Business secrets of Dhirubhai Ambani, Founder of Reliance Industries84 rate or flag By JYOTI KOTHARI

Dhirubhai Ambani: The Indian business icon

He was Dhirubhai Ambani. He was a genius. He had an extra ordinary talent. He was creative. He mastered the secrets of business. He was the founder of Reliance industries. Dhirubhai Ambani changed the stream of Indian industries. He was the pioneer and hero of this success story. He changed the investment scenario of India and surely the shape of Indian stock market.

Dhiru bhai Ambani is an Indian business icon and gem of the gems.. He is a man rags to riches. He was undoubtedly the most talented businessman of his time. He amazed the world with his success stories. He became a celebrity in India and overseas.

What are the secrets of his amazing growth? What made him Dhirubhai Ambani? How he became an industrial tycoon, a global conglomerate? Why are people in India, The US, The UK, EU, Canada and elsewhere in the world his fan?

Dhirubahi Ambani

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Dhirubhai Ambani Bil Gates

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See results without voting Business secrets of Dhirubhai Ambani

He used some secrets throughout his life-time to become a business tycoon. Some of them are as follow:

Business Secret No. 1: Gather information, whatever it may be. Gather information about Governments be local, state, central or international. Gather information about products, companies, consumers, markets, people, services, politics and any thing, just anything and everything. Do not forget to get information of your competitors. Dhirubhai Ambani had mastered this secret. It was in his practice to gather information about anything and every thing.

He used to gather information, analyzed and processed those. He was also able to find opportunities out of those news and information. He was also quick to disburse those information to his subordinates when and where required.

One of my friends, Prof. M.L. Sisodia, a senior professor of physics and research scholar once told me a story about Dhirubhai Ambani. The story shows his extra ordinary ability in gathering information. Mr. Sisodia had undergone a bye-pass surgery after a heart attack. Just after few days of his surgery his son was called on for an interview with Dhirubhai Ambani.

Dhirubhai wanted him for a senior position in his company. The very first question Dhirubhai Ambani asked him was " How is your father". This instance alone is enough to describes his capability of information gathering. We have to remember that it was not an Internet age.

Business Secret No. 2: Find an opportunity. He always endeavor to analyze whatever information are gathered. He used to do that to convert information into an opportunity, a profit making

opportunity. According to him, " There is no invitation for making profits". You have to find it. He always searched for news and information, a news or information that can earn him profit.

Business Secret No. 3: Jump from an orbit to the next. No matter where you are. Just work there. Master that place or situation. Accumulate some energy and jump into another orbit, a higher one. Stay there some time. control that orbit. Master it and again jump to another higher level, the next orbit. This is the way to success at faster pace.

Dhirubhai did it many times. He did it life long.

Caution: Do not jump from one orbit to another in hurry before mastering the present orbit. It could be proved dangerous. Do it patiently.

Business Secret No. 4: Complete projects on time. Thrive to do it before the scheduled time. He and his sons completed all their projects on time, mostly before time. However big the projects were, they completed those timely. No matter how much disturbance or hurdles came in their way.

Dhirubhai Ambani and his sons Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani derived some techniques to do so. They kept close eyes on their projects to monitor them effectively.

Vision: Dhirubhai Ambani

More business secrets of Dhirubhai Ambani

Business secret No. 5: Think big. Think global. He thought global much before the globalization took place.

Most of the Indian companies were not doing well in the global scenario at his time. Most of the Indian companies were not acting with global standards. He made world class projects and world class factories. No body in India could even think about that in his time.

Business Secret No. 6: Hire the best people. Pay them well.

Dhirubhai Ambani was able to employ the best people, top ranking masters of their respective fields. He was the best pay master of his time. He never compromised in Quality and timeliness. Only those top ranking masters could make it possible. Human resource is the best resource, according to him.

Business Secret No. 7: Pay share holders well. He paid his share holders the best.

His ambitious projects had hunger for capital. He required huge amount of money at that time to make his dreams true. Bankers and financiers were failed to assume his capabilities. They were reluctant and not agreed to fund those big projects. Funding his projects was risky in their eyes.

Dhirubhai Ambani went to his share holders as he recognized them the best source to funding his ambitious projects.

