Dr. Anil Menon, Senior Advisor to the Chairman, World Economic Forum

Anil, who started his career in academia with two PHD’s to his name, takes us through his experiences from consulting with large corporations to running a strategic marketing group for IBM and then as Head of Cisco Smart and Connected Communities Business. Grounded with his core beliefs that innovation is a product of diversity, and that you learn from people, because it is people that make history, Anil looks for agility of thinking and people that are frustration proof, when he looks to the leaders of tomorrow. He also outlines why relevance is so important and how being fearless is the only way to really drive change.

Transcript

Leadership in the Digital Age

Dr. Anil Menon, Senior Advisor to the Chairman, World Economic Forum

[00:00:00.890] - Matthew Smith

Welcome to our series, Leadership in the Digital Age. Today, it's my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Anil Menon, senior advisor to the chairman of the World Economic Forum. Anil's  career is a long and illustrious one, and has been forged at the intersection of business innovation and market disruption. Prior to taking on his role with the World Economic Forum, Anil worked for Cisco for nearly 10 years as the global president for Cisco's Smart and Connected Communities Business. The company's deputy chief globalisation officer and also a key leader of the  Internet of Things business through its incubation and growth within the company.

[00:00:36.830] - Matthew Smith

Prior to Cisco, Anil held various global roles at IBM, including Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer for IBM's Global Hardware Business and as a member of the company's core strategy team. Prior to this, Anil was a tenured professor at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, where he also acted as a senior advisor and consultant on market innovation and transformation to global blue-chip consumer and industrial companies. A member of numerous boards and the recipient of American Marketing Association's Alpha Kappa PSI Award, Anil has also two PHD's, one in marketing strategy and the second in multivariate statistics and linear equation modelling. Welcome, Anil. 

[00:01:21.470] - Anil Menon

Thank you, Matt. Good to be with you. 

[00:01:24.380] - Matthew Smith

So, thinking way back when, when you started your career, you're a fresh graduate. What were your goals? Where did you want it all to go? 

[00:01:35.320] - Anil Menon

So, Matt, you should recognize that way back when was almost 38 years ago when I came to America for my master's degree. After that, I went to do my PHd.

[00:01:48.670] - Anil Menon

And so the career objective at that time was to go into academia and to be a professor. In a very strange way. I never even considered at that time to go into business. So it seemed strange on hindsight as to why I didn't. But at that time, my I guess my aspiration was to get a P HD, and a P HD naturally led to an academic career rather, than going into a corporate career. 

[00:02:15.960] - Matthew Smith

I see, so, you know, when you look when you look back then and then you sort of think about from when you finish your master's degree, when you started your PHD, that the technological trends, I suppose at the time and we we've gone from the brick mobile phone to the normal mobile phone to the smartphone to something which is business applications, from fax machines to the Internet to mobile everywhere.

[00:02:44.490] - Matthew Smith

Think about as you look back, perhaps give the listeners some views of the impact that these technological changes have had at the time. And then also as the technologies matured, how that changed. 

[00:02:59.640] - Anil Menon

You know, it's interesting, I talk about this quite often, that when I came to America in 1981 coming from India, which was at that time, if you need a telephone, you waited for not just one day or two days or one month or two years, you waited for a decade or more to get a telephone connection to your house.

[00:03:19.560] - Anil Menon

So you come for me. When I called home after I landed, you did something called the trunk call. You had no idea as to when that call would be placed to India. You just knew it would come in the next eight, nine, 10 hours. And you get a call from from the dorms and the downstairs saying that you have a call and you show up. And this set called you to India. So that was the level of technology that I had to deal with.

[00:03:48.120] - Anil Menon

There was no e-mails. And you send letters back home, especially when you're the first one in your family to ever leave India to come to America for education. So it was a very different kind of a world just from a vantage point, the first couple of months, I didn't understand what was being discussed in my marketing class when the references were made to cultural things like MASH, the TV show or some other reference that was made like Jeannie and and the bottle that there was a TV show.

[00:04:21.630] - Anil Menon

So I had to go over to the library and go to a TV guide for the last 10 years to fifteen years, so that when I got into the class, I could talk in some ways in the cultural context of marketing. So the context being that you went to the library, you went to someplace and everything was defined by time and space, which was it was fixed. You went to the office at a particular time. You went to the store for a particular thing at a particular time and for any other things that you needed.

[00:04:50.340] - Anil Menon

You went to a location physically and at a particular time and frame. Over time with technology, each of those two dimensions change. So today, when you are a young person, you're not constrained by the space, nor are you constrained by time. So if there is a biggest impact that technology is done, whether it's computing and then, you know, distributed computing or mobile phones and and all the new variations of a mobile phone all the way to a smartphone, what it has done is systematically taken away the two critical dimensions on which business was founded, which was space dimension, our location, dimension and time dimension.

[00:05:34.410] - Matthew Smith

That's fascinating because I also remember the trunk calls and the sort of booking a call ahead of time. And so, you know, technology has changed, obviously, you know, we've seen all of these interactions, but let's talk a little bit now about leadership. So people talk a lot about leadership traits. Management books keep developing new formula. What do you feel makes an effective leader? You know, over time, has your views, you have your views changed.

