Play To Potential Podcast

GUEST R Gopalakrishnan is a man of many identities. A Board Member, an author, an advisor, speaker and a teacher. Apart from having an illustrious career in Hindustan Lever and Tata Sons, he has been on several Boards over the last few decades. He has authored 12 books since 2007 (that is a run rate of about a book a year if you think about it). He spends his time on Boards, as a Mentor and as a Corporate Advisor, as a speaker and as a Teacher. He is an Executive in Residence at SP Jain and a Distinguished Professor at IIT Kharagpur. While there is a lot of wisdom to mine from him, we tried to anchor the bulk of the conversation around his book Crash where he profiled about 15 high profile CEO appointments that didn’t quite work out (that includes Vikram Pandit at Citigroup, Anshu Jain at Deutsche Bank, Carly Fiorina at HP, Vishal Sikka at Infosys and more. He looks at common patterns across some of these transitions and distils them in the book. We unpack some of that in this conversation.We first speak ab