“Failure is not fatal. Failure is inevitable. If you don’t fail, it perhaps means you aren’t taking enough risks.”
These words by Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla have not just landed as a mere inspirational quote, but grown to become the mirror of several lives including mine!
Failure, self-introspection, strategy, and execution are the key ingredient to any perfect recipe, even for Aditya Birla Group. The biggest name in the textile and apparel industry also faced small setbacks like Abof.com and Tendin.com, but the application of their merger and acquisition strategies and consolidation of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited has let them into being India’s number 1 Fashion Lifestyle entity which hosts India’s largest fashion network of more than 30 million loyalty members and many more to come.
The revolutionizing transformation from being a commodities player to one with excellence in other sectors like cellular network, retail, apparel, and financial services was not an easy path to tread. But like the Japanese proverb says “Vision without action is a daydream, an action without a vision is a nightmare” Aditya Birla Group has swiftly marked its presence in our lives from being elemental in the houses we live to the clothes we adorn or the mobile networks we use to the roads we travel, they are omnipresent. Their omnipresence doesn’t end here as they have contributed towards the society by providing mid-day meals to the children in the schools, also has helped to immunize 70 million children against polio, providing skill training for the people, and many more. Aditya Birla Group is the epitome of success worldwide.
Born and brought up in a small town in a nuclear family, the journey to a B-School was needlessly bone-breaking. By the time I completed my undergraduate program in electronics engineering, the realization of not being passionate about my technical core, instead, the enthusiasm about marketing and sales had taken the driving seat. But, the fear of language skills and the failure that might follow crawled in like a nightmare.
Then life presented me with two job opportunities, one was a safe 9 to 5 job in a leading MNC, whereas the other was a sales and business consultant in a start-up serving American demographic. The revelation of those opening words dawned upon me in life and I chose the latter; a more challenging path to tread. The failure followed, but so did the zeal to overcome my weakness and learn all that the work habitat and people around me had to offer.
In my opinion, the validity of Aditya Birla Group’s role might not be verifiable with the products and brands that I have consumed, but I do resonate and look up to the brand’s journey to becoming an industrial giant! My memories with the Aditya Birla Group’s brands are innumerable yet negligible in front of the learnings that I imbibed from its methodological success in cement, aluminum, infrastructure sector as well as with growth in financial service and apparel sector.
The hard choices I made re-modeled my career path and prepared me to enter a B-School and add finesse to my skills for me, Aditya Birla Group was not just any conglomerate that changed my life with its product lines, but it was an influencer that shaped my decision making and unknowingly became a driving force on the difficult path that my life’s journey till date, made me walk down!