Vineet Nayar
Founder, Sampark Foundation & Former CEO, HCL Technologies
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 currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the HCL Corporation. He 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, Vineet 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.
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. 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.
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. Previously Vineet 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.
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 Vineet
being cited in Forbes magazine’s prestigious ‘48 Heroes of philanthropy List 2013‘.
Vineet spends his spare time reading and writing on management strategy. He hosts two blogs, a
personal one at www.vineetnayar.com and another for the Harvard Business Review, which can be
found here.