28th October, 2019 – Paro, Bhutan Melting Negativity, Casting Positivity It was in January 2019, that I decided to start writing my experiences of moving negativity to positivity. After having gone through an exercise of self-reflection and understanding through the mirror of entrepreneurial competencies – understanding of behaviors, I could start relating the subject much easier and thought to try and put them together looking through the framework of PECs (Personal Entrepreneurial Competencies) I started my conscious journey into industry with Foundry where castings are produced, and have always seen melting and casting all along and continue to do so. The process involved melting some old rejected or scrap material and some freshly mined material, and then casting into a shape which would be useful to the humankind in some or the other form. Thus evolved the topic of melting negativity and casting positivity. In life, I have been conscious and always tried to take some of the thoughts or incidents which were negative in nature, mix with some fresh thoughts, and see if I could process them into making some positive from it. I will try to bring some of the experiences I have faced personally and have been closely connected with, which may be able to relate to some of you and may help in finding a different perspective in life, a life which is full of challenges day in and day out. One of the advantages of writing “Stamps” (documenting behaviors) over the past one year has been improving my ability to document thoughts with clarity, and channelize the flow of thoughts, and my belief has become stronger, that writing the thoughts i.e. moving from thinking to action, is an essential element to move closer to reality.
1. Negative Marketing of Competitor taken to Positive advantage a. In the year 1998 or so, we had just come out of a very difficult project in Pune. It was my first project on actual automation in foundry along with our French Partner Fondarc – Renzo Cappelletto. We had lot of mistakes in implementation, but persisted and ensured that the project could be productionized, even though we suffered from some penalties. In this time one of the clients in Ambala had finalized an order with my father in GIFA 1998 in Germany, and our competitor (an MNC – would not like to take names) marketing team fed our prospective customer that Father & Son (meaning my dad & me) were taking people for a ride, the plant in Pune was not working and was closed. The market heard the MNC and they did not go ahead with the order, but my immediate reaction was that if an MNC was trying to bad market a company of such a small size as ours, there must be something which we were doing well. I found a lot of positivity in that negative statement, which further motivated me to persist and continue. Fact of the matter was that the plant in Pune was in production, we got the plant head to talk to the client, but the negative aspect weighed higher. The same customer then became one of our first projects in Northern India, the first personal family relationship we enjoyed and also the first customer who supported us when we built the prototype MultiFlexFM™ in 2007. All his expansions and upgradations were done with us, and today I enjoy a very close bond with the owners. This perhaps is the first instance of converting an environment of negativity into positivity, and something which is continuing
for years. Instead of getting bogged down or reacting to our competitor in the same way as they did, took a step back, listened to the criticism with more depth, and in fact, probably we were not even ready for the market at that time with the right product, we were too immature in technology and manufacturing to have serviced the market at that time. This criticism may have helped us in our long term, and for me personally when I think back there was a lot of positive in the negative. b. It was the same MNC who continued to find us as one of the strongest competition, started their negative pitching. In the year 2010 when we launched in the market our new innovative moulding machine MultiFLexFM™. In 2012 – 2014 we had established these machines in the market, and slowly we were challenging the existence of the old and obsolete technology, mostly from the same MNC and also a few Indian machine manufacturers. They again started a negative campaign for our machines. They started stating that the machine was not “High Pressure” but just a “contraption”, spreading a negative image of the technology which we had invested and proven in the field. Since we had challenged the Europeans with a solution that could be simple and affordable, and was eating into their markets where they were selling old technology to our Indian foundries at the MSME (Micro Small and Medium Enterprises), they perhaps thought that this could be a way of dissuading us. Once again hearing the negatives from the market were interpreted as a positive sign that this is a product which is probably the need of the industry and we are in the right place. The criticism initiated me to start researching and collecting
information on what exactly is the definition of “high pressure”. Taking data from international standards, and equipped, I published an article which equated our technology with what was an accepted benchmark globally over the past 50 years. None of the people mentioned has said so in the open or documented it directly, and these are just verbal feedbacks received from prospective customers who were confused by them, sometimes intimidated. There were a few instances when the brand of the MNC ruled over technology. However, all these negative aspects just kept motivating us, continuing on the path of positivity, persisting and setting up our own standards of excellence in the absence of any benchmark. We shifted the focus from the comparison of something which did not have a yard stick to the outcome where the casting (end product) variance, impact on cost, impact on energy were documented and compared. The narrative was shifted from an ambiguous input of “high pressure” to a measurable comparative of “weight consistency”, “dimensional tolerance” vis-à-vis the previous technology. As we went deeper into the comparison of the outcome, the positive aspect was we started getting compared with the similar world class technologies which were better than us, and this positive approach has led to a complete paradigm shift of moving us into a comparison with the global standards of the highest level. No longer are we compared to the “old and obsolete” technology, this is a gone era, and we are now being challenged to match the global standards of excellence, which has been a big positive boost for us. Once again a small negative leading to opening up doors to a huge global technology market.