[00:06:04.970] - Anil Menon

So the way I would answer that is at two levels. One is leadership skills or management skills. And I won't go into the details because most of the listeners that you have would know that there is a difference between being a manager and a leader. But if you think about it, the higher up you go into a company, you start out when you're a junior, you come out of college. The skills that are needed and the skills that are going to make you successful or at least promotable are going to be your technical skills and your technical skills get you up to a point when you get promoted to becoming a manager.

[00:06:42.110] - Anil Menon

At which point technical skills are still important, but not as important as social skills, the ability to manage people, to understand people. The higher up you go from being a manager, which means now you're getting into senior management position. It becomes all about conceptual skills while technical skills and social skills are critical. You're going to differentiate yourself by your ability to take a problem, organize a problem, tear it apart, put it within a bigger framework and look for new connections that you had not seen before.

[00:07:13.010] - Anil Menon

The company had not seen before. So the higher you go up at a company, the leadership skills become a lot more what you might want to call soft, which is about your ability to break a big problem, create new frameworks of organizing your thinking and your problems. And then how do you motivate people to work within that framework? So that's the first thing I would say. The second is that leadership skill, the higher up you go in a company, it's about giving a vision.

[00:07:44.210] - Anil Menon

Getting people to understand and agree with that vision and see how they fit into that vision and what needs to be done to accomplish the goals of that vision. And then the whole idea is, can you project manage them? Can you organize them? Can you provide your perspective and your judgment? And then can you motivate them to get it done? So those are I mean, you know, we can go into this in more detail. But the thing that if you asked me what is the skill that we either don't teach at MBA schools and we don't think about even in companies is we teach leadership, but we rarely teach followership.

[00:08:19.880] - Anil Menon

And the whole idea of followership is knowing when to lead. And when you are supporting somebody else, and especially in today's world, when things are getting more matrix, when things are getting more globalised, when things are getting more distributed, and when things are, influence leadership becomes even more important. The idea of influence leadership is knowing when do you lead? On, what do you lead? And that means you own it, you drive it, you take ownership and then where do you follow and take direction and help and support?

[00:08:51.020] - Anil Menon

And the great leaders, even at the CEO level, knows how to manage leadership and followership. In fact, the only place that used to teach followership for the longest time was West Point. It was only at West Point that they focused exclusively and had a particular focus on followership. I think it was Carnegie Mellon that then started teaching it at the university. So my record, my my thought is that is the one area that we don't emphasize enough, which is how do you become a true follower to the vision of the company?

[00:09:22.250] - Anil Menon

The mission of the organization and also to your leaders and to your peers so that, you know, when to help and when to shape and went to lead. 

[00:09:32.920] - Matthew Smith

That's I mean, that's fascinating followership. I mean, as you mentioned, it's about organizing problems, breaking down problems, solving problems, knowing when to step back and follow and knowing when to step up and lead, Now, on that stepping up and leading. You've been managing and leading people for quite some time.

[00:09:52.780] - Matthew Smith

Could you give me a couple of examples of really hard decisions you've had to make in that time and how you've managed their outcomes? 

[00:10:02.500] - Anil Menon

You know. When you're in a senior management position. One of the things that I always tell people, much of our training academically and otherwise has focused on optimal decision making. We are wired to try and make the most optimal of decisions. And I can tell you unequivocally that at a senior level position, whether it was at IBM or in at Cisco or at the World Economic Forum, I have rarely seen, nor have I made a true optimal decision.

[00:10:37.360] - Anil Menon

The higher up you go into a company, you're always going to find conflicting points of view, conflicting things and objectives that you're trying to balance, which means most decisions that are important, that have some not only immediate impact, but also long impact, is never quite clear. So you're always making a hard decision. And I always say that, you know, you train yourself to learn which of the decisions that's not the most optimal. How do I decide which is the least best optimal?

[00:11:07.180] - Anil Menon

I'm not even sure how you'd call it the least best suboptimal decision you can make, because you're always trying to balance multiple things so you learn how to do to to balance it in terms of judgment and it's the judgment. So what are the decisions that are the most difficult? It can start from the simple ones, which is very, very common, but just taking a cut. If you have to go for productivity gains, you have to make cuts.

[00:11:30.910] - Anil Menon

The easiest way is to just give a general five percent or 10 percent to everybody. But that's usually not the best way to do it. I remember Jack Welch of G.E. telling me that you have to make those decisions, like the way you put butter on a toast, in as much as the analogy is a little brutal. The point he made is your butter. Your bread is never evenly hot. So some areas actually get the butter and they melt into it.

[00:11:57.970] - Anil Menon

The other ones remain as clumps. And you literally can't eat a clump of butter on a piece of cold bread. So you pull it out and then you eat the rest. And his analogy, be that you have to focus on people who are performing and make some very difficult decisions on people who are not performing. Maybe they're not in the right role. Maybe they are not working the way you thought they should or could. So you're making those decisions that are very difficult, especially because the decisions you make have an impact not only on them, but also their family and friends in all the circles that they belong to.

