Mr. R. Gopalakrishnan, has served in several Blue Chip Companies, such as Unilever and Tata in key positions across his career spanning over five decades. Apart from serving as a Director on the TATA parent board, Tata Sons, he also worked with several group companies and is an independent director of Castrol India and Hemas Holdings PLC, Sri Lanka. He was the president of the All India Management Association.
Mr. Gopalakrishnan is an international speaker and is actively engaged in both instructional and inspirational speaking and has addressed several conferences, both international and India over the past years. He has been a newspaper columnist and continues to write for financial papers. He has also authored eight books since 2007. Mr. Gopalakrishnan holds an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and has attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
Mr. Bharat Puri has helmed numerous successes during his tenure at leading Indian and Global companies. He started his career with Asian Paints in 1982 and rose to the position of General Manager – Sales & Marketing. He has subsequently held key portfolios in Cadbury where he was in charge of Strategy, Marketing and Sales.
From then onward, a series of senior leadership positions at the country, region and global level shaped his career. Mr. Bharat Puri has completed his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Mr Vivek Sunder has been leading Swiggy’s business operations since July 2018. He spearheaded the effort to scale the company across cities, while still continuing to operate as a nimble startup. Prior to that, he has been associated with Procter and Gamble for about 20 years in various roles. Mr. Sunder is passionate about building organisational capabilities and has worked with diverse teams spanning more than twenty nationalities in varied roles. He has been an early adapter and innovator of big data/ analytics across many sales & marketing roles.
He is a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kolkata, where he specialised in marketing, finance and economics, and prior to that studied Computer Engineering from Delhi University. He is a guest lecturer at his alma mater IIM-C, as well at other premier B-schools across the world where he teaches and shares business expertise.
Ms. Sonali Dhawan, CMO P&G, India Subcontinent, has over twenty years of experience in Business Leadership and Brand Management. She currently heads the Fabric Care business for P&G across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. She is appointed to the Board of Directors for Gillette India Ltd and PGHH India Ltd as the Non-Executive Director.
Ms. Dhawan was associated with the development of multiple socially relevant award-winning campaigns, including Cannes award winners: Ariel #SharetheLoad; Whisper #TouchthePickle and Vicks #TouchofCare. She was awarded the ‘Top Woman Achievers of 2017’ by AsiaOne magazine and ‘CMO of the year’ by exchange4media in the category of Home products in 2015. She is sixth on the list of IMPACT’s ‘50 Most Influential Women’ in Marketing and Media for the last two years. She also leads the CSR programme for P&G India-‘Shiksha’, which has won multiple awards – including the ‘Best CSR Program’ award by Lokmat in 2017-18.
Ms. Dhawan is an alumnus of renowned institutes like Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University and IIM, Ahmedabad.
Dr. Ranjan Banerjee brings with him a rare combination of extensive business, corporate training, academic and consulting experience and insight. Dr. Banerjee holds a BTech from IIT Mumbai, an MBA from IIM Kolkata and a PhD in Management from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USA. His research has been presented at the University of Michigan, Harvard Business School, London Business School, University of Texas at Dallas, Indiana University etc. His doctoral thesis won a global award for the best dissertation in B2B marketing from the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, Penn State University, USA. Dr. Banerjee has worked for leading FMCG companies like Asian Paints, Vadilal and Hindustan Unilever. Dr. Banerjee has also consulted for top Indian and multinational companies like BASF, Legrand, Vodafone, AXA, Philips, Madura Garments, etc. He was the Group COO of Insta Worldwide.
Prior to joining SPJIMR, Dr. Banerjee has also taught at prestigious B-schools like the Carlson School, University of Minnesota, SMU Singapore, IIM Kolkata and Great Lakes. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review online. He has led the workshop for international deans at the GMAC conference in Miami, USA and was a speaker at the GBSN conference in Manila, and the EFMD conference in Phuket. Dr Banerjee was one of the two panelists at a Korn Ferry thought leadership series in
Dr. Suranjan Das’s areas of interest cover statistics, operations research, marketing analytics and design thinking & innovation. He has taught for over 24 years in regular MBA programmes in some of the premier Business Schools in India - IIML, IIMC, IIMI, IIMN as a guest faculty. He has taught across MBA programmes in Belgium, Canada, Dubai, Netherlands, Singapore and Sydney. He also conducted several Management Development Programmes for corporate and social sectors.
Dr. Das has participated and presented papers in seminars and conferences in India and abroad. He has taken part in faculty exchange programmes in Belgium and Netherlands and has worked in EU and World Bank projects on technology and knowledge management. He has been a PhD guide and evaluator with BITS Pilani and IIT Bombay and mentored several PhD students. He was on the National Jury to select the best Design Thinking projects under the Design For Change programme for high schools.
Knowledge Resources
Srinivas Venkatraman is the Founder-CEO and Lead Researcher of Illumine Knowledge Resources. Prior to Illumine he co-founded and co-led INFAC – a company that pioneered the production of industry reports. Srinivas is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad.
He began his career in 1989 as a knowledge entrepreneur and went on to set up Illumine in the form of a design and action research lab. Mr Venkatraman experimented with how knowledge can be used as a catalyst for creating sustainable growth/evolution in human systems. Since 2017, he has also been engaged in reflecting on his extensive learnings by organising and systematising his work in to a form that is more widely accessible.