2. An internal challenge by those close to me and those who knew me. It was during the transition and change of hands of leadership of Rhino in the year 2009 that there were lot of people close to me who put a lot of negative thoughts into the mind, of failure and in ability to do something. It was true that I had never led a complete organisation, and had my short comings from understanding financial management, and all the negatives which were fed to me, were taken positively, I could identify my mistakes and weaknesses which may lead to the organization not sustaining in the market. It was during this period, I got a lot of support from my wife Rashmi and my brother Rohitbhai from the financial system support, and with their positivity and support, I could start organizing my thoughts in this negative and challenging environment. It was during this period in 2009-10 that I wrote my first Vision and Mission Statement, set myself some challenging goals, and together with the support of the team, set out on the positive path to meeting these goals. I got lot of critical feedback from all those who were close to me, and known to me. This was in today’s context opening up my JoHari “blind” window for the things which I did not know, but others knew, taking feedback, absorbing it, and then opening out my “hidden” window where I was sharing my thoughts, without worrying of the negative or critical feedback. I challenged myself to overcome all the critical negatives with a thought of positivity, withstand the immense financial pressure of debts, delayed payments, and at the same time market ups and downs. This led to lot of positive outcomes, our statutory compliance became 100% due to discipline and knowledge of the weaknesses, our debt became near to zero in a period of 4 years,
we reorganized ourselves and consolidated ourselves and were in a position to experiment and try out new ideas. It was this period which opened up the mind to innovative solutions, and the journey took off in 2012 when our first innovations started in Sand Handling. Yet there was a lot to learn, and there remains a lot to learn, but the ability to convert a negative environment to an environment of positive thoughts was a big takeaway for us in this period. 3. Falling out of love of what I personally was good at a. Exiting the business with Italian Company – No Bake Technology When I started observing the outcomes from the business with Italian Company as only an agent and not doing any value addition were eating away into loss of other opportunities, and neither of the parties getting satisfied, I started to look at all the negatives and positives. I loved the subject, knew it inside out, sometimes more than my principal due to my hard core shop floor experience, but then it occupied a lot of my own time. I found out that we had now transitioned from a project engineering and consulting organization to a manufacturing organization, which needed value addition activities to increase more than trading (being an agent) activities. Understanding the negativity of the situation, before my principal could tell mention their unhappiness with the poor results on sales, I asked them to allow us to quit on a positive note, and continue to maintain good & healthy relationships. I did try to convince them of starting to manufacture in India, but since they were not keen to do so, fearing that we may copy and ditch them (as has been the case in so many alliances),
probably they thought to stay within their locus of control and not take this risk. Even today I get enquiries for the plants, which I regret, though I do understand the subject very well both technically and commercially, but had to fall out of love of this and have kept the knowledge parked, and continue to look for a partner who would like to collaborate with us at a later date. The relationship which could have entered a negative area, came out with a positivity of remaining friends even if we compete in certain areas today. b. Centrifugal Casting Solutions has been a combination of design and process both in equal proportions of 50-50, and a technology which I absorbed at a young age from my father and senior design engineer. For several years, our company has been one of the only company in India to have manufactured diverse machines, supplied to Naval Dockyard, BHEL as a single source as we brought both the knowledge of process and machine manufacturing together. It was with this background that we took a risk and partnered an American company (we did not do enough due diligence and went more by brand & repute rather than dig deeper into their history). This company’s original founder’s book on the Centrifugal technology is still referred today as a manual for the process and based on this past history we started working with them. It took as a while to understand that they were using our working capital, and with zero investment, they were doing business, which started to lead to differences and rifts. They experimented new designs with us, and used our money for development. This left a lot of negative impact on our commercials and brand name,
