TCS HR director (UK & Ireland), Nupur Mallick, a TCSer since 1997, replaces S. Padmanabhan as the HR chief of Tata Sons. will replace Padmanabhan, who has been handling the HR portfolio for the past 18 months, was given this responsibility following N. S. Rajan’s resignation in the wake of Tata Sons removing Cyrus Mistry from the chairman’s post in October 2016. Rajan was hired by Mistry in 2013. Mallick’s proposed appointment highlights Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran’s move to strengthen his leadership team. Chandrasekaran has been building up a support system comprising external hires and candidates from TCS where he was the CEO before becoming the chairman of Tata Sons last year. Old Tata guards have been unhappy that key portfolios at Tata Sons have been allocated to new recruits with some even complaining to Ratan Tata about the change in culture. Padmanabhan will retire from Tata Sons on turning 60 this May under the company’s HR policy. Besides heading HR, Padmanabhan oversees ethics and sustainability at Tata Sons following the recent exit of Rajan. Padmanabhan is also the chairman of Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG), a division of Tata Sons. It is unclear who will be his successor at TBExG. However, Padmanabhan, who has been with the group for 36 years, will continue to be on the board of Tata companies such as Tata Chemicals as the retirement age for non-executive directors is 70 years.
Sachin Gupte is the new Head of Human Resources of Standard Chartered Bank, India. He takes charge from William Paul who retired after having a stint of almost a decade with the Bank. Prior to this appointment, Gupte was the Head of Human Resources, Global Banking (GB) and Transaction Banking (TB) at Standard Chartered. He has 16 years of service in the Bank holding various HR roles in Mumbai, London, Chennai and Singapore and has been instrumental in the restructure within GB and TB and also designed and implemented the talent strategy for TB. He will report to Zarin Daruwala, India, CEO and Peter Hatt, Regional Head, HR, ASEAN & South Asia and Global Head, HR, Private & Commercial Banking.
Susheel Balakrishnan joins Ola as the Chief People Officer. The post has been vacant for a while since Yugantar Saikia made his exit from the company. Balakrishnan, an alumnus of TISS Mumbai, was based out of Dubai and West Asia for the last 14 years. Having worked with Yum Restaurants MENAPak for 11 years, his last designation was that of chief people officer. Balakrishnan is a strong, commercially- oriented human resources professional skilled in transformation, business partnership, HR consulting, culture change, and executive coaching. Post his stint at Yum Restaurants, Balakrishnan dabbled in several consulting assignments. Based out of Dubai, he was business development director at Food Labs. Simultaneously, he was executive board member of Future Legends Cricket Academy and managing partner of 720 Transform Consulting. He spent a large part of his career (12 years) with P&G. He started in 1991 and his last designation was that of HR associate director. “Balakrishnan will head HR across the Ola group. He has successfully led organisation and culture-change efforts that have become global best practices, in roles that have impacted 3,000 to 30,000 employees,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder & CEO, Ola Cabs.
Giving a boost to his morale, SAP promoted Bhuvaneswar Naik to the position of vice president - HR at the Office of the CEO. Naik, who was the head of global talent management and a member of the global HR leadership team, will also lead HR for SAP Leonardo, which is the European multinational company’s new digital innovation system and has moved to Palo Alto, California in the Silicon Valley. Naik led a strategic global transformation programme disrupting performance management through eliminated performance ratings to build a culture of continuous dialogue. He was also involved in co-innovating and developing an app with SAP’s Success factors for future deployment to customers. He has had a stint with SAP in the past, from 1996 to 2005. In 2015, Naik moved into SAP and was based in Bengaluru as its head - HR, India and was also a board member of SAP Labs India. But his earlier move into the company was in the 2010, where he was the vice president – people processes, Asia Pacific at Capgemini. He has ample experience as he has worked with brands such as Yahoo, SE Technologies and the Taj Group of hotels.
