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Krishnamurthy's leadership has shown that be can achieve stupendous taske. If for any reason at all be fails, virtually the entire public sector will have to be written off for the nect twenty years,' noted the panel that cbose V. Krishnamurthy as the Business India Businessman of the Year in 1987.

Management of a business enterprise in India is a lot more diffcult than in other countries. there are far more uncertainties that an Indian manager has to encounter that an while performing his tasks-even more so in state-owned companies, often synonymous with inefficiency, than in private ones. But Krishnamurthy, through his exemplary stewardship of there enterprises, that holds lessons for managers everywhere, emerged as the pride of India's public sector in the 1970s and 1980s.

At Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, he saved the company from imminent disintegration and dispelled Indira Gandhi's impression that Indian managers did not have the ability to manage large organizations. At Maruti, he was given the responsibility of not just manufacturing a car but of modernizing the automoblie industry itself. Steel Authority of India Limited was almost a sunset company when he took over, but he shook up the organization from its very foundations and put it back in a leadership position.

At The Helm is the story of how a boy from the small village of Karuveli in Tamil Nadu starts our as a teachnician at airfields during the Second World War but goes on to script the biggest success stories of young India's fledgling public sector over the next five decades.