R. Gopalakrishnan is corporate advisor, The Mindworks. He is the author of bestselling books such as The Case of the Bonsai Manager , When the Penny Drops: Learning What's Not Taught , and A Biography of Innovations: From Birth to Maturity . He studied physics at Kolkata University, engineering at IIT Kharagpur and attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He has served as the chairman of Unilever Arabia, MD of Brooke Bond Lipton, vice chairman of Hindustan Lever, and as the executive director of Tata Sons and several Tata companies. He also serves as an independent director of listed companies like Akzo Nobel India, Castrol India and Hemas Holdings PLC, Sri Lanka. Gopal mentors a start-up called Mapmygenome Private Limited, the board of which he chairs. He is actively engaged in both instructional and inspirational speaking.