Roshni Nadar

"The evolution and leadership transition started almost 15 years before it happened. We have had three CEO transitions and two CFO transitions in that period. Such changes prepare the board. When he transitioned out of the board, I had already been on it since 2013. I have been working at HCL since 2008. When he transitioned out of the company as chairperson, he completely left the organisation and the board. That was a mark of a mature organisation and of trust"

"Have a little faith in young daughters, they are not too bad"

"In 2020, pre covid, there was talent in the big cities. There were centres in the likes of Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Noida among others. The evolution post covid is that a lot of talent is now spread across the smaller cities. We are struggling to get people back at work as a lot of people want to work remotely for reasons like bigger cities are more expensive to stay in"

"HCL does a lot more on semiconductor design and works with organisations from all over the world. I was in Taiwan last year and I met with leaders of companies. Yes, it’s got the might but one of the leaders rightly pointed out that it took them 40 years to get there. So much of it had to do with the way skills evolved. We (India) have catching up to do, but technology will shrink that time of catching up. Investment in R&D and skills can’t be spearheaded by industries alone"

"With generative AI, it’s impacting the individual and helping in all walks of life. We are figuring out a way to evolve with it. The skills take a while to catch up. Our educational institutions also have a lot of catching up to do. Skills around data engineering, cyber security, and IoT (the Internet of Things) will have to evolve. Educational institutions have to start this if India has to stay ahead"

"Such moments have been part of our evolution. Back in the 70s when the calculator came, everybody was scared and thought that children didn’t need to learn math. Then, we evolved the system of using them (along with students learning math). A few generations later came the search engine. Everybody was looking at information online and there was a certain evolution that took place there too. Then came the iPod and after that shortly came the iPhones and everything was available at fingertips. It evolved and helped consumers"

"There will be some jobs that will go through a certain evolution, in the world of generative AI. However, there will be new jobs that will be created. If some companies are reducing headcount, it’s perhaps for a certain segment of jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that opportunities will reduce. I think it will grow"

"India is the technology talent hub of the world. It also helps global companies achieve diversity goals as the country produces the highest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) talent in the world when it comes to females. Unfortunately, if you look at the data, it’s declining, but it’s still the largest number in the world"

"Within the top 200 leaders of our company—out of 120,000 employees—we don’t have a single woman leader"

"So we asked ourselves, if we want a female CEO in a decade, what steps do we need to take to get there"

"These women get married, have a family—it’s why they leave"

"We have to plug the gap and bring them back without treating it as lost time"

"The steppingstone for building a great leader is getting a great education"

"The work we do is driven by our conviction to drive meaningful transformation by harnessing the power of inclusive education"

"We believe in depth, not breadth—at any given time, we’re only touching maybe 10,000 students. A lot of people say that we could be touching so many more lives, but you can’t touch that many lives if you’re trying to make a leader"

"These children have been phenomenal in the amount that they’ve developed. And hopefully in my lifetime, one of the VidyaGyan students will be the prime minister of India – that would be exciting"

"I can’t say to you, “I live in a country of 1 billion and I’m touching 2 million or 3 million lives.” We don’t have fancy numbers to show, but I think we concentrate on depth of philanthropic impact and not breadth"

"So government should do what they do, and philanthropists should continue to act independently, too, but there are also many opportunities for them to work together through public-private partnerships"