He went to his shareholders and asked money from them. The shareholders jumped out to fund his projects. He paid handsome to his shareholders in return. What he paid no body could even imagine. Shareholders trusted on Dhirubhai Ambani and they were rewarded for their trust.

He realized the fact that the share holders can not be satisfied with dividends only that was the trend at that time. He knew the value of capital appreciation. He paid bonus, gave rights issues to his share holders in addition to regular dividends. He went beyond the expectations of his investors. Even he went to the extent of challenging the law. Once he converted a non-convertible debentures into shares. Share holders got enormous profit, but it was against the law. He fought against that law and the government was compelled to change it.

Dhirubhai Ambani had highest number of shareholders with him in his time. He boosted market capitalization of BSE. He brought millions of share holders under his umbrella, many of them were first time in the stock market.

Who resembles Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of Reliance industries and follow his secrets of business?

Mukesh Ambani

Anil Ambani None of them

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He was not much interested in the books or magazines about management. Rather he left those for his sub-ordinates, his managers. He had an appetite, a never ending hunger for news.

He had given some ideas which are the Business Mantras indeed. One who follow these..... are at the doorstep of success.

A recent Bollywood movie "Guru" has depicted his life.

These are some secrets of a pioneer. Starting from a lower level employee of a gas filling station, he became an industrial giant, a global conglomerate. His name was included in the list of Fortune 500. He could manage an yearly revenue of $ 78 billions in his life time. No Indian industrialist could achieve that level up to that time. His ambition was not ended with that. He was dreaming of World No.1. He could not achieve that because of his untimely death.

However, it has been achieved through the Reliance industries that he founded. Dhirubhai Ambani is world No.1 today, though after his death. The assets of Mukesh and Anil ambani ( Both sons of Dhirubhai Ambani, between whom his assets were distributed ) together has crossed Bil Gates of Microsoft corporation.

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DHIRUBHAI AMBANI FROM RAGS TO RICHES Posted by Pranay Bhatt on January 16, 2007 12 Comments Rags to riches is click that is often applied to describe the climb up the ladder of even modestly successful businessmen. But it could hardly be more appropriately used than to trace the meteoric rise of Dhirubhani Ambani, Chairman of high flying Reliance Industries, rated among the top three business groups in India today. From an initial investment of a mere Rs. 15000 in 1958 to start a trading house, followed by the setting up of his own tiny manufacturing facility in Gujarat in 1966, Ambani, Son of a rural school

teacher, has managed to build up a synthetic yarn, textiles and petrochemicals empire that is today the third largest private sector mega corporation. For the year ended March 1991, Reliance Industries is understood to have recorded a sales turnover of Rs. 2,300 crores ( more than US $ 1 billion), making it the third largest private corporation in the country to day. Those who predicted that he was a conman, a confidence trickster, have had to eat their words. I am the dubble that burst! chortles Dhirubhai, sarcastically referring to the negative headlines that greeted his forays into the primary capital market in the early- 1980s. Success on such a gigantic scale inevitable excites jealousy and enmity; and Ambani, today 58, has had to deal with his share. Reliances have been the subject of several exposes in the press. But these have neither fazed the tycoon extraordinaire, nor halted the inexorable progress of his march forward towards his goal of becoming the undisputed No.1 in the country. To any sort of sniping in the press, Dhirbhai has responded with stoic silence. Rarely has he reacted to even the most stringent media criticism. In the last couple of years, though, he has taken a leaf out of industrialist-cum press baron Ramnath Goenkas book. He has taken the precaution of shoring up his own strength in the media, not minding the expenditure of huge sums of money, and timing the launches of his products to a nicety. In late-1989, he bought a small but well-respected weekly newspaper, The Sunday Observer, that had a combined circulation of approximately 85,000 in the up market areas of Bombay and Delhi. He converted it into the Observer group of publications, and recruited some of the countrys top financial journalists to help run it. Today, the Observer group brings out a political and financial daily in addition to the weekend paper. Notwithstanding excellent production values, the paper is a white elephant, has limited circulation and is understood be making huge losses. Started recently is an equally slickly produced video news magazine that is becoming increasingly popular. These tools have helped Ambani counter the adverse publicity that his group has often faced in the past for the reluctance of its big bosses to grant interviews. Even to the most powerful of journalists in the country, Dhirubhai pleads his inability to grant taped interviews. He and his sons are wiling to meet the scribes on a personal level and give them any information they desire, but on condition that it is strictly off the record. Whether he talks to the press about his groups working or not is a matter of the utmost indifference to lakhs of Reliance shareholders, a high percentage of them ordinary middle-class people. They all unequivocally bless the moon-faced magnate for having handed them sizable fortunes in the share market in return for loyalty to Reliance. Over the years, the company has rewarded its shareholders handsomely. Anyone who resisted the markets skepticism when the firm went public in 1977, invested even a small amount in debentures and shares, and purchased all subsequent additional rights offerings, has seen his money multiply by leaps and bounds, to well over a hundred times the original investment. Today, nearly three million people hold shares in Reliance Industries and its sister concerns. And these shareholders beget special treatment form Dhirubhai as his family. He has gone to

