R Gopalakrishnan

Executive in Residence

A corporate leader for 55 years, Mr R Gopalakrishnan has served as the Chairman of Unilever Arabia; Managing Director of Brooke Bond Lipton; Vice Chairman of Hindustan Lever and Director on the Tata parent board, Tata Sons, as well as several other Tata companies. He is an independent director and non-executive chairman of Castrol India and an independent director of Press Trust of India (PTI). He also serves as Distinguished Professor at IIT Kharagpur.

An erstwhile newspaper columnist, he continues to write every month for financial papers and has authored several books. He actively engages in both instructional and inspirational speaking worldwide and in India. 

Mr. Gopalakrishnan has a wide repertoire of subjects like Business in India, Markets and Customers, Governance and Strategy, Organisation and People, and Innovation. He relies on practical examples, rich with anecdotes rather than theory or analytical frameworks. He is known for his unusual management course titled “LWNT – learning what nobody teaches”.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan studied physics at Kolkata University, engineering at IIT Kharagpur and attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

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