Leadership Style
I am a born entrepreneur. I have not worked under anybody. I don’t like working under anybody. But I believe I am a team player. As a progression of such a personality my leadership style is that I try to identify opportunities first.

This gift of identifying opportunities is something within me. I can’t call it inborn; in fact, I am an average human being as are majority of other businessmen. But then I have the strength to find people and motivate them to achieve more. Going forward my company’s vision is not a rigid compass but is a dynamic and evolving entity. This represents my personality as a visionary.

A vision is the goal and the strategy is the means of achieving that goal–both are ever evolving. The difference between a leader and the management is that the leader who in my case is the entrepreneur, is the risk taker while the management is not. I provide the vision and business plan to the management.

I saw an opportunity in India two and a half decades ago in diskettes, which nobody was looking at then. Was this identification of an opportunity, inborn to me? No! These are things you develop yourself. My family also did not influence me as the unit consisted of landlords and government employees; there were no businessmen present in the family to emulate.

I initially did not possess great people management skills and took considerable amount of time to hone it to the present levels. It took me 30 years to develop this important art. I can feel people and know whether they are sincere or not and more often that not my judgment is correct. This particular ability of feeling people and assessing their strengths and weaknesses is inborn in me.

I did not develop such ability by rigorously working upon my senses. Another crucial attribute, which I possess, is that I am a good listener.

Choosing the Right People
I believe that my team is like an orchestra and I am only the orchestra leader. In order to produce an output that is music to ears I ensure my team players are better than me. I don’t deliberately avoid hiring people better than me to run the organization, which is not the case in many other organizations.

The business philosophy of the organization I have founded can be taken forward only by hiring very high quality people and this does not give me any jitters. I have my own space and place, which can be further strengthened only by respecting and contributing to the growth of other individuals.

Infusion of new people brings new ideas and perspectives to the company. I believe that the management should turn itself around every four years to take stock of the direction in which it is heading. Make no mistake but the core team always remains. The core team is regenerated by the infusion of new members to the firm This way the new recruits pick up the core strengths too, thereby further consolidating the organization’s strengths.

To counter poaching of the organization’s human resource there must be ‘stickiness’ within the organization. This can be developed by duplication wherein there are good people around, who have an outer layer of their duplicates who act as an alarm to the strategic team. Thus the core team remains along with the second inner layer.

Motivating Troops
Motivating a team is preceded by the ability to create a team and believe in it. The smart way to keep the team cohesive is by generating inter-dependencies within a team. For that hiring people with excellent different competencies and harnessing these skills for a higher corporate goal is the key.

By providing guidance at every step, I ensure that a protective and caring atmosphere is in place to envelope every individual.

Satisfaction levels of the company employees especially at the mid and lower levels are looked through a balanced scorecard system.

Customer Focus
Delivering to the customer on time is a key ingredient of the effectiveness of an able leader. This is the litmus test of stimulating your employees to deliver. This decides the fate of your company. As the company grows the equation with the customer becomes closer and closer.

The personal relationship with the customer and the marketing policies of the company are also vital to garnering that coveted order. This does not mean I sell cheap. We are a low-cost manufacturing company but we do not undercut prices.

Most Admired Companies
There was a man called Dhirubhai Ambani who was a gas station attendant and his ascent to form Reliance and build it into a world-class entity is what I admire most. I admire Reliance a lot. Second on my list would be Microsoft, which started in a garage. Today Microsoft’s reserves exceed the reserves of some European countries!

The Road Ahead
We will continue to exploit the opportunities in the optical recordable media. We would explore any other media, which entitles mass usage, for maximizing our interests. We have achieved excellence in one product line and by the next year hope to diversify into a wider portfolio keeping the core competency of the company–manufacturing–intact.