Event Dates : 19^th March 2024 (Tuesday)

Event Location : AIMA Auditorium, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

Session and book launch on Embrace the Future : The Soft Science of Business Transformation with Mr R Gopalakrishnan, Author, Corporate Advisor, The Mindworks and Past President, All India Management Association. The session will be held on 19^th March 2024, Tuesday at the AIMA Auditorium, Lodhi Road, New Delhi from 4:30 PM  to 5:30 PM.

The session shall be based on the book authored by Mr R Gopalakrishnan on the subject, published by Bloomsbury.

Professor Deepak Nayyar, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Former Vice Chancellor, University of Delhi shall be the Chief Guest at the session.

We would request you to send a line in confirmation of your attendance on membership@aima.in

 About the Author – Mr R Gopalakrishnan

Mr R Gopalakrishnan is an Author, Corporate Advisor, The Mindworks and Past President of the All India Management Association.  Mr Gopalakrishnan has been involved in multiple organisational transformations during his professional career of over fifty years in Unilever and in Tata. This is Gopal’s nineteenth book. 

About the Chief Guest - Professor Deepak Nayyar

Deepak Nayyar is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He was recently invited to the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the United States Library of Congress, Washington DC, for the academic year 2022-23. He was Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York. He also served as Vice Chancellor, University of Delhi. Earlier, he taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex, and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.  Professor Nayyar is Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, in Britain, and was Chairman of the Board of the World Institute for Development Economics Research, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki. He has served as Director on the Board of the Social Science Research Council in the United States. He served as a member of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, as Vice Chairman of the South Centre, Geneva, and as Vice President of the International Association of Universities. His professional life in academia has been interspersed with time in the world of public policy, as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and Secretary in the Ministry of Finance.  He was educated at St. Stephen’s College and the Delhi School of Economics.  Thereafter, as a Rhodes Scholar, he went on to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a B. Phil and a D. Phil in Economics. Professor Nayyar has published numerous articles in professional journals and several books. His books include the best-selling Catch Up and The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalization, both of which have been translated into many languages. His latest books, Resurgent Asia, also a best-seller, and Asian Transformations, published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, analyze the remarkable economic transformation, and rise, of Asia during the past half-century.

About the Book - Embrace the Future : The Soft Science of Business Transformation

A guide to surviving and growing in the new normal of continuous technological change and paradigm shifts in business. ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a family whose very name connoted wealth. The Vanderbilts had a vast empire built on freight through steamboats and railroads. Over a few generations, the wealth—worth billions in today’s money—had been frittered away and the business itself faded as new options came up in the freight business. Their story remains an enduring example of what happens when business leaders fail to embrace the future and transform. BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION is a live subject, one that authors R. Gopalakrishnan and Hrishi Bhattacharyya have between them a hundred-plus years of leading in their companies. Their learnings, supported by numerous examples, make for riveting reading. One chief lesson why such transformations succeed or fail has to do with combining the art and science of the change – the heart and the mind – and getting the balance of the two right. In life as in business, to effect a transformation, one needs a compelling narrative, one that inspires the organisation. Important too is to see transformation as a continuous endeavour and made a part of work culture rather than to consider it an exercise undertaken only in a crisis. Embrace the Future is a major book by two business leaders that will appeal to anyone who has faced change—in today’s fluid business environment, most of us. As Gopalakrishnan and Bhattacharyya emphasise, companies that fail to adapt are destined to perish. One needs to learn from the past, manage the present and prepare for the future. We must imagine the future we desire and then fold it into the present.