Sudhir Sitapati is currently Executive Director, Foods and Refreshments at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL). He has just published his first book - The CEO Factory, published by Juggernaut Books. 

I have had the privilege of knowing him for the last 22 years right from the day we joined IIM Ahmedabad in the summer of 1997. This podcast conversation is special for a few reasons. 1) It is the first time I am interviewing a friend on the podcast 2) It is the first time two siblings have been on a podcast (I had interviewed Sudhir’s brother Vinay on his book Half Lion a while back). 3) Sudhir speaks about Prof AK Jain of IIMA in the book and in the podcast. I had the fortune of being taught by Prof Jain and happened to interview him in the context of a felicitation function we had organised last year. You can find my interview with Prof AK Jain here. 

In this conversation, Sudhir and I spoke about various elements of his book - The CEO Factory. We spoke about a range of topics including how HUL looks for talent and thinks about career planning, the importance of having an HR function with teeth, how it breeds Entrepreneurial Professionalism, the distinction between core competence and competitive advantage, unlocking the value of mavericks, the secret sauce behind the culture and how that gets propagated and much more. I also happened to shoot this conversation in a video format. If you prefer that, please see our interview here.

Published in Dec 2019.