Speakers

Professor Johny K. Johansson was named the McCrane/Shaker Chairholder in International Business and Marketing at Georgetown University’s School of Business in 1989. An expert in the areas of international marketing strategy as applied to Japanese and European companies, Prof. Johansson has published over 70 academic articles and chapters in books.

His books include Relentless: The Japanese Way of Marketing (with Ikujiro Nonaka), Harper Business, 1996, In Your Face: How American Marketing Excess Fuels Anti-Americanism, Financial Times / Prentice-Hall, 2004, and Global Marketing, McGraw-Hill-Irwin,1997, fifth edition 2009. In 1986, he was Isetan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Keio Business School (Japan) and in 1988 Ford Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Cologne. In 2010, Prof. Johansson received an award for life time contributions to Global Marketing from the American Marketing Association. He is married to Mrs. Tamiko Kubota of Tokyo and lives in the New York City with his family.

Prof. Jos Lemmink was marketing advisor to Dutch Postal Services and Telecommunication (KPN) in The Hague and visiting professor at the Universities of Southern Queensland (Australia) and Hasselt (Belgium). He is the chairman of the ROA (Labour Market Research Organisation) and MERIT Foundation (Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology). He serves as a fellow of the Centre for Services Leadership, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA and member advisory board of the Latin American Academy of Services Management, ITESM Monterrey, Mexico. Furthermore, he is on the Initial Accreditation Board and the European Advisory Council of AACSB International - The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, USA.

Prof. Lemmink published extensively on service science and management, service quality, management and modelling; seven books and many publications in e.g. Journal of Marketing, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Management Studies, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Journal of Retailing. He was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Service Industry Management (now Journal of Service Management). He carried out international consultancy and research projects for e.g. European Union, Shell, Mitsubishi, Heineken, Oce/Canon, Ericsson, Libertel/Vodafone, Dutchtone/Orange, RaboBank and Dexia Bank. He is founder of the ServiceScienceFactory.com at Maastricht University.

Prof. Narasimhan Srinivasan, PhD (SUNY at Buffalo), is the faculty of Marketing, School of Business, at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include consumer behavior, research methods, technology and marketing, nonprofits, cross cultural research international marketing. An alumus of IIMA (PGP 81), he was a Fulbright Kahanoff Scholar to Canada in 2000 and a Fulbright Senior Specialist to Peru in 2008.

Prof. Srinivasan has published notable papers in peer-reviewed journals and won many awards for teaching excellence. Prof. Srinivasan has more than 25 journal articles and other research publications. He has mentored more 14 doctoral students and is in the editorial board of four international journals. Another accolade to his research works is the Outstanding Article Award (1999) from the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing for his significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues.

Prof. Sameer Mathur is presently Assistant Professor of Marketing at McGill University, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing. His teaching interests include Marketing Management, Marketing in Emerging Markets and Retailing. His research investigates the strategic and competitive impact of limited-income, middle-class consumers on marketing strategy in emerging economies, particularly India and China. This includes managerial problems such as pricing, package sizing, product line design, promotion and distribution in emerging markets.

Prof. Siva was the head of the Marketing and International Studies Group at the Faculty of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne University of Technology from 2005 to 2008. Since 1990, Siva has also held academic positions at the University of Newcastle, Monash University, Kennesaw State University & Elizabethtown College – USA, Adjunct Professor at IPMI Graduate School of Business, Indonesia, and eleven years of work experience at a senior management level in Malaysia. Professor Muthaly was awarded the inaugural teaching award offered by the Newcastle University Postgraduate Student Association (NUPSA) – “Teacher of the Year 2000” for his excellence in teaching at the Newcastle Graduate School of Business. His areas of expertise include Marketing Research, International Marketing, Export Marketing, Marketing Concepts & Marketing Information Analysis. Prof. Siva will commence as Associate Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business and Law at RMIT University, Melbourne Australia in 2011.

Prof. Arindam Banerjee joined the faculty at IIM Ahmedabad after working in the industry for over seven years. He has worked on business problems in the retail financial services, FMCG and consumer durable sectors. He specializes in developing business models based on statistical analysis of large syndicated databases.

