BOOK REVIEW ON ONE OF THE BIOGRAPHIES OF MISSIONARIES OF

INDIAN RETAIL...........

BY SHASHANK JADHAV 5097

PRASHANT JAIN 5098

SAHIL JAIN 5099

 FACTS:
BOOK : I T HAPPENED IN INDIA

AUTHOR : KISHORE BIYANI AND DIPAYAN BAISHYA

PUBLISHED BY : RUPA CO

TOTAL PAGES : 250

PRICE INR : 150

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kishor Biyani is the proud owner of The Future Group which heads the
Pantaloon Retail, Big Bazaar and Central etc. He is known as the retail guru of
India .

Success in business comes from the mastery in all aspect including skills,
training and motivating the teammates. These things become crystal clear
from the life of ‘Retail King’ of India

Born on 9th August, 1961

In a typical joint Marwadi family

Chairman and Managing Director, Pantaloon

Retail (India) Ltd.

Kishore Biyani, who three was conferred

“International Retailer of the Year” Award by

the prestigious US National Retail Federation

(NRF), IN 2007.
Summary: It Happened In India
It Happened in India: The Story of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Central and the
Great Indian Consumer is the autobiography of Kishore Biyani, written with the
help of Dipyaman Baishya. Kishore Biyani is highly regarded as the retail king of
India. He is known as Kishoreji or KB among his employees, friends and
family.Here are few inspiring lines we am reproducing from the book with all
the due credit given to the authors.

I based everything on one philosophy ‘Rewrite Rules. Retain Values’. Chase

your dreams but don’t compromise on your belief system.

Entrepreneurship is about thinking big, believing in your own ability and going
ahead with huge risks even if you are aware that some of the ventures may not
be successful. It’s also about making decisions, leadership, and about making
your colleagues believe in you dream.When one is young and tries to rewrite
rules, he is called ‘mad.’ But when he is finally successful, because he dared to
risk it, he is called a ‘maverick.’

By the time one manages to get out of the control of one’s family, one loses his
zeal and becomes complacent with what has already been created. Broadly it
talks about the journey of Kishore from a middle class business family living in
South Bombay to where he is today and the various experiments that he did
during this journey to reach where he is today. He briefly talks about his family
and the business attitude it had and how he did not agree with it, as it had a
preserving attitude rather than a growth attitude. He extensively talks about his
experiments with readymade trousers for men, his setting up the chain of
Pantaloons store across the country and finally his flagship Big Bazaar,
followed by other famous formats like Central, E-Zone and Food Bazaar. It
talks about his non-conventional ways of doing business, taking fast decisions
and not running after the usual MBAs to run the business using defined models.
He talks about the success milestones like making huge sales on 26th January,
which they call ‘Sabse Sasta Din’.
Book Review: It Happened in India
This book is a result of one of the most recent and big business success story in
India, and may be the biggest in the upcoming retail segment. The book has
been written in an autobiographical format by Kishore Biyani, the person
behind Pantaloon and the Furture group. Written in first person, it is
interspersed by what others have to say about. The best thing about Biyani is
that he thinks about the consumers, and thinks Indian. His success highlights
the fact that it’s not necessary to have fancy MBA degrees, what’s required is
creative thinking and good understanding.

When we first picked up this book we did it with very little enthusiasm. We
thought this would once again be one of those typical management books
where you would find out of advice on how to run a business. However after a
few pages of reading I could no longer give it a cursory look as I had intended
too.

What first grabbed our attention was the structure of the book – which is not a
linear narrative. The chapters are presented in a fashion of first person voice
intertwined with quotes from various stake holders (business partners,
employees & friends of the author). The story is interspersed with other
voices, which not only breaks the monotony of a narrative; it actually gives the
reader the advantage of multiple visions, simultaneously. More than hundred
people were interviewed for the book; the views of some are directly printed.
This adds a degree of unique authenticity to the narrative. The reason the book
was written interested me-the writer wanted to tell the story of the success of
retail in India to the potential India of tomorrow. As Ashni Biyani, says in the
Foreword, “I realize that India needs role models who will make it believe that
it can happen right here, in this country…We need the story of ordinary people
who have made extraordinary things happen during our times.”

