From pioneering cable TV in India to manufacturing toothbrushes and establishing a brand like UTV that redefined the media industry, Ronnie Screwvala is the man who always aspired for excellence. In his maiden book, he decodes a ‘dream’ and opens up on his failures. In a candid chat with Divya Kaushik, he shares how he struck a deal with Rupert Murdoch and how he made UTV a huge success, despite starting it on an unambitious note
How did the idea of the book come acrossIJ Were you inspired by any of your readingsIJ
Ever since I moved out of media and entertainment, after divesting my stake in UTV to Walt Disney, I have been interacting with a lot of entrepreneurs about investments and many other things to understand how the ecosystem has changed in the last 20 years. More than readings, it was my interactions that triggered the idea to write the book. I realised that not much has changed in the last 20 years, apart from the fact that we now have a few more role models to look up to and there’s a lot more media attention to entrepreneurship, thanks to new economy companies. But for most people in India entrepreneurship is still a question of ‘to do’ or ‘not to do’ it. Entrepreneurship is not an aspirational thing in India. Most people in our society think that if one can’t get a good job then he can become an entrepreneur. Starting something on your own is not even an option, it’s considered a lower option. Though this is not the case with family businesses. Inheriting a business and going forward with it is another thing and we have a large legacy of family businesses in India.
The socio economic climate is not allowing youngsters to feel they need to have something of their own because everyone around them says, ‘Oh! So you didn’t have a good job so you turned to entrepreneurship’ rather than saying that it was your natural choice. That mindset has to change otherwise we won’t get a massive inflow of first generation entrepreneurs. We think we are a great entrepreneurial nation because we have so many family businesses. But I don’t think today’s generation necessarily identifies with family businesses because the whole spectrum of economy has changed, how businesses were built then has changed now.
The second factor that influences entrepreneurship in India is lack of risk-bearing attitude and more than that it is the fear of failure. I think we don’t talk about our failures and when it is talked about people will either pounce on it or it is very negative. Anyway we have a crab mentality in our country, whenever someone tries to do something, there will be ten people to pull him down. So fear of failure is very acute. A fair amount of my book is about sharing failures. My first motivation was to share opinions with first generation entrepreneurs.
How easy was it for you to talk about failuresIJ
It was very easy. It’s very important to talk about them. In the entire 20 years that I have grown up, built teams in various companies, I have gone out of my way to cultivate an open culture. You can’t have that open environment if you can’t discuss failures. When the team members know that their founder identifies a ruined case and knows how to get on from there, that creates a completely different culture in the organisation. Talking about failures, understanding failures, acknowledging failures, letting your team members know that it is okay to make mistakes, as long as you don’t make it second time, is important. Writing about failures came easily to me and that was one of my key motivations to write the book. My first line starts with failure in the book, ‘Failure fascinates and intrigues me.’ There is one chapter about failures but overall I have kept harping on the fact that it is absolutely fine to fail. Knowing that you will fail, not once but twice, thrice or multiple times, and it is fine, is therapeutic. I am not saying that one should aspire to fail, I am only attempting to say that failures should be cool and acceptable.
From pioneering cable TV in India in 1980s to manufacturing toothbrushes and establishing UTV, you ventured into diverse businesses. What guided you throughoutIJ
When you are thrown in the deep end, you have no option but to figure out how to survive and even if you are half smart, you will survive. So most of the early experiences were like being in the deep end and working out on survival mechanism. One of the anecdotes that I share in the book was how I learnt swimming when I was about eight or ten. For five days I was struggling with the teacher and on the sixth day my father threw me in water. For a few minutes I bobbed up and down and thought I will die but ultimately I survived and I learnt how to swim. My father was fully confident that when I will have no help in water, I will have to swim. I learnt two things that day — one is that even if you are half smart, you survive and second, when you have someone showing confidence in you, you are encouraged. These are important moments in life that form the sum of your thinking.
When I got into some of my early businesses, cable TV or toothbrushes, those were just opportunities that were not pre-planned. I was quite excited about cable TV, toothbrushes just happened as an opportunity. There was a factory somewhere in UK, on a chance visit with someone I saw some machines in the scarp there. I didn’t have a clue of that industry but I just felt that those machines would have a life of 20 years in India. That was a different time in India then. I came back and built an ecosystem, looked out for people for manufacturing toothbrushes and told them that I have got this phenomenal technology that no one else has. later in the decade, that business, lazer Brushes, grew to be one of the largest of the kind in India. It was some instinct guiding me. The same happened when we were doing a deal with Rupert Murdoch. One of his team members was on his visit to India and he came to our basement office, had a chat and left. Couple of days later we got a call from his UK office asking if I could go for a discussion.
At night I went, thinking it will be a conversation. They were eight people in the room and I was alone. They were ready to do the deal. I could have either gone away, saying I am not prepared (they asked me if I want to come back), or seized the deal. I knew if I would come back another day the momentum would be gone because the large organisations, you have to grab the opportunity. I took it up. What I learnt was that one has to get on with opportunities. A lot of people in today’s generation mull too much, pondering ‘should I’ or ‘should I not.’ I am not advocating that every time just jump off the cliff but do a bit of research and then get on with your gut feeling. Move forward because you never get all the answers at the starting point. If you think you will get all the answers before you start you are kidding yourself and then opportunity will pass. Too much pondering is not a good idea. Most people think let’s try and if we will fail, we will do this, that is a recipe for disaster. If you say that if nothing happens in so and so time, you will get into a job, you are heading for a disaster. You are actually looking at an exit without even making a beginning. If you are making a deal with the exit plan and parachute strapped on you, nothing’s going to work.
