Anil Agarwal on Turnaround Management

The Hindustan Zinc turnaround is, in Agarwal's telling, the company's signature operational story. Acquired when reserves were estimated at five years and output at 150,000 tonnes of zinc annually, Vedanta installed top talent and lifted output roughly sevenfold to one million tonnes while extending reserves to 40 years — and added close to 1,000 tonnes of silver production from scratch.

Despite Vedanta's portfolio diversity — zinc, lead, silver, copper, iron ore, aluminium, power, oil and gas across multiple continents — Agarwal has insisted on operational simplicity: strong leaders in the field, a flat structure, and trust as the operating system. The discipline of refusing to add organizational complexity has been, in his view, the precondition for surviving commodity cycles.