This interview is part of the Leading Asia series, which features in-depth conversations with some of the region’s most value-creating leaders on what it takes to realize bold ambitions and take them further.
In this Leading Asia interview, McKinsey’s Gautam Kumra talks to Mukesh Ambani about what it takes to lead in Asia. They discuss how Ambani’s focus on vision and unique leadership style has brought Reliance Industries from a small textiles business to an outlier value creator—a large conglomerate at the forefront of innovation.
Born in 1957, Ambani did his chemical engineering degree at the prestigious Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. He left his MBA studies at Stanford in 1981 to help his father grow Reliance Industries. He has been instrumental in expanding the company’s reach into various sectors, such as petrochemicals, oil refining, telecommunications, retail, life sciences, finance and media and entertainment. Under his leadership, Reliance Industries has achieved significant milestones, one of which was the creation of the world’s largest start-up petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, India, in 1999. Another was the launch of Reliance Jio in 2016, which brought 4G and 5G connectivity to all of India and has become the country’s leading digital services company with nearly 500 million subscribers.
Ambani has also been focused on fulfilling Reliance’s vision of creating large-scale societal impact—particularly through the work of Reliance Foundation, headed by his wife Nita. It is India’s largest corporate-funded philanthropic organization, which supports high-impact initiatives in education, healthcare, sports, rural development, urban renewal, disaster mitigation and management, and promotion of India’s cultural heritage worldwide.
Here, Ambani delves into his leadership journey, his ambitions for the future, and the risk-taking philosophy he applies to the role of technology and disruptive innovation. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Gautam Kumra: You have always talked about different aspects of Reliance Industries’ vision, which is deeply rooted in your sense of India’s vision. Can you give us a glimpse into that, how you think about the North Star, and what vision drives you and the Reliance Group?
Mukesh Ambani: I am very loyal to my father’s vision. He was the founder of Reliance, an initiative that was started even before the garage start-ups in the United States. My father Dhirubhai Ambani was a son of a schoolteacher. He saved his first $100—about $1,000 today—working in Yemen as a gas station attendant. He came to Mumbai in 1960 and said, “I will build a business of my own, and make it one of India’s biggest and most consequential.” He started with one table, one chair, a telephone, and that $100 as capital.
He began by saying, “I need capital.” While Reliance traded in spices and other stuff, my father’s use of capital was very clear—he wanted to put it into businesses of the future and in talent.
Textiles were very big in India in the 1960s, and polyester had just been invented. My father decided to start trading in polyester. While the company earned money through trading and other things, my father was dreaming big. He realized that manufacturing polyester on a large scale would create higher profits for the company and greater value to Indian society. So he set up a greenfield polyester factory, the biggest of its kind in India with the best machines in the world, in record time. He demonstrated the benefits of economies of scale, an innovative concept unfamiliar in pre-reforms India in the 1980s.
When you think about innovation, it is not only in the product. Investment is also in disrupting the market, in developing a new business model, and in finding totally new solutions to the needs of society. In the Indian market at that time, polyester was still viewed as a rich person’s fabric. We made it affordable to millions of Indians, because they also had an aspiration to wear clothes made of this new fabric. So, in terms of innovativeness and resilience, we not only served the Indian market, but the company also decided to change to exports and achieved that goal in the 1970s.
My father used to say that if you want to start a business to be a billionaire, you are an idiot; you will never get there. If you want to start a business to impact a billion people, then you have a good chance of success, and, as a by-product, you can make a reasonable amount of money.
At Reliance, as we’ve grown, we have realized that technology changes lives. We want to create impact at scale that improves the lives of all Indians. Therefore, businesses of the future will have to be good at harnessing technologies of the future. So, our North Star always has been that our vision and purpose of doing business have to be impact-led. My father used to say that if you want to start a business to be a billionaire, you are an idiot; you will never get there. If you want to start a business to impact a billion people, then you have a good chance of success, and, as a by-product, you can make a reasonable amount of money.
That’s in the DNA of Reliance. We will figure out where to get to what we want to do—as long as we have the right talent and we have the right goal. We have a saying that if you focus on the obstacles, you will never reach your goals; but if you focus on your goal, you will overcome all the obstacles. Our goal even then, at the beginning of Reliance’s journey over four decades ago, was to contribute our utmost to making India a prosperous nation and enabling all Indians to live a better life. Between my father and I, as owner-leaders, we believed in this goal and we built a team that also believed in it and executed it with equal zeal. That focus on the North Star, on achieving continuous growth through excellence, and creating large-scale societal impact remains unchanged in Reliance. What changes is our business strategy. Even today, we reinvent our business every three, four, or five years in terms of what we do.
Leading Asia
Gautam Kumra: How do you go about building a new business?
Mukesh Ambani: At the absolute core of Reliance’s DNA, there are five or six very important values. Some are domain values. Domain values are like first principles. We think about our first principles for the group as a whole and then we make an attempt to understand and learn the first principles for every individual business. At the beginning of building any new business, we ask ourselves: “What is the most critical need for India’s development, and how can we fulfill it at scale and over a long arc of time?” That remains a fundamental piece of Reliance. We also have no hesitation in believing we can build businesses of the future. With our experience, we can extrapolate the future 20 years from today. That’s why we didn’t hesitate to build polyester first or to build 4G before its time. The same is now true about our newest business venture in new energy. We are building one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems for green and clean energy. It covers solar, batteries, hydrogen, bio-energy and much more. This is our contribution to saving planet Earth from the looming climate crisis.
Gautam Kumra: What do you think about risk management—taking risk and managing risk?
