Book review: What makes Sun Pharma founder Dilip Shanghvi tick, and how he became the richest self-made Indian

Dilip Shanghvi, Founder and MD of Sun Pharmaceuticals.

The Reluctant Billionaire: How Dilip Shanghvi Became the Richest Self-Made Man
by Soma Das
Penguin
Hardcover,
500 pages, Rs 799

It would be a watery joke but also a solid truth to use the word ‘shining’ for Sun Pharma, though that would be an accurate assessment of most of its journey. Sun, says Forbes magazine, is ‘the fourth largest speciality generics maker and India’s most valuable pharma outfit...’ Its founder, Dilip Shanghvi, in 2015, overtook Mukesh Ambani as India’s richest man, though Ambani is currently back on the top of the list.

‘The Reluctant Billionaire: How Dilip Shanghvi Became the Richest Self-Made Indian’ is tightly focused on the Sun founder’s rise. The book's author, journalist Soma Das, writes that she has interviewed "over 150 of his friends, extended family members, rivals, present and former aides and business associates", and also the famously publicity-shy Shanghvi himself; the result is a 500-page tome. Clearly, a book on the rise of Sun’s founder would have to explain the tactics and strategies, the innovations and disruptions, and the values and goals that made Sun what it is today, which it does. But the book would need to do more. It would have to describe not only the company as an organism but also the market conditions and regulatory climates which nourished or impeded its growth, and the book doesn’t dwell much on these. That’s because it has a clear-cut brief -- to be a biography of Shanghvi and to use key inflection points in the history of his company to analyse his psychology and tactics. As a biography, it is a heavy but informative read, barring flaws that won't dissuade a business-focused reader.

Humble beginnings

Given the business focus of the book, Shanghvi's early life is treated briefly. The first two chapters, for the most part, comprise his childhood and teenage years, mapping out his characteristic traits, including his ambition and ability to understand business processes, and also his thirst for knowledge and a knack for being taken seriously. By the end of chapter two, we are already reading about the humble beginnings of Sun Pharma. The chapters that follow detail Sun's rapid growth, its acquisition of talent and infrastructure, and its shaking up of the pharma market by launching a slew of new products.

We are shown how Sun's values are in fact Shanghvi's own-- the set up of Sun Pharma comprised not only cubicles and employee registers but, in a deeper sense, an emphasis on forging long-term relationships with customers, that is, the doctors who prescribed Sun's drugs. The company’s marketing folks behaved as friends with those doctors whom they were targeting for prescriptions, thus completely disrupting the traditional way of clinical, detached selling. To quote from the book, 'Sun would attend to his or her (the prescribing doctor's) need, at times humanitarian or social, at times educational or medical, which helped create a bond that had a humane and emotional texture to it'. In doing so, Sun's employees were taking a page from the playbook that Shanghvi himself had devised.

The growth of Sun

Further chapters chronicle the growth of Sun, both in terms of numbers and, interestingly, in terms of culture. The book shows how induction of senior managers inaugurated turf wars at Sun, and what Shanghvi did to tackle the crisis -- an interesting study of how a system, once established in a certain way, is resistant to change, even in a supposedly task-oriented and flexible company such as this one. And how, sometimes, companies change what is not needed and have to roll back at least partly to their old ways of functioning. Which is not to say, of course, that the Sun of today is the Sun of yesterday, but that managers will find an instructive case study here of what to avoid and what to do while scaling up the management of a company to suit its growing size. Particularly, when such growth comes by way of acquisitions-- like that of the American company, Caraco, and the Indian giant Ranbaxy.

All in all, this book gives us a wide-ranging survey of the life of its protagonist, and, through its correlations of Shanghvi’s character traits with his business tactics, offers would-be or new entrepreneurs and managers lots of food for thought about the interplay of personality and corporate values. Most notable are the lessons to be learned from Shanghvi's psychology as depicted in the book, from handling people effectively to stepping out of one's comfort zone to take a calculated risk, from questioning conventional knowledge to upending traditional business practices.

Moreover, by highlighting the subtle and positive impact on Shanghvi of his mercantile family and community of friends and associates, succinctly and convincingly, and without stating the obvious, the biography highlights the combination of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ that make up Shanghvi. The book chronicles the fact that while Shanghvi is for the most part a self-made man, he was initially boosted by friends and family in little and big ways. So, another insight from the book is the realization that it takes a circle of people to raise and mould a so-called self-made man.

In order to depict a life that has myriad facets, a biographer needs to be a bit of a historian, a psychologist, a cultural expert, an expert in the domain under research, and that rare creature who is able to mould the insights from these disciplines into a chugging narrative. Das is most of these things, to her credit.

Clunky expressions

Recording the nuances of culture or psychology in a nimble manner takes a large array of fine-geared writerly machinery; the writer hasn't deployed it as well as needed, given the complexity of the book. Clunky expressions and, sometimes, entirely clunky sentences pop up, though seldom: ‘The spirit of childhood argumentative tradition using forceful logic between the two continues, only the realm of the clash has shifted to memories.’ This could have been written more simply. It is an example of a flaw of writing, not of research. Flawed writing is the norm rather than the exception in business literature from India.

Another problem with the book is that while the writer remains a meticulous reporter throughout and is also impartial to Sun’s flaws, her tone with regard to Shanghvi is overly deferential. Praises of Shanghvi’s business acumen occur in almost each chapter, amounting to overly emphasising the fact that Shanghvi’s got a sharp head on his shoulders. The height of it comes in this sentence: ‘Sundaram reckoned Shanghvi was to business what Sachin Tendulkar was to cricket.’ The writer hasn’t said it herself, but has consciously chosen to include it in her book. Now, according to ESPN Cricinfo, Tendulkar is the highest run-scorer in Tests and one day internationals -- statistically, the best in the world. The praises should have been toned down.

Given Shanghvi’s reticent nature, the book tells us how he reacted to adversities and what tactics and strategies he used, but his inner motivation remains a mystery-- if it is not money, if it is not fame, what is it?

Whistleblower complaint

Finally, one event under question apparently came when the book was already written-- the whistleblower complaint against Shanghvi himself and his company co-promoter, Sudhir Valia. The whistleblower accused Shanghvi and Valia of lapses in corporate governance-- amounting to alleged transactions worth Rs 5,800 crore. The matter apparently is pending with the Securities and Exchange Board of India. This event is dismissed in a few lines in a postscript.

No reader would regret buying this book, but I wish it were easier to recommend. It is slightly undone by the writing and the deferential treatment of Shanghvi, which might not suit those readers who have read general-interest biographies. Moreover the intricacies of pharma deals and processes, which also find a place in the book, would be interesting to pharma industry observers or employees. It is to them that I recommend this book.

Suhit Kelkar is a freelance Journalist. He is the author of the poetry chapbook named The Centaur Chronicles.