extraordinary lengths to give them a feeling of belonging. When he floated his last series of debentures, he set up a temporary force of delivery boys who handed over the certificates to each individual shareholder at his or her stated address. In several ways, Dhirubhai is unique. He could hardly have started nearer the bottom then he did. Please understand, to have success traditionally, you require education or money or family background; and I did not have any of these three, he admits. So people occasionally ask; Where did this upstart come form?, and demand to see my credentials! Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambai ( Dhirubhai is a nickname ) came from a tiny village that is not even a dot on the political map of Gujarat. But Chorwad, in Junagadh district, today remembers that its most famous scion born- was the progeny of a humble school teacher, and that he could not go in for higher education simply because there was no money in the family kitty. Instead, at the age of 16, he shipped out for the Arabian peninsular city of Aden, where a village acquaintance had secured him a job working for A. Beesse & Co. , a French trading firm, as a clerk at a gas station. From that point onwards, his rise has been generally steady and occasionally meteoric. The Jewish proprietor of the agency must have seen some exceptional qualities in the young man; and by the time he was 24, Ambani was already the general marketing manager for Burmah Shell products. Any middleclass Indian would have been euphoric to have achieved so much success at such a young age, and clung to the job like glue. Not Ambani. He wanted his own business, he wanted to put to work the precepts he had picked up on the job. For a while, he worked in a totally unrelated business-representing people whose insurance claims had been rejected, and splitting any settlements he was able to negotiate. At the age of 25, he returned to India and set up a firm for exporting spices and other commodities to Aden. Reliance Commercial Corporation was put up at an outlay of Rs. 15,000. While the firm specialized in ginger, cardamom, turmeric and fabrics, it was not averse to taking on any other item. Dhirubhai has never looked back. Most top Indian corporate bosses at the time were content to sit behind the walls of governmental protectionism on the imports front, and earnprofits from marketing frequently shoddy, high-priced products based on obsolete technology. In contrast, Ambani showed that he could combine the inborn shrewdness of the Gujarati businessman with an almost American style of entrepreneurial self-confidence and a Japanese willingness to invest in the latest technology. For a long while, he indulged in buying and selling synthetic fibres and textiles. He was a small-time, paan-chewing trader, with a persuasive manner and a razor-sharp brain for finance, recalls Virenchee Sagar, former Managing Director of Nirlon Chemicals and Synthetic Fibres Limited. In the early 1960s, he used to buy regularly from us; by the start of the 1980s, we were buying a lot of our own raw material from him! At first, Dhirubhai could not afford an office of his own, so he rented desk space for two hours a day. He, wife Kokilaben and four children (two sons, two daughters, in that order) lived in a cramped tworoom flat in a crowded chawl in a Bombay slum, sharing communal lavatories.

