NIO U.S. CEO Ganesh Iyer on China Speed and Automotive Leadership

[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Jan Griffiths: This is the Automotive Leaders Podcast. Straight talk from the CEOs and innovators who cut through the noise, create clarity, and drive transformation across this industry. The old command and control playbook is dead. Culture is the operating system. Authentic leadership is the edge. We're rewiring it, starting now. I'm your host, Jan Griffiths, that passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales and the champion for culture change. Let's dive in.

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[00:01:08] We're here today, we are straight off the stage from the Reuters Automotive 2026 Conference, and I'm thrilled to be talking to Ganesh Iyer, who is the CEO for NIO US.

[00:01:21] Ganesh, welcome to the Automotive Leaders Podcast.

[00:01:24] Ganesh Iyer: Thank you. Thank you, Jan. It's been a pleasure in your panel earlier today at the Reuters event in Detroit.

[00:01:29] Jan Griffiths: It was exciting, wasn't it?

[00:01:30] Ganesh Iyer: Oh, it absolutely was.

[00:01:31] You know, what I liked about was we didn't talk about something that only we want to talk about.

[00:01:36] Jan Griffiths: Right.

[00:01:36] Ganesh Iyer: We talked about something what the audience really wanted, right?

[00:01:39] Bringing them in into the mix. I thought that was very unique, and that resonated pretty well with me.

[00:01:44] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, yeah.

[00:01:45] Looking at your background, Ganesh, you've worked for Tesla, right? You have a strong tech background. But my first question is a question I always ask.

[00:01:54] Who are you as a leader?

[00:01:56] Ganesh Iyer: Great question. Yes, I started my automotive career back in 2010. Till then, I've been in this tech industry for, now it is almost 35 years.

[00:02:06] So my switching from the traditional automotive into auto tech, if you will, started with Tesla back in late 2010.

[00:02:15] So I was there from the early days of, more or less engineering side. So fortunate to work for directly with, who else? Elon Musk.

[00:02:22] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:02:23] Ganesh Iyer: I learned a ton from him. Fascinating thing was about how to look at problem-solving using a different lens that many of us, many of the listeners out there, how they are approaching about problem-solving.

[00:02:35] That is something that I get a unique perspective and fortunate to work with such an elite leader, Elon. So that excited me even more to get into deeper, penetration into this whole electrification.

[00:02:48] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:02:48] Ganesh Iyer: How it should be looked at. At the end of the day, car is no longer a people mover.

[00:02:52] Car has become like a, physical AI. That's where we... the buzz word, right?

[00:02:57] Jan Griffiths: That's a good way to say it. It's a physical AI.

[00:02:59] Ganesh Iyer: It is a physical AI. And it needs to be safe and it is already safe. Every day it is getting improved. Now, the cars are coming without steering wheel.

[00:03:07] There could be a point where, you know, do you really need a driver's license anymore for driving a car because you're not driving it, right?

[00:03:12] Jan Griffiths: Exactly.

[00:03:12] Ganesh Iyer: So all that possibility evolved from this back in the early days of electrification. So I got excited about it.

[00:03:19] So as a leader, directly to your question, so I believe in more of a friendly approach to being a leader.

[00:03:28] Honestly speaking, I believe every single person is a leader. You are the leader that I'll be looking for. If that mindset changes, I think we will be in a different place about it, right? But in the traditional metaphor, the leader is, to me, it's like, who is approving your expense report?

[00:03:43] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:44] Ganesh Iyer: That's extent of it, right?

[00:03:45] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:03:45] Ganesh Iyer: But it's not. It's basically, it's a problem-solving. We are collaborating together as quote-unquote, "A unified leadership team" to drive towards that innovation to the mass users.

[00:03:55] That is how I would describe myself as. I'm a very friendly person. I don't treat anybody as a, you know, I'm your supervisor, rather, I say that I work for you. I work for you all. Leverage me as a blocking and tackling person to get any constraints on your way to get things done.

[00:04:11] Jan Griffiths: So you employ more of a servant-leadership style mentality.

[00:04:15] Ganesh Iyer: That's what I believe in. That's what I trained on. I believe in that philosophy.

[00:04:18] Jan Griffiths: But what was the trigger? Because as you know, the automotive industry is very much command and control, the legacy auto industry. If you will, give yourself permission to be a servant leader?

[00:04:29] Ganesh Iyer: So, if you look back. Auto industry is more than 100-plus-year-old legacy. But until about 15 years ago, nothing has changed really. It is still moving objects and people from point A to point B. Yeah. That was the purpose of that quote, unquote, " Auto industry vehicles." Until now, that has evolved from a traditional mechanical engineering driven project to more of a software driven product.

