Vidya Nandagopal

Founder and CEO

Tercel Business Consultancy FZC

Business Consulting

United Arab Emirates

⭐ Leaders at a Glance

Leaders at a Glance

As a seasoned entrepreneur, accomplished author, and ICF Certified Life Coach (ACC level), Dr Vidya Nandagopal, Founder and CEO of Tercel Business Consultancy FZC, excels at guiding individuals and enterprises toward profound transformation. Operating seamlessly between Dubai and India, she leverages her cross-cultural expertise to cultivate resilient leaders and inspire enduring organisational excellence. She can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected], and by phone at +971 52 777 4163.

Name: Vidya Nandagopal
Designation: Founder and CEO
Company: Tercel Business Consultancy FZC
Industry: Business Consulting
Country: United Arab Emirates

Vidya Nandagopal-Visionary Women Leaders of Asia 2026

Leadership is often measured by the organisations people build. Some leaders leave a different kind of legacy by building the people who go on to run those organisations. Dr Vidya Nandagopal belongs firmly in the latter category.

She arrived in Dubai in 1994 as a marketing manager with an MBA from Bombay University, at a time when the city had no formal training industry and split-shift office hours made her own career close to unworkable. An unusual request, to teach engineers “appreciation of marketing,” pulled her into training almost by accident. Thirty years, seventy-five training programmes, and a PhD later, she had run the Career Planning and Placement division at a leading UAE institution for thirteen years, then led the Centre for Executive Development at the University of Dubai, designing large-scale programmes for government entities including Dubai Customs, Dubai Taxi, and DEWA.

Today, through Tercel Business Consultancy, she is applying that same instinct, building programmes and systems rather than simply attending them, to a broader mission of helping organisations and leaders grow. In this conversation with The Portfolio Magazine, she reflects on the choices, the myths she has had to bust, and the advice she wishes she had trusted sooner.

Your career has evolved across business, academia, executive education and now entrepreneurship. Which moments shaped that journey the most?

Every chapter prepared me for the next one, even when I could not see the connection at the time. I topped my chemistry class in Mumbai and was offered a seat at IIT for my Master’s, but chose an MBA in marketing instead and spent eight years at Crompton Greaves. Moving to Dubai in 1994 introduced me to a completely different professional landscape. What began as a strange request, teaching engineers how to appreciate marketing, gradually opened the door to a career in learning and development that I never planned for but never left. Establishing a career planning division, pursuing a PhD on corporate training effectiveness, and eventually leading the Centre for Executive Development at the University of Dubai all strengthened one belief: education only creates lasting change when it connects directly with business realities.

What myth about organisations and leadership do you feel your career has disproven?

People assume there is far more control inside organisations than there actually is. Every boss I had, from the time I was in my twenties, eventually stepped back and gave me the floor once I proved I was reliable and consistent. In 2014, that autonomy let me design the University of Dubai’s first six-month digital marketing programme, at a time when even commercial academies were only beginning to teach the subject. A student once travelled from Croatia after finding the course online, drawn by its reputation for pairing academic faculty with working industry practitioners. That same credibility let me push back on a Citigroup-funded entrepreneurship grant that was originally restricted to Emiratis. I argued that expats were just as much a part of Dubai’s economic fabric, and the grant expanded from ninety thousand dollars to two hundred thousand, with the final cohort split evenly between both groups.

Starting your own consultancy came after decades of building institutions. What inspired that next chapter?

I get bored easily, and for most of my career I had a job that kept reinventing itself fast enough to hold my attention. That changed when certain opportunities fell outside whatever mandate I was working under. A friend once brought me a well-researched proposal to run a programme using art therapy for patients with schizophrenia, and I had to turn it down simply because it sat outside our institution’s remit. Founding Tercel Business Consultancy removed that ceiling entirely. I now choose my own timing, my own clients, and my own causes, including the coaching work I trained for through an ICF certification in 2021. I take pride in being an ICF certified transformational life coach, and I want to use those coaching skills to make a difference in people’s lives. Tercel Business Consultancy focuses on leadership development, HR, learning strategy, and business transformation for organisations across the region.

If you had to give aspiring leaders, particularly women, one piece of advice, what would it be?

Be authentic, without faking anything or copying anyone. It is completely fine to be a woman in a room built around masculine norms. You do not need to become louder or more dominant to prove you belong there. What men and women both respect, without exception, is consistency and authenticity. I built my own team around my actual weaknesses rather than hiding them: I was never good at organising logistics, so I made sure I had people around me who were. Every woman should build her own signature the same way, around her real strengths, rather than trying to resemble someone else’s version of a leader. That is the only way to realise your full potential and do what you were actually meant to do.

We believe you are writing a book that is going to be published in the coming days. What prompted you to write it, and what message would you like to give?

The book is a full memoir, and writing it forced me to look at my life as one continuous story rather than separate chapters. It covers my school years, my marriage, motherhood, including raising a son with a mild learning disability, and every career move I have described here in far more detail. Three times across my career I took a sabbatical to be with my family, and three times my employer called me back rather than replacing me, which became part of the book’s larger argument: what you give up will return to you if it is meant to. The message I hope readers take away, without me spelling it out directly, is that you can reinvent yourself at any point and take your life into your own hands, the same way I moved from chemistry to marketing to training to entrepreneurship without ever staying in one lane for long.

What guiding principle continues to shape your leadership today?

Leadership has always meant helping people become more than they believed possible, whether that is a twenty-year-old professional just out of college or a senior executive I am advising through Tercel. Titles and achievements matter, but the real fulfilment comes from watching someone build the confidence to lead on their own terms. I hope my contribution is remembered through the people and organisations that keep growing long after our work together has ended.

“Be authentic, without faking anything or copying anyone. You were not designed to be anyone else.”