My brother does strategic consulting work for some really nice business houses, one of them is the esteemed Hero Group. So on the ceremony of this year's BML Awards, he got The Making of Hero as a gift. It's a chronicle about the Hero Group, explaining the rise from scratch to billions, penned down by S.K. Munjal sir himself.
The Hero Group is one of the foremost business houses of India. The company was started up by four brothers in 1930s in West Punjab which later became a part of Pakistan. Imagine having established yourself pretty well and then being forced to move out and start from scratch all over again. The brothers did it, and did it so well. Like most entrepreneurs, Munjals faced more than their share of challenges and near death experiences. But what set them apart (in my eyes) were their extraordinary people skills. Owing to the extremely tough circumstances, none of them could study beyond high school, but their ability to forge and maintain relationships was so great that it's almost unbelievable. Once again, my contempt for formal education and admiration for informal learning was reinforced. Munjals learnt business from the street, sans the jargons and "academic sophistication". The story is just terrific!
The terrific story aside, I have special complaints against the publishers - HarperCollins India. The editing job is severely poor to say the least. Forget about the literary quality, there are proper grammatical mistakes in the book. And far too many to ignore. I feel bad for S.K. Munjal sir as I feel his gigantic effort of penning down Hero's biography has been let down (at least in this edition). Hope they improve in the next one.
