The Adani lesson

In early October 1998, when a small tanker moored at Mundra, a modest port on Gujarat’s Kutch coast, one of India's greatest business empires was born. The tanker was the first seaborne customer for Gautam Adani, then a 36-year-old port operator eager to augment his booming trading business. Just over two decades later, on April 6, 2021, Gautam Adani rewrote India’s corporate history by becoming the first and only first-generation Indian entrepreneur to lead a business group to a market cap of USD 100 billion.

Gautam Adani's dizzying ascent through India’s economic circumstances is an oft-told tale. What is not so often discussed is why he succeeded — and enormously at that —especially in slow, bureaucratically smothered India. His achievement is all the more confounding because the Adani Group is not known to follow any of the business world's sacred dictums, like the core competency concept. In fact, the sweepingly diversified Adani Group continues to top the business charts without adhering to any of the core competency norms.

Since that is a trait it shares with the family-run conglomerates of the East, there are those who would argue that the Adani Group succeeded because family-centred businesses, in general, do well. After all, the Korean chaebols and their now-defunct Japanese equivalent, the zaibatsu, developed into giant industrial conglomerates much like the Adani Group.

However, a look within the Adani war room quickly invalidates such a comparison. In direct contrast to East Asia’s management systems, the Adani operation is run by professional hires sourced not for their family ties, cultural adherence or fawning loyalty but for their specialist knowledge and corporate skillsets. Although the Adani family remains in

command, the dizzying array of Adani businesses is managed by an army of competent executives with unambiguous unity of purpose.

So, what makes Gautam Adani and his eponymous empire tick?

In many ways, Gautam Adani’s journey mirrors that of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, a name that Adani says inspired him. However, while both led their businesses to great heights and significantly contributed to the country's economic growth and development, the Adani tale is far more compellingly industrious for four major reasons.

Firstly, Gautam Adani built his business empire from scratch, starting with a modest trading business that he nurtured on his own. Secondly, Adani has been massively successful in multiple industries. Adani's success is more diversified. He has built benchmarkable companies in ports, logistics, power, utilities, renewables, agriculture, mining, airports, and other sectors. This diversification is a testament to his ability to identify opportunities across a range of industries and execute them. Thirdly, Gautam Adani has been able to succeed in a more challenging economic and regulatory environment than what Dhirubhai Ambani faced. When Dhirubhai was building his business in the 1980s and 1990s, India was still a largely closed economy with many regulatory barriers to entry. His success in this more challenging environment is a testament to his ability to navigate complex regulatory environments and succeed in a highly competitive global marketplace. Finally, Gautam Adani's contribution to India's economic growth and development is significant. Apart from contributing to the GDP, Adani's businesses have also helped address critical infrastructure gaps in the country. He also helped attract vast amounts of foreign investment into the country.

From his early days, Gautam Adani's story has always been about seizing opportunities and scaling up. Constantly shrugging aside rumours of political deal-making, he has accelerated ahead in infrastructure, especially critical infrastructure. Whenever a business opportunity reared its head, Adani grabbed it and then built massively on it.

The Port of Mundra is the first Adani example. In 1995, when the Gujarat government decided to develop 10 ports on the state's coast, Adani ventured in immediately. Undaunted by his lack of experience in building physical structures of any kind, he surrounded himself with builders. An idea soon became a multipurpose commercial port. A marsh soon became a thriving special economic zone replete with air, rail and road links. Today, Mundra is India's largest private port and India's largest container port as well.

This idea-to-megabusiness progression formed the basis of Adani's expansion strategy for the next two decades and beyond. India's liberalisation of the economy was rapidly altering the opportunity horizon. Instead of feeling threatened by global competition, Adani chose to stand up to it. Alert to changes in policy and anticipating market needs well ahead of his peers, he marched his group into unfamiliar business terrain, often with little more than an idea and a passion to build.

In 2006, seeing a rising need for power, Adani moved to set up power generation plants. He had the fuel, he had the port and he had the need. More importantly, he was determined to make it happen although he had no experience in this sector. Today, the Adani Group is the national leader in private power generation and also holds the foresighted tactical advantage of having simultaneously built its own power transmission operation.

