“Ready for Takeoff - a leadership Story” - Book review

Book: Ready for Takeoff - a leadership Story
Author: Sachit Jain
Published in 2010
Publisher: Rupa Publication India,New Delhi

Review by: Sachidanand Kulkarni

About the Author: An alumnus of IIT Delhi and a gold medalist from IIMA, Sachit Jain started his career with Unilever India as a management trainee. He has been working as Executive Director with the Vardhman group. In his tenure at Vardhman, he has headed project management, manufacturing, TPM, marketing and ERP implementation. He currently heads finance and control functions of the group. This is his first book and it is based on his unique style of leadership and strategies for performance - improvement.

Story at a glance:
It is a leadership story of hardcore Career Investment Banker Mr. Anurag Amar Sachdeva, forced to become the MD of the Steel manufacturing company ‘Ajanta Special Steel’. It talks about how he emerges as a good leader and raises Ajanta Steel from losses.

Why Me?
Anurag out of curiosity asks to Mr. Sehgal about his selection as a MD of Ajanta. Mr. Sehgal says, I trust you. Are you Happy in what you are doing? This question of Mr. Sehgal’s turns Anurag to think about this opportunity.

1st Open house:
Anurag addresses workers of Ajanta first time and shares financial situation of the company. As a leader he deliberately chooses to put this front of his workers and along with crises he also shares his vision about Ajanta.

Vision from the leader:
Ajanta to be knows as World Class Company. He believes that unless people are aware of what is our dream, what we want to achieve by putting our efforts together they don’t come along. Sharing of vision with workers was much appreciated amongst all. Everyone was charged to work for making this Company World Class.


Establishing:
Anurag starts meeting his senior management team and understands their functions. He visits floor shops regularly to learn more about steel manufacturing. It is the quality of ‘Natural Leader’ – they don’t care about levels in positions when it comes to knowledge sharing. They are always ready to learn from junior most as well.

Anurag starts thinking about where to begin and he first thinks of visiting workers toilets. This is the quality of People Oriented Leader. He issues instructions to get it done neat.

He chouses to eat lunch in mess where all workers have their food and everyone is surprised of this as they are not used to see MD coming for lunch in workers mess. Anurag is down to earth personality and believes in utmost value to human beings hence doesn’t consider his positional cap.

The Man in Action:
The action starts, meetings are being held, people are understanding the new boss. And the new boss is very clear about his vision for the company, new ideas, opens discussions to all and seeks their contribution in all initiatives. Taking a team along is the great quality of Anurag.

For various developmental initiatives, Anurag calls for a meeting with all senior executives and together they arrive at ‘Project Arjun’. Through this initiative they first tackle burning issues like, unnecessary costs and decides to sale Ferrari used by earlier management team, give up costly Guest house and cut the staff. This helps team to recover some money out of these assets.

He feels leader has to:
1. Take calculated risks
2. Giving a free hand to team
3. Having an uplifting vision (becoming world class)
4. Communication with team
5. Listening
6. Involvement
7. Ownership
8. Learning
9. Discipline
10.Be nice and treat other people well.

Management by walking around:
Anurag chooses to have a regular round on floor and see how things are progressing. Meeting Engineers, managers and workers, interacting with them directly at their workstation motivated everyone to give their best. This also helped him to learn more things about steel.

Eating in mess, walk around, and involvement in people’s discussions, walking in meeting without informing and being observer created a positive impression about Anurag. He would not allow individual escalations, prefers to take both departments to approach him together and this helped him to take faster decision and close issues.

1st celebration:
After initial few months success and kick-off of the project Arjun, Anurag decides to take his team out for drinks. True leaders know when and how to plan for celebration. They know how to appreciate efforts, motivate people and at the same time being tough to get things done.

Initiatives:
1. Project Arjun – formed several cross functional teams to attack on areas of vital improvements
2. Anurag chooses Sunaina and Arun to work on new initiative of making “Actively Good” organization
3. Action plan to move to an ‘Active Good Work Culture’ was put in place.
4. Introducing Quality Circles
5. Education for lower band worker
6. Insurance policies for employees and personal loan schemes

Big boss’s visit:
Mr. Sehgal’s first visit at Ajanta, he was taken to floor shop for a round and then to Bright Bar shop. Through project Arjun the production in Bright Bar shop had increased by 35%. Boss was happy with the overall progress and positive change. For a leader, when to get the big boss to visit and when to use him as a tool is an important skills to have.

Theory of Happiness:
Leadership is not something complicated, it is intrinsic to us. We just have to be aware of this and allow ourselves to be open and receptive. Look within.

If there is a positive environment created in the organization then there is lesser fear and in such a situation employees are overall happier. Since they don’t have to worry about unnecessary negative issues, it encourages excellence & enables them to think of improvement and long term health of the organization.