This can happen only with Indian cricket. After bagging a cheque of Rs.16347.50 crore for global media rights for a five-year period for the Indian Premier League (IPL) from Star India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) got richer by yet another big money as they got a cheque of $944m (Rs.6138 crore) for bilateral rights for Indian cricket during the same period. It was just in the month of September 2017 that BCCI struck a deal and now it is Disney’s newly-acquired India arm, Star India Pvt Ltd, who tore a cheque for $944m (Rs.6138 crore) to bag the rights for Indian cricket. In the process, Star India has now committed a massive $3.36b (Rs.22,485.5 crore) to Indian cricket between now and FY 2022-23. In what turned out to be a fierce online bidding process with its closest rival Sony Pictures Network (SPN), Star eventually bid Rs.19.41 crore more to take home the BCCI rights. The former Rupert Murdoch’s Fox-led India arm—which has now been taken over by Walt Disney, following a $54b deal in late 2017—will pay BCCI a little in excess of Rs.60 crore (Rs.60.176 crore, to be precise) per match. SPN and Reliance Jio Infocomm were the other bidders in the fray. This is the fourth deal struck by BCCI after the title rights, jersey rights, IPL and now the bilateral series rights. In the latest deal, Star listed the per match value for each of the five years of the deal as follows: Rs.46 crore (per match in year one), 47 crore (year two), 46.5 crore (year three), 77.4 crore (year four) and 78.9 crore (year five), respectively. To give an idea of what this investment may mean from a global perspective, Major League Baseball (MLB), one of the world’s biggest sports properties, pays close to Rs.52 crore per game.
Honda Cars India has appointed Gaku Nakanishi as its new president and CEO. Two new directors have also been appointed to drive the company’s sales and marketing function. Nakanishi, before taking charge at Honda Cars India, served as president and CEO of Honda Automobile Thailand since 2015. He has worked with Honda Motor Co. for nearly 30 years and in many international markets including North America, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, CIS, the Middle East and Africa. Rajesh Goel, who has been associated with Honda Cars India for over 22 years, has been appointed senior vice-president and director (Sales and Marketing). Over the past few years, he has headed several critical functions, including purchase and quality. During his career at Honda, he has had two overseas long-term assignments in Japan in 2001 and again in 2015. In his latest assignment, he served as general manager in charge of Purchasing Division 2 (Worldwide), in Honda Motor Co. in Japan since 2015 with responsibility for powertrain and electric/electronic components. Makoto Hyoda, who has been in India since April 2017, has been elevated as director (sales and marketing), from the erstwhile position of Operating Head. Hyoda has been associated with Honda Motor Co. for the past 22 years.
Sanjiv Mehta, chief executive officer and managing director of Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) will take over as interim chairman in addition to his existing roles. This move was made after Harish Manwani retired. Manwani has been the India unit’s longestserving non-executive chairman, having been in the position since 2005. During his tenure as chairman, Manwani oversaw a period of sustained growth, with the business nearly tripling in size, and HUL reinforcing itself as one of India’s most admired firms, the company said in a note. Manwani joined HUL as a management trainee in 1976 and joined the HUL board in 1995 as a director responsible for the personal products business. In 2005, he was appointed to the Unilever executive committee as president- Asia, Africa, Middle East, and the role later expanded to include central and eastern Europe. From 2011 to 2014, he was chief operating officer of Unilever. One of the most successful leaders of HUL, Manwani strongly believes that the challenges businesses face today can only be addressed through the “4G sustainable growth model” of competitive, consistent, profitable and above all, responsible growth. This model has been central to the company’s business strategy in India. Mehta’s appointment will be an interim arrangement until the company identifies a new chairman. Last month, market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India had accepted most of the recommendations made by the Kotak Committee to improve governance standards in listed Indian firms. This includes separating the post of chairman and managing director. The HUL board will ensure compliance with the new regulation of separation of the two positions by April 2020.
Raj Karunakaran joined Cargill Business Services as the chief of HR of the Bengaluru-based firm. Karunakaran was the director HR/global HR business partner for Philips Mobile Surgery business, before joining Cargill Business Services. In his role he will take direct accountability for translating business strategies and challenges into human capital strategies, plans, HR actions across six global strategic locations at Bengaluru (India), San Jose (Costa Rica), Uberlandia (Brazil), Nanjing (China), Sofia (Bulgaria), Rosario (Argentina), Gurugram (India). With Philips, Karunakaran was the global HR Business Partner for Image Guided Therapy (IGT) Mobile Surgery business, wherein it included developing HR Strategic priorities based on critical business imperatives and deploying key initiatives around leadership capability, business critical competence, creating a high-performance culture for the business across geographies in various functions like Product Development, Marketing, Customer Services, Procurement, Manufacturing, etc., in India and the Netherlands. Karunakaran’s professional journey began with Tech Mahindra as an HR generalist in 1998 and he then moved to Astra Zeneca as a manager - HR after three years. He has also worked with Fidelity Investments before he joined Philips in 2009. He stayed with Philips for almost close to a decade and grew through the ranks before joining Cargill Business Services. A business management graduate from Barkatullah Vishwavidyalaya, Karunakaran completed his post-graduation in human resources from Savitribai Phule Pune University. With over two decades of managing leadership qualities, his rich and cross-cultural exposure has helped him in handling the entire gamut of HR including strategy formulation, organisation development, HR business partnering, culture building interventions, change management, talent acquisition, talent management, compensation and benefits, training and development and performance management.
