We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.
— Shiv Nadar
Though easy to define, it is important to understand the significance of philanthropy. I believe it is really a state of mind: where one feels empowered and equipped to fill the huge gaps in the existing system.
The younger you are, the more courage and audacity you will have to set long-term goals and be there to personally work towards your vision. You will have the confidence to take risks because you have time by your side. You can bring innovation into everything you do and constantly reinvent yourself.
It is good to start as young as you can. What is more important is to carve out your vision and assess your readiness to start giving. Commitment and purpose are core to giving.
At the undergraduate level, SNU has a unique 'Opportunities for Undergraduate Research' programme. Students are encouraged to undertake research programmes at the undergraduate level and get trained in the interdisciplinary research.
I would like to share something that is being done extremely well by Bill Gates through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is only going to address areas which are seen by Bill or Melinda as ills of the world. The foundation has no perpetuity.
A founder can carry an institution only so far, and then others have to step in, even the alumni. That's how an institution becomes one.
A 5-acre school each in Noida and Gurgaon is what we have; it costs Rs. 50 crore to buy the land and another Rs. 50 crore to build the property. That's the capital cost alone.
To us, the definition of philanthropy is what we spend. A P&L account means expenditure, lines of revenue. There is a surplus; it goes to the balance sheet. A transparent foundation should disclose this.
In the future, there are going to be various components of doing business that have to be looked at.
The 1980s were fantastic. This was a time when we were at the peak of our creative work. The question of whether we would exist or not - something which everybody used to ask, including ourselves - stopped. Profits kept pace with growth requirements. HCL had credibility - that was the biggest barrier we had to break.
I was a very good student. But I didn't have the latitude to study more. I was never allowed to do anything cross-disciplinary. Why can't an engineering student learn physics?
On Sundays, we would travel to the town and watch English movies. This way, we must have ended up watching some 1,000 movies during college.
Re-skilling has to be much wider with a strong foundation.
If you go to Wall Street, there is someone from Harvard, Stanford, etc, who relate to each other by the batch they studied in, the dorm they lived in, and so on.
In large companies, the CEO is very distant from operations.
Major forces that have contributed to the evolution of philanthropy in India in the pre-modern era have mainly been driven by religion, family, and society. The Hindu teaching of 'daan' or 'giving' is present in different ways in almost every celebration or ritual.
As a product of education, I have always believed in the power of education as the most powerful, high-impact catalyst for transformation. Look at the impact that the Indian Institutes of Technology have had globally.
Shiv Nadar University was established in 2011, and our first batch graduated in 2015. The first batch mostly had engineering courses and a B.Sc. programme in Mathematics.
Research is creation of knowledge which leads to new and efficient solutions for the society. Shiv Nadar University, therefore, believes in being at the forefront of research. To create new knowledge, one needs to solve open-ended problems, which basically make one think on one's own.
My daughter is very happy doing philanthropy, especially in the schools.
The future consists of cross specialisation; that is how university systems abroad have evolved.
Working with Roshni gives me lot of confidence. When I started SSN - in 1994, after a windfall gain from HCL-HP then - I was OK to do it alone. My brother, who was supposed to head it, passed away. We had a governing council to run it. That was a leap of faith, and we didn't know where we will get.
What happens to a private company that comes out with a quarterly report and an annual report? It gives transparency. It talks of basic issues of governance and transactions with related parties.
I have talked about the 'fractal organization'. Those smaller pieces should innovate and lead the rest of the organization. There will be parts that will be thinking about technologies of the future, and you need to nourish them.
Each quarter, Indian IT firms publish their results, and these are broadcast on CNBC. From the comfort of their boardrooms, executives say how many new employees have been added, how many more Fortune 500 companies have been signed up as clients, how many million-dollar companies were added, and so on.
My role in the business is to use my judgment. All these years of experience have given me a clear head, and I can give a nonpartisan view with a sense of distance.
When you live away from your family, your friends and faculty become your family.
There is a disconnect in education and work. And corporates don't do a great job of skilling. In future, corporates and educational institutions will work closely.
I admire companies that give back to communities. It is an absolute essential for organizations to watch, mitigate, and improve their impact on the environment, people, communities, their health and overall well-being. But this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.
India's connection with philanthropy didn't begin with western influences. The connection with philanthropy is age-old and ingrained in our value systems.
I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.
Shiv Nadar University has five schools with 16 departments offering 14 undergraduate, 10 master's and 13 doctoral programmes. The demand for engineering courses - computer science, engineering, electronics, communication engineering, mechanical engineering - is slightly on the higher side compared to other engineering courses.
If you get to think of sharing wealth with people who need it and the purposes that need it, it gives a very different sense of satisfaction. I think I can build an institution which is very unlike the Gates' foundation. Gates' foundation is totally project-driven, that will serve a specific purpose and then self-destruct.
My daughter has no interest in succeeding me in the business. She is going towards social entrepreneurship, an area she is interested in.
When you take the best of universities in the world, all of them have research and education contiguous; the person who teaches you could be a Nobel laureate. Some subjects are at the tri-junction of many subjects put together.
A press statement may be given with a very good intention, but it says nothing beyond it. If it comes from corporations they run, then it is corporate social responsibility (CSR). That's different from philanthropy. CSR is a lot of shareholders, including me.
I was with top CEOs in 2009, and they were clearly shaken. Top leaders of Wall Street and elsewhere, shaken. The ones at the top did get by because if they are seeing a decline somewhere, there is also growth elsewhere, like in emerging economies.
You have to be very skilled in this industry. I grew in this industry; we created the very beginnings of this industry. We made the first PCs (personal computers) in the world.
My colleagues and I were engineers who worked for DCM's calculator division. These electronic calculators used digital integrated circuits, and then they started using chips. The advanced versions of those chips were used for programmable calculators, which were the forerunners of PCs.
I am good at conceptualizing and building institutions.
Education is and will be the most powerful tool for individual and social change, and we must do all that it takes to facilitate it.
Any institutions' alumni are key to its growth. We are focused on giving a global experience to our students.
