Immerse Yourself in Culture to be a Better Businessman, Says NVIDIA’s Trivedi

In todays fast paced world of buisness and technology having a keen business sense, technical know-how and marketing prowess isn't enough. From the series of ongoing FirstPost interviews by Bernice Yeung with some of todays most innovative thinkers and business leaders, our pick, this time, is one with Shanker Trivedi, current VP. Worldwide Sales and Business Development for NVIDIA.

Listen carefully and there’s a lilt in Shanker Trivedi’s accent that betrays his multinational background and his ability to easily navigate multicultural business environments. Growing up in the “hills of India,” Trivedi attended a high school run by a group of Irish-Catholic brothers before heading off to earn a mathematics degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Calcutta.

After moving to London where he worked for companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM, he landed in Silicon Valley, where he is currently the vice president of worldwide sales at NVIDIA. The former entrepreneur and first-ever intern at Hindustani Computers talks about how to manage a global team, why studying history is important for business, and how to avoid being “dead boring.”

You’ve lived and worked in three countries: India, England, and the US. What have been the biggest transitions, culture shocks, or growth moments?

India to England was not that hard because my parents are both doctors and they were trained in Britain. And because of [my schooling] with Irish-Catholic brothers, I was actually quite okay.

The big learning point was moving from Britain to the US. We jokingly say it’s two different nations divided by a common language. But the language issues are real. The way you speak English and communicate is a little bit different in the US. Unless you’re conscious about it, you can make accidental errors and you can mis-communicate.

And my job at NVIDIA is to develop deep strategic relationships with the customers, so you have to understand where they’re coming from. And it takes a long time to understand [American sports]. Every sport I’d been doing was cricket and football. So I spent 20 years understanding Manchester United and cricket, and it was all useless. You’ve got to start again. And you have to know the universities where people are from here, and which network they could be part of. That is the big cultural thing to overcome.

To read the full interview head on over to FirstPost.com here.