Listen, trust, verify is this CEO’s mantra

Imagine an electronics and communications engineer fresh out of college spending time with truck owners and drivers to understand their financing needs. That's how Shriram Group veteran Nanda Kishore N S, currently MD & CEO of Novac Technology Solutions, first cut his teeth in the industry that has been his playground for three decades. Back in 1994, as a freshly minted engineer from Osmania University, Nanda Kishore was one of the first batch of engineers that Shriram Group recruited. "I was aware that this is a finance company, but since there was a lot of technology being adopted in those days I thought it would be an interesting opportunity," he says.
It was. The top management, led by group founder R Thyagarajan, decided that everyone in the organization needed to spend time at the branch offices to understand the business. "We used to meet truck owners and drivers," he says. "It was totally different from what we had studied in college, but I did not miss that I had moved out of engineering," he adds. That customer-facing experience taught Nanda Kishore one of his biggest leadership lessons – management by listening to people. A CEO, he says, has to listen. Why? Because a CEO is only as good as his team. "Today we have so many technologies coming up – they change every two or three years," he says. A CEO's "ability to identify a team and work with it is important". His corner office mantra is: "listen, trust, verify".
After spending several years on the business side, he eventually moved into a series of tech roles driving group-wide technology initiatives, including software application management, IT infrastructure, data centres, DR & BCP, call centres, customer services desk, and business process re-engineering. After spending nine years as chief technology officer at Shriram Transport Finance and another four as CTO Shriram Capital, Nanda Kishore, now 53, he took over as CEO of Novac in April 2019.
Looking back, he feels he's had a vantage point view of how quickly technology changes. "Back in the early 2000s, we started branch automation with offline-online kind of setup. Then there were a few years with no offline systems and then we moved to the mobile era," he says. "Every phase needed us to unlearn and relearn," he adds. Today, the things he remembers are the small surprises along the way. One of them, he calls the case of the receipt book. It happened when the company moved to SMS receipts from the earlier physical version. "We felt that the first adopter customers will be from the tech-savvy cities, but we found 100% adoption of our tech in Chattisgarh instead," he says.
So what's his tech mantra in a world where artificial intelligence will soon disrupt everything? "Technology is an enabler," he says. "It will not give you business." If used right, it will help in "ease of doing business". "But if you don't use it properly, then it will just be junk in, junk out," he says. Like a CEO, technology is only as good as the team that uses it.