probably we lost some business due to this relationship. The negatives started building, and it was during this period we took a positive step to not only stop our relationship with them, but also filed a legal suit for the first time on them for cheating, we also decided that we will exit this business, as once again I was the sole person to have the complete knowledge of the technology and challenges. This negative relationship, led us to a positive move to exit from something I would love, and move on to do better things, and look beyond a smaller market segment. We still possess all the know-how and do-how in our repository, and this remains as an asset in our library which can be leveraged upon when need arises. c. Moving out of Operations to Management - I was and still am a hands on person, like to work on my own, and had the ability to take on projects single handed and take on challenges. As I took more responsibility, and found youth working with me and ready to start taking the same responsibility, I had to let go of the negatives of their inefficiencies and start to move to let go of what I loved – designing, programming, project management, and start my journey to start transferring what I loved to the professionals in my organization. This aspect of letting go of what you are very good at, forgoing the fact of the negative impact (and there have been several mishaps or losses), and taking that as a positive outcome that a second level was getting groomed is perhaps one of the most difficult challenges for hands on entrepreneurs like me. But I also started counting the mistakes I had done or losses I had made during my learning phase, took the mistakes positively and now after
the Empretec Experience have started working on documenting the experiences into standards of excellence and building systems which can minimize the risks of failures. Had I stuck with the negative thoughts of losses and failures, probably I would not have been able to build the “people� assets and build a strong foundation to leverage ourselves into the global space. 4. Innovations started flowing by challenging the negativities and limitations The biggest impact of melting negativity and casting it into positivity has been our strengthening our core innovative values into a habit, and now into a character. Every negative input or criticism inspires us to step back, think deeper and innovate. Innovation as a perception has also transitioned from a product innovation to process, business model, technology, management innovation. Let’s see how the negative scenarios we faced got absorbed into innovations which have been the backbone of me as an individual and our group of organizations. a. Silcate-CO2 Sand Reclamation System In the period of 1998-99 when the market had gone through a low, and we were recovering from the impact of our major project in Pune, when we lost a lot of ground in the conventional green sand system market, my Dad (from whom I inherit the positive approach) identified another untouched market. The ideation came from discussions with Renzo Cappelletto who was experimenting with Green Sand Reclamation by Attrition in a small model, and we started to experiment something similar on a burning issue in India for this CO2 sand as it was normally called. The combination of a negative scenario in our brand for manufacturing of sand
plants, which needed time to recover, we invested in developing this technology in Indore with another foundry who were known to us, and things led to successful implementation after lot of effort of the entire team, and it was sale of 13 machines in a year, which sailed us through in a scenario when we had almost bottomed out. The positive approach to a negative scenario led to our first patent in the year 2000 for the mechanical attrition process. The patent was more for marketing than for protection of the design, as we were on the path of rebuilding our brand. For 5 years, these machines allowed us to regain our brand image as a technology company and friend of the foundry industry. It was one of my first real learning of how to come out of a negative frame, and this innovative thinking became deep rooted in all the work we did. b. Sand Handling System – the birth of rEcoflex™ The challenges of completing projects on time in Howrah region due to the civil work were limiting the number of projects and hurt our business. In the year 2011, while chatting with customers and my colleagues we were looking at addressing multiple negatives affecting our growth in the market. The civil work limitations were one, the differentiator in the market was another, and then there was a challenge of working with one of the handling equipment bucket elevator in sand handling which was representing almost 50% of the breakdown in the sand plant was a major pain area. Taking these challenges formed a positive outcome of a plant which reduced the pit (civil) work by almost 70% - direct impact on cost & time, replaced the bucket elevator with a much simpler equipment belt
