Who is Reliance Industries?

BY JOSHBERSIN · FEBRUARY 14, 2020

Reliance is a well-known company in India, originally founded by Dhirubhai
Ambani in 1973. Today, led by his son Mukesh Ambani, the company operates
a broad conglomeration of businesses, each of which is growing at astounding
rates. The company’s tagline is “Growth is Life,” and this is truly the way
Reliance operates.
In 2019 the company generated $89 billion in revenues, a 44% increase from
the prior year, with profits around $5.6 billion (13% year over year increase).
If you look at analyst projections for the company, one expects the company to
grow to $124 billion in revenue by 2024.
How does this company perform so well?  Well, the story of Reliance is the
story of India: as the Indian economy evolves, Reliance is there to accelerate
growth. In fact Reliance’s most exciting business, Jio (the 4G telecom
company that provides an entire range of services for digital life), has the
potential to be one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.

How does Reliance create such success? Many business schools teach the
importance of focus – yet Reliance operates in hydrocarbons, retail,
distribution, and digital services. How can it do everything so well?

Well, the Chairman and HR leadership team reveals the secret and it is very
clear. This is a company that thrives on smart ideas, bold bets, and investment
in people. And when these three things come together well, we find a company
with unstoppable power to grow.

Let’s talk about smart ideas first. Every time I meet with Reliance they ask me
about innovative new ideas in organization design, rewards, pay, and growth.
The leadership team understands the need to build a flattened, highly
empowered organization, and they have experimented with this year after
year. Today, the Jio business has been designed around a “fractal”
organization model – one which empowers thousands of local sales and
service teams to reach into Indian markets with a “one-stop” service for all
products.
As far as bold bets, Reliance has built the world’s largest and most multi-
functional refinery in the world. The company has dug a deepwater oil well,
the first in India. And at the time Jio was conceived, built the largest 5G
network in the world. These “big bets” come from the Chairman and his
leadership team, and they don’t just bet, they bet smart. They spend lots of
time thinking, studying, and researching how to make these bets work, and
then with engineering precision (the top executives are engineers) they
launch, iterate, improve, and grow.
In the area of investments in people, Reliance takes every aspect of HR and
management seriously. While the company is a demanding, hard-working
place, the leadership team is constantly looking at new approaches to pay,
goal-setting, rewards, and benefits. Reliance has been implementing OKR’s (a
form of goals), agile team-based management, and continuous learning. I feel
honored to be able to advise them on many of these ideas, but the company
does relentless research before they do anything.

And I’m not talking about a company that is “good to its people.” It goes much
further than this. Reliance is relentlessly focused on employee productivity
and support, relentlessly looking for new ways to manage people. Its
telecommunications and retail operation is designed with a “fractal”
organizational model, enabling small business units to make decisions quickly
with real-time information. To support its employees the company has built
an entire HCM platform that rivals Workday and Success Factors, based on a
new micro-services architecture.

While many of these businesses are enormous in scale (more than 500,000
employees work in these businesses), the company is committed to building a
“team of teams” operating model. We have discussed this topic many times
with the team, and Reliance is aggressively pursuing new performance
management, development, and goal setting tools to help the company stay
fast-moving, growth-oriented, and efficient.

Constantly Improving HR
Learning is core to the company’s growth. Not only do Ambani and the
leadership team constantly study new business models and industries, they
want to learn everything. In one executive meeting the Chairman mentioned
to me “I’m taking a course on Python.” I asked him why?  He said “I need to
understand AI and advanced analytics – I cant ask my people to do all this
work if I don’t know what it is!” How many global Chairmen think this way?

This company is fast-moving, innovative, and focused on execution. Every

business area is growing at hockey-stick shaped rates, and hiring people fast.
This means HR must quickly hire, onboard, train, and support people
everywhere, leading to a very aggressive focus on making HR world-class.

One example of this is the “fractal model” for operating the Jio business. Jio
sells phones and services in thousands of small towns all over India. Typically
this organization would be designed as a massive matrix, with local managers,
district managers, regional managers, and so-on. The Chairman looked at that
idea and rejected it. Decision-making would be far too slow.

Instead, Reliance designed a network-based operating model, where each

small sales and service team operates independently. There are regional and
country managers, but they get sales, support, hiring, and financial
information in a real-time dashboard. If an employee or local manager needs
information on product shipment or features, they just go online, bypass the
entire hierarchy, and interact with a real-time operations center.

The operations center for people is like the NOC (network operations center)
for the network. It uses home-grown tools (SAP is the core backbone) to see
and serve people for every need they have. And every possible service is
automated. When the company was initially building up the network the
CHRO Sanjay Jog showed me the new hiring and onboarding app. New
employees could pick up a phone, click a few times, scan their government
paperwork, and get hired in a few minutes.
There Is A Lot to Learn from Reliance
Every time I meet with Reliance I come back with something to share. To help
you really hear this story in detail, we will be developing an in-depth video-
based case study in the Josh Bersin Academy, and Vaibhav Goel, the head of
HR technology and services, will be speaking at JBA Live!  (June 8-10 in Los
Angeles.)

But the biggest learning of all is to “be bold.” At Reliance the team avidly
studies best-practices and technologies, scans the market, and then sits down
and says “can we do this in an even faster, easier, and more service-centric
way?” The result is a constant stream of innovation (new tools for
performance management, learning, hiring, etc.) and a culture of “let’s just
build this ourselves.”

Which leads me to my final point. In today’s new world of digital business and
our digital personal life, you can’t just “buy the best solution” in HR. Of
course, vendors like Workday, SAP, Oracle, and others have wonderful
products. But none of them are perfect, none of them do everything, and your
employees need something easy to use that works. You have to be a systems
integrator and designer in HR these days, driving the need for many new skills
and what I call the “Full-Stack HR professional.”
Reliance is the most amazing company I have ever visited. I encourage you
to come to JBA Live! this year and hear this story. Not only will it teach you a
lot about strategic thinking and bold HR practices, you’ll learn about one of
the most fascinating companies in the world.