How Top Gun and Tom Cruise inspired Kumar Mangalam Birla to continuously reinvent

Kumar Mangalam Birla cited Tom Cruise and Top Gun while talking about reinvention.

Billionaire industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of Aditya Birla Group, shared his reflections for 2022-23 with a note on reinvention inspired by Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise.

Emphasising that reinvention is key for his company, Birla wrote: “Changes in technology, and evolving consumer needs, are creating ever shorter business cycles. For a group like ours, a unique challenge is to harness the trust and stability that comes from longevity, while ensuring that we can continuously reinvent ourselves.”

Then he went on to mention Tom Cruise and his box office blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” that grossed $1 billion dollars within a month. He said the original Top Gun movie was released decades ago and yet Cruise managed to enthral Gen X and Gen Z with the second installment of the film more than a quarter of a century apart.

“The original Top Gun movie was released more than a quarter of a century ago. I can imagine some of you as youngsters grooving to the tunes of that iconic soundtrack and imagining yourselves in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. Top Gun Maverick in 2022 grossed a phenomenal $1bn at the box office in the very first month of its release," he wrote.

"The franchise is carried not just on the shoulders of the nostalgic Gen Xers of Tom Cruise’s youth, but by the enthusiastic embrace of Gen Z. This is in no small part due to the push for cinematic excellence, the commitment of a star who still does his own flying, and the imagination to reinvent and build for the future,” Birla continued, praising Cruise who still does his own stunts, some of them life-threatening, and continues to reinvent himself even at 60-years of age.

Read: Kumar Mangalam Birla spots five key trends for 2023. Read full text

Birla ended the note with saying while 2022 was characterised by much change and uncertainty, it still had a lot of hope for the future.