Next generation gets ready to take charge at Reliance Industries

The next generation of the Ambani family is moving into the board of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). The annual general meeting of the company, a hugely anticipated affair at any given time, had Mukesh Ambani, the Chairman & Managing Director, making the announcement on his three children, Isha, Akash and Anant, coming aboard as non-executive directors.  

Market trackers have viewed this as an exercise in succession planning. In many ways, the foundation has been laid for a few years, with the three children being given clear responsibilities—Isha runs the retail business, Akash is in charge of Reliance Ji Infocomm, while the youngest Anant oversees green energy. Keeping that as the background, moving them to the board of RIL appears to be a continuation of a process.  

According to Deven Choksey, Promoter and MD of KRChoksey Group, a wealth management firm, the Ambani siblings have spent a reasonable time being in the respective businesses and understanding them. “The initial period was spent in a phase of mentorship by the professionals. That was obviously a part of getting them ready for larger leadership roles,” he says. Maintaining this was a planned approach, he thinks it helped in gaining acceptance from the senior management and also other RIL board members. “Today, RIL is an extremely complicated entity with a multitude of businesses. It is huge and a proper succession process is necessary and the company has been very proactive in doing that.” 

In the Indian context, given how many businesses are family-run, succession planning is a tricky affair. Kavil Ramachandran, Senior Advisor at the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise in the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and a long-time family business tracker, points out that the board of any company has a primary responsibility as the custodian of its stakeholders. “It is important to bring in people with proven capabilities,” he explains. Based on his understanding of large Indian conglomerates and their succession planning models, Ramachandran says it has been observed that the chosen ones move through several levels in the organisation before being large responsibilities. “They are continuously evaluated, groomed and mentored before a board position comes their way. The way Reliance has gone about it is merely one more example of that.” The grooming model, he points out, has been successful, with the overall impact in the long-term seen be to quite beneficial for the company and its stakeholders.