studied physics at Kolkata University, engineering at IIT Kharagpur and attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He has been a professional manager from 1967. He has served as Chairman of Unilever Arabia, as MD of Brooke Bond Lipton and Vice Chairman of Hindustan Lever, as director of Tata Sons and several Tata companies. He serves as an independant director of Press Trust of India (PTI).
R Gopalakrishnan (Gopal to his friends) spends his time writing, advising, speaking and teaching
R Gopalakrishnan (Gopal to his friends) spends his time
Writing Advising Speaking Teaching
Writing : Gopal has been a newspaper columnist and continues to write every month for financial papers. He has also authored twenty-one books since 2007, the titles of which are:
- Chanakya and Sun Tzu: A Business Lens on Trade, Thought and Travel
- Jamsetji Tata: Powerful learnings for corporate success
- Embrace the Future: The Soft Science of Business Transformation
- Inside The Boardroom: How Behavior Trumps Rationality
- Pivots for Career Success: Unleashing People Power
- Wisdom for Start-ups from Grown-ups Discovering Corporate Ayurveda
- How Uday Kotak Built A Valuable Indian Bank
- How Harsh Mariwala ‘Groomed’ Marrico
- How Deepak Parekh Grew HDFC Group Exponentially
- How TCS Built an Industry for India
- How Anil Naik built L&T's Remarkable Growth Trajectory
- How Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw ‘Fermented’ Biocon
- Doodles on Leadership: Experiences within and Beyond Tata
- Crash: Lessons from the Entry& Exit of CEOs
- The Made-In-India Manager
- A Biography of Innovations: From Birth to Maturity
- The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons for Managers on Intuition
- When the Penny Drops: Learning What’s Not Taught
- What the CEO Really Wants from You: The 4 A’s for Managerial Success
- A Comma in a Sentence: Extraordinary Change in an Ordinary Family Over Six Generations
- Six Lenses: Vignettes of Success, Career and Relationships
Advising : Gopal has been a corporate leader for 59 years: 31 in Unilever, 18 in Tata, and over a decade as an author and commentator. He served in Jeddah as Chairman of Unilever Arabia, in Bangalore as Managing Director of Brooke Bond Lipton and Vice Chairman of Hindustan Lever, and as director of Tata Sons. Apart from serving as a director on the TATA parent board, Tata Sons, and he serves as an independent director of Press Trust of India (PTI). Gopal mentors few start-ups. He is actively engaged in both instructional and inspirational speaking.
Speaking : Gopal is an international speaker and is actively engaged in both instructional and inspirational speaking. Over the last few years, he has spoken at conferences, both internationally and in India
- Speeches: Business in India, Market and Customers, Governance and Strategy, Organisation and People, Innovation
- Thought Classes: Reflective leadership, Putting human back into relationships, Manager to transformers, Innovation - barriers and triggers
Teaching : Gopal studied physics at St Xavier’s Kolkata, engineering at IIT Kharagpur and attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He is a past president of the All India Management Association. Gopal has a wide repertoire of subjects, especially – Business in India, Markets and Customers, Governance and Strategy, Organization and People, and Innovation. He relies on practical examples, rich with anecdotes rather than theory or analytical frame works. He has taught an unusual course at B school titled “LWNT – learning what nobody teaches”