Mukesh Ambani: The principle is whether you can survive in the worst-comes-to-the-worst situation. You start off by thinking in terms of what the worst is that could happen, and then you have to survive that. This has been one of my principles.
About 30 or 40 years ago, I said that another principle I should personally have is to look any of my employees in the eye. At Reliance, we tell our leaders that it’s important to have eye contact because then you express your sincerity. I think we can put all our principles to our top 100 leaders by saying, “These are our principles. We’ll do what is right. Whatever we do, we should be able to look at each other and say we are not embarrassed.”
This is how we have built our institutional culture. And this institutional culture is our best insurance against any kind of risk.
Gautam Kumra: You have taken many significant risks when leading Reliance, such as the $25 billion investment into an untested market with the launch of Reliance Jio in 2016. Now we’re talking of a valuation of $100 billion or so for Jio. How do you manage the risk that comes with bold ambition?
Mukesh Ambani: We’ve always taken big risks because, for us, scale is important. The biggest risk we have taken so far was Jio. At the time, it was our own money that we were investing, and l was the majority shareholder. Our worst-case scenario was that it might not work out financially because some analysts thought India wasn’t ready for the most advanced digital technology. But l told my board, “In the worst case, we will not earn much return. That’s okay because it’s our own money. But then, as Reliance, this will be the best philanthropy that we will have ever done in India because we will have digitized India, and thereby completely transformed India.”
We are believers that, at the end of the day, you come without anything into this world, and you leave without taking anything with you. What you leave behind is an institution. My father said to me, “Reliance is a process. It’s an institution that should last. You have to make sure that Reliance lasts beyond you and me.” That’s my commitment to him—that Reliance will last beyond us. In 2027, Reliance will celebrate its golden jubilee. But I want Reliance to continue to serve India and humanity even after completing 100 years. And I am confident it will.
That’s the mindset we have when we say we believe in the businesses of the future. If you think about the Reliance of the 1960s and ’70s, or of the 2000s and 2020s, it’s a completely different organization now. That’s because the world changes every five or ten years. It goes against everything that we learned in business school, such as not integrating across the value chain. We have challenged all of those things. What has also happened is that, as we chase the opportunities of technology into the future, some of these opportunities become bigger than our existing opportunities. And we cannot leave them alone.
Gautam Kumra: You’ve spoken about your plans to transform Reliance into a deep-tech empowered company. Technology has been front and center of your operating model as a leader; many of your largest investments have been technology bets. How do you envision technology’s impact on Reliance over the next decade?
Mukesh Ambani: The fact that the technology landscape is changing at an exponential speed is self-evident. I think that the big challenge will be in the confidence of our next generation to succeed in this new landscape. When we grew up, we were the users of technology, and it was clear that we had to license technology from abroad to ensure high quality. But we were subjugated to so many licenses. It was also high risk because, at the end of the day, if a plan didn’t work, you could lose your shirt. I used to push my leaders by saying, “We have to be owners of technology. We must be innovators.”
The change now for Reliance is that we are going to be a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company. We started with telecom. In 2021, we launched 5G. We built everything ourselves, end to end—the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece. We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20 percent, just to make sure that the 80 percent that we put in was good. I also wanted to make sure that our people were not too full of themselves. l said to them, “You have to be better than these guys.” And we are now. That gives us unique capabilities today that we are launching in the market. As it’s our own technology, we will now be able to offer unique services.
That kind of movement is what we have seen in all our businesses. What people don’t realize is that when you make OpenAI or other [artificial] intelligence, the same 500 people will work on it. Today they work for you, and after tomorrow, they work for someone else. They also have a purpose, and they say, “As long as we align with the company’s big purpose, we’ll come to work for you.” We are doing that continually now. Within the AI field, we have created our purpose by saying, “Our big purpose is to solve the complex problems before society and create wealth for the nation and the people. For this, we need not go into the high-risk GPU game. Let’s do everything downstream.” This has a compelling appeal on many bright minds. As a result, we are attracting the best people. If you are clear about your goal, and you know how to use technology, then you will achieve your North Star.
Gautam Kumra: You made a reference earlier to the relationship between professionals and owners. Could you say a few words about your people philosophy?
Mukesh Ambani: The criticality in people, more than qualifications, is very important for us. Our people process focuses on the character of an individual. It’s important that we can trust each other. The two Cs are most important—character and competence—in terms of what we want. Character is even more important than competence because competence can be built. We’ve also always believed in motivation because if you can win a person’s heart, their mind will work for you.
The third C is culture. Not everyone comes with the same orientation and same thoughts about the organization. It takes a conscious effort to bring new people into the common institutional culture of Reliance—our vision, our values, our purpose and our organizational philosophy. But once people get used to it, then you cannot live without it. Part of our culture is that once you are part of us, we take care of everything. We also don’t count rules. Fundamentally, we take ordinary people and allow them, encourage them and empower them to do extraordinary tasks.
Gautam Kumra: What, in your experience, are the key success factors in unlocking extraordinary potential from ordinary talent?
Mukesh Ambani: I think it’s clarity about the goal, the purpose, and the mission. I am a big believer that, individually, all of us have great potential, but we are limited by our habits. Habits prevent us from realizing our potential.
I believe that organizations are also limited by their systems and structures. I believe that once a person is recruited after a rigorous process, sometimes [structures] prevent people from becoming high performers. If we align the systems and structures to our outcomes and goals—which is what we do at Reliance—we create flexibility. Flexibility is the secret sauce that ensures organizational capability doesn’t get limited.
