Harry Paul is a charismatic, energetic speaker and bestselling author.
Harry is the co-author of seven business books including FISH! A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results, one of the bestselling business books of all time with well over six million copies sold and translated into thirty-five languages. For many years, his books have been on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Business Week, Amazon.com and Wall Street Journal.
Harry’s articles and interviews have been published in several Indian publications including the Economic Times, Business Standard, Outlook Business, Smart Manager and Business Today.
Dr Ross Reck is a leadership consultant, author and speaker. He is the author/co-author of several books including The Engagement Formula; Turning Your Customers into Your Sales Force; The X-Factor; Destination Work; REVVED!! An Incredible Way to Rev Up Your Workplace and Achieve Amazing Results and The Win-Win Negotiator. His popular weekly newsletter is in its eighteenth successful year of publication.
He received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1977. From 1975 to 1985, Dr Reck served as professor of management at Arizona State University. During his tenure at ASU, he was the only two-time recipient of the prestigious ‘Teaching Excellence in Continuing Education’ award and was identified by the university as an ‘Outstanding Teacher’.
Ashok Alexander studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, the Delhi School of Economics and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He went on to have a long career with McKinsey & Company in New York and India. In 2003, he left that firm as a senior partner to create an ambitious HIV/AIDS prevention programme in India named Avahan, for the Gates Foundation. This initiative is credited with having averted over 6,00,000 HIV infections. In 2013, Ashok was a senior fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, teaching a course on leadership lessons from Avahan.
Ashok now nurtures his own NGO, The Antara Foundation, which works in the field of maternal and child health. It is a grassroots operating entity working in remote rural areas of three Indian states-Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. When time allows, he chases his passion for painting and chess, both of which he has pursued at the national level. His first book, A Stranger Truth, describes his work with Avahan and won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2019.
Priya Nair Rajeev is associate professor in Organizational Behavior and heads the Centre of Excellence for Social Innovation, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. Trained in participant-centered learning from Harvard Business School, she is PhD in management studies from IIT Madras. She is a recipient of the Highly Commended Award 2011 in the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards in the Management and Governance category and a gold medallist and university rank holder at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels. Earlier, she was the chairperson of Executive Education programs including the satellite campus at Kochi and the chairperson of the Organizational Behavior and Human Resources area. She has more than twenty-one years of research and teaching experience in her field. A prolific trainer, she has conducted several management development programmes for corporates like Reliance Industries, RPG Group, John Deere, Bharat Electronics Limited, Defence Research and Development Organisation, as well as for the Ministry of Ayush, Indian Army and Naval Officers Wives Association. She has to her credit several published articles in international journals and two co-authored books including Indian Cases in Organisational Behaviour published by Pearson (forthcoming). Her areas of interest include managing emotions, leadership and personal growth, social innovation and women in management.
Simy Joy holds a PhD from Case Western Reserve University, USA and is a fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK. She served as a faculty member at the University of East Anglia, UK and as a faculty fellow at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK), where she was a founding member of the Centre of Excellence for Social Innovation. Her research interests include institutional and organisational sources of inequality, exclusion and injustice; and social innovations, social enterprises, socio-tech enterprises and micro-enterprises that attempt to engender equality, inclusion and justice. Her work has won awards from the Academy of Management, British Academy of Management, Academy of Management Learning & Education Journal, and the Family Firm Institute. Her co-edited and co-authored books include Socio-Tech Innovation: Harnessing Technology for Social Good, Managing for Social Justice: Harnessing Management Theory & Practice for Collective Good, Being an Impact Champion: Enacting Corporate Social Consciousness, and Indian Cases in Organisational Behaviour (forthcoming). Prior to her PhD, Simy Joy worked in the Indian finance sector in the areas of training and development, organizational restructuring, and change management.
Arjun Mohan is a leading edtech specialist who has played an integral role in the Indian start-up ecosystem helping the rise of several edtech start-ups. Formerly, the CEO of upGrad India, Arjun has been integral in scaling the company to dominate higher edtech and working professional courses globally. He was previously the Chief Business Officer (CBO) at Think & Learn Pvt Ltd (BYJU’S) and was responsible for setting up their India Marketing and Sales teams and scaling business globally. He holds board positions at several companies like Sharekhan BNP Paribas Pvt Ltd, ASAP Kerala and is also the member of the board of advisors of NIT Calicut EEE Dept. Arjun is a gold Medallist and MBA from Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode and an Electrical & Electronics Engineer from National Institute of Technology, Calicut. He lives in Bengaluru with his wife and two beautiful kids.
Dr. Tehemton Erach Udwadia (1934-2023) was awarded the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the B.C. Roy National Award by the President of India, and the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II. With a career spanning almost seven decades, he has been credited with leading the team that introduced laparoscopy to India and the developing world in 1990. He served as the president of several prestigious Indian and international bodies of surgeons, and was conferred honorary memberships and lifetime achievement awards by many surgical societies across the world.
During his illustrious career, he was widely published in medical journals and authored More than a Life (2021), detailing his educational and professional life.
Harini Nagendra teaches sustainability at Azim Premji University, and has conducted research on the interaction between people and nature in forests and cities for over thirty years. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on sustainability, by the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award. Her previous books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future and The Bangalore Detectives Club mystery series, set in 1920s colonial India.
Seema Mundoli teaches sustainability at Azim Premji University. She has worked with NGOs in conservation, mining, land and forest rights, and education in indigenous communities. Her current work examines the relationship between people and nature in cities that is critical to understand sustainability and climate change challenges. In addition to research papers and popular articles, she has co-edited State of the Environment 2005: Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She always listens to her cats who provide the best advice on all matters.
The authors also co-wrote Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities and the illustrated children’s book So Many Leaves.
A.S. Panneerselvan is fellow at Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai and head of its Centre for Study in Public Sphere. Earlier, he was the Readers’ Editor (an independent internal news ombudsman) of The Hindu, , for nearly a decade. Apart from being a regular columnist, he is also an adjunct faculty member of the prestigious Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
Panneerselvan is the author of Karunanidhi: A Life, published in 2021 by Penguin Random House. He was conferred the G.U. Pope award by the Government of Tamil Nadu for his literary and journalistic contributions. He was the head of the jury for the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature.
