Leading Global Brands With Simple Education & Practical Knowledge

Mr. Anupam Bansal is Executive Director at Liberty Shoes

Hello and welcome to my third video in the Leadership Speaks series. In this interview, I speak with Mr.Anupam Bansal, Executive Director at Liberty Shoes.

INTRODUCTION

Founded in 1954, Liberty Shoes has been fashioning footwear for well over 65 years and is well known as India's favorite footwear brand. Mr. Bansal oversees Retail Sales at Liberty Shoes which markets its products globally through distributors, exclusive showrooms, and multi brand outlets. Today, with 16 footwear brands, over 4000 employees and Rs.665 crore annual turnover, India's iconic Liberty Shoes is a global brand present in 25 countries, and is the only Indian company to be among the top 5 manufacturers of leather footwear in the world with turnover exceeding 100 million US dollars.

Mr. Anupam Bansal is a very successful second generation entrepreneur who started his career at low level entry positions in the footwear industry and has grown to take on the leadership role. Liberty has always been an industry leader, and keeping the top position in face of rising competition has been Mr. Bansal's main challenge.

"Instead of fancy degrees, I preferred to Learn from Practical Experience and Direct Customer Interaction"

In today's chat, I found it very interesting how Mr. Bansal, who was never very studious or focused on book learning, he instead preferred to learn from practical experience and human interaction. One can learn valuable business lessons from travelling and meeting people, and often the best way to succeed is to simply be interested in finding out what your customers want.

So what more can we learn from Mr. Bansal's life as a Business Leader? Let's ask and find out in our 3rd episode of Leadership speaks.

KEY LEARNINGS

Here are the two main lessons I learnt from his leadership journey -

1st: The importance of constantly learning directly from consumers by interaction and Travel - Today, India and the global market is becoming increasingly diverse. Whether it is a rich and famous customer in cities or a very budget conscious buyer in rural India - there is no single solution to meet everyone's demands. If we stop meeting people and learning from them, we will quickly become out of touch with our consumers, and that would be very bad for business.

And 2nd: The best ideas and education comes from demanding customers. Book knowledge and MBA degrees are great to get started in your career, but that is not enough to achieve success. One should not be overconfident with our degrees, and neither should one be discouraged by our lack of top-class higher education. Long-term success depends more on our ability to constantly learn new things and adapt to real-world situations.

After every chat, I will be releasing a follow-up video and blog on key takeaways and learning from that episode - So please watch that video as well. You can share your own opinions in the comments section and I will do my best to respond to your comments.

This is the third in a series of my interviews with business leaders and people who have achieved success in life. My goal here is to learn from their experience and to find out what choices they have made in their lives that contributed to their success.

If you enjoyed watching episode 3, please do hit the like button and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'll be releasing my next Leadership Speaks interview very soon. Till then, Think Positive, have Big Goals and Focus on the Road Ahead.