So do you mostly go with your instinctIJ
When you are in an absolutely nascent industry, the only thing that you can think about is not following the herd. Today when everyone is looking at e-commerce and technology, there is a lot of herd following. There is a phrase in the book that says that if you are following the herd, the maximum you see is the bum of the person in front, that can’t be too much of a visionary thing. Can itIJ When you are in a completely new industry, two things can happen. One is that you will be extremely intimidated and step back or say that I will go ahead and think I am on the right way.
Tell us about the creation of a brand like UTV that changed the course of film and television business in India.
We started off quite unambitiously with just a few ad films, documentary and one show on Doordarshan. When we started we wanted to create TV programmes for various channels. Initially I wanted to look at scale and that pushed the envelope at every stage as I was looking for opportunities where one would be able to break out. So doing a soap opera was a break out. Doing 10 shows for Zee TV when it launched was a break out. Even at that early stage, 1992-93-94, those were important scale moments. If you think of scale you get somewhere and that was my trigger. Second important thing that worked for us was an early and very strong understanding of consumers. I think if one has a certain amount of creative brain and a certain amount of commerce brain, one can know his consumers in a given time. Whether you are making a daily show or a movie like Rang De Basanti, you need to get a sense of youth’s anxiousness. So the success of UTV was the combination of my obsession for scale and understanding the consumer constantly. I think that’s also one of the key reasons for our continued stay in the movie business.
In the TV section, we were breaking the mould by doing a daily soap when nobody had even thought about it because there were no writers. There was no concept of having a writer who could do a soap daily, which meant five different writers would be writing five episodes. For the audience to come back to Shanti every afternoon we needed a certain continuity. So setting the team was same as setting any other manufacturing unit. But these are the set ups that you need to do from time to time. In the media business, there are many ups and downs. One of the shows we were doing for Doordarshan during the early days was pulled off. It was called Parliamentary Quiz and in the book I have three pages on that. At that stage we had produced 26 episodes and we suffered a loss. On that day the company was bankrupt. I had to come back to talk to 35 people to explain that this is it, salaries will be delayed but we will go out with gusto and we will solve the problem by doing ads, documentaries. So when you do this, a culture gets formed in a company. When 35 people stand behind you during a tough time, a complete sense of ownership and commitment comes to the company. I start the book by talking about my first movie called Dil Ke Jharokhe Main. It was a complete flop. When I saw it I didn’t know what to think of it. I was an outsider, I followed formulas everybody told me. But then what after thatIJ In business, failure can be a stronger motivator than success. The failure is not the end of the road, get that failure out of people’s mind and move on.
How should one deal with failuresIJ
Recalibrate your brain, sit down with yourself and ask yourself what is your worst case scenario.
You have to spend a bit of time on your worst case scenario. Once your brain is attuned to worst case scenario and if you can live with that for the next one day, your mind starts working from there onwards.
What keeps you going during tough timesIJ
I believe that you need to stay strong and keep going. Everybody tells me that you sold businesses but I say that how many people have remained in the media business for 22 years, not many. Many people have gone as they saw failures and they went away. We stayed here and overall our marks are 5.5 out of 10, which I consider a success. We just stayed and took our failures as setbacks and moved forward and that is what matters.
How did theatre train youIJ
It was a hobby that attracted me to the media and entertainment business. It was an important part of my life. My early stage creativity came from there. It gave me a lot of confidence, clarity of thought and phenomenal communication skills. I think for any leader communication skills are very important. I don’t mean elocution skills, you don’t need the best language to speak. If you are a bad communicator, 50 per cent of your impact will get lost as a leader.
As a leader your job is to inspire. If you draw parallels with India, the greatest communicators are those who have got people together and gone forward. Today we are feeling positive because we have a great leader like Mr Narendra Modi who is eloquent. You look up to him and you start feeling positive because he is saying, ‘It can be done.’
Is your book an autobiography with a messageIJ
The lessons are all generic. It is not an autobiography, I have not chronologically listed my life anecdotes. I have only connected my real-life experiences to the message of the book. It is about ten messages that I want to talk about being an outsider. What is brand-building, how do you look for trends and what is luck are some of the questions that the book answers. There is whole chapter on luck. You can’t wait for that lucky moment, you have to create your own opportunities. I have not written a chapter on TV or films. It is a much more a third person book. I am not an author.
The book is written in a tonality like I am talking to someone. It’s not about what to do and what not to do.
You have devised a strong and effective marketing campaign for the book...
The reason I wanted to write a book was to reach to the masses. When I finished the book I decided that I want to market it like a maniac. Nobody has made a TV commercial for a book in India, so many people said that you are redefining publishing industry, I said I am not, to me it was absolutely natural. It was my thing that I wanted to share. I did an eight-city research of 500 people and figured out that 50 per cent of those 500 have not heard of me, 25 per cent knew nothing but the name Screwvala and not what I do and other 20 per cent knew me as a producer, so I did not want to take anything for granted. I don’t want to sell the book just to media, agencies and industry people. I want to reach half a million at one stage, which will be a record. So like everything else that we create, if we don’t market it well what is the point of creating it.