It’s always inspiring to hear from the great men who do things their way.
Nevertheless the biographies, especially the autobiographies are rated as
boring (even though they are enriching) especially to the restless readers… But
this one is different.

This book is a winner from the word Go. A story of the victory of the
indomitable human spirit, it’s an inspiring book. Biyani stresses on the long
standing Indian principles of humility, simplicity, confidence and combines
these with out-of-the-box-thinking to start from virtually nothing to become
the ‘Raja of retail’ in India. As one reads one comes across comments which
are common sensual as well as insightful,
“Most businessmen make the mistake of creating an environment wherein
only then win. They see life only as a competitive arena and not a co-
operative one. Relationships are built on principles, and not on the basis of
power and position.”

The plot of It Happened in India moves around retail strategies of an

entrepreneur and his conviction in him while most of his ideas were rubbished
by the then retailers and his family members too.

The acute understanding of the Indian situation, knowledge about Indian

customers, their culture and character is bound to be a great differentiating
factor for the group-

“The rice we eat, the apparel that our women wear, the dialects we speak,
change every hundred kilometres in our country. There are also a lot of
conflicting trends and paradoxes that are evident across the country. Logic
and emotion, individuality and social feeling, poverty and affluence, life and
lifestyle, value and indulgence, and the past and the future simultaneously
coexist in India. And all these paradoxes converge to make India what it is.
To the external world, this harmonious coexistence of seeming contradictions
is one of the most confusing aspects of the Indian consumer market. But to
me it signifies our country’s openness to change and its ability to add new
dimensions to its social structure without losing the old ones. This opens up
new and unique opportunities as well as brings forth challenges for
marketers and retailers. “(Page 11)

In every page there is an evidence of a deep knowledge of one’s country, kind

of knowledge that can be gained not from books but from actual observation
of palpable life.

The best aspect of KB, of course is the fact that he stresses heavily on
building relationships – even in the age of cut throat competition. He
maintains good relations with everyone, right from the peon to his dealers,
from his children to uncles. This is what he has to say on relationship with
employees, “Just like a company has to deal with its customers’ emotions, it
has to deal with every employee’s emotions as well. However, I have found
most management theories and tools focus only on how people can perform
better, how a company can drive efficiency through more processes, etc. I feel
that field of human resources till now has hardly dealt with how to manage
human emotions and understand human dynamics. And unless a leader
understands human dynamics, he can never get the best out of his
colleagues.” (Page 160)
The book stresses on “learning”, “relearning” and “unlearning”. What is
bound to attract the Indian reader is its Indian philosophy _it is very much an
Indian book with Hindi words liberally sprinkled in. It is very simple to read.
There are no pompous words, No difficult logic.

It is immensely inspiring…our young generation imagines all CEOs to be fancy

looking…English speaking… Kishore Biyani’s book dispels this myth like none
other. All you have to do is believe in yourself. Life will have ups and downs but
a go-getter still manages to come up after each down.

Here’s what he says about retail-

“Retail is a simple business. …..At the very basic retail is about buying and
selling – something human beings have been doing since they started living
in societies. All one needs to be successful in retail, is common sense.
Unfortunately, common sense is not that ‘common.’(Page 154)

The book is a story of the conviction of Biyani about the Indian market and an
uncanny reading of the masses. His basic mantra is so simple – observation of
the Indian buyers.

“I do that every day. We are trained to do that. So, while we are at the
airport we are watching people, and then at the stores and the malls. We
observe people anywhere and everywhere.” (Page 143)

It will not be an exaggeration to say that the future group has revolutionized
the experience of the Indian buyer- experience is the key word- one doesn’t
just shop but experiences the clean surroundings, modern fittings, clean toilets
and instant food, it is this experience that the companies would be fighting for
in future- How can we give our customers a better shopping experience than
all others? It took Kishore Biyani’s vision to observe the daily needs of the
Indian middle class and come out with Big Bazaar.

