Surinder Kumar is currently Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at TruEats Modern Baking Company. Surinder has more than forty years of experience in senior management positions in Fortune 100 companies.
He has been a global R&D and innovation leader at some of the finest consumer product and pharmaceutical companies in the world, including Quaker Oats, Mead Johnson, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Warner Lambert, and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.
He is an honored and distinguished member of Who’s Who worldwide. He has been awarded 17 patents, published many scientific papers, and has served on several advisory boards. These include a Board of Trustees member, International Life Sciences Institute; Scientific Advisory Board Member at Penn State University, DePaul University, Rutgers University, and The Ohio State University. He has also worked as an adviser to the CEOs of many non-profit associations including IEEE and ISACA.
Surinder received the Distinguished Alumni award from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, where he received his Ph.D. He has an MBA in Marketing and Finance from the University of Chicago. He has taught innovation and leadership courses at the Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern University; University of Chicago, DePaul University, and the University of North Texas. He has authored several papers on innovation and leadership and a book on leadership, Riding the Blue Train: A Leadership Plan for Explosive Growth, which has been published in the USA, India, Turkey, and South Korea.
His third book is “Everything You Need is Within You”. He and his family reside in Flower Mound, Texas.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Steve Jobs Co-founder of Apple
- Bill Gates co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation
- William Wrigley Jr. II
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I think that entrepreneurs face multiple types of barriers. Barriers that frankly reside within them and barriers that reside outside them. As my father used to say everything you need to succeed is within you and everything that is holding you back is also within you. When I first came to the US in 1966 Neil, I had a few assumptions in my mind and I would say those were my own barriers. One of those assumptions was everybody in the US has multiple advantages over me. You know they have all of the resources, a lot more resources than India had, they had more universities than India had so I figured they must be more intelligent, they must be obviously brighter because they are exposed to a lot brighter people, they must have a lot more resources… Which is obviously financial resources. So with all these competitive advantages Neil I believed obviously I could not compete successfully”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market book by Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale Book by Hermann Hesse
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change Book by Stephen R. Covey
Favourite Quote:
“whatever you want to accomplish in life give it your all” Surinder’s Father
Recommended Online Resources:
- Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.
- Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Unless you are really passionate about an idea don’t even start a business. Starting a business to make money is not the best way to start. Passion alone is not sufficient either. So, you need to ask yourself what gives you the right to succeed in the marketplace? Does your product or service have a sustainable product or competitive advantage? Many entrepreneurs dream of success, they may even have a clear vision, they may be really passionate about their business, they may even have a plan in mind. Now however when you look at businesses and when you look at products the path to successful business is littered with good ideas and good intentions. I would say without hard disciplined work and executing that plan, and without resilience and persistence success is very tough to come by”…[Listen for More]
More About Surinder Kumar:
Author of Everything You Need is Within You Book by Surinder Kumar
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Life’s a game made for everyone and love is the prize” Wake Me Up, Avicii
Other Quotes From the Chat with Surinder Kumar:
- “Whatever you want to achieve give it your all” Surinder’s Father
- “Live your life by your own designs, by your own principles and by your own values” Surinder’s Father
- “Hindsight is always 20/20. We had to start a completely new business when Covid cause havoc. So, I’m looking at if we had prepared ourselves that changes will come that are unpredictable that we should learn to be able to pivot quickly. That would have helped. In our case consumer behaviour is changed dramatically in March of 2020. Purchasing behaviours change from in-store purchase to online purchase. We literally couldn’t test our food products with consumers because during Covid you could not even take the products to consumers. Travel got restricted for example and all of our meetings with key clients and all our conferences got cancelled. Supply chain of our ingredients was highly impacted. So, in fact in an entrepreneurial world, it is really important to be able to pivot with change as quickly as the change is coming. And the changes do come…”
- “There is a theoretical part that you can learn but nothing really is better than experiencing things… You must experience different things to become more knowledgeable rather than just reading stuff. So, you must try different things, you must experience different things so that you can actually become more knowledgeable and be more wise”
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