Vineet Nayar

Vineet Nayar is the 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).

Nayar 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.

Nayar joined HCL in 1985 after earning his MBA from XLRI. In 1993, he founded Comnet and helped it grow into a $1.4 billion dominant leader in technology management services. In 2005, Nayar became president of HCL Technologies and served as the company’s CEO from 2007 till January 2013. During these years he led a remarkable turnaround of the company which saw it revenues and market cap grow by six times along winning awards for the “Most Democratic workplace in the world”, “Workforce Management Optimas Award for HR Innovation in US”, “Britain’s Top Employers” ,”Best Employer in Asia” and many more. Today he serves as the company’s vice chairman.

Nayar 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 2011/12 List‟ which is a definitive list of the world’s top 50 business thinkers. His ideas of organization transformation in form of his book Employees First, Customers Second has received rich praise from influencers like the late C.K. Prahalad, Tom Peters, Gary Hamel and Ram Charan and has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.

Nayar has served as governor of ICT, member of the Global Advisory Board of Women Leader's and Gender Parity Program as well as a community partner of the Forum of Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum. Nayar has also recently served as a “Mentor‟ (co-chair) of WEF’s 2011 Annual Meeting of New Champions Conference and currently serves on the Global Talent Competitiveness Index Advisory Board established by INSEAD and Human Capital Institute.

In 2004, he established Sampark Foundation (www.samparkfoundation.org), which aims to transform the lives of children, youth, and adults through large scale programs in education, social entrepreneurship, livelihoods and climate. His work in this area over the last decade has seen Nayar being cited in Forbes magazine's prestigious '48 Heroes of Philanthropy List 2013'. He has also been honored with “Beacon of Hope” award by 2009 Asha for Education, NYC/NJ Chapter.

Nayar spends his spare time reading and writing on management strategy. He hosts two blogs, a personal one and another for the Harvard Business Review, which can be found http://blogs.hbr.org/vineet-nayar/.