Vineet Nayar is Founder and Chairman of Sampark Foundation and former CEO of HCL Technologies. He is also author of the highly acclaimed management book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down.

With ‘Innovation led large scale social change’ as the central idea, Nayar co-founded Sampark Foundation with his wife, Anupama Nayar. 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. Nayar has been cited by Forbes in its '48 Heroes of philanthropy List 2016’ and by Fortune for the pedagogical innovations the Foundation has brought into classrooms.  

Nayar is also an acknowledged management visionary and a radical thinker who orchestrated HCLT’s transformation from $0.7 billion in 2005 to a $4.7 billion Global Technology Services Company with over 85,000 employees across 32 countries in 2013. This radical transformation led Fortune to recognise HCL as “the world’s most modern management” while BusinessWeek named HCLT as “one of the world’s most influential companies”; which led HCL’s innovative management practices to be taught as a case study at both the Harvard Business School and London Business School.  

Nayar currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Leadership Institute and Fortune 1000 companies. He also mentors 18 technology lead startups and is on the Advisory Board of 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.