Pune, India-based leader in Digital Out of Home (DOOH) Advertising, focused on developing programmatic advertising solutions, Lemma Technologies, announced the induction of Bob Walczak as an Advisor on their board. Bob Walczak is a marketing industry pioneer, having served as founder and CEO of ad tech startup Ringleader Digital, one of the first companies to develop a comprehensive mobile ad server and patented mobile ID technology. Currently, he is working on a venture in the Blockchain and Crypto category. Prior to this, Walczak was the Executive Vice President of Global Product at Xaxis, WPPs programmatic audience business. Walczak also served as Global CEO of Light Reaction, the outcomes performance advertising division of Xaxis. Earlier, Walczak was General Manager for IPONWEB’s BidSwitch where he grew the platform’s revenues 500 per cent and doubled its client base in a year. Prior to BidSwitch, Walczak was GM & VP of Product and Emerging Media at PubMatic, where he developed the company’s mobile and emerging media business from inception to more than 25 per cent of the company’s overall revenue in less than three years. “Outdoor Media isn’t stationary anymore—it moves, it talks and it even thinks. One such company in the industry that set foot on this avant garde path is Lemma Technologies. I am happy to join this prestigious organisation which strives to be in the forefront of innovation to become the world’s leading Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) programmatic ad exchange platform, fortifying its core objective— coming up with the most resourceful ways to help their customers achieve apex results,” said Bob Walczak, on his move.
Rakesh Bharti Mittal, Vice Chairman, Bharti Enterprises took over as the President of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for 2018- 19. He takes charge from Shobana Kamineni, Executive Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd. Others to make a move in CII were Uday Kotak, Founder and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank as President-Designate for 2018-19, while Vikram Kirloskar is the new Vice President for the current fiscal. Mittal has many other posts—he is the Chairman of Bharti AXA Life Insurance, Bharti AXA General Insurance, FieldFresh Foods and Centum Learning, and he is also on the Board of Bharti Airtel and is Managing Director - Bharti Realty Holdings. Mittal’s association with CII has been long. He has served as the Chairman of CII Northern Region in 2004–05. Besides being active at the Regional level, Mittal also chaired the National Committees on CII Agriculture, CSR and Public Policy Council. “He also served as member, India-Pakistan Joint Business Forum (IPJBF) and several government committees and governing councils of Institutions of Excellence like ICAR. Mittal had been elected as a member of the National Council of CII several times since 1999,” the Chamber said in a statement. President-Designate Kotak holds a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce and an MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai , while Kirloskar who is the Chairman and Managing Director of Kirloskar Systems Ltd. and Vice Chairman of Toyota Kirloskar Motor is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.
With over 20 years of experience, Jyoti Mahendru, an alumnus of IMT Ghaziabad, got McCann Worldgroup calling as she joins them as executive vice president, human resources. She in the past has worked in the capacity as s VP - HR at Bharti Walmart as well as Barista, besides a stint with STAR TV in their HR department for five years. She kicked off her career as an independent consultant for eight years. She joined KNAV International in 2017 as practice director – HR solutions, where she was setting up their HR consulting vertical wherein she worked on the entire HR framework including best practices in culture management, talent acquisition, talent management, engagement and performance management. “Mahendru will add more value to our organisation. She has vast and varied experience, and also an understanding of and sensitivity towards a people- driven culture,” said Prasoon Joshi, chairman - APAC, CEO & chief creative officer, McCann Worldgroup India. Commenting on the move, Jyoti said, “I look forward to supporting the company and its growth through meaningful HR contribution”.
by Joe Williams
