Dr. Nagendra Palle, fondly known as Nagi, is a distinguished leader with over two decades of global experience in the automotive industry. He currently serves as the Director of Sovereign Solutions Pte Ltd., based in Singapore. From January 2013 to March 2018, Nagi was at the helm of Mahindra First Choice Wheels Ltd (MFCWL) as its CEO, steering the company through a transformative phase in India’s rapidly evolving used car industry.

Before his impactful tenure at MFCWL, Nagi worked with OPENLANE in Redwood City, California—one of the premier online wholesale marketplaces in the United States, facilitating the sale of over 300,000 cars annually. His rich career spans various automotive domains, including R&D, business planning, strategy, finance, mergers & acquisitions, and online vehicle retailing/auctioning, in globally renowned organizations like Ford Motor Company, Visteon Automotive Systems, A.T. Kearney, and Accenture LLP.

He earned his B.Tech from IIT Madras, followed by an M.S. in Applied Mechanics from the Colorado School of Mines, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Adding to his stellar credentials, he also holds an MBA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with distinction, specializing in Finance and Strategy.

Nagi’s thought leadership is reflected in his contributions as a speaker at prestigious platforms like The Economist, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His accomplishments include two U.S. patents, participation on Accenture’s exclusive Management Consulting Advisory Panel, and winning A.T. Kearney’s Great Client Work Award.

He has also served on award committees for the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. and has been recognized for his expertise in both the corporate and academic worlds.

• In this episode Dr. Nagi Palle talks about Entrepreneurship and Leadership outside bigger Corporations and how a new mindset is required for surviving in a globally competitive world of startups. In this world one needs to be entrepreneurial rather than follow a corporate mindset. Models such as TQM, widely applied in the larger companies, are hardly known or used in the startup world.
• While management models in themselves are not necessarily useless, their applicability in a wider range of contexts may be limited. So, the same set of rules that apply to a 5-billion-dollar automotive company cannot bureaucratically be applied to a startup which is just starting to earn revenue.
• Another critical is a lesson learnt from Silicon Valley startups- no one spends on training. The employee is expected to come in with adequate knowledge to start being efficient from day one, without handholding. These and other efficiency parameters are discussed by Dr. Nagi Palle in the episode.

Run time – 00:44:07

Birendra Kumar Tiwari is the Director-in-Charge of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), Bokaro Steel Plant. He has a highly process-oriented mindset. During his tenure as Executive Director (Works) at Bokaro Steel Plant, he brought safety and quality to the forefront of all operations and services. His leadership was instrumental in de-bottlenecking crude steel production constraints, resulting in record production levels across all units. Significant strides were made in new units like SMS (New) and CRM-III, with quantum jumps in output.

As Executive Director (Collieries), he successfully operationalized the Tasra coal mines and charted a strategic roadmap for securing long-term supplies of indigenous coking and power coal, leading to a 20% increase in the supply of coking coal to SAIL plants.

Earlier, as Chief General Manager (Coke Ovens and By-Product Plant), he used safety and housekeeping as critical management systems to improve production, quality, and work culture and drive sustainable growth. Under his guidance, production targets were consistently met, and the performance of the shops saw a remarkable turnaround.

In today’s episode, I’ll be gaining his insights on the significance of process excellence in the Indian public sector environment.

• In this episode, B. K. Tiwari talks about Process Excellence in PSUs. He discusses internal assessment frameworks and continual dip-sticking in a dynamic environment to assess current capability and future competitiveness.
• Indian PSUs such as SAIL have evolved from the era of a protected economy to an era of global competition and have managed to survive. This speaks to its capability in transformation and modernization through process excellence and sixty years of resident knowledge.
• SAIL has also been using TQM for the last two decades or more to increase employee engagement and customer satisfaction. The business excellence wing in each and every plant brings in the necessary interventions aimed at continuous improvement.

Run time – 00:44:01

Rajeev Dubey is the former Chairman of Mahindra Insurance Brokers, Mahindra Steel Service Centre, and Mahindra First Choice Wheels.

Rajeev holds a degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and furthered his studies at the Delhi School of Economics. He earned his MBA from the Yale School of Management in the USA.

He joined Mahindra in 2004 after a remarkable 29-year career with the Tata Group, which he entered as a member of the Tata Administrative Service (TAS) in 1975. His tenure included 21 years with Tata Steel, followed by leadership roles as CEO of Tata Metaliks and later Rallis India. Rajeev retired in 2020 as the Group President (HR & Corporate Services) & CEO (After-Market Sector), and a member of the Group Executive Board of Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

In addition to his corporate achievements, Rajeev has had a distinguished career in international labour relations. He recently retired as a Member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva and served as a Board Member and Vice President for Asia of the International Organization of Employers (IOE) in Geneva. He has also led as the President of the Employers’ Federation of India (EFI) and the National Human Resource Development Network (NHRDN).

Rajeev Dubey’s extensive contributions have also allowed him to actively participate in the Steering Committee and National Executive Council of FICCI for many years.

• In this episode Rajeev Dubey talks about the importance of cultivating an organizational culture, and his definition of what an organizational culture is, in the context of a business enterprise— it is the way stakeholders behave as they take decisions. And this behaviour is created by means of certain levers. Thereafter Rajeev Dubey proceeds to elucidate on the HR levers that help in creating behaviour.
• He discusses his background as the General Manager of a township— Jamshedpur, which is a general town and not a company township. In an organization, it is easier to create systems due to command structures and ownership, but in the context of an open system such as a town, which comes with its multifarious stakeholders and baggage of all kinds of people, it requires astute handling, as well as a fair share of spirit, to take along all stakeholders to create value-oriented systems.
• Regarding AI, Rajeev Dubey believes that when we are dealing with a technology that can produce efficiency at the cost of dehumanizing, ultimately human values such as respect, empathy, ethics and appreciative inquiry, along with soft skills and governance, will become even more important than ever before. Research on the Future of Work from ILO, with which he has been associated, also points in the same direction.

Run time – 00:41:45 mins.