Turnaround in style

How would you briefly describe the Tata Chemicals’ turnaround story?

In 1999, soda ash prices were really low and profits were under strain. There were too many people in the organization, costs were high, and we were not competitive globally. To add to it, imports were coming in from China.

Our turnaround came about in three waves. The first one was called Action 500 which focused on initiating the turnaround from red to black. The second was called Manthan which came with its relentless focus on costs and efficiencies. The third one was Udaan which was not about costs but about value. It was a logical shift of focus from cost to value. To achieve this transition, the company changed the entire management around 2000 and a completely new team succeeded in turning around the company.

As a result of that we are the second largest soda ash company in the world today. We’ve done two major acquisitions in the last two and a half years. Today we have presence Netherlands, Kenya, US and India. We are a different company today, profitable and growing.

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Bootstrap Billionaires

Most of the 1,125 billionaires featured in Forbes’ 2008 list are rags to richest stories. They are self-made billionaires who have roughed it out. Good examples are - George Soros (World War II refugee), Kirk Kerkorian (son of watermelon seller), Roman Abramovich (orphaned at 4), LiKa-shing (sold plastic flowers at 15), Oprah Winfrey (lived on a pig farm). The only Indian in this famous list is Micky Jagtiani.

Jagtiani flunked out of accounting school in London and took up driving taxis and cleaning hotel rooms to pay the bills and support a-bottle-of-whiskey-a-day habit. He then lost his entire family to illness in the span of one year. Just 21 and alone in Bahrain with $6,000 of his and his family's savings, he took over the retail space his brother had leased before dying of cancer, and started selling baby products.This chain, famously called, Landmark, is now one of the most profit able retail groups in the Middle East.

J K Rowling is the only writer in the billionaire's list. She moved to Portugal after the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis. She returned to the U.K. as a single mother and lived on welfare while finishing her first Harry Potter story. Now one of the world's most successful authors, she published the seventh and final installment of the boy wizard series last year. For the first time ever, the tally of the world's billionaires crossed into four figures, reaching 1,125. Americans still occupy 469 of the list's slots, but that's down two percentage points from last year. In total, Forbes identified 226 new billionaires, 70% of whom come from the U.S., Russia, China and India.

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