Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Vineet Nayar is former CEO of HCL Technologies and Founder of Sampark Foundation. He is also author of the highly acclaimed management book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down” (Harvard Business Press, June 2010).
Vineet is an acknowledged management visionary and a radical thinker who architected HCLT’s transformation from $0.7 billion in 2005 to a $4.7 billion Global Technology Services Company with over 85,000 employees spread across 32 countries in 2013. This radical transformation led Fortune to recognize HCL as “the world’s most modern management” while BusinessWeek  named HCLT as “one of the world’s most influential companies”; praise that has led HCL’s innovative management practices to be taught as a case study at both the Harvard Business School and London Business School.

Vineet was also recently chosen by Fortune Magazine for its first ever, global “Executive Dream Team” 2012 which has been described as an “all-star leadership” that “could coalesce and dominate in any industry”. This is in addition to his inclusion in the elite “Thinkers 50 List” in 2011-12 which is a definitive listing of the world’s top 50 business thinkers.
Vineet currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Leadership Institute and is on the Advisory Panel of the Global Talent Competitiveness Index established by INSEAD and Human Capital Institute and the Millions Learning Project led by the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard. He is also the Founding member of Brookings India and has been a Juror of Harvard Business Review’s prestigious McKinsey Prize, two years in a row.

In 2004, he established Sampark Foundation (www.samparkfoundation.org) with the aim of enabling large scale innovation in education, social entrepreneurship, livelihoods, and climate. His work in this area has seen Vineet being cited in Forbes magazine’s prestigious ‘48 Heroes of philanthropy List 2013’.

Employees First, Customers Second – turning conventional management wisdom upside down

In his speech Vineet Nayar will re-emphasize the need for “Employees First, Customers Second” Management style. Nayar believes that since employees are the closest interface with the customer they are the new value zone for companies: the place where value is truly created for customers and therefore organizational accountability should lie first with the employees, and not the other way around.
 
He would like to encourage Managers to:
· Create a sense of urgency in their teams by enabling employees to see the truth of the team’s current state as well as feel the “romance” of its possible future.

· Create a culture of trust by pushing the envelope of transparency in communication and information sharing.

· Invert the organizational hierarchy by making themselves accountable to the employees.

· Unlock the potential of the employees by fostering an entrepreneurial mindset, decentralizing decision-making and transferring the ownership of ‘change’ to the employees.
 
Nayar’s arguments will be focused on providing valuable insights for teams in need for transformation and managers seeking to realize their aspirations to grow faster and become self-propelled engines of change.