Global
Leadership Team

Nisaba Godrej is the Executive Chairperson of Godrej Consumer Products Limited. She has been a key architect of GCPL's strategy and transformation in the last decade.

She is also the Chairperson of Teach for India and sits on the board of Godrej Agrovet, Bharti Airtel, Mahindra and Mahindra and VIP Industries. She has a BSc degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Nisaba is passionate about education, the human mind, trekking and equestrian sports. She lives in Mumbai with her children Zoran and Aidan.

Sudhir Sitapati is the Managing Director and CEO of Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Prior to this, Sudhir was the Executive Director - Foods and Refreshments at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL). In his 22 years at HUL, he led teams across several categories and functions in India, Europe, South East Asia, and Africa to create significant value for the business. Sudhir was appointed to the HUL Management Committee as an Executive Director in 2016, making him one of its youngest ever members.

Under Sudhir’s leadership, HUL built up its Foods and Refreshments business as one of the largest in India. This included the USD 5 billion merger and integration of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare with HUL, the largest deal of its kind in the FMCG sector in India. In his previous roles, Sudhir was instrumental in creating a world-class Tea business for HUL in India and leading HUL’s Soaps business in the country.

He is a past Co-chair of the CII National Committee of Food Processing and the FMCG Committee. He was also a member of the advisory board of Flipkart in 2015. Sudhir was awarded the ‘Young Alumni Achiever’ by his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, in 2017. He is also the author of the best-selling book 'The CEO Factory: Management lessons from Hindustan Unilever'.

Sudhir has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a B.Sc. in Math with Economics Honours from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Sudhir is married to Ketki and spends his free time trying to get his children, Sahaana and Kabir, interested in his own hobbies — tennis, Hindustani music, farming and scrabble. So far to not much avail.

Sameer Shah is the CFO of Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Sameer has worked at GCPL for 15 years. He has held a number of key leadership roles including being the Chief Financial Officer of our largest business, the India & SAARC cluster. He has also led diverse priorities across our global portfolio – investor relations, financial controlling, ERP implementation, global financial planning and analytics and integrating inorganic businesses like Africa. Before joining GCPL, Sameer worked at PepsiCo and General Mills.

A Chartered Accountant by profession, Sameer has also specialised in Treasury Management from The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts.

Dharnesh Gordhon is Business Head - Africa, USA & Middle East, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Prior to joining Godrej, South Africa born Dharnesh spent over a decade and a half with the Nestlé Group, where he held key leadership positions in the company’s Africa and South East Asian businesses. During his time with Nestle, he was President Director and Chief Executive Officer of PT Nestlé Indonesia; Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nestlé Nigeria Plc; Chairman of the Nestlé Nigeria Trust Limited; Group Sales Director for Nestlé’s Southern African region, and a member of Nestlé’s Global Sales Leaders Council. He has also worked in the printing and textile industries, and was a high school teacher early on in his professional career.

Dharnesh has an MBA and a Bachelor’s degree in Arts (Honours). He has completed the Programme for Executive Development (PED) from IMD Lausanne and the Leadership Development Programme from London Business School, has a Diploma in Higher Education, and is a Chartered Marketer (CMSA). He is passionate about human rights, literature and music, loves riding motorcycles and experiencing different cultures. Dharnesh is married to Anita and is a doting father to their daughter, Yashmay, and son, Akhil.

Rajesh Sethuraman is Business Head - ASEAN, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Rajesh has 26 years of work experience, the majority of which he has spent at Unilever, leading teams across categories and divisions in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa to deliver significant value for the business. He has also worked at Crompton Greaves and Heinz India.

In his current role, Rajesh leads the execution of Unilever’s largest digital transformation programme across Asia, Africa and the Middle East; enhancing customer experience, while delivering a simplified, agile, and cost-efficient organisation. The programme future-proofs the company’s core operations through the end-to-end reimagination of processes, technology, and organisation design. It aims to deliver significant improvement to the bottom-line growth ambition, and enable a focus on growth.

Rajesh has previously led the company’s largest division in Africa – Home Care, and driven a significant portfolio turnaround. The business, which had witnessed a multi-year decline of turnover and profitability, saw a turnaround under his leadership, and delivered sustained top-line growth and margin expansion across several African markets.