I remember, a children, my elder brother Mukesh and I had to share clothes, and our only playgrounds were the gullies in the area, recalls 32 year old Anil, the younger of the Ambani, sons, who was in the limelight earlier this year because of his marriage to former film star Tina Munim. Very early in his new venture, Dhirubhai picked up the art of profiting from the Byzantine system of controls that were guaranteed to choke the enthusiasm out of other entrepreneurs. He exported spices, and used replenishment licences to import rayon. Later, when rayon began being manufactured in India, he exported rayon and imported nylon. Still later, he exported nylon and imported polyester. He was always a step ahead of the main competition, looking ahead and scoring bulls-eyes with most of the bold steps he took. With the imported items being heavily in demand, his profit margins were rarely under 300 per cent. (he admits to having made 700 per cent on one occasion!) There were occasions when we exported rayon at a loss, because the entire purpose was to get an import licence for nylon, he explains. In this country, it is considered fashionable to complain about government restrictions. We took the restrictions as an opportunity. If the rules against nylon imports had not been there, I could not have made the money! Reliance began manufacturing activities at Naroda in 1966, with for warp-knitting machines and a staff strength of 70. By the time he decided to make his maiden public offer of shares in 1977, he had already gained a good reputation as a manufacturer of quality fabrics. That first issue of 28.20 lakh shares of Rs. 10 each was oversubscribed seven times, despite the financial press shooting down the offer in its issue reviews. Today, the company is a multi-division behemoth, employing more than 50,000 people at its major manufacturing centres in Naroda and Patalganga, and using machinery that is among the most advanced in the world. In his early days, Dhirubhai found the domestic cloth market controlled by wholesalers who preferred to deal with established companies. So he decided to set up his own chain of retailing stores throughout India, using the franchising technique. Today, Vimal textiles are sold through thousands of retail outlets, and easily from the industrys best-selling brand. Once the rupees and dollars both began flowing in, Dhirubhai decided that his sons would have the best education that money could buy. Elder son Mukesh, who showed a technical bent of mind, did chemical engineering, subsequently went to Standford and obtained an M.B.A. Anil, the younger of the boys by three years, specialized in chemistry and then went to Wharton to secure his masters degree in business administration. The experience of putting up projects in the shortest possible time so as to avoid cost and time overruns served Mukesh in good stead when Dhirubhai purchased the latest polyster filament yarn technology from DuPont, and decided to set up a 10,000 tonnes per annum plant at a 300-acre site in Patalganga, about 65 kilometres from Bombay. DuPont would have taken two years to raise such a complex, but Mukesh, working with a small project team, completed the job in an incredible 18 months. Going still further upstream, Reliance put up plants to manufacture purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG), both essential raw materials in the manufacture of polyster yarn.

Some time in the future, boasts Anil the more voluble of the two sons, We hope to integrate all the way back to natural gas! Dhirubhais ability to have finger on the political pulse of the country has quite obviously helped him slice through most of the bureaucratic red tape that has often tied Indian businessmen up in knots. Since it went public in 1977, Reliance has repeatedly infuriated competitors and customers alike by acquiring manufacturing licences to produce not only synthetic yarn and fibre, but also more and more of the raw materials used in making these products. Other manufacturers consistently failed to get these coveted licences. In 1981, more than 400 companies applied for a licence to produce polyster filament yarn; 43 made the waiting list, but only two companies were granted the requisite permission. Reliance got a licence for 10,000 tonnes per annum while the only other licence granted was to Orkay Mills for 6,000 tpa. Since it went public in 1977, Reliance has set several corporate records. One of these is for the growth in its assets; these have bloated by a factor of 33 times of currently top the Rs. 2,000 crores mark. No other company has grown so much, so fast. Another record is for subscription from the investing public in a single issue. In 1985, Reliance notched the record of collecting Rs. 400 crores from an estimated 1.5 million investors through the issue of nonconvertible debentures. That was one of its best years- a year that saw a mammoth, record crowd of over 12,000 attend its Annual General Meeting held inside a shamiana set up on the cooperage football ground, in a carnival-like atmosphere, where food packets were distributed to attending shareholders. Subsequently, the subsecription record was broken by Larsen and Toubro, which collected well over its equity offer of Rs. 820 crores in 1989. That happened when Dhirubhai was elected chairman of the highly respected engineering colossus, and put his weight behind the media blitz that accompanied the announcement of the offer. One of the boasts of Reliance Industries is that the level of integration it has achieved in the manufacturing process in unmatched anywhere in the world. Raw naphtha, a product refined from oil, is used to produce paraxylene, which in turn in used to produce PTA to make polyster filament yarn and staple fibre. Not only does the company use this to make fabrics which are marketed through 1,500 franchised retail outlets all over the country, but it also supplies PTA to leading textile mills throughout India. While its manufacturing activities have made Reliance pre-eminent in its field, it is in the realm of high finance that its chief has been proven to be a forerunner. A sort of innate financial legerdemain enabled this human dynamo to manoeuvre his finances. Its innovative financial schemes gave a big boost to the capital market. Dhibubhai turned the non-convertible debenture (NCD)-which is actually little better than a fixed deposit placed with a company-into an amazing financial tool. By announcing that these NCDs would be converted into equity shares at a premium, Dhirubhai not only sent his investors into ecstasies, but his firm also benefited hugely from the hefty premiums charged.

