Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Shiv Nadar
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Indian businessman Shiv Nadar.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
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.
I am good at conceptualizing and building institutions.
If you look at the leading Indian IT companies, Cognizant is not active in business process outsourcing, and neither is Satyam.
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.
When you live away from your family, your friends and faculty become your family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The future consists of cross specialisation; that is how university systems abroad have evolved.
Adaptability and constant innovation is key to the survival of any company operating in a competitive market.
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.
When I got started in my own engineering course, my interest in physics and maths was very high. After all, engineering is all about applied maths and physics. If I were to learn anything further in physics or mathematics, it simply was not there.
India's connection with philanthropy didn't begin with western influences. The connection with philanthropy is age-old and ingrained in our value systems.
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.
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.
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.
We didn't create an institution to increase land value or asset value.
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.
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.
Buffett gave significant portions of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett made money for 50 years before he donated.
If you are calm about your ambitions, you become confident of achieving what you set out to do.
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 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.
Like education, healthcare also needs to be given importance.
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 never second-judged my mother.
Any organisation has to go through at least one depression to see how it survives, and a normal economic cycle takes seven years.
Re-skilling has to be much wider with a strong foundation.
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.
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.
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?
Government, in its ultimate form, is the biggest philanthropher based in the world. And Bill Gates also said that he could do a small part of what the government can do, which is business philanthropy, equalling people and making sure there is inclusiveness.
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.
My daughter has no interest in succeeding me in the business. She is going towards social entrepreneurship, an area she is interested in.
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.
My daughter is very happy doing philanthropy, especially in the schools.
HCL is a corporation. It is for profits. A corporation stands for its shareholders, its profits, its employees, its discoveries, and its customers.
At what age did Warren Buffett come into philanthropy? At 76. He gave a very good reason. He said his wife was considerably younger than him. And all Americans believe they would live till 80, and they do live till 80. He told his wife that when he is gone, she should take care of whatever they need to do.
There is only one entity which I built, which is HCL. And the legacy which I want to leave behind that is in my name. There is only one thing which bears my name in the doorsteps - that is only the University and the foundation. And that legacy will not have a price tag.
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.
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.
One time, the teacher was the storehouse of knowledge. That will no longer be so. So what would a teacher do? A very good teacher will play the role of augmenter. Also, the teacher will be located anywhere and helping students.
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.
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.
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.
The moment I write out a cheque, it's an asset I have written off.
In large companies, the CEO is very distant from operations.
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.
In the future, there are going to be various components of doing business that have to be looked at.
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.
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.
Any institutions' alumni are key to its growth. We are focused on giving a global experience to our students.
If you have excellent people, then you have to give them the power.
The government of India is consistently very advanced. When the world was hesitant on UNIX, we were the first to move in; the RBI said that all banks will implement on UNIX. It worked!
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.
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.
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