Prior to this, Rajesh led the South Asia Laundry brand development agenda, with his team successfully delivering Hindustan Unilever’s biggest innovation of the decade, Surf Excel Easy wash.

Rajesh has an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and a Bachelor of Engineering from Coimbatore Institute of Technology. His wife, Shanti, is a keen painter, and they love to travel, especially across the African Savannah. One of their most vivid memories is of admiring the Milky Way galaxy, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, under the pitch-black night sky of Sutherland, Africa’s coldest town. Currently, they have their hands full raising two little boys, Rayaan and Yohan, besides being pet parents to their cats, Mia and Loki.

José Toscano is Business Head, Latin America, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

He has over 20 years of experience and has worked at leading FMCG companies such as IBM, The Clorox Company, Cepas Group and General Mills. Before joining Godrej, he worked with General Mills for 10 years as Managing Director for the company’s Argentina business.

At Godrej, José has worked across the marketing and sales functions in senior leadership roles and has transformed the business by drawing the focus on consumers, brand development and company culture.

José joined Godrej Argentina as Sales Director in August 2018 and played an important role in the design of a new commercial route-to-market strategy, among other things. Since then, he has taken on higher levels of responsibility, first as Commercial Director and now as Business Head, where he has been instrumental in building a culture of innovation, fostering international expansion and boosting process efficiency.

As Business Head, he has led the transformation of the Latin America business through the democratization of personal care consumption, delighting consumers with our range of brands.

José has a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a Post Graduate degree in Negotiations from Austral University.

Sumit Mitra is Head - Human Resources, Godrej Consumer Products Limited; Head - Group HR and Corporate Services, Godrej Industries Limited; and a member of the Godrej Management Committee.

Sumit joined Godrej as a management trainee, and has spent over 25 years working across different Group businesses including FMCG, Real Estate, and Food and Agriculture. He currently leads the people practice and efforts to build a purposeful, authentic, inclusive Godrej employer brand for 20,000 team members in over 20 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America. He has been instrumental in making Godrej an inspiring place to work with an agile and high performance culture that attracts and engages some of the best global talent.

Sumit plays a key role in due diligence, mergers and acquisitions, change management and cross-cultural integrations, which form a major part of the Group's aggressive global growth strategy. He also spearheads Godrej Good & Green, the Group's Corporate Social Responsibility focus on creating shared value opportunities to address social and environmental concerns.

Vijay Kannan is Head of Business Transformation and Digital, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

He has over 19 years of work experience in the Consumer Goods and Energy industries with multinational organisations like Shell and Unilever, leading multi-disciplinary teams to deliver significant business results and superior customer and consumer experiences.

Vijay was previously the Global Chief Information and Digital Officer of the Global Lubricants business of Shell, a global market leader that operates in over 100 countries. He was instrumental in building digital ecosystems to transform customer engagement, and route-to-market capabilities and innovations around new digital native business models by unlocking the power of data and data intelligence. He was also responsible for the broader B2B customer transformation at Shell. He delivered a market leading e-commerce platform for Shell’s customers, and enriched the customer service experience through seamless omnichannel engagement capabilities to improve supply chain transparency. He has also had past experience as Hindustan Unilever's IT Head, and prior to that with Asian Paints.

Vijay has an MBA from IIM Lucknow and a Bachelor of Engineering from College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai.

Venkateswara Rao Yadlapalli is Head - Research & Development, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Venkat joined GCPL in 2014 as a member of the R&D team, where he was responsible for leading product development across categories. Since then, he has led the R&D function for the India and SAARC business and spearheaded global product development across geographies.

Venkat believes that developing ‘disruptive innovations’ is a way of life at GCPL. He has been instrumental in applying this thinking to create some of our biggest innovations, including mr. magic (the world’s first powder-to-liquid hand wash), the Goodknight Naturals household insecticides range, Goodknight Gold Flash (India’s most powerful liquid vapouriser), and Goodknight Power Shots (a no gas aerosol format) in Africa. He has also led the development and execution of the Godrej Professional hair colour range in India. Additionally, Venkat works closely with our Manufacturing and Supply Chain teams, helping to set up best-in-class manufacturing facilities and facilitating cost-saving initiatives and process improvements.