[00:04:54] Nobody talks about software anymore. The different term is digital. It is digital. It's not software, this is digital.

[00:05:00] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:05:01] Ganesh Iyer: Right? But now we are shifting even towards, with this AI being the new term in the block right now. It is becoming more of a user experience driven, automobiles.

[00:05:11] Whoever is able to do it at scale will be the winner. Why the adoption is still, in my humble opinion, why it is much slower in many parts of the Western Hemisphere as compared to the Eastern, mainly China, in particular, is they're not cutting corners in creating these products, right?

[00:05:31] They're innovating the process by which these vehicles are being created. Traditionally, there is a 10 or 12-step process with each process with a gating.

[00:05:41] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:05:42] Ganesh Iyer: Until you pass this successfully you can't go to the next one.

[00:05:45] Jan Griffiths: Resistance points.

[00:05:46] Ganesh Iyer: Resistance points, right?

[00:05:47] Jan Griffiths: All the way through the process.

[00:05:49] Ganesh Iyer: There's merits and demerits to it. The merits is it is a structure. There's a structure to the madness. The first company to break that siloed, process was the Tesla, right? Because it was a fundamentally different product that the history of mankind and the planet Earth has never seen before.

[00:06:05] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:06:06] Ganesh Iyer: You cannot do the same way that you have done in the last 100 plus years. Then you'll be yet another one of those legacy inventor. Where I was going with that thinking is process should not become the product.

[00:06:21] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:06:21] Ganesh Iyer: Process cannot become the product.

[00:06:23] Jan Griffiths: Exactly, because we tend to optimize within the silo

[00:06:27] Ganesh Iyer: Correct

[00:06:27] Jan Griffiths: Which is about the process.

[00:06:28] Ganesh Iyer: Correct.

[00:06:29] Jan Griffiths: Not thinking about the ultimate. How does this gonna impact the end product or the output of what I'm trying to do.

[00:06:35] Ganesh Iyer: It should be more of an outcome based and then create a lean process to achieve that milestone.

[00:06:40] Jan Griffiths: To support it, yes.

[00:06:40] Ganesh Iyer: But if you go with the traditional mindset that is how the legacy OEMs are being framed to, but it is changing now for good. That's because of these innovators that are coming in to drive change and disrupting. So the process should never become the product.

[00:06:53] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:06:53] Ganesh Iyer: That doesn't mean that you have to eliminate everything and then just go with that, right?

[00:06:56] Jan Griffiths: But that should not be the focus. And that should not be how you're measured.

[00:06:59] Ganesh Iyer: Correct.

[00:07:00] Jan Griffiths: And I interviewed, Stefan Krause, he was the CEO of EVelocity and then Canoe at one point several years ago, and we were talking about leading with conviction and leading with compliance.

[00:07:13] And legacy automotive tends to lead with compliance to process. Not leading from the heart with conviction.

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[00:07:40] Ganesh Iyer: Correct, correct. You know, for example, the company that I work for, I'm so fortunate and then, and I always talk about it. Every employee, no matter who you are, what rank you are in, your performance is based on not just what you have delivered, what you have been asked to deliver, that is just one of two things.

[00:07:59] You may have achieved the result, but killing so many people.

[00:08:03] What I mean by killing is you know, just disappointing them, right?

[00:08:05] Jan Griffiths: We talk about leaving a trail of dead bodies.

[00:08:07] Ganesh Iyer: Exactly. You cannot do that, then that means you're not a good employee. You have to still meet your objective, i.e, deliverables.

[00:08:15] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:08:15] Ganesh Iyer: But the other thing is about...

[00:08:16] Jan Griffiths: how you did it?

[00:08:17] Ganesh Iyer: How you did it?

[00:08:18] Jan Griffiths: And that is part of the way employees are measured or evaluated at NIO. Is that correct?

[00:08:23] Ganesh Iyer: That is absolutely correct. Because, we look at every employee. There are four core attributes that we measure upon, on every employee from the chairman all the way to a receptionist on the floor: Honesty, Vision, Care, and Action.

[00:08:36] Jan Griffiths: I like that. It's short and simple.

[00:08:38] Ganesh Iyer: Simple way to remember—HVAC. Honesty, Vision, Care, Action (HVAC). That's easy way to remember it, right?

[00:08:43] You delivered it, but tell me from your perspective as an employee, then as part of your evaluation, we look at your peer group.

[00:08:51] Hey, tell us how Jan did it in those four dimensions. That the holistic view of you as an employee, you as a leader, I get a much better picture. Imagine the world where every single person is going through the same metaphor, same framework.