Creating a positive environment:
1. Appreciating performance
2. Smiling
3. Giving respect to people
4. Controlling Anger
5. Delegation
6. Training
7. Controlling Ego
8. A feeling of gratitude

Towards excellence:
Now that Ajanta has moved from losses to profit, people were happy, things are better, Anurag is still not that satisfied and his hunger to implement more better ideas, bring new processes to enhance and expand the organization further continues.
Some of the best practices introduced for further improvements are as below:
1. NVA – Non Value Added Activities – reduce this to improve productivity
2. ETDBW – Easy To Do Business With – achieve ETDBW
3. ERP implementation for common database
4. Spend more time on Value Added Activities
1. Expansion
2. Training & Development
3. Self development
4. New business/customer development
5. 5 S implementation
1. Sort
2. Set Location
3. Shine & Sweep
4. Standardized
5. Sustain
6. TPM – Total Productive Maintenance or the concept of ‘This Plant is Mine’

Achievements:
1. Bright Bar production increased by 35 %
2. Overall production up by 25%
3. Internal rejections went down by almost 50%
4. Ajanta moved from losses to profit
5. Implemented quality circles
6. Profit up by close to 2 crore a month

Appreciation:
Finally Mr. Sehgal has to appreciate Anurag and teams effort in making Ajanta the profitable organization. Ajanta marked sales of 900 crore in a year with net 25 crore profits. Mr. Sehgal offers Anurag to head group of companies after succession from Ajanta.

Leadership lessons:
1. True leader gives respect to everyone regardless of authority and hierarchy.
2. Appreciates people and encourages them constantly to do better and better
3. Would trust people and his team & allow them to be more independent
4. Creative, visionary, focused on improvement.
5. Welcoming new ideas, encourages innovation and involvement of all the levels

Moral of this story is, Leadership traits can be learnt and practiced. It is not necessary that you need to be born leader to succeed. Taking team along, involving every single stakeholder in the process, openness, welcoming ideas, knowing teams capabilities and capacity of delivering, motivating team to work for the ultimate excellence, focused approach to vision are some of the great qualities Mr. Anurag’s leadership styles has highlighted through this book.
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My journey to extreme end...!

Day - 1

23rd Feb 11, Wednesday, 3:00 PM, I was boarding ‘British Airways’ from O. R. Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg. My journey to extreme end of ‘land’ of African Continent was about to begun. Flight was not that good, it was bit old Aircraft. I didn’t get chance to do online check-in and I ended up getting middle seat. Anyways, that was not what was important for me as I was looking for much beyond this Aircraft and middle seat.

In few minutes after Takeoff I was feeling uncomfortable due to small seat and being middle one. The Gentlemen on my right seat humbly said, sorry if you are uncomfortable, but no choice. You can rest your arms with little adjustment, its matter of 2 hrs. I said thanks Mister…..and he offered me handshake saying I am David, I am Sachin. He instantly replied with smile, Tendulkar…! Sorry David, I am not. However I am from the same land where he belongs to, “India”, I said. Within short while we started discussing on cricket and ICC world cup. Soon our conversation turned to our professions. He said, he is working for ‘Sanlam’ at Cape Town. I said that’s good to know David. In fact I had visited ‘Sanlam’ for a presentation during October 10, I added. He was happy to know that and our discussion continued.

I landed at Cape Town International Airport at 5:15 PM. David & I shared our cards and word of pleasure. Rohan, my colleague working at Cape Town was ready at Airport to pick me. He straight took me to guest house which is located at one of the best area in Cape Town city, Sea Point. This was my 3rd trip to Cape Town in the last 2 years of my assignment in South Africa however I never got a chance to explore the beauty of this place.

We came to guest house; Kamlesh opened the gate for us. He is one of my colleagues from India office and was on 2 weeks assignment at Cape Town. Kamlesh was also staying at guest house. Great, I had some company. We had good chat for an hour and we decided to go for a beach walk. During my last visit I did go for evening as well as morning walk on the seashore. Besides that I didn’t go any were as I was on one day trip. This time I had planned my visit for 4 days. 2 working days office work and then weekend was devoted for the beautiful Cape Town and its nature.





It was Sunset time almost; Kamlesh & I stepped out for a walk and in just less than 5minute we were at beach. The huge Atlantic Ocean was singing ‘Deep Raag’, whole city was lightning. Sun was winding up for the day and I was looking at the possible end I could see of Atlantic Ocean. Just on top of it, the deep orange Sun was spreading its rays and the portion of Atlantic Ocean was looking just like a beautiful Sunset painting. I decided to buy a painting for my house with similar sort of scene. This is something everyone doesn’t see often. Those are very lucky and blessed who live their life at such an awesome place. For me, it was a moment of life.

We walked on the soft seashore sand; it was pulling my legs inside. Something shined in the sand and I picked it up. Wow…very beautiful shell..! It has doted line around with different colors. Sun had reached home and we too decided to move back.

It was simply beautiful evening.


(To be continued, await your turn for Day - 2)