Prior to joining GCPL, Venkat was the R&D Head at Wipro Consumer Care, where he successfully led product development for leading brands like Santoor, Yardley, Chandrika, Safe Wash, Glucovita, etc. He also worked closely with Wipro’s South East Asia team during and post UNZA Holding’s merger with Wipro. Before that, Venkat worked with Dabur as a Principal Scientist and was involved in product development of the brand’s proprietary ayurvedic products, fermentation process improvements and intellectual property rights.

Venkat has a Master’s in Pharmacy from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, and a Post Graduate diploma in Intellectual Property Rights from Amity Law School, Delhi. He was awarded a gold medal for topping his university during his Master’s degree; and, has, during his career, also received several patents across categories.

Venkat is married to Ramalakshmi, who has a Post Graduate degree in Mathematics, and they have two children Shruthi and Sreekar. In his free time, Venkat enjoys playing sport.

Robert Menzies is Global Head - Category, Innovation and Strategy, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Robert joined Godrej Industries in 2014 as Group Head - Strategy, where he was responsible for turnaround, cost reduction, growth strategy, organisational design and process improvements for Godrej's different businesses.

In 2018, he went on to start the E-commerce business unit for GCPL's India business and was instrumental in defining its long-term vision and strategy, forming the team, developing new processes and systems, and building strong relationships with key customers and partners. Under his leadership, the business has shown very strong top and bottom line growth.

In his current role, Robert leads GCPL's global categories – Household Insecticides, Air Care, Hair Colour and Hygiene – driving strategy, product development, brand equity and advertising development. He leads the global Design and Consumer & Market Insight teams, and is also responsible for developing a Global Digital Centre of Excellence for GCPL.

Prior to joining Godrej, he was a Principal at Bain & Company - one of the world's leading business consulting firms - where he led major client engagements for Indian and global clients across multiple industries, including FMCG, transportation, industrials, financial services, and private equity.

Robert holds a Master's degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Cambridge University. He is married to Farah, an entrepreneur in the consumer space, and they have two daughters, Kiara and Alena. Robert enjoys surfing and fitness, and is a passionate traveller, closing in on visiting his 100th country.

Omar Momin is Head - Mergers & Acquisitions and Business Development, Godrej Consumer Products Limited.

Omar joined the Chemicals business of Godrej Industries Limited in 2001 after graduating in Chemical Engineering from the Mumbai University Institute of Chemical Technology. He worked across different functions of the business, including Operations, Marketing and Supply Chain Management.

Post this, Omar went on to complete his Masters in Management from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad in 2004. He rejoined the Godrej Group after his stint at ISB and worked as Executive Assistant to the Chairman, Adi Godrej, for two years.

Today, Omar is responsible for driving new vectors of growth for GCPL, including through Mergers & Acquisitions.

Omar is married to Mahnaz and they have a son, Sinaan. He enjoys travelling and music.

Head - Legal, Godrej Consumer Products Limited; Group Head - Legal, Godrej Industries Limited

Divya Narayana Murthy has 20 years of Group-level experience at Reliance Industries Limited. As Vice President - Corporate Legal and M&A, her central leadership role required her to work closely with the Group’s management team, and partner with business and legal heads across sectors (oil and gas, refining, petrochemicals, retail, brands, telecommunications, digital and technology, and new energy).

She has been responsible for leading the Group’s major transactions, including investments, joint ventures, and debt management cum fundraising. This has offered her unique opportunities and insights, both as a legal professional and a manager. Some of the salient transactions that she has worked on, include the restructuring of the telecom business, followed by negotiating investments in the tower and fibre infrastructure businesses with private equity investors, the petro-retail joint venture with BP plc, and Reliance’s foray into ‘green energy’ across the globe.

Through her career, Divya has been instrumental in shaping and evolving the in-house Legal function at the central and business levels, in framing internal legal risk policies, and selecting and nurturing relationships with external stakeholders in Indian and international law firms.

In line with her commitment to building more diverse and inclusive workplaces, Divya has accepted Board memberships at Just Dial Limited and Reliance Clothing India Private Limited, and internal POSH committee membership at Karkinos Healthcare Private Limited (a healthcare platform).

Divya enjoys competitive half-marathons, trekking, and travelling. She completed her schooling in Chennai and has a BA LLB Honours degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.