conveyor, reduced the height of the entire shed, which again meant lesser civil work, reduced the foot print. These were the initial tangible outcomes on the basis of which the negative impacts stated were being addressed. As we started implementing the projects, we had some really larger impacts, which have taken our solution to a very different level. The first impact was “dust free” environment – or minimized dust environment. My wife who would never sit in the conventional solutions, started enjoying the plants, and we could even serve food in the running plant which was a first in the India, and we set up benchmarks for moving from a “dusty” industry to a “cleaner” industry. The second was getting selected for Energy Efficiency in the Global Cleantech Innovation Program as an MSME manufacturer in India in the year 2015. Though this was not the primary impact planned, it came out to become one of the most important outcomes of the innovation, as we got leveraged to be one of the top 6 Innovators in the country, the only and first foundry machine manufacturer in India to be recognized for Innovation of any sizeable impact. Our rEcoflex™ was documented to save about 30% installed energy in the plant apart from all the other benefits. The third was elevating the brand of Rhino Machines and suddenly from competing with our complementing suppliers in India, we started competing almost 100% of the times in sand plant with our MNC competitor. Our energy efficiency, dust free environment moved us way ahead of the MNC and other similar manufacturers, and opened up the market further for us.
What started as a small negative in 2011, today is one of the biggest strengths of Rhino in 2019 as we have scaled up the innovation from 10 t/hr plants to 80 t/hr plants, and move into the medium and large plants segment. c. High Pressure Moulding – MultiFlex™ - a game changer creating a new market In the year 2004 to 2006 we went through a very rough patch trying to enter the conventional fully automatic high pressure moulding line market, just adapting the European technology and manufacturing in India. The losses of image and finance were immense during this period, and a lot of negative impact on our bottom line. This led us to introspection, and relooking at the negatives and failures we faced, understand the market better. We soon realized we were falling for the “rat race” of trying to replicate Europe in technology implementation in a country where we had miles to go before reaching that level. We were trying to compete directly with MNCs who had 40 + years of experience, financial muscle and brand, with our emotions more than with real achievement. The market segment we were looking was beyond our reach, and this led us to look at the market segment which did not have access to technology. There was a 60% (in numbers) market which was supplying nearly 50% (in quantity) of the Indian casting production, and we put our head together with our French Partner and guide Renzo Cappelletto. He gave us the process guidance, and we invested in the prototype building. We learnt a lot from our past experiences, started calculating the risks, mitigating them and reducing them before the product was launched in 2010 at the Foundry Exhibition. It took the trust of a few
foundries to allow us to partner them and implement the technology, coming from a huge trust built over the years, I took the risk to leverage the trust and once again take my next risk. The period of 2012 to 2014 was a confidence building measure in the industry, and resisting all the negatives, taking each negative feedback with a positive note, attending it and moving further, we have kept raising the bar. In the year 2016, we once again participated in the GCIP accelerator program, got into the top 6 again, and demonstrated that we were not innovators “by chance”. This time we were able to make our tangible outcomes much clearer, the pitch and focus was clear – energy efficiency and process savings. With a demonstration of 30% of installed energy reduction compared to the old obsolete technology and reduction in weight by an average 2% which had a direct impact on the bottom line of the casting plant, we could turn the entire phase of negativity in the year 2006-2008 to a period of positivity. This led to finding a new market space, creating a market which did not exist in people’s thoughts, allowed new players to start participating in the same space from India, and increase the positivity in the market. d. Vocational Education – Industry Partnership The narrative of not having skilled labour or workforce was a negative or problem which gave birth to another opportunity and risk which I took along with my brother’s organization. Understanding that the future of our business and being on the global map as a quality supplier & solution provider relied on quality workforce at the bottom of the pyramid as well as the top of the pyramid, we set up a Vocational Education School in our newly acquired space in the year 2015. There were 2 key aspects which we were looking at