The book does have its weaknesses- the advises often becomes too obvious,
the testimonies of different people who have worked with Biyani, seem to be
specially designed for the book. Nevertheless the book outshines all this. It
emerges as a text, which would be referred to by entrepreneurs and students
of business. A brief extract from the culminating part of the book will stand as
an example-

“It cannot be a zero-sum game anymore. We need to create win-win –win

scenarios- where we can win, our business partners can win and the
customer can win. Exploiting our bargaining power to get the best terms on
each individual contract can kill innovation and long-term collaboration.
Instead, the best businesses are being built by leveraging collective strengths
and insights that every partner brings on board. ‘Innovation networks’ or
collaborative research and development programmes, and ‘co-creation’ or
designing goods and services with collective inputs and insights on
consumers, are the new order of the day.”(Page 262)

He falls in INTP category :-

• Introvert

• Intuition

• Thinking

• Perception
CHARACTERISTICS WHICH ONE CAN
GENERATE FROM THIS BOOK :
1) Visionary:- He is true visionary when he started selling
readymade garments when nobody preferred ready-to-wear shirts or trousers.
Now his vision is serving Indian society and which is unchallenged.

2) Risk taker:- He tried out different things on his own, like

readymade garments, textile production, creating brands before he ventured
in retail business of selling garments. He took risk in doing something new
every time.

3) Ambitious:- He always had ambition of making it big in

business, and that he have done.

4) Simplicity: You’ll never catch him in a tie and jacket. He don’t

drive expensive cars.

5) Optimistic: Till six months ago, in his own words, Kishore

Biyani was an “eternal optimist”. Today, he’s transformed into a “realist”. “it’s
my next phase in life,” shrugs the Chairman of the Rs 8,600 crores Future
Group, which has today moved away from retail into financial services.

CONCLUSION
The book takes the reader through Kishoreji’s journey of building a great retail
business in India from scratch. Author recounts on how he started as an ordinary
cloth seller in Mumbai and eventually how he established the giant retail business
spread over a few hundred cities in India serving millions of Indian consumers.

The unique and interesting point I liked about this book is: Kishoreji’s friends,
relatives and employees of the company share their experiences about being
associated with Kishoreji and give the reader a deep insight into Kishoreji’s personal
and as well entrepreneurial abilities.

Kishoreji takes the reader through his childhood days, college life and finally how he
had left the usual way of doing family business and started his own journey on a road
called entrepreneurship, which most of the young Indians now are aspiring to travel.

Doing something that opposes the established system of beliefs is not an easy task.
An entire chapter titled ‘Defying the Odds’ is dedicated to how he started Pantaloon
Shoppe amidst very testing and difficult times.

He talks about building emotional connect with consumers. He emphasizes on how

he brought Indianness to the business and how he studied Indian consumers with
passion. He confided that even till today he visits some of his stores and observes the
consumers to understand their needs and their thoughts.

KB emphasizes on relationships throughout the book: relationships with customers,

employees, share holders and most importantly family and friends. He also
emphasizes on building trust and the importance of mutual trust in relationships.

Kishoreji has even shared about his failed businesses. KB explained about how he
tried to enter into movie making in the bollywood but could not produce a huge
success there. In a whole chapter dedicated to his bollywood stint, he shared his
learning from this failed attempt of movie-making.

It’s an inspiring story every budding entrepreneur should read. The book has
something for everyone. If you are aspiring for a career in retail you have a lot to
read from a man who built everything from nothing. If you are a casual book reader,
even then you have a lot to appreciate and learn.

Finally, it costs only 150 rupees! Go and get a copy for you and I assure you that the
time and money you spent is worth the effort.