Vineet Nayar

Vineet Nayar is Founder Chairman of Sampark Foundation and former CEO of HCL Technologies (click here for wiki Profile) and author of the highly acclaimed management bestseller, “Employees First, Customer Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down”(Harvard Business Press, June 2010).

A management visionary and radical thinker, Vineet led the transformation of HCL Technologies into one of India’s fastest-growing global information technology service company, which under his leadership grew from a $0.7 billion in 2005 to a $4.7 billion global technology service company with over 85,000 employees across 32 countries by 2013. This radical transformation led Fortune to recognise HCLT as “the world’s most modern management”, while Business Week named HCLT as“one of the world’s most influential companies”.

His innovative management practices at HCLT were taught as a case study at both the Harvard Business School and London Business School.

Vineet was chosen by Fortune magazine for its first ever global Executive Dream Team, and also found a place on the elite Thinkers 50 List. His innovative, transformative ideas have received fulsome praise from influencers like late C. K. Prahalad, Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, and Ram Charan.

Vineet quit HCLT in 2013 to focus on Sampark Foundation, which he co-founded with his wife Anupama Nayar, to catalyse ‘large-scale transformation in primary education through frugal innovation’. Today Sampark Foundation is improving learning outcomes among 7 million children studying in 76,000 rural schools across 6 states in India: Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh at less than $1 per child per annum. This large-scale transformation is now a ‘case study’ at Harvard Business School.

Vineet has been cited by Forbes in its ‘Heroes of Philanthropy List 2016’ and also as a ‘Global Thinker 2016’, along with his wife, by Foreign Policy magazine for ‘unplugging technology so kids can learn’.

Vineet joined HCL in 1985 after earning his MBA from XLRI. In 1993, he founded Comnet, a technology start-up, where he developed and put to practice may of the ideas (he later described in his book), transforming it into a multi-billion-dollar business. In 2005, he became president, and in 2007, the CEO of HCL Technologies, where over the next five years, he spearheaded a remarkable turnaround.

Vineet currently serves as a Senior Advisor to ChrysCapital, McKinsey Leadership Institute and many Fortune 1000 companies. He is on the Advisory Board of the Millions Learning project led by the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gilliard, and has served as Governor of ICT; member of the Global Advisory Board of Women Leaders and Gender Parity Program at the World Economic Forum. And, as a mentor to multiple technology start-ups, he continues to follow his passion of turning conventional management wisdom, upside down.