Creating social impact

Coach, mentor, investor and philanthropist Viiveck Verma is one of the brains behind getting the TEDx Conference to Hyderabad. It all began in 2014 when Viiveck and team planned to bring TEDxHyderabad is to build a community of ‘Thinkers, Enablers and Doers’. “We thought that Hyderabad has a huge potential and as TEDx has a global platform, we wanted to create local engagement and build stronger and connected communities,” Viiveck shared.
Viiveck has 30-plus years of work experience in well-known corporate houses with a proven track record for excellence and dynamic leadership. 

He has successfully executed key positions of diverse nature and capacities during his career. His leadership skills, a strong commitment to ethical and professional standards were recognised with an award for “Best Ethics in Business” by the then Civil Aviation Minister - Praful Patel. During his tenure in the travel industry, he was also recognised as an industry “Thought Leader”. 

He is a Zenger Miller Frontline Leadership Certified Trainer. Today, his skills are also used to efficiently organise Ted talks in the City of Nizams and in selecting the right speakers who can inspire the audience with their stories and experiences.   

About selecting speakers for the talks Viiveck shared, “First we decide on a theme and then choose the speakers. ‘Rethink’ will be our theme for this year’s talk, which is scheduled to be held on September 16. We also take feedback from our 4k plus community members and decide what areas should we cover and within that, we find who is doing what in that area. Then our team chooses speakers in the various topics; in our first phase, we list about 80 speakers or so and then depending on the availability and interest of the speaker we shortlist 12 to 15 speakers. It is a process of nearly two months. Each talk is about 18 minutes or less.”

The fourth edition of TEDx Hyderabad will have Bollywood actress Tabu; retired Chief of Army Staff, Gen. VK Singh; Chief Secretary to Government of Telangana, Dr SK Joshi among the speakers. “We have a strong curation process. We work with the speakers and discuss what they are going to talk. The content will be upto the speakers, but we give feedback on how to make the talk more powerful or how to add a punch,” the co-organiser said.

Viiveck informed that when they started TEDx Hyderabad, the conference was attended by 500 people and in its fourth edition - this year - they are expecting an audience of at least 2,500. “We place huge emphasis on attendees too. We have a selection process for them. We give them a form and our team check the answers given by them based on which invitations are sent. Around 4-5 of our speakers have come from the attendees list in the past.”

TEDx events in Hyderabad are organised by the members of a not-for-profit society – SAHE (Society for Advancement of Human Endeavour). In the past, the team has organised. TEDxHyderabadLive – a live streaming of talks as they happen; TEDxHyderabadWomen – an interactive session with live talks from the main TEDWomen event; TEDxHyderabad – a flagship speaker event and TEDxYouth@Hyderabad targeted at a younger teen audience, besides taking up various community projects around the environment, education and social driven projects in the city of Hyderabad.

“We conduct these talks because of the sheer passion we have in community building. All the proceeds from the sale of tickets go to SAHE, which has initiatives like ‘Save10KBores’, ‘LiveTheLakes’, ‘100KResponse’ amongst others to make society a better place,” he adds.