Skills Intelligence 2.0 Optimising Workforce Liquidity Through Strategic Orchestration
Join us at the People Matters LLC 2026 and learn how to shape the future of business, talent and culture.
October 8/Thursday
Areas:
8:00 AM - 9:20 AM
Registrations & Networking
Arrive early, get registered and start your day without rushing.
9:20 AM - 10:00 AM
Opening Experience: Think Outside The Box
Jimbo Clark
Creator of The B❒X®
Step outside the familiar, break through your usual ways of seeing and doing, and get ready to experience a different world of possibilities. Through an immersive opening activity, Box Breakthrough gets you to literally and mentally step outside your box, challenging assumptions, sparking curiosity and opening your mind to what lies beyond the obvious. This is more than an opening session. It sets the tone for the entire day—inviting you to question, explore, experiment and look at the future of work through a new lens.
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
The Big Picture: Optimising Workforce Liquidity Through Strategic Orchestration
Explore how Strategic Orchestration can help HR and Learning leaders move beyond simply managing skills to actively shaping how work gets done. From Skills Intelligence 1.0 to 2.0, discover how data, technology and smarter talent decisions can help organisations build a more agile, adaptable and high-impact workforce.
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Candid Conversation: CEO's Bet: How Talent Priorities Are Being Rewritten At The Top
Santosh Iyer
Mercedes-Benz India Pvt. Ltd.
Balfour Manuel
Blue Dart
Cheshta Dora
People Matters
In this session, leaders will get a rare, unfiltered look at how two CEOs — from auto and logistics, two industries transforming at very different speeds — are rethinking talent at the very top. Attendees will walk away understanding how transformation reshapes what CEOs look for in talent, what big, unproven bets they're placing today, and how to translate that thinking into their own talent strategy.
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Tea & Networking Break
A curated pause to connect, exchange perspectives, and build meaningful conversations.
11:40 AM - 12:10 PM
Candid Conversation: Reinventing HR Leadership: Building The Function For What’s Next
Dr. Afsha Dokadia
Pidilite Industries
Kathy Claytor
HRCI Board of Directors
What if HR is no longer fit for the future it is being asked to lead? As work, technology, talent and business models change, simply adding new skills to the existing HR playbook won’t be enough. The function itself needs to evolve.
This conversation challenges HR leaders to rethink what HR should own, how it should operate and what capabilities its leaders need to build next. From data and AI fluency to business acumen, workforce strategy and organisational design, explore the critical investments needed to move HR to a function that actively shapes how the business works and grows.
12:10 PM - 12:40 PM
Fireside Chat: Who’s Next? Building a Deeper, Stronger Leadership Pipeline Across the Enterprise
This session explores how organisations can move from succession planning to continuous leadership readiness—identifying high-potential talent early and deliberately building the capabilities, experiences and exposure they need to take on larger mandates. The conversation will examine the role of executive education, targeted upskilling, coaching, mentoring, cross-functional exposure, P&L experience and stretch assignments in preparing leaders for what comes next. It will also look at how organisations can take these interventions beyond small CXO cohorts and build scalable leadership development journeys for business-unit heads, functional leaders and mid-management—the critical feeder layer for future enterprise leadership.
12:40 PM - 1:00 PM
Keynote: Woven With Purpose: Building A Business Around Human Dignity
Nand Kishore Chaudhary
Jaipur Rugs
Nand Kishore Chaudhary built Jaipur Rugs not around a product, but around people — turning rural artisans and weavers into entrepreneurs and co-owners of the business they helped create. In this keynote, leaders will hear how purpose, when placed at the center of a business model rather than at its margins, can transform lives, communities, and the very definition of what a company owes its people. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how leading with purpose isn't a philosophy layered on top of business — it can be the business itself.
1:10 PM - 2:00 PM
Lunch
Recharge & connect! Enjoy a curated lunch while building meaningful connections and exchanging fresh perspectives.
2:10 PM - 2:50 PM
Masterclass: Building The Composable Leader: Capability For Constant Redesign
Leaders are operating in an environment where teams, technologies and business priorities are continuously reconfigured. They need the ability to combine strategic thinking, technological fluency, empathy and execution according to the challenge at hand. This session explores how leadership development can move towards shorter, applied capability cycles that help leaders learn, unlearn and adapt continuously.
2:50 PM - 3:30 PM
Flipped Panel: Leading a Workforce That Didn't Sign Up for Your Playbook
Shreyas Haridas
Spotify
Gen Z is questioning hierarchy, loyalty, and what leadership itself should look like — and many leaders are still leading with a rulebook written for a different generation. This panel brings together leaders who are rethinking authority, feedback, and career progression for a workforce that wants purpose and transparency over titles and tenure. Attendees will learn what's actually working to earn trust and drive performance with Gen Z talent — and what old leadership habits need to go.
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM
From Unknown to Unmissable: What Burma Burma Teaches Us About Building Culture & Experience
Ankit Gupta
Burma Burma Restaurant
When Ankit Gupta set out to build India's first dedicated Burmese restaurant, he was betting on a cuisine nobody had heard of, with no playbook to follow. In this candid keynote, Ankit takes us behind the scenes of building Burma Burma: the early struggles of sourcing, training, and winning over an unfamiliar market and the deliberate culture-building that turned a single unlikely restaurant into a movement scaled across cities. At the heart of the session is a question every leader wrestles with: how do you actually translate culture into lived experience? Ankit unpacks how Burma Burma turns its values into small, intentional moments and nudges for every guest, the details most brands overlook but that quietly build loyalty and distinction. He draws a parallel for leaders in the room: the same principle applies inside organizations, where culture goes beyond a mission statement and is built one small, repeated moment at a time for employees and teams.
4:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Scaling a Legacy at Speed: Building the Skills, Capacity and Culture to Sustain Growth
Indraneel Chitale
Chitale Bandhu
Growth tests more than market demand; it tests whether an organisation’s people, capabilities and culture can keep pace with its ambition. With roots dating back to 1939, Chitale Bandhu has evolved from a family-led dairy and sweets business into a diversified, technology-enabled enterprise with expanded manufacturing capabilities, product categories and market reach. In conversation with Pushkar Bidwai, CEO, People Matters, Indraneel Chitale will share the leadership choices and learning behind this journey, from building capabilities ahead of expansion and introducing automation to preparing talent for changing roles and carrying the organisation’s cultural strengths into its next phase of growth.
4:40 PM - 6:00 PM
Leadership Learning & Culture Awards 2026
Join to celebrate a new era for India Inc—where learning is a strategic weapon, leadership is deliberately engineered, and culture is a force that shapes organisations’ destiny