Play to Potential Podcast

GUEST Mr Om Prakash Bhatt (OP Bhatt) is the Chairman of Tata Steel Limited and a Board Member at Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) and Standard Chartered Bank. He started his career in State Bank of India (SBI) as a probationary officer in 1972 and retired as the Chairman of SBI in 2011. I had first met him when I was participating in the Director’s C...

GUEST Ambi Parameswaran is the Founder of Brand-building.com , a Brand Advisory Organization. In a career spanning 30+ years, Ambi has handled assignments in Marketing, Sales and Advertising with companies like Rediffusion DY&R, Boots Company and UDI Yellow Pages before dropping anchor at FCB Ulka where he spent about 25 years finishing as ED & CEO of FCB Ulka Group. Ambi has also been a p...

GUEST Arun Maira is a former member of the Planning Commission of India and former Chairman of BCG India. He had a distinguished career in Tata Motors (then called TELCO) and rose to be on the Board of the company. He then had to relocate to the US due to a personal situation and had to reinvent himself at 45. He has written several books, the most recent one being “Listening for well-being: Conve...

GUEST Bombay Jayashri is one of the leading Carnatic musicians in the country. She is born into a family of musicians with a rich lineage in classical music. She represents the fourth generation of music practitioners in her family. Apart from her contribution to the world of Carnatic music, she has collaborated with artists around the world including Egyptian musician Hisham Abba, Senegalese musi...

GUEST Deepa Malik is a Silver Medalist at Paralympic Games (Rio 2016), an Arjuna Awardee (2012) and a Padma Shree Awardee (2017). She has won 58 National and 18 International medals (and counting) in her sporting career that started at the age of 36. She is paraplegic and was compelled to spend the rest of her life on a wheelchair after choosing to undergo a crucial surgery in 1999. This happened...

GUEST Neera Nundy is Co-Founder at Dasra - India’s leading strategic philanthropic foundation. Dasra actively shapes the process of social change by forming powerful partnerships with funders and social enterprises. Since its inception in 1999, Dasra has accelerated social change by driving collaborative action through powerful partnerships among a trust-based network of stakeholders (corporates,...

GUEST Vinay Sitapati is an Assistant Professor in Political Science and Legal studies at Ashoka University. He has a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, in addition to degrees from National Law School Bangalore and Harvard University. His book - Half Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India (Published by Penguin Randomhouse) - traces P.V. Narasimha Rao’s journey from his modest beginni...

GUEST Roopa Kudva is Partner at Omidyar Network and Managing Director of Omidyar Network India Advisors, where she leads overall Investment Strategy, Operations and Portfolio Development. Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Roopa spent 23 years with CRISIL, and was its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer from 2007. She led CRISIL’s transformation from India’s premier ratings agency into a...

GUEST Chandramouli Venkatesan (Mouli) has a strong corporate track record of over 25 years. He is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur and spent his initial years in Sales and Marketing in Asian Paints, GE Capital and Onida. He worked with Cadbury’s from 2005 till 2016. Over that time Cadbury metamorphosed to Kraft Foods and Mondelez and his last role there was Managing Director for India. In his decade...

GUEST Amit Chandra heads Bain Capital in India and is a Managing Director in the Financial and Business Services Vertical and a member of the Asia Pacific Private Equity team and a part of its leadership group. Before joining Bain Capital Private Equity, he spent most of his professional career at DSP Merrill Lynch, a leading Investment Bank in India. He retired from DSP Merrill Lynch in 2007 as a...

GUEST Baijayant Jay Panda is currently serving in his 4th term in the Parliament of India. He was elected to his second term (2014-2019) in the Lok Sabha from the Kendrapara constituency, Odisha. He graduated from the Michigan Technological University and, with a background in Engineering and Management, worked in the world of Business before joining politics. Jay Panda had helped to form the erst...

GUEST Devdutt Pattanaik writes on relevance of mythology in modern times, especially in areas of management, governance and leadership. Trained in medicine, he worked for 15 years in the healthcare and pharma industries before he focussed on his passion full time. He is author of 30 books and 600 columns, with bestsellers such as My Gita, Jaya, Sita, Business Sutra and the 7 Secret Series. He was...