At IIM for the past over eleven years, he has taught courses in Quantitative Marketing and Research Methodology to post graduate and doctoral students. Besides, he has worked extensively with various Indian and global business organizations in building and strengthening internal processes to support "fact based decision making". He has also imparted training in various in-house corporate management development initiatives.

He has published papers in several academic journals in management such as the Journal of Segmentation in Marketing, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, International Journal of Management and Decision Making, Asian Journal of Marketing, Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, Vikalpa and the Decision.

Prior to joining the IIM, he was a senior consultant at Mitchell Madison Group, a global management consultancy firm specializing in the financial services sector, based at their Chicago office. Previously, he was at AC Nielsen (Chicago) where he headed a marketing analytics team that provided marketing support to Philip Morris Inc. In the year 2006-07 he took leave from IIMA for setting up a global risk analytics team at HSBC for the bank’s US-based consumer and mortgage lending business. He is currently a Professor in the Marketing Area at IIM Ahmedabad.

Prof. Diptesh Ghosh is an associate professor in the production and quantitative methods area at IIM Ahmedabad. Prior to joining the institute, he was a postdoctoral researcher, in faculty of economic sciences, at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands; and assistant professor decision sciences group at IIM Lucknow. He has obtained B.Tech in mechanical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and is a fellow of IIM Calcutta in operations research and systems analysis. He has published extensively in reputed international and national journals. He is a member of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis (EWGLA), European Chapter on Meta-heuristics (EU-ME), Quantitative Logistics and Operations Research Group (QLORG), Operational Research Society of India (ORSI), and Society for Operations Management (SOM). His current research interests include meta-heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems, use of sampling to solve combinatorial optimization problems, un-capacitated facility location problem, and travelling salesman problem.

Prof. George Kandathil earned his PhD from the ILR School of Cornell University in New York, USA. His primary research interest is in the area of the politics of information systems implementation, particularly in cross-cultural contexts. Within this area, currently, he focuses on technology mediated institutional change, politics of sensemaking and employee identity manipulation. His secondary research interest is in value internalization. His tertiary research interest is in the politics of employee involvement in worker cooperatives. He has published in international journals, Academy of Management best paper proceedings, and edited books. He has also presented his research at international conferences. Currently, he is working on a number of research papers in collaboration with faculty members from reputed foreign universities. He is in the process of writing a book on employee involvement in worker cooperatives. Prior to joining Cornell, George worked for about six years with ISRO satellite centre, Bangalore, in the area of spacecraft project management. He also completed a short stint with British Tyres. Before getting into the corporate world, Prof. George took M.Tech degree in Industrial and Management Engineering from I.I.T, Kanpur.

Prof. Varma is currently the Chairman of the Secondary Markets Advisory Committee of SEBI (the Securities and Exchange Board of India) and was a full time Member of SEBI for a year and a part time member for three years. He has previously been Chairman of several committees set up by SEBI, the Forward Markets Commission and the Ministry of Finance and Company Affairs. Prof. Varma is currently a director on the Board of Infosys BPO Limited (a subsidiary of Infosys Technologies Limited), of Axis Bank Limited (formerly UTI Bank Limited) and of Onmobile Global Ltd. Earlier he was a Director on the Board of the Punjab National Bank. Before joining the faculty of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, he worked for three years as Senior Consultant at a leading firm of management consultants and chartered accountants.

Prof. Varma has carried out extensive research in the field of Indian financial markets and finance theory, published extensively in Indian and international journals and has nearly a hundred papers, articles and cases to his credit. He has authored extremely popular books on portfolio management and on the Indian securities scam. His book on the securities scam was a national best seller. Prof. Jayant Varma teaches courses in capital markets, fixed income and corporate finance. He has been the Dean of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad for three years. He is also a qualified cost accountant. Prof. Varma's current research interests are principally in the area of financial markets including equity, debt, currency and derivative markets. He is also interested in broader issues related to the financial sector and in mathematical modelling and computer simulation.

