because we can all dream of big things and in the morning we can get up and forget about those dreams. There should be realistic dreams and also a plan which is executable. Also you need to have a committed set of people. I had the set of people who were committed and worked together focusing on developing aspects of how to grow the business. An entrepreneur creates opportunities for people. There would be days when you feel the company would run into losses and the people will run away from you. But you have to induce the confidence as a teacher, as an entrepreneur and has to share the prosperity in the people. You have to treat them as a family. You should be doing the same basic things you would be doing with your children. Normally we have two personalities, when we come to the office we become the bosses and at home you are a father. At office also you have to have a similar treatment. Rewards and appreciation should be given to people who perform and there should be some deterrent if not punishment for those people who does not perform. As an entrepreneur you have to change with time. Lot of entrepreneurs doesn’t change with time and they run into trouble. So the message is that India has a lot of opportunities and you can do wonders if you are really bent upon it. You must have the patience and pursuance throughout.
3) His comment on the management education of today and how it should be changed to meet the current industrial needs.
First of all the basic level of grounding is not done properly. The course curriculum needs to undergo a change since it is mainly comprised of theory. Also in most of the cases, the books that are being used are still the old ones and needs to change with time since this is an electronic age. There should be a more practical method of learning by doing things. In schools in Europe and Singapore like United World College where my grandchildren are studying they are invariably sent to various camps and places to meet poor people, live in tents, help the handicapped and stay in challenging environments. They work with these people and this is a part of their syllabus. They have exchange programmes within the students which most of the colleges here don’t have. We are happy to get into colleges which have become a racquet now. Government should come up with policies keeping minimum standards and people not able to meet them should be faced with some serious deterrents so that such people are not encouraged. But I am sure in pockets there are good B-schools in the country. I would not say everything is bad, but in the process of the country growing very fast people think about ways to earn a quick buck. This has to be regulated. Over regulation or under regulation is bad for the country’s education system. It has to be balanced. A lot is required to be done in the education system. We should have people coming from the industry to come and share their ideas and experiences on different aspects of management. You should also try and apply what you learnt in the books to the real world outside.
-ARIF HASSAN
