• Mr. Anand Kripalu

    Mr. Anand Kripalu is the Managing Director and CEO of United Spirits Ltd. He served Hindustan Unilever for twenty two years and Cadbury for eight years before joining United Spirits about two years ago.

    In his final assignment in Unilever as Managing Director for its East Africa operations, he turned around a loss making business into one delivering double-digit growth. He was the President of Cadbury-Kraft-Mondelez, India and South Asia, and the Managing Director of Cadbury India Ltd. He led the company to a record eight years of continuous industry leading growth and helped the business earn its status as one of India's Most Admired Companies. During his stint at Cadbury, the Cadbury Dairy Milk campaign “Shubh Aarambh” won the 2010 Abby’s ‘Grand Prix award’ and the ‘Gold Standard 2011 APPIES Award’ in Singapore.

    Anand became the CEO of United Spirits (USL), a company with a turnover of about Rs.10, 000 crores, with 140 brands, 88 manufacturing facilities, and over 11,000 people in May 2014. Soon after joining, he was also appointed to the United Spirits Board and became a member of Diageo’s Global Executive Committee. In the past year, Anand set about transforming USL’s business and reputation and have turned a large, domestic, volume-driven business into a professional, efficient, ‘value-driven’ organisation with high governance standards.

    His appointment as the Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Alcoholic Beverage Companies (CIABC), the apex association of the alcoholic beverages industry in India, in May, 2015 has given him a prominent platform in pursuing his vision of creating a responsible industry.

    Anand has been on the board of Marico Ltd since 2007. He chaired the CII National FMCG Committee. He has been on the Managing Committee of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the National Executive Committee of FICCI.

    Anand Kripalu receiving his award

  • Mr. Sunil Sood

    Mr. Sunil Sood is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone India Ltd. Over the last 15 years, he has played a pivotal role in establishing Vodafone India as one of the country’s largest telecom services companies and an admired brand. During this period, he helped to strategize, design, and lead several industry wide initiatives to enable the adoption of mobile services as the preferred means of communication across all strata of society in India.

    During his tenure, Vodafone India’s revenue, number of customers, and network coverage have grown at an exponential rate. He pioneered several services and process improvement initiatives to enhance customer experience and launched innovative products and solutions across customer segments that have revolutionized the state of mobile telephony in the country. Prior to joining the telecom sector Sunil had served the FMCG sector in South-East Asia and Africa, and also held the position of CEO of Pepsico in Bangladesh.

    In addition to his responsibilities at Vodafone, he also serves as a Director on the board of Indus Towers, the world’s largest telecom tower company and is a member of several prestigious industry policy forums including CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, and COAI.

    A firm believer of ‘good for society is good for business’, Sunil conceptualized ‘Project Drishti’, an award winning initiative that provides the visually impaired with opportunities to become financially independent. He was also instrumental in leading Vodafone India to partner with the Indian Academy of Paediatrics and launch the world’s largest vaccination reminder service for its flagship programme ‘Immunize India’.

    Sunil Sood receiving his award

  • Prof. N. Venkat Venkatraman

    Prof. N. Venkat Venkatraman holds the prestigious position of David J. McGrath Jr. Professor of Management at Boston University, Questrom School of Business, where he was the youngest faculty to be awarded Chaired Professorship in 1998. His appointment is both in the Information Systems and Strategy and Innovation departments. As a renowned academician, he has taught in several esteemed institutions across the world like MIT Sloan School of Management and London Business School.

    Prof. Venkatraman is an internationally reputed academician with research and teaching focus on how companies win in the digital age where products, processes, and services are shaped and supported by information and communication technology. His numerous academic research works have been published in journals of international repute, such as, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Information Systems Review, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and many others.

    He has been the recipient of many accolades and fellowships, such as the IBM Faculty Fellowship in 2004 and 2006 for his work focusing on business challenges in the network era. He was also awarded the 1986 AT Kearney Award for Outstanding Research in General Management for his Doctoral Dissertation by the Academy of Management. Venkat is one of the most cited scholars in management with over 30,000 Google citations—which is considered to be among the top 25 of active scholars. Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, Thomson Financial/ISI and Google have recently recognized his continued research contributions that track scholarship and impact.

    N. Venkat Venkatraman receiving his award

  • Indra Nooyi

    Mrs. Indra K. Nooyi is currently the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo. She has directed the company's global strategy for more than a decade and has been a trailblazer in restructuring and expanding the PepsiCo family!

    At PepsiCo, Mrs. Indra K. Nooyi has been the chief dealmaker for some of its most important acquisitions: she put together the $3.3 billion-dollar-deal for the purchase of the Tropicana orange-juice brand in 1998, and two years later was part of the team that secured Quaker Oats for $14 billion which became one of the biggest food deals in corporate history, and added a huge range of cereals and snack-food products to the PepsiCo empire. She was also responsible for the historic merger with PepsiCo's anchor bottlers and the acquisition of Wimm-Bill-Dann, the largest international acquisition in PepsiCo’s history.

    In 2007, Mrs. Indra K. Nooyi was honoured with the Padma Bhushan award by the Government of India and in 2009 she was conferred with, the Barnard Medal of Honor, the highest award given by Barnard College, New York. She has also been named consistently in many reputed magazines, journals and reports across the world. She has been named as one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report; Fortune magazine has named her number one on its annual ranking of Most Powerful Women in business consecutively from 2006 to 2010 and in 2014, she was ranked 13 in the list of Forbes World's 100 most powerful women. Before joining PepsiCo in 1994, Mrs. Indra K. Nooyi worked with reputed companies such as Asea Brown Boveri, a Zurich-based industrials company; Motorola; The Boston Consulting Group; Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell, Ltd.

    Today, Mrs. Indra K. Nooyi is one of the top female executives in the United States, and is also believed to be the highest-ranking woman of Indian heritage in corporate America.