from a long term perspective, the first being able to train young 16 year age group over 2 years in an industrial environment, making them industry ready at the age of 18 and possibly try and change the culture of working, and the second was to use the existing workforce with us to become the faculties, and get indirectly trained while training and build their culture. This exposure of international quality education and competencies started getting injected from the year 2015, and today we are able to see a small transformation taking place. The intangible outcome from this was our branding and positioning as an organization who was not only investing in themselves but also for their industry, a position which started opening up doors to diverse platforms where we had no access, diverse institutions recognized our inputs and model of how Industry run Vocational Education Institutions can sustain. The initial negative narrative got converted to an opportunity (which is still an investment today) into an indirect and direct benefit, and we have now a ready to launch scalable model with us. e. Green Sand Reclamation – a cluster model approach solution After partnering another American owned Italian Technology firm with a technology transfer agreement in 2013, we started understanding the techno-commercial challenges in green sand reclamation in our country. There existed the challenge of having technical feasibility in India with Indian Sand, the challenge of scaling down the size from European large plants to smaller modular plants, the possibility to work in cluster as a common facility for the MSMEs, the challenge of zero discharge and being able to address all the issues in the ecosystem. All these negatives were countered
by another pilot project where we could demonstrate the positive outcomes of all the challenges faced became another example of melting the negativity and casting positivity. Today it is a matter of pride that we are the first in India to have demonstrated how to manage the solid waste of a foundry industry and provide solutions for zero discharge. This also led to an innovative approach of offering BOO and BOOT (Build Own Operate (transfer)) models where we again overcame the negative narrative of who will take the challenge. 5. Sustainability – transformation and learnings from Social Ecosystem As I moved from the space of a participant to being an advisor (usually called a mentor), I could see the challenges from a very different perspectives. The negatives of startups not getting financed in time, the struggles of scaling up and sustaining were a huge learning from the negatives I absorbed and listened to. One of the first things I realized was that being an advisor was not a solution, and it needed a “skin in the game� approach which could help in the transformations or innovations to become sustainable. a. Mentoring and Partnering Social Organizations Taking the approach of mentoring in true sense, I took the approach of putting a stake into building sustainability and move out of the negative approach that Social Organizations are not sustainable and have to rely on external donations only. I visited a village and listened & absorbed different views, there were some positive views and some negative views, and together with my sister Priyanka who also has had a strong social bent of working to alleviate poverty & contribute to build a more inclusive society, built a business
model which could be experimented. Though the organisation with whom I started as the first NGO did not work out, GAP took me to other NGOs and slowly we started building a positive model out of the entire negative narrative of things not happening. I personally visited another centre in Mithapur and saw how NGOs had been able to build businesses, but yet the impact was limited and there was no thought on how to scale up or make it replicable. Thus came the challenge of replicating and scaling up. With the continued persistence my sister Priyanka with the help of my daughter Nandita were able to break through a sustainability project of a major departmental store chain who gave a positive support to find a commercial balance to the entire story. The learnings from GAP and our venture with other NGO partners soon have enabled to replicate the bag stitching venture into multi-location, multi-NGO, and creating a positive vibe, where in Oct 2019, a corporate has approached to replicate and further build a sustainable business model of manufacturing in the rural / underprivileged social ecosystems. Every challenge or negativity in this story was countered by persistence and commitment with a very clear intent or purpose. There will be many more such challenges as we continue to scale up this intervention, and I am sure we will find a positive way out. b. Sustainable Socio-Economic Solutions - a bit bigger canvas, lot of people have been trying and not fully successful and a lot of negative vibes about it. In my GCIP 2015 engagement with UNIDO, I was assigned Mr Deepak Gadhia as my advisor/mentor who would guide me in making my first innovation sustainable. It was just a start, but connecting to