[00:09:04] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:09:04] Ganesh Iyer: Outcome is completely different.

[00:09:05] Jan Griffiths: It is different, and I do think that... yeah, obviously, I've grown up in the legacy automotive industry, and you were almost celebrated if you left a trail of dead bodies behind you. How tough you were, how aggressive you were. That was celebrated years ago. Now, It's not so much now.

[00:09:22] But I do think that we are too metrics focused. It's all about the KPI, and I'm not saying that KPIs aren't important, but it can't be all about that. Like you say there are more dimensions to this.

[00:09:35] Ganesh Iyer: Much, much more dimensions to it. You know, we heard yesterday at this Reuters events, many people talk about balanced scorecard.

[00:09:41] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:09:41] Ganesh Iyer: I mean, these are old terminology, right? Nothing wrong in using those terminology, but that's not the world that we live in.

[00:09:47] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:09:48] Ganesh Iyer: It's not too black and white, right?

[00:09:49] Jan Griffiths: Does the customer care about a balanced scorecard?

[00:09:51] Ganesh Iyer: Exactly. Customer don't care really about it. That's an internal metric, but you cannot just run your company just by using that. You have to use certain metric that is relevant, but you cannot just run just using the metric alone.

[00:10:04] It's all in, you have to have that culture aspect, the value aspect.

[00:10:09] As an example, in our staff meeting, my chairman staff meeting, there are three things that we go through every single week.

[00:10:14] Sales goals. How did we do in our sales? How are we doing on the supply chain and manufacturing? And the most important thing is, what is our users telling us? User satisfaction.

[00:10:25] User value creation. So that is how we're looking at. Are we creating value for the end users? If not, what's wrong with it?

[00:10:34] So chairman wants to know it. So that is a philosophy KL approach, and then, it's a different mindset of running a company if you think about it.

[00:10:42] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:10:42] Ganesh Iyer: Right?

[00:10:42] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:10:42] Ganesh Iyer: Not rocket science, it's common sense.

[00:10:44] Jan Griffiths: Interesting take. We talked earlier about collaboration at the OEM level.

[00:10:49] Ganesh Iyer: Yep.

[00:10:50] Jan Griffiths: And the, Chinese OEMs are known to collaborate more. I know that you're a global OEM, but tell us how important is collaboration and how do you do it?

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[00:11:38] Ganesh Iyer: that's only way to enter into global market these days because there is, the ease of doing business is becoming harder and harder, no matter which continent, which country that you want to get in.

[00:11:49] And we are no different. There's always constraint, there's opportunities, there's challenges. So when we talk about the partnership. I always say that if you know, Jan better than I do on certain thing show to do it and you have a demonstrated success in doing so, rather than me trying to invest my limited resources in those areas, again, to reinvent the same wheel that you have invented already and you perfected it to drive customer value, why don't we talk?

[00:12:15] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:12:15] Ganesh Iyer: Why don't we talk? Why don't we collaborate? Why don't we extend our hands? As opposed to...

[00:12:20] Jan Griffiths: fighting each other.

[00:12:21] Ganesh Iyer: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a healthy competition is always welcome, right? Both of us, we get better.

[00:12:25] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:12:25] Ganesh Iyer: And all the companies get better by having a healthy competition.

[00:12:29] But at the end, the competition is for what? It's to drive and generate value for our end users, and consumers.

[00:12:37] Consumer demand choices.

[00:12:38] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:12:39] Ganesh Iyer: Whichever organization is delivering those more choices, no matter which industry it is. They are the leaders, they are the winners. Let's collaborate.

[00:12:47] Jan Griffiths: And, I take this through all the way down through the supply chain, and looking at all the different tiers of suppliers. Their life would be so much easier, and cost would be taken out of the way that they do business if there was more collaboration at the OEM level. I mean, you talk to any tier one, they get frustrated with the way they have to do business for OEMs, for Ford, for General Motors, for Stellantis, you name them, right? For VW.

[00:13:14] Everyone has a slightly different system, a different way of doing things. At that simple collaboration level on process and how we do business, let alone collaborating at a more fundamental business level, it would drive tremendous cost out of this industry and make us more competitive.

[00:13:32] Ganesh Iyer: Oh, 100% you're right to that point.

[00:13:35] Take one good use case example, and the electric vehicle's battery is the classic example, right? Today, as we all know, there's three separate countries, and then the suppliers in those countries, they dominate. CATL, CALB in China.

[00:13:50] Samsung and LG in Korea. Of course, Panasonic in Japan. These are the leaders, in that order, if you will, who produce this, the small molecules, I call it as cells. Lithium ion cells or there are different dimensions to it, but they are the leaders. But now every OEM is creating their own version of this, putting those cells into modules into battery packs.

