Anand Piramal, a scion to a mega business family, has been meticulously mentored by the best in the world. Reliance IndustriesNSE 1.79 % chairman Mukesh Ambani’s 26-year-old daughter Isha is set to tie the knot with Anand Piramal (33), son of Ajay Piramal, chairman of the Piramal Group.
The couple will marry in December in India. Though both the families have been in a close relationship, Anand has a special bond with Mukesh Ambani.
In the summer of 2010, Anand had an existential crisis, according to an ET report published in 2015. Back home, during his break from the Harvard Business School, Anand was still undecided where life would take him. He had a choice of following the footsteps of many of his classmates or even elder sister Nandini and land up in Wall Street to be a McKinsey consultant or a blue-blooded banker or maybe even a private equity investor.
This was also the time when his father made one of his boldest moves ever and sold the lion’s share of the family’s flagship pharma business to Abott for a jaw-dropping $3.8 billion. So slipping effortlessly into dad’s shoes was also no longer on the table.
Also Read: These are rich kids of Indian billionaire’s having a super-luxury lifestyle
In between graduate and business school, he had already bootstrapped for two years with his rural healthcare and telemedicine start-up but with mixed success until it got subsumed as one of the Piramal group’s CSR initiatives. So it had to be something radically game-changing and from where Anand was looking, New York seemed safe haven.
That was when Mukesh Ambani’s words changed Piramal’s career path. “Being an entrepreneur is like playing cricket and being a consultant like watching it as a commentator,” Ambani, a long-time family friend, told the young Piramal drawing parallels from his favourite sport. “In the long run, if you want to play the game, grab the opportunity without wasting time and try to achieve all your goals by the time you are 30. Play the game, make mistakes, but pad up.” Anand took the plunge on focused on the real estate business.
Ambani is not the only mentor to Anand. He has honed his skills with a group of veterans like Deepak Parekh of HDFC, and Nitin Nohria, Dean, Harvard Business School. They are Anand’s key mentors who double up as members of Piramal Realty’s advisory board. Over time, Anand, on his own, has also added to that list by bringing on board Robert Booth, former CEO of Emaar and Subbu Narayansamy, Director at McKinsey and Head of its Asia real estate and infrastructure practice to strengthen his brain trust further.
Post Your Comments