This readiness and eagerness to play with the spin, rather than against it, has defined every calculated move Gautam Adani has yet made. Where others whine about changes in national policy, Adani appears to see change as a new frontier to be explored, and more importantly, as yet another opportunity to align his empire's course with that of the country.

In 2019, when the government decided to monetise airport operations instead of managing them, the Adani Group flew in. Sensing another opportunity to go with the national flow and scale up critical infrastructure, the Group bid for as many as half a dozen airports. The acquire-more strategy is one that Gautam Adani has repeated in other infrastructure sectors too, like ports and energy, thereby harmonising his business interests with national interests. While the Adani Group has built an extensive business base in a multitude of sectors, ranging from consumer gas, energy, defence and logistics to rail, ports, airports and data centres, this model of diversification is neither new nor different. What is different though is the powerful contributory purpose embedded in Adani’s ventures.

A little-noticed facet of the Adani Group's pan-India presence is its seeding of peripheral economies in all its business locations. Livelihood ecosystems have sprung up around its infrastructure projects, often fuelled by an influx of thousands of well-paid workers. Over the years, the direct jobs generated by dozens of Adani ventures have, in turn, created an extensive layer of secondary jobs. The more the Adani business empire expands, the more the number of jobs created. Through these economic ripples, Adani is strengthening not just India's critical infrastructure but also its straining social fabric. In pursuing the growth and development of infrastructure in both economic and social spheres, Gautam Adani is unique in India.

The monumental success of both the Adani Group and Gautam Adani, must not obscure the many truths it holds for India and Indians. Foremost among them is the fact that India is the place to be, the place to dream big and the place to make it happen. India is the world’s third largest ecosystem for startups (after the US and China) with over 77,000 of them scattered across the country. Already, India has over 100 unicorns (privately-owned startups valued above USD 1 billion) with a combined valuation of over USD 340 billion. Remarkably, 65 of these are less than two years old.

With major changes that have taken root in India's funding and regulatory environments, the art of business entrepreneurship is flourishing in today's India. Although adopting a higher purpose is uncommon in business, Gautam Adani and his entrepreneurial journey are proof that opportunities, if seized and developed, can seed the country's development in tandem with a rise in business returns. The country is still hungry for infrastructure and interrelated services. A new generation of visionary builders like Adani could fulfil that need.

Gautam Adani’s story also shows that entrepreneurial success is possible in any sector, be it physical, digital or altruistic. Opportunities to think big, do big and grow big are fuelled by India's openness to ideas. Minds like Adani’s are leading the way into new landscapes, from food and education to renewables and healthcare. In turn, these successes are equipping the social sector with more financial resources. The needs of millions of underprivileged citizens are being served by CSR funds from big business groups through their charitable arms, among them the Adani Foundation. Here too, unlike many others, Adani has chosen to route his aid to healthcare, education and skill development with an enhanced focus on women and children, usually the most poorly served segments in developing societies.

Gautam Adani’s idea of nation-before-profit is unusual in India. However, elsewhere it is not. In August 2019, Business Roundtable, the association of American CEOs, stated that "serving shareholders can no longer be the main purpose of a corporation; rather, it needs to be about serving society, through innovation, commitment to a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all."

In two decades, the Adani name has become synonymous with growth. From operating two berths at a captive jetty in Mundra, Gautam Adani's entrepreneurial skills have powered his group into an asset-building industrial colossus without parallel in Indian infrastructure. In the process, he has grown wealthier if the valuation is to be identified as the measure of success. The counterintuitive lesson here is that placing country before company and people before profits is a smarter idea than the single-minded pursuit of wealth rankings.

As the Adani Group moves into newer areas like digital technology and services, it remains consumed by the idea that India and Indians should benefit from its expanding business portfolio. It should encourage every entrepreneur that Gautam Adani's fluctuating wealth is merely incidental to his entrepreneurial mission. His remarkable business acumen, his track record of creating successful companies across multiple industries, and his indisputable contribution to India's economic growth and development make him India's greatest first-generation entrepreneur. His vision, leadership, and ability to execute his ideas have made him a role model for aspiring entrepreneurs across the country who have good reason to believe that if he can do it, they can, too.

Views expressed are personal