General_Jakarta Post_2006 02 23_L N Mittal

Good management leads to success

The report Mittal, industrialist and India's man of steel by AFP (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 1) brought back many pleasant memories of my close professional association with L N Mittal from 1984 to 1989. As a fellow Indian, I am extremely proud of the remarkable achievements of Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, better known to us as Niwasbabu than Lakshmi.
Born on Sept. 2 (not June 15 as written in AFP report), he was a struggling young entrepreneur owning just PT Ispat Indo, still referred to as the flagship of Mittal Steel.
Even in those early days I saw so many sterling qualities in Mittal. He was totally focused on his business, which took priority over everything else. Often he would visit the plant in the middle of night while returning from a social event.
In those struggling days, the company used to have many problems, but he always overcame them with his management skills. He was a great motivator, and while we got a pat on the back for achieving one of his seemingly impossible targets, he would always give us a new seemingly impossible target.
He was very good at spotting good ideas from whichever source: Be it from me, then his top technical man, or an officer or a worker. Good ideas would really fire him up and end in a brain-storming session leading to a time-bound action plan.
Mittal had great follow-up technique and possessed the necessary energy to see that the action plans would be executed on schedule. That is one of the many things I learned from him.
He had phenomenal memory and had great capability to retrieve effortlessly from it when necessary. Then a commerce graduate, he was totally at ease with engineering subjects, even relatively difficult ones like electrical engineering. He learned and remembered these inputs very well.
Though he was still a small entrepreneur when we parted, I could see the makings of a future icon. Closely associated with his first acquisition of ISCOTT (Caribbean Ispat), I could see his fantastic ability in understanding the complex issues and overcoming seemingly impossible situations. Mittal fully deserves his success.
I am very proud to have poured a few cubic meters of my own sweat-and-blood into the very foundation on which the present Mittal Steel Empire stands so majestically. Doubtlessly, he was the best CEO under whom I have ever worked.
K. B. KALE
Jakarta