“Our values provide us with our roots, and they provide us with our wings.”
-Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group
Being in the league of Fortune 500, the Aditya Birla Group, with its 1,20,000 employees belonging to 42 nationalities, is built on a strong foundation of creating value for its various stakeholders. The 44.3 conglomerate has carried out seven decades of responsible and differentiating business practices; the result is that they have grown into a worldwide powerhouse in a wide range of sectors including metals, textiles, carbon black, telecom and cement. It is an excellent example of how, despite being a large conglomerate, it has continued to be a market leader in most if not all of the sectors that it is in. It stands true to its vision of “To be a premium global conglomerate with a clear focus on each of the businesses.”
From being a fashion brand with its clothing lines including Allen Solly, Louis Philippe, Peter England, and Van Heusen to having the second largest 4G telecommunication network of the newly merged entity of Vodafone and Idea Cellular, ABG has become an indispensable part of our routinized lives. ABG is also in the infrastructure business being the owner of the companies Ultratech and Hindalco, thus serving the nationwide and global demand for global development. The CSR projects carried out under the name of "Aditya Birla Centre for Community Initiatives and Rural Development" focus on the all-round development of the communities around their plants which are located mostly in distant rural areas and tribal belts.
It holds the following five values as the ultimate guiding principle in its businesses:
- Integrity: For ABG, it means acting and taking decisions in a manner that is fair and honest. By following the highest standards of professionalism and being recognized for doing so, it has encompassed not only financial but also intellectual integrity.
- Commitment: Working on the foundation of integrity, and doing all that is needed to deliver value to all stakeholders, ABG has maintained accountability for its actions and decisions, those of our team and those on the part of the organization.
- Passion: With an energetic, intuitive zeal that arises from emotional engagement with the organization, ABG aims to make work joyful and inspires each one to give his or her best. It is a voluntary, spontaneous, and relentless pursuit of goals and objectives that involves the highest level of energy and enthusiasm.
- Seamlessness: It encourages thinking and working together across functional groups, hierarchies, businesses, and geographies and leveraging diverse competencies and perspectives to garner the endless advantages of synergy while promoting organizational unity through sharing and collaborative efforts.
- Speed: It incorporates efficiency and speed in responding to its internal and external customers with a sense of urgency and continuously striving to finish before deadlines and choosing the best rhythm to optimize organizational efficiencies.
Learning from the above five values have provided me unmatched confidence and zeal to follow these basic guidelines and apply them to my life in the smallest of things, from thinking to acting upon these fundamental guiding principles. I have continued to strive in life, trying to balance both academics and extracurriculars, which has especially helped me in my B-school life.
“Great businesses are never built on the quick sands of opportunism. I reiterate that, if living by our values means, perhaps growing at a pace slower than we would have otherwise liked, so be it. For us, leadership lies at the heart of knowing what we stand for.” - Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group