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The Rediff Business Profile/ A M Naik

Merit to the fore

Priya Srinivasan in Bombay

When Anil Manibhai Naik, 57, joined Larsen & Toubro -- India's premier engineering and construction company -- in 1965 as a junior engineer, all he aspired for was a gradual promotion to the position of manager. Sure enough, Naik moved on from the now $ 1.5 billion company's engineering workshop in suburban Bombay, realised his wish of becoming a manager, and gradually rose to L&T's top slot of MD and CEO, to succeed S D Kulkarni. All in a little over three decades.

Enroute, Naik broke corporate records: he was the youngest manager ever at L&T. He repeated the feat several times over: he was the youngest member to occupy the posts that he did in the management cadre.

A few minutes of conversation with L&T's newly appointed chief is enough to get a feel of this extraordinary career, storyline of which makes engrossing reading.

"I had never imagined I would be the CEO of this company when I joined. All I aspired to become was a manager," reminisces Naik. "My first nine years were unparalleled in this company, the next decade and a half were relatively slow and it was in the last ten years that I realised I had a chance to make it to the top."

L&T's top officials vouch for Naik's efficiency. "He puts in 16 hours a day. He is amazingly hardworking but he's also gutsy and takes calculated risks," says P M Mehta, L&T's vice-president and a colleague since 1965.

The L&T chairman hails from a family of teachers. His father, a stringent Gandhian, founded and taught in a school near Navsari in Gujarat where Naik had his early education. He went to do his bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Gujarat.

"The road leading to my school was lined with jamun trees," he remembers as he spots the fruit on his lunch table.

"What sets Naik apart is his drive to keep aiming at what look like impossible targets," explains Mehta. "For instance, under him the engineering section often quoted for manufacture of equipment that we had never produced before but his argument always was, 'If someone else can make it, why can't we?' "

His strategies worked: under him, the engineering division increased its contribution to L&T's turnover by about 50 times in the last eight years.

"Freedom, empowerment and a sense of ownership were instilled in me here. Despite my humble beginnings, I made it to the top position here since every promotion was based on merit which is why I was never tempted to leave the organisation," he says.

Having spent more than three decades with L&T, Naik has seen the company change, adapt and grow with every twist in national priorities. "Post-Independence, the company had capitalised on the government's emphasis on indigeneous manufacture and L&T switched from trading to actually manufacturing the equipment.

"By the 1970s, we had established a strong enough reputation for the government to invite us to manufacture nuclear reactors. That was 30 years ago. More recently, with liberalisation we saw the scope for turnkey projects in engineering and we made a shift from piecemeal to turnkey solutions where we've broken world records," he recalls.

A Rs 250 billion company by 2005

Photographs: Jewella C Miranda

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