[00:14:12] Wouldn't it be nice if we can standardize the battery pack? So that means, there is a set of suppliers who know exactly, so it's much faster to do it at a fraction of a cost.

[00:14:23] For the supplier level, for the OEM level, eventually who's gonna enjoy the lower cost? It'll be the end users.

[00:14:30] So standardization is absolutely there. So suppliers bringing the new suppliers into it and, that's the way to do it.

[00:14:36] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:14:36] Our last question. We talk all day long in this industry about China speed, why are we not able to design, develop, and launch vehicles the same way as we see Chinese OEMs doing it? From your perspective.

[00:14:53] Ganesh Iyer: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:53] Jan Griffiths: I know that that's a huge question and an answer that could take us hours.

[00:14:57] Ganesh Iyer: All day. Yeah.

[00:14:58] Jan Griffiths: But what's top of mind to you?

[00:15:00] Ganesh Iyer: Yeah. It's real. One is execution speed. Commitment towards execution. Once we decided we are gonna do, we're gonna get it done by then all in. There's no two ways about it. The decisions are made quickly.

[00:15:14] Jan Griffiths: So no hierarchies...

[00:15:15] Ganesh Iyer: no hierarchy ...

[00:15:16] Jan Griffiths: no PowerPoint reviews, and then a week later having more data, and then a week later...

[00:15:21] Ganesh Iyer: otherwise, if you do, you cannot go into the analysis paralysis mode.

[00:15:24] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:15:24] Ganesh Iyer: You need to get to the ... You know, I always call it as the shortest paths communication.

[00:15:29] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Ganesh Iyer: If there is a problem that we need to solve, and we assume that we are in a cross-functional teams. You department one, I'm department two. We have been asked to work together to collaborate on, to solve this problem.

[00:15:41] Typically, what happens is, you talk to your manager, who talks to the director, who talk to the vice president, that vice president talk to my vice president. Guess what? It's hierarchical driven. By the time that it gets to the problem-solving, it's already late.

[00:15:54] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:15:54] Ganesh Iyer: The issue has become into a risk.

[00:15:55] Now we are management is looking at mitigating those risks, managing those risks. Wouldn't it be nice if we can get short touch path decision-making to solve problems?

[00:16:06] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:16:07] Ganesh Iyer: That is one fundamental difference that I've seen working in China.

[00:16:13] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:16:13] Ganesh Iyer: And execution speed. That's because of that shortest paths communication.

[00:16:17] Let's get it done.

[00:16:19] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:16:19] Ganesh Iyer: There's nothing called perfection.

[00:16:20] Jan Griffiths: Progress instead of perfection.

[00:16:22] Ganesh Iyer: Progress over perception. Then, you iterate ...

[00:16:24] Jan Griffiths: The fear of failure.

[00:16:25] Ganesh Iyer: Correct.

[00:16:26] Jan Griffiths: You have to get over that.

[00:16:27] Ganesh Iyer: You have to get over it.

[00:16:28] Jan Griffiths: Yes.

[00:16:28] Ganesh Iyer: You cannot just manage any project, any risk with the fear of unknown.

[00:16:31] Fear of unknown is always there.

[00:16:33] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:16:33] Ganesh Iyer: That's part of our humanity, but you cannot just run a business or problem-solving using the fear of unknown.

[00:16:39] Let's go get it done. What the information we have today, let's solve it.

[00:16:42] Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

[00:16:43] Ganesh Iyer: Tomorrow, if we have additional information, we iterate.

[00:16:45] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:46] Ganesh Iyer: Nothing wrong in doing that. That has been the recipe that I have seen. To your question, why many of these Chinese OEMs are successful, continue to be successful is because of the speed of execution, and then the other point is scale. The problems are not solved as a point solution.

[00:17:00] They are looking at, is it gonna have a meaningful impact on masses, millions and billions of people? So the speed and the scale are the two foundational differences between, the OEMs there, as well as the OEMs in rest of the world. That has to change.

[00:17:14] Jan Griffiths: Speed and scale.

[00:17:15] And as you said, let's go get it done.

[00:17:18] Let's go get it done. And that's a great way to close today.

[00:17:20] Thank you, Jan. So to my audience, let's go get it done.

[00:17:23] Ganesh Iyer: Let's get it done. Thank you, Jan.

[00:17:25] Jan Griffiths: Thank you for listening. You can watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel. Search for Jan Griffiths Automotive Leaders, and download the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership. It's a free PDF and the link is in the show notes. And remember, stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.