Legislation was finally moved in June 1989 to prevent the company from converting its fifth and sixth (the E and F series) issues of debentures into equity. But by then, Reliance had already made a fortune which it has wisely invested in both men and machines. Dhirubhai, one could say, has virtually the Midas touch when it comes to making money. Even in a sports sponsorship deal, where a company usually only gains unquantifiable publicity, Reliance made a quantifiable cash profit. In 1987, the company sponsored the World Cup limited overs cricket competition; and thanks to some savvy marketing techniques, not only got free worldwide publicity, but also made a profit in the manner made famous by the organizers of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Apart from began a financial wizard, Dhirubhai is a truly magnificent organizer, and has been able to give his employees the impression that they can unequivocally count on him in times of distress. For example, when an unexpected flood hit the industrial township of Patalganga, and washed out three entire villages on Black Monday, 24th July 1989, the human factor in the Reliance complex there was the least badly affected, through the factory itself was totally submerged. More than twenty inches of rain fell in just eight hours in an area that had no flood history in the previous 80 years. The downpour was accompanied by winds rising to more than 80 kilometres per hour. Out of 384 people dead and 264 missing, not a single person was a Reliance employee. As many as 1,500 families were rendered homeless, and 1,15,000 people rendered destitute, but none of these were Reliance personnel. In space of 72 hours, Reliance bosses had mobilized more than 6,000 personnel from India and and abroad to salvage the complex in which the company had invested more than Rs. 1,500 crores. Accommodation for affected employees was organized overnight. In spite of an ongoing transport strike, trucks and tempos were commissioned to remove 6,000 tonnes of debris within three days. The firs two plants of the complex were restarted in just 14 days from the date of the disaster, and the entire complex was back on stream in a record time of 21 days. Why do the investors in his companies respond so wholeheartedly to Dhirubhai Ambani? One of the reason is that, all through his career, he ahs employed one principle that he picked up at A. Beesse in Adenlibreally rewarding those who have come to his assistance in times of need. Enormously largehearted with those he considers his benefactors during his days of struggle, he has been known to dole out massive sums of money across the table without expectation of its being return. At the same time, he is known to be ruthless towards his competitors. He has an elephants memory that easily identifies those who have crossed his path in the past. The strain of ceaselessly fighting corporate and political wars has inevitably told on Ambani, and his health hit a downward curve after 1986. That year, he had a stroke that left one side of his body partially paralysed. The news of his indisposition spread like wildfire in the stock market, and the Reliance share fells like a stone in only a couple of hours trading. For a long time, he did not make any public appearances, and the counter continued to languish in the doldrums. The day he first appeared in public, the scrip made a smart recovery. Though not as physically hardy as before, Dhirubhai has not let the permanent handicap of the paralytic stroke blunt the edge of his razor-sharp brain. It is still from his fourth floor office in Maker

