Vineet Nayar, DBA, Founder, Sampark Foundation, Former CEO, HCL Technologies

Tues 9/30, 11:00am – 12:00pm EST
Forum: Harnessing Digital Technology

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.

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Michael Schrage, Research Fellow, MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business

Tues 9/30, 2pm – 3pm EST
Forum: Harnessing Digital Technology

Michael Schrage examines the various roles of models, prototypes, and simulations as collaborative media for innovation risk management. He has served as an advisor on innovation issues and investments to major firms, including Mars, Procter & Gamble, Google, Intel, BT, Siemens, NASDAQ, IBM, and Alcoa.

In addition, Schrage has advised segments of the national security community on cyberconflict and cybersecurity issues. He has presented workshops on design experimentation and innovation risk for businesses, organizations, and executive education programs worldwide. Along with running summer workshops on future technologies for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, he has served on the technical advisory committee of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. In collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Schrage helped launch a series of workshops sponsored by the Department of Defense on federal complex systems procurement. In 2007, he served as a judge for the Industrial Designers Society of America’s global International Design Excellence Awards.

Schrage authored the lead chapter on governance in complex systems acquisition in Organizing for a Complex World (CSIS 2009). He has been a contributor to such prestigious publications as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal,strategy+business, IEEE Software, and the Design Management Journal. In his best-selling book,Serious Play (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Schrage explores the culture, economics, and future of prototyping. His next book, Getting Beyond Ideas (Wiley), is forthcoming in 2010.

See other VIP guest from MIT Sloan Questrom School of Business: David Schmittlein
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Paul LeBlanc, PhD, President, Southern New Hampshire University

Thurs 10/2, 9am – 10am EST
Forum: Harnessing Digital Technology

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU).  Under the ten years of Paul’s direction, SNHU has more than quadrupled in size and is the largest provider of online higher education in New England, one of the five largest in the country, and the first to have a full competency-based degree program untethered to the credit hour or classes  approved by a regional accreditor and the US Department of Education.  In 2012 the university was #12 on Fast Company magazine’s “World’s Fifty Most Innovative Companies” list and was the only university included.  Paul won a New England Higher Education Excellence Award in 2012 and had repeatedly been named one of “New Hampshire’s Most Influential People” by New Hampshire Business Review.  In 2012 Forbes Magazine listed him as one of its 15 “Classroom Revolutionaries,” he was featured on Bloomberg TV’s “Innovators” series, and Fast Company included him in its “1000 Most Creative People” List.  He speaks frequently to industry, IHEs, associations, and other higher education stakeholders and often appears in the media.

Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college, and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD).  From 1993 to 1996 he directed a technology start up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003, and became President of SNHU in 2003.  His wife Patricia is an attorney and their daughter Emma is a Rhodes Scholar completing a D.Phil at Oxford University.  Younger daughter Hannah is completing her PhD at Stanford University.  Annie, their black Labrador Retriever, studies sleeping on the couch and ways to steal food from the counter tops.

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