Ramabadran Gopalakrishnan is an Indian businessman and author. Until his retirement he was an executive director of Tata Sons Ltd and served on the boards of Tata Power, Tata Technologies, AkzoNobel India, Castrol India and ABP Pvt. Ltd. Before joining Tata he was Vice Chairman of Hindustan Lever, the Indian subsidiary of Unilever plc.
Gopalakrishnan earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from St Xavier’s College, Calcutta University, a bachelor’s degree in Electronics from IIT Kharagpur in 1967 and did a six-week Advanced Management Programme from Harvard Business School, United States.
He has lived and worked in India, the UK and Saudi Arabia. He began his career in 1967 as a computer analyst with Hindustan Lever. He worked in the marketing function before moving to general management. During his years with Unilever, he was based in Jeddah as CEO of the Arabia unit; later, he was managing director of Brooke Bond Lipton India and then vice-chairman with Hindustan Lever. He has been president of the All India Management Association.
He has also authored twenty books since 2007, the titles of which are,
1.Jamsetji Tata: Powerful learnings for corporate success
2. Embrace the Future: The Soft Science of Business Transformation
3. Inside The Boardroom: How Behaviour Trumps Rationality
4. Pivots For Career Success: Unleashing People Power
5. Wisdom For Start-ups from Grown-ups Discovering Corporate Ayurveda
6.How Uday Kotak Built A Valuable Indian Bank
7.HowHarsh Mariwala ‘Groomed’Marico
8.How Deepak Parekh Grew HDFC Group Exponentially
9. How Anil Naik built L&T’s Remarkable Growth Trajectory
10.How Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw ‘Fermented’ Biocon
11.HowTCS Built an Industry for India
12. Doodles on Leadership: Experiences within and Beyond Tata
13.Crash: Lessons from the Entry& Exit of CEOs
14.The Made-In-India Manager
15.A Biography of Innovations: From Birth to Maturity
16. Six Lenses: Vignettes of Success, Career and Relationships
17. A Comma in a Sentence: Extraordinary Change in an Ordinary Family Over Six Generations
18. What the CEO Really Wants from You: The 4 A’s for Managerial Success
19.When the Penny Drops:Learning What’s Not Taught
20. The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons for Managers on Intuition
