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After having held several top management positions in various
organizations, I took up a challenging assignment in a
sick chemical company in Gujarat State, India as the Chief
Executive Officer in November 1987. The company had been
incurring perpetual losses since its inception. My good
friends, also not-so-good friends, thought that this was the
end of my professional career as my failure was guaranteed.
The Company, Gujarat Aromatics Limited, was making
synthetic cresols from toluene but since the finished product,
mixed cresols (cresylic acid) did not have sufficient market,
more often than not the company’s manufacturing facilities
at Ankleshwar, Gujarat had to be shut down. The company
was soon amalgamated with Atul Limited, a big multiproduct
Chemical giant of Gujarat, and, was reconstituted
as the Aromatics Division of Atul.
The division was considered a step child, an untouchable
at Atul as it was not at all contributing to the bottomline of
Atul. In fact, the aromatics division was eating away a chunk
of Atul’s profit. Not surprisingly, everybody thought that my
days were numbered. |