him led me into the Socio-Economic working also I many a times call as social engineering. His experience in Solar Thermal, BioGas, Biomass has been inspirational. He shared that the challenge was to reach solar thermal and bio gas solutions to the masses in the rural ecosystem, as it had a lot of economic sustainability challenges. I took all the negative feedbacks on why these systems did not take off or “failed� to reach to the masses, the challenges and constraints. I understood that it was a long haul, not easy and had multiple stake holders involved. To understand the same better, I took the first step of establishing a proof of concept with his blessings at our factory in Anand, took the charge of building the business with his team, and slowly have been able to move up step by step. It is still a work in process, and will require a lot of socio-economic ecosystem building which can be plugged into the existing NGO network where I am already setting up the stitching based solutions. Building a local economy which can increase the local manufacture and produce, or decentralize the manufacture and allow consumptions at a local level has been one of the dreams of our founders of the nation. Once again I am trying to evaluate the overall system from a distance, validating the purpose and intent, validating the value proposition, identifying the missing links and do consider this as one of my next challenges of innovation in business modelling for building sustainable solutions in the rural economy. c. Incubating entry level entrepreneurs – there has been a lot of negativity about the success rates of startups with figures of 1% or 2% success rates of sustenance of their businesses.
As a participant in GCIP 2015 & 2016 I could understand the difference between a startup working on making an innovation sustainable and my own innovation as an experienced and mature entrepreneur. I did try and meet several of them, try to partner them and see if I could contribute to their growth, but was not so successful. I overcame this negative situation, and tried to understand why it was so. I got an opportunity to understand better when I became one of the mentors in the GCIP 2017, and I took one of the innovators as a case study to incubate. He was working with a solution for physical separation using ceramic tubes, and he was able to reduce the cost by producing at a lower cost in India and being able to bring down the total cost of the project. However, he was struggling to find funds to make a prototype and test it. I worked to make a testing model for him and will be conducting tests with him for different commercial applications. Such incubation intervention exposure is able to overcome the negativity in the mindset of startups and in the minds of the market, and raise the %age of success. This coupled with the newly acquired framework of entrepreneurship development is further enhancing the possibility for senior entrepreneurs to partner entry level entrepreneurs and innovators, pull them into the value chain and raise the %age of sustenance as close to a much higher %age. There can be innumerable events of periods when I cast aside negativity, melted it and shaped into a positive outcome, or at least a thought. At the heart of all these lie the values which were inherited from my parents. My mother who took all situations with positivity in
family life and my father who took every situation and found a positive frame of mind. These values kept flourishing as I kept experimenting with challenging negative outcomes from childhood, and continue to do so today. There may be times when I may feel lost, but the positivity pulls me back. Even today, there are so many negative sentiments of the market, of the inefficiencies of the administrative and governmental ecosystem, of the way people think, but I have a firm belief that if you start from yourself, things outside will start looking different and you may be able to impact the negative energy with an equal or more positive energy, or may be able to ignite the dormant positivity amongst the people around us. Yet, a word of caution is to find the balance of countering negativity with a rational balance of decision making. I did take a lot of positive steps, but also failed a lot of times, as many a times the decisions were taken from the heart (emotions). Emotions can identify and make the challenge relevant, but it is the combination of relativism and absolutism which can bring rationality to decision making and allow the decisions to be of lesser risk, bring higher success rate, and inspire many more to take this path.