Fast-forward a century and the Haldiram’s empire has revenue much greater than that of McDonald’s and Domino’s combined.In Bhujia Barons, Pavitra Kumar tells the riveting story of the Agarwal family in its entirety—a feat never managed before. It begins in dusty, benign Bikaner and traces the rise and rise of this home-grown label, now one of the most-recognized Indian brands in the world.The Haldiram’s story is not an average business story—it’s chock-full of family drama, with court cases, jealousy-fuelled regional expansion, a decades-old trademark battle, and a closely guarded family secret of the famous bhujia. Fast-paced and captivating, this book provides a delicious look into family business dynamics and the Indian way of doing business.

    Founded by the son of a sweet vendor, with a mere Rs 2 lakh, the sum total of his life savings.On 17 June, 2015, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh stepped out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai with the much-coveted banking licence, beating some of the country's top corporate houses. This moment compensated for all the frustrations that had come along the way. A year later, Bandhan Bank was launched with 6.7 million small borrowers.So, how did Ghosh build India's biggest MFI from scratch and then, along with his team, transform it into a universal bank? Bandhan: The Making of a Bank chronicles that journey.This is also Ghosh's personal story-of a boy growing up in small-town Agartala struggling with poverty, but relentless in his ambition to make it big. He battles competition, hostile moneylenders, a tough economic climate and the perpetual lack of resources. Nobody in India perhaps knows better than him the psyche of a small borrower and the alchemy of doing business with the poor, profitably.This is one of India's biggest entrepreneurial stories.

    Krishnamachari, who later became a Union minister and held the portfolios of finance, industry and commerce for close to fifteen years.In this book, the current chairman T.T. Jagannathan, along with Sandhya Mendonca, takes us through the journey of this extraordinary company which fought off bankruptcy and rose like a phoenix to become a highly profitable, successful entity.What makes this story all the more startling is that T.T. Jagannathan is an accidental and reluctant businessman. He came into the profession very unexpectedly, and without any preparation, with neither an MBA nor having ever worked in the family business before having its very survival entrusted to him.Like a phoenix, the Group and its constituent companies, have risen from the ashes, many times over, to stand tall and proud. This is the story of a journey that began with early success and experienced catastrophic disasters, and set about turning its fortunes around in stunning comebacks, time and again.With invaluable business lessons, decades of experience and innovation distilled in these pages, Disrupt and Conquer is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, executives and business leaders.

    Years later, with the launch of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, Central and many more retail formats, he redefined the retailing business in India. Incidentally, Kishore Biyani’s objective is to capture every rupee in the wallet of every Indian consumer, wherever they are - an investment banker living in a south Mumbai locality or a farmer in Sangli. As large business houses enter the retail space, Kishore Biyani is not just concentrating on retail but aiming to capture the entire Indian consumption space. From building shopping malls, developing consumer brands to selling insurance, he is getting into every business where a customer spends her money.

    However, there was no factory. It was a company registered in name only. Apollo Tyres. Thanks to Onkar Singh Kanwar, Raunaq’s eldest son, Apollo is today one of India’s most successful automotive companies with a turnover in excess of $2 billion and factories across India and in Europe.This is the story, never told before, of how Onkar Singh Kanwar built Apollo from scratch and took it to the world stage. To do it, he had to combat strikes and union intimidation, the restrictions of the Licence Raj, politically motivated nationalisation, and near bankruptcy.As if that was not enough, he also had to endure and survive a traumatic falling-out with the father he so admired. Never before has Onkar Kanwar spoken so openly or movingly about the father he still reveres and his regrets that life should have been so different from what he would have liked it to be.The Man Behind the Wheel recounts these dramatic events in compelling detail as Onkar Kanwar follows his steadfast vision to build not just a company, but also an industrial institution. For the first time Onkar Kanwar’s closest friends and colleagues have spoken about the triumphs and the setbacks that have shaped both his and the company’s life and times. His wife and family share their personal insights of the man who is at the hub and heart of their world and how his values as a Sikh, father, brother and husband have moulded him as an entrepreneur.The Man Behind the Wheel is the insightful and exciting story of a highly successful company and its creator as he takes us on a journey through his early days in the US of the 1960s, importing and exporting in the pre-boom Middle East, to building factories in Vadodara and Chennai, and further expansion to the Netherlands and Hungary with stop-offs in China and a highly charged courtroom battle in the United States.But tellingly, it is also the story of fathers and sons and of family dynasties and responsibilities played out against the backdrop of India’s first seventy years since Independence.

