Tapping into engineering

Daimler Truck Innovation Centre India has gone through a massive transformation in the last 12 months. It started with standing up a new company in record time and stabilizing the operations. As per Raghavendra Vaidya – MD & CEO, DTICI, “The next transformation is centered around finding the purpose and strategy driven by purpose and in lockstep with Daimler Truck AG’s strategy, which is very different from the previous setup. This was not easy because of the long legacy we have. The other transformation we are going through is to instill a culture of innovation or the way I would like to say it — Consequent Innovation, where we start with an idea and follow it up all the way to the product.”

Raghavendra Vaidya – MD & CEO, DTICI

Leadership is a choice, not a position and we choose to be leaders no matter what our job description is or where we are positioned in the organization. A firm believer in this concept, Vaidya practices it o two ways, one is authentic leadership, and the other is Lead to Inspire. “The team that you are leading needs to know you very well and they should not be second-guessing your intention or interpreting your ideas and communication. I inspire my team by helping them understand the purpose of Daimler Truck AG and of DTICI. If they believe in the purpose and see on a daily basis how their work helps achieve that purpose, they will be inspired to achieve that,” shares Vaidya.

On keeping himself evolved in the era of self-disruption, Vaidya mentions, “I see personal growth in 2 dimensions: how do I become a better engineer every day and how do I become a better leader every day? I practice lots of techniques to achieve this, but the most important and effective one is to learn through conversations with team members, and in many cases, these could be GET’s. The other dimension of personal growth is learning things that have nothing to do with my job or role. As I said, I read a lot about cosmology and quantum mechanics. This helps me realize how insignificant we are in the overall scheme of things and how little we know about the universe and how it works.”