Sandeep Nag

For more than 20 years, Sandeep Nag, Director of 5G at Capgemini, has been within the technology industry with a primary focus on telecommunications. Starting his career at GTL, Sandeep has worked for the likes of SSE, Oracle, UST Global and Jio before joining Capgemini in August 2019. “When I joined Capgemini they were looking for someone who understood the domain from both the telco side as well as from the enterprise side for the 5G initiatives. This new innovation initiative was to enhance their digital engineering and manufacturing practice with 5G transformation. As a result they needed to set up the 5G competency and ecosystem. After joining Capgemini I was soon introduced to the leaders and teams within the organisation who work on various innovative technologies and current trends. When it comes to workplace culture Capgemini has very good practices that they follow, there is no hierarchy based approach.”

During his career, Sandeep has seen the early stages of the internet evolve into what it is today. “When I began my career Google had just begun, with people using wired networks, where people work in a desktop environment with limited people having access to a laptop. Then came broadband and the wireless industry, which completely shifted the industry, where the mobile network industry also emerged with 2G right through to 5G which is being trialed today, which has allowed people to essentially carry a computer within their pocket - which was previously constricted to high end servers. Now people are innovating with these capabilities further to develop greater business continuity and harnessing cloud technology, organisations are looking to develop an entirely intelligent system based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, which has evolved significantly in the last four to five years, to optimise network capabilities.”

When it comes to being an effective leader, Sandeep believes that - even more so within the current COVID-19 pandemic - it is important to be decisive on your strategies. “Whether you are in logistics, supply chain, retail or manufacturing you need to define your strategy. For any future crisis that may happen - while you can never predict a situation like COVID-19 - it will be important for leaders to ensure that their organisations become more agile and flexible, with measures in place to make it more accessible to work from home and ensure that it is as seamless as possible.”

Discussing his own leadership style Sandeep details that “in the previous organisations I have worked with, I worked both in the software as well as in telecom services. From that experience the aspect that has dictated my leadership style is the importance of understanding the industries in which you operate, as well as how you manage multiple stakeholders, the product life cycle and roadmap, and the company vision, as well as how you bring all this together to maintain business continuity. It is important when it comes to innovative initiatives that we don’t let them fizzle out. We want to keep the fire burning, which requires a proactive approach.”