Vineet Nayar is an Indian business executive, author and philanthropist. He is the former Chief Executive Officer of HCL Technologies (2007–13), Founder Chairman & CEO of Sampark Foundation and author of critically acclaimed management book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down” (Harvard Business Press, June 2010). which has sold 100,000+ copies.
Nayar was born and spent most of his childhood in Pantnagar, a town in the foothill of Himalayas in state of Uttarakhand. He completed his schooling from Campus School Pantnagar. He studied for a B.Tech in mechanical engineering from College of Technology of G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology and a Masters in Business Management at the XLRI- Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur in India.
Currently, Nayar serves as a Senior Advisor to HCL Corporation. He joined HCL in 1985 after earning his MBA from XLRI. In 1993, he founded Comnet, which grew into a $1 billion dominant leader in Technology Management business. In 2005, Vineet became President of HCL Technologies and served as the company’s CEO from 2007 until January 2013. During these years he helped it grow revenues and market cap by six times which led HCL to win 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.
Nayar was 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‟ which is a list of the world’s top 50 business thinkers.
He 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. Vineet has also served as a “Mentor‟ (Co-Chair) of WEF’s 2011 Annual Meeting of New Champions conference.
Nayar narrated the story of his company’s success in the book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), and also outlined the intellectual basis for transformation and lessons learned. The book has been praised by some of the world’s leading business leaders including the late C.K. Prahalad, Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, Ram Charan, and Victor Fung.
In 2005, Vineet co-founded Sampark Foundation with his wife Anupama Nayar with “innovation led large scale social change” as the central idea. Today, Sampark Foundation is transforming learning outcomes of 3 million children studying in 50,000 schools in Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Ladakh; making it one of the world’s largest primary school transformation initiatives by a Foundation.
For his social philanthropy, Vineet has been cited by Forbes Magazine in its “48 Heroes of Philanthropy List 2016” and by Fortune for the pedagogical innovations the Foundation has brought into classrooms. He has also been honored with the “Beacon of Hope” award by the 2009 Asha for education, NYC/NJ Chapter.
