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