Smita Puranesh
Enabling organisation and leadership for growth, scale and transformation
Smita Puranesh is a business and people leader with three decades of experience across industries, geographies and different stages of organisational growth. She brings a practitioners perspective to organisation transformation—connecting business ambition with real world solutions around leadership, organisation, culture and talent required to deliver it.
Smita brings over three decades of experience across hospitality, real estate, consulting, telecom, IT-enabled services, technology, and media & entertainment. Her early career in Business development and operations was with leading organisations including Le Méridien, Great Eastern Shipping, Colliers Jardine and Airtel. She moved to lead HR teams at Genpact, Star, Hotstar, Netflix and HBO Max and her last several years were as CHRO at Viacom18 and JioCinema and HR Head & Integration leader for the JioStar JV.
Across her career, she has held senior people and organisation leadership roles through periods of rapid growth, digital transformation, business disruption, leadership transitions, organisation redesign, and integration. Her experience spans organisation design, talent strategy, leadership hiring, culture and change, post-merger integration, and building leadership capability.
This rich experience and rare combination of business and HR experience shapes the leadership she brings to Potentia. CEOs and leadership teams value her pragmatic approach to building leadership capability, top-team effectiveness, culture, and performance. She helps organisations view people and organisation choices not as standalone HR interventions, but as interconnected business decisions that enable the organisation to evolve and move to its next orbit.