Prof. Neharika Vohra is a psychologist who teaches organizational behavior at IIM Ahmedabad as a full time faculty. Prof. Neharika’s research interests are in the area of cross-cultural behavior, educational administration, governance, leadership, discipline development, and gender issues. She has guided several FPM and PhD students. She has several papers in international and national journals. She is currently the editor of Vikalpa: A Journal for Decision Makers. She has been on the editorial board of Journal of Management, IIMB Review. She was the Associate Editor of Indian Psychological Abstracts and Reviews published by Sage for six years and the Book Review Editor of Journal of Cross Cultural Management for three years. She has authored three books.

She has also been the recipient of the best teacher award at the University of Manitoba, Canada and the Young Psychologist Award at the International Union of Psychologists meeting. She has expertise in training people who work in diverse environments. Prof. Vohra has trained and consulted with many large corporations in India, including IOC, L&T, Infosys, Satyam, Patni, ABB, Siemens, Ericsson etc and has been involved in designing and delivering 360 degree feedback to senior executives. She has also been involved in large scale changes in a technical college and school culture audits. She was the lead knowledge partner of the 1st HR excellence award in the manufacturing sector by SAIL. She has been an advisor of an Engineering colleges set up by a group of professionals in Bhubaneswar.

Dr. Dheeraj Awasthy has wide experience of working in the domain of risk analytics, marketing analytics and consulting. He has experience in developing new practice groups across various environments like offshore (for US and European markets), research and consulting. He has worked extensively on developing variety of quantitative solutions like risk modeling, consumer choice modeling, telecom churn modeling, online ad targeting, modeling consumer information search process. His research interests lie in the area of consumer behavior modeling where he has published in International Journal of Management and Decision Making, Asian Case Journal and Indian Management.

Currently he is working as Senior Vice President, Risk Analytics with HSBC focusing on developing data driven risk practices. Prior to joining HSBC he was a Lead Consultant with Symphony IRI GOC. Prior to joining Symphony Services he was heading data mining with DecisionCraft Analytics. He is an MBA (Gold Medal) from Himachal Pradesh University and also holds FPM (Marketing) from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is also a visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad where he teaches advanced marketing modeling to doctoral students and IIM Indore where he teaches course in advanced marketing analytics and marketing research.

Rajesh has extensive international research and consulting experience in the area of modelling Economics, Energy and Environment (3E) linkages with focus on cap and trade markets. Most recently Rajesh has been invited to join the New York City Green Sector International Advisory Board on behalf of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In this role he would provide unique international perspective on critical issues for Development Initiatives in NYC. He has worked with international research organizations, a multinational energy major, a big four consulting firm before turning entrepreneur in July 2008. With an extensive experience in advocacy of policies for the downstream natural gas transmission and distribution sector, he has been part of the Gas Industry Group (GIG) advocating policies for City Gas Distribution (CGD) development in India. He was also the Consulting Member and contributing author to United Nations Environmental Program's (UNEP) Quantitative Group, representing the Asia Pacific region. Dr. Nair has extensive international experience working with Asia Pacific research Center Stanford University, NIES Japan, Max Planc University Germany, ECN Netherlands. He has been associated with IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and University of South California with his guest lectures. He has several publications in international peer reviewed journals, articles in news journals and has also co-authored a book on modeling Economics, Energy, Environment linkages.

Dr. Siddharth is currently working as an Analytics Manager at Opera Solutions. Prior to joining Opera Solutions he worked as senior scientist at ID Analytics, San Diego, where he developed models for detecting ID Fraud and Credit risk for account acquisition, portfolio management and collections. He is an accomplished and innovative research professional with nine years of experience in building mathematical and statistical models. His team was placed second at KDD Cup 2009. Siddharth holds B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Roorkee and M. S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

Ms. Anasua Mukherjee Das is working with Emerald Group Publishing Limited as Publishing Relationship Manager. Prior to joining Emerald Publishing she has worked with organizations like Greenpeace and UNESCO in policy as well as in research level.