tower IV at Nariman point that all major policy decisions which affect the future of the Reliance group are taken. The routine running of the organization is left to Mukesh and Anil, who nevertheless consult him in all key matters. There are some opinion-makers, like well-known newspaper editor Vinod Mehta, who have referred in print to Dhirubhai Ambani as the embodiment of evil; However, to the Gujarati business community, he has assumed the status of demi-god. To al aspiring small-time entrepreneurs, he has become a sort of benchmark they aim at. And so, with each succeeding day, the legend to Dhirubhai Ambani continues to gather spice. *********************************************************************** THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRINCE: Dhirubhai will go one day. But Reliances employees and shareholders will keep it afloat. Reliance is now a concept in which the Ambanis have become irrelevant, said Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, arguably Indias greatest entrepreneur ever, years before his death on July 6, 2002. His words have proved prophetic, as the Reliance juggernaut keeps rolling on towards excellence. Dhirubhai rose from humble beginnings to found Indias largest industrial empire and, in the process, became one of the worlds richest men. He transformed the way big business operates and thinks in India. His death marked the end of a golden era in Indian entrepreneurship, but his values continue to guide the Reliance group, now run by his two sons, Mukesh and Anil. HE CHANGED THE INDIAN STOCK MARKETS: Dhirubhai was praised for his key role in shaping Indias stock market culture by attracting hordes of retail investors to a market dominated by state-run financial institutions. The history of the Indian market, there are two distinct eras Before Dhirubhai and After Dhirubhai. In the first, people invested in gold or land; the stock exchange was an arena reserved for the rich. But that changed forever when Reliance went public in 1977. Dhirubhai created a new class of Indians middle-class investors. Buying into the Ambani legend was one of the wisest decisions they ever made. THE AMBANI MAGIC: Reliance Industries was listed in 1977 in one of the largest public stock offerings of its time and its annual shareholders meetings were so well attended they had to be held in a football stadium. And Dhirubhai held his shareholders spellbound, paying high dividends and bonuses at a time when equities were seen as a low-return, risky investment. This made Dhirubhai Ambani a hero to shareholders. Original investors in the 1977 initial public offering have earned a compounded annual rate of return of 43 per cent.

THE MASTER STRATEGIST: Dhirubhais is not just the usual rags-to-riches story. He will be remembered as the one who rewrote Indian corporate history and built a truly global corporate group. He was not a conformist, but those who chose to back Dhirbubhais style of doing business came up trumps. For, the Dhirubhai school of management firmly believed that the only thing which mattered at the end were results and the benefits which accrued directly to the shareholders. And that is what he passed on to his two sons Mukesh (right), the current chairman of the group, and Anil, the vice chairman. His biggest success was his ability to carry people with him. From brilliant technocrats to financial whiz kids and high flier managers to small time dealers and messenger boys. Assisted by his sons, Dhirubhai, unlike some of the other corporates of India, never had to face any internal revolt. EVER THE FAMILY MAN: The Reliance patriarch, although busy all through the day building Indias largest private conglomerate and interacting with the crme de la crme of the worlds political, entrepreneurial and social superstars, always had time for his family. He loved to play with his grandchildren, passing on qualities to them that would mould their future. On June 16, 1998, Dhirubhai Ambani became first Indian ever to be awarded the Wharton School Deans Medal. A galaxy of politicians and entrepreneurs attended the ceremony. Seen in the picture are former defence minister of India Mulayam Singh yadav (from the left), former Indian prime minister H D Deve Gowda, Dhirubhais wife Kokilaben, Dhirubhai himself, and Thomas Gerrity, Dean of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, United States. Dhirubhai was conferred the Economic Times Award for Corporate Excellence for Lifetime Achievement in August 2001. Seen in the picture are Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan (extreme left), Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha (third from left), Dhirubhai himself, and Dr Verghese Kurien, Chairman of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation. He was conferred the lifetime achievement award by India HRD Congress in February 2002. He was thrice rated Indias Most Admired CEO in the Business Barons-Taylor Nelson Sofres-Mode survey in June 2001, 2000 and 1999. Dhirubhai was picked by Asiaweek magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Asia. If power is measured in face time with the leader of the free world, then Ambani has it in spades, said the magazine. When he visited India, former US President Bill Clinton spent 45 minutes with the Polyester Prince. That was the measure of the power of the man.

Dhirubhai and his sons, Mukesh (left) and Anil (right), strike a happy pose with the charismatic Bill Clinton. THE PAST AND THE FUTURE: The question about the future of Reliance group in the post-Dhirubhai Ambani era haunted millions of small investors, after the legend passed away. But Dhirubhai had moulded his sons well. Mukesh and Anil learnt the lesson from their father in the art of market management, coupled with the enhancement of shareholders value that had helped the patriarch build an investor cult and in the process build a formidable business empire. The Mukesh-Anil duo is carrying on Dhirubhais legacy, even as the Reliance group continues to attain new heights. ONE YEAR AGO: It will be one year on July 6, 2003 since the Reliance patriarch passed away. But his group continues to reach dizzy heights under the stewardship of his sons. On July 6, President A P J Abdul Kalam will deliver the first Dhirubhai Amabni Memorial Lecture, instituted in the memory of the late chairman of Reliance Group of Industries, in Mumbai. A host of distinguished businessmen, speakers and politicians will greet the function.