It Happened in India - India's Retail Moghul Speaks

This book is the autobiography of Kishore Biyani, the founder of the Future Group. Future Group is India's leading retail group, which owns Big Bazaar, Central, Pantaloons and Food Bazaar among others. I picked this up out of the urge to read something on contemporary India.

Kishore Biyani narrates the story of his rapid growth to being India's retail moghul. There are some distinctive traits in Biyani's style of business, which are mentioned umpteen number of times in the book. He talks about the need to develop solutions for the Indian customer and emphasizes the Indian way of doing things. Biyani is obviously a risk taker, who dreamt big and bet a lot on the success of the retail business. He also comes across as a street smart business who understands the Indian customers. He registered one of his men's wear brand as John Miller, to make people it was a foreign brand. This man is big on branding and marketing. He made the Hrithik-Roshan starrer 'Na Tum Jaano Na Hum' to promote Pantaloons! The Future Group's forays in the value segment of retail, developing niche retail formats, consumer finance, retail media, retail real estate are elaborated upon.

I don't think you can categorize autobiographies as good or bad. They are never completely factual, but are meant to present a point of view. The book is a bit of a marketing vehicle, potraying a sunny future for the Future group and putting in a lot of management cliches from design management to scenario planning to memetics. These were new to me, so those for informative bits. The book could be a fast read.

The best part of the book was a pointers to a few other books [:)]. Here are a few that interested me.
I too had a dream: Verghese Kurien
Made in America: Sam Walton