Gautam Adani exhorts IIM students to opt for conviction over caution in leadership roles

Lucknow, Aug 7 (IANS) Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani on Thursday exhorted students of IIM Lucknow to be prepared to face a future that never unfolds as neatly as it appears in classrooms and have the courage to build new pathways to overcome unprecedented challenges to achieve success.

Gautam Adani advised them to opt for conviction over caution, consequence over comfort, creation over conformity, and conscience over convenience in making their decision as leaders.

"The future is messy, uncertain, and often brutal. And this is what you must be prepared to face," he said in his address at the institute here.

Sharing lessons from his life experience with the management students and IIM professors, the Adani Group Chairman said: "I have learned – and still continue to learn – that the real world is made up of moments that have no precedent. And when these unprecedented moments come where the data is ambiguous, where the business models break down, and where the road ahead is unmarked, I have come to realise that success is not defined by how well you studied your business cases."

He told the students that success is defined by being able to make your own story a case study. History is not made by how well existing models are executed. It is made by courage and leadership to build new pathways, he stressed.

"Looking back, I can tell you that every meaningful journey I have taken has almost always faced moments where my resources ran dry and my support systems failed. Only one thing always remained with me – the burning conviction that my bold dreams were worth the struggle."

Taking the students through his life journey, he mentioned how no banker was ready to fund Mudra port when the Adani Group first took up the project in a desolate marshland.

He said some of the bankers laughed and asked: "Mr Adani, how do you expect us to finance land that is under water?" And they were not wrong. Mundra had no access, no industry, no precedent, he added.

The Adani Group Chairman pointed out that this was precisely where his first philosophy of conviction over caution came into play.

He said that his conviction was not about asking the bankers to fund a piece of land, but asking them to fund a possibility no one had explored.

"Maps will only take you where someone has already been. But to build something truly new, you do not need a map. You need a compass that points to the possibilities. And my compass of conviction pointed me to Mundra. Today, that marshland is India’s largest commercial port," he pointed out.

--IANS

sps/vd