Nirmalya Kumar is Lee Kong Chian professor of marketing at Singapore Management University. Previously, he headed strategy at Tata Sons, reporting to the chairman of the $100-billion Tata Group with 6,75,000 employees. Nirmalya has taught at Columbia University, Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland), London Business School and Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University). He has also been a visiting fellow at BITSoM, Cambridge Judge Business School, Indian School of Business and INSEAD.
Nirmalya is one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy and marketing. As a consultant and speaker, he has worked with over fifty Fortune 500 companies in sixty countries. He has served on more than twelve boards of directors including ACC, Ambuja Cement, Bata India, Tata Chemicals, Ultratech and Zensar. Thrice included in Thinkers50 (the biannual listing of the top fifty management thinkers in the world), he received their Global Village Award for his contributions to the business community’s understanding of globalization and emerging markets before being inducted into their Hall of Fame.
Amazon and Walmart, with more than half a trillion in revenues annually, are the two largest companies in the world. They have not only redefined the retail industry—Walmart in the 1980s/1990s and Amazon since 2000—but have also been the benchmark for business best practices (e.g., the use of IT, supply chain, data analytics, customer orientation). This year, it is anticipated that Amazon will dethrone Walmart as the world’s largest company, a position that Walmart has occupied for more than two decades.
By examining these two companies and their business models in depth, Professor Nirmalya Kumar elucidates on the more general phenomenon of incumbents competing with disruptors (e.g., Volkswagen vs Tesla, Marriott vs Airbnb) as well as the move to omnichannel retail where physical stores must coexist with online retailers.