GUEST Suresh Narayanan is the Chairman and MD of Nestle India Limited (which recently crossed INR 10,000 Crores for the first time after about a century of operating in India). Suresh is often dubbed as a turnaround leader given what he has accomplished in various markets - Handling the operations in Singapore during the 2008 financial crisis, Leadership in Egypt, Libya and Sudan during the Arab S...

GUEST KV Sridhar (Pops) is one of the most respected creative leaders in the Indian Advertising World and has been the driving force behind several international awards including 22 Cannes Lions. He currently runs Hypercollective - a cross-disciplinary platform for leading independent companies in strategy, communication, content, design, technology and data to collaborate and solve real world pro...

GUEST Meher Pudumjee is the Chairperson of Thermax Limited, one of India’s leading energy and environmental engineering companies. She is also an active Philanthropist with a passion for making a difference in Education. She is the Chairperson of Akanksha Foundation and is a Trustee of Teach to Lead, Mumbai. She is also on the Board of Imperial College India Foundation, Shakti Sustainable Solution...

As we approach the end of 2017, we at the Play to Potential Podcast decided to step back and reflect on the year that has gone by and the incredible learnings from the various conversations at the podcast. It is hard to distil 20 plus hours of content into a few minutes but we wanted to share some key themes that stood out for us across the various interviews we had. We are excited to share that w...

GUEST Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand is an Indian chess grandmaster and a former World Chess Champion, considered as one of the greatest chess players of all time. Anand was the first recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award in 1991–92, India's highest sporting honour. In 2007, he was the first sportsman to receive India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan. Harnessing the full po...

GUEST  Anu is a Partner with McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the economics and business research arm of McKinsey & Company. She is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and worked for a few years in Banking before joining Consulting at McKinsey. Subsequently, she moved from the Consulting track at McKinsey to her current role at MGI through some experiments along the way. In our conversation, Anu spoke...

GUEST  Dheeraj Pandey is Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Nutanix, Inc. (Market Cap of ~USD 3.5 Billion) that had an IPO in September 2016. Nutanix is a cloud computing software company that sells what it calls hyper-converged infrastructure appliances and software-defined storage. He grew up in Patna and is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and UT Austin. In our conversation, Dheeraj spoke about his early...

GUEST  Rama Bijapurkar is India’s most respected thought leader on market strategy and India’s consumer economy. She has an independent consulting practice and works across sectors and organization types, describing her mission as “bringing market and customer focus to business strategy”. In addition to her consulting practice, she is on Boards of several blue-chip companies. She is a regular visi...

GUEST  Zia Mody is an Indian legal consultant and considered an authority on Corporate Merger and Acquisition Law, Securities Law, Private Equity and Project Finance. She is an alumnus of Harvard Law School and worked for 5 years in the US with Baker and Mackenzie in New York City before returning to India. She started her own practice in Mumbai in 1984 and over the years, she has built AZB &...

GUEST  Vinita Bali is a distinguished leader who has held leadership roles in 6 countries (UK, Nigeria, South Africa, Chile, USA and India) across 5 continents across organizations including Cadbury’s, Coca Cola Company and Britannia. She is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). In addition to this, she also sits on multiple Indian Boar...

GUEST  Vedika Bhandarkar is the MD in India of Water.org , an organization that empowers families with access to safe water and sanitation through affordable financing. Water.org pioneers innovative, community-driven and market based initiatives to achieve the above objective. It is a global organization that operates on the belief that access to safe water can turn problems into potential: unlock...

GUEST  Dr. Pramath Sinha has worked in diverse fields spanning business and strategy, consulting, leadership and academia. He spent 12 years with McKinsey & Company in North America and India, heading leadership and media practices. Passionate about education, he forayed into the field as the founding Dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB) and was instrumental in building ISB into a world...

GUEST  Karthik Reddy (based in Mumbai) is a Founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading tech-focused early stage VCs that was set up in 2010. Karthik is the architect of the Blume business model and investment hypothesis framework that he constantly iterates with his team members. Karthik is arguably one of the best sounding boards in the early stages of a business on ca...