    The brand they created – at first against tremendous odds and restrictive norms – injected freshness into the market and in retail spaces through its cutting-edge marketing strategy and empathetic advertising. Not only did the new watchmakers on the block transform watches from being utilitarian objects to fashion statements, but it also systematically ventured into areas untapped by corporate entities with its brands Titan, Tanishq, Titan Eyeplus, Skinn and Taneira, and established itself as a winner across multiple verticals. Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand takes readers from boardrooms to back rooms to reveal how a quintessential Indian brand from the house of the Tatas, not known till then for its success in the consumer goods market, reached such remarkable heights. It is a tale of innovation and fortitude, of thinking outside the box and staying the course, of obsession with detail and the courage to acknowledge failure. A story that will inspire every reader, here is the inside account of what continues to make Titan tick.

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    Founded in the regulated and stagnant Indian economy of the late 1980s, offering a credit rating service that had no takers, and without any real assets or capital, CRISIL seemed destined to fail. Instead, it became one of India’s most respected companies, redefining its vision from being India-focused to playing a quiet but critical role in global markets. This is a story of razor-sharp analytics, unshakeable values and sheer grit. It is also a story of leaders with very different styles, who brought it all together over a quarter of a century. A narrative that, above all, shows that doing well can go hand in hand with doing what is right.

    And to do this as a public sector company, having to follow all governmental systems and procedures and having to please both its masters in the government and Suzuki Motor Corporation.However, the Maruti project succeeded and in ways that were unimaginable in 1983. the car revolutionized the industry and put a county on wheels. Suddenly, ordinary middle-class men and women could aspire to own a reliable, economical and modern car and the steep sales target were easily met. 26 years later, the company, now free of government controls and facing competition from the world's major manufacturers who have entered the Indian market,still leads the way. Not only that, cars made by Maruti can be seen in all continents.By any yardstick, it is an incredible story, involving grit, management skill and entrepreneurship of a high order. R. C. Bhargava, who was at the helm of the company and is currently its chairman, co-writing with senior journalist and author Seetha, shows how it was done in this riveting account of a landmark achievement.

    The outspoken Chariman of the Sony Corporation candidly discusses the rise of Sony, his own extraordinary career as one of the most successful businessmen of our time, and his views on the U.S., Japan, and the world economy.

    Hailing from a small town in Haryana, where his family ran grain mills, Chandra has been a perennial outsider, repeatedly aiming high and breaking into businesses where he was considered an interloper.Starting work as a teen to pay off family debts, Chandra had to rely on bluff, gumption and sheer hard toil to turn things around. A little bit of luck and political patronage saw him make a fortune in rice exports to the erstwhile USSR.Always a risk-taker, Chandra then had the vision of getting into broadcasting early, even as established media players failed to see its potential. His Zee TV, India's first private Indian TV channel, changed the rules of the game and tickled the fancy of a public starved of entertainment.Several gutsy initiatives followed, though not all of them were successful. Chandra's attempts to launch satellite telephony and a cricket league came a cropper. But the man continues to reinvent himself; he is now also focusing on infrastructure and smart cities.This is an unusually candid memoir of a truly desi self-made businessman who came to Delhi at age twenty with seventeen rupees in his pocket. Today, he has a net worth of $6.3 billion and annual group revenues of about $3 billion.

    

    Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul. In Onward, he shares the remarkable story of his return and the company's ongoing transformation under his leadership, revealing how, during one of the most tumultuous economic times in history, Starbucks again achieved profitability and sustainability without sacrificing humanity. Offering readers a snapshot of a moment in history that left no company unscathed, the book zooms in to show, in riveting detail, how one company struggled and recreated itself in the midst of it all. The fastpaced narrative is driven by day-to-day tension as conflicts arise and lets readers into Schultz's psyche as he comes to terms with his limitations and evolving leadership style. Onward is a compelling, candid narrative documenting the maturing of a brand as well as a businessman.Onward represents Schultz's central leadership philosophy: It's not just about winning, but the right way to win. Ultimately, he gives readers what he strives to deliver every day - sense of hope that, no matter how tough times get, the future can be just as or more successful than the past, whatever one defines success to be.

    Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning.But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair—with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO—founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix's triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century's most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph's transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts, and determination can change the world—even with an idea that many think will never work.What emerges, though, isn't just the inside story of one of the world's most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

    Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers.Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80% market share? As it forges ahead into finance and entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions?  How does the Chinese government view its rise?  Will Alibaba expand further overseas, including in the U.S.?Clark tells Alibaba’s tale in the context of China’s momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an unlikely corporate titan as never before.