[00:12:33.340] - Anil Menon

So those decisions are very difficult. I have to admit that those are the ones I find the most challenging and most most most upsetting at times. But you have to make the decision based on the data and the facts and what is right for that and for the company. Then once you make the decision, then you've got to figure out a way to do it in a humane manner. So you are there to help the person or people who are impacted by the decision you made.

[00:13:00.430] - Anil Menon

So that's one that's probably one of the more difficult decisions. And especially these are people who have worked for you for a long period of time that you like personally, telling them that either they don't get a promotion or they won't get a pay raise is difficult. You have to do it in such a way that motivates them to understand the reasoning, but also not break, their complete self aware self-worth down to where it breaks them. You have to be very careful when you push people, challenge people that you're doing it within the limits of it being motivational.

[00:13:35.980] - Anil Menon

Those those are kinds of things that I deal with. Obviously, there are others that are quite difficult, but not necessarily as emotional. Those are decisions when somebody is not performing at all. And you have to fire them. And you know that the person is not right, for the company. There are no other roles that is right for them. Or if somebody does things that you consider them to be performing, but not within the culture, that is that they are disruptive.

[00:14:03.430] - Anil Menon

And it is not just because they are challenging, not because they are diverse or because they are different is just because they are just not right for the culture or the organization. And there you have to be extremely careful that you're not playing into any form of unconscious bias or any kind of prejudice that might exist in the organization. So those decisions are also extremely difficult. 

[00:14:26.440] - Matthew Smith

That's very, particularly, obviously tech to the point of that optimal decision making is, you know, we've talked obviously a little bit in the beginning about how technology has changed over your career.

[00:14:38.020] - Matthew Smith

And then obviously a little bit about leadership. And now about technology in its intersection with leadership. Do you see in making those optimal decisions, That technology is a tool? Or do you think It's a critical element for today's leaders or maybe somewhere in between? 

[00:14:56.140] - Anil Menon

You know, it all depends on how we define which type of technology. Let me let me just take that within the context of a non-business context. James Baker, the wonderful. Yes, I think US secretary of state, he was I mean, he was just one of the one of the great ones.

[00:15:19.000] - Anil Menon

He wrote a book where he talked about how technology sometimes takes away and brings immediacy to something that is happening thousands of miles away. And he says the downside of that, versus the upside? The upside is obvious that you get visibility, you get to know things quickly. But the downside is he says smaller problems become magnified into bigger problems. In leadership, there is a little trick just as it's bad to make a decision too late that is delaying a decision.

[00:15:51.770] - Anil Menon

There is such a thing as making a decision too fast. Sometimes you are so predisposed to making a decision. Taking an action that you may not have had the right perspective, the right data. So technology has to be used carefully. There is a sense that it brings you the immediacy it brings you there. But it also sometimes does not let the local manager resolve some issues when it comes to your desk immediately. I mean, today, CEOs will either through social media or e-mails, find out about something that is happening in a small region or in a small country somewhere immediately.

[00:16:32.390] - Anil Menon

What that does at times, while there are some very positive things that can come from that. Sometimes it does not allow the local managers to resolve things and get those things resolved locally rather than having to go all the way up to a senior executive or senior manager. So you need to learn that these technologies does not mean you have to be on call 24 by seven. Not everything needs to be responded immediately and not everything is worth responding to. So if you're a senior leader, there are some things you should say.

[00:17:02.760] - Anil Menon

I am not going to interfere just because I happen to have visibility to it. Somebody else is the person who's supposed to make decisions. So technology, when used right, is good. But when you are constantly looking for immediacy and immediate responses, you are sometimes, for some decisions not letting the right decisions come up to you. 

[00:17:25.780] - Matthew Smith

That's I mean, that always on. I think we've heard that over and over again, how being always on. Can really be a big distractor.

[00:17:34.260] - Matthew Smith

And then obviously, looking back over just the last three years. Technology's changed so much. What are the three things that have taught you the most in the last three years around how technology has changed, how it's interacted, intersected with business and just have been eye opening for you? 

[00:17:53.820] - Anil Menon

Well, the the the most immediate thing about technology is whether social media or the fact that you can do data mining and all the other forms of artificial intelligence is that the capacity of computing, powered, with some algorithms and decision making, has made a lot of things that used to be considered to be a high skill, no longer as special.

[00:18:21.060] - Anil Menon

That is the one that is the most striking when you see algorithms coming out and giving you insights and information that used to take much longer and more specialized people. So that's a first. That's the one you want to call it. One of the interesting and important developments. But if you if you also look what has happened, especially on social media and you know, it's a double edged sword, as you know, every opinion, every thought goes published today and not all thoughts need to be published.

[00:18:54.510] - Anil Menon

Nor need to be heard because they're not particularly interesting, nor particularly correct. But yet in today's world, everybody has a voice which on one hand you could argue is a good thing. But then you have to ask yourself, does every opinion need to have the same standing as something else? And so in that sense, when you're on Twitter, it is kind of. It can demoralize you whether you're on one side of the equation or some other side of the equation.

[00:19:22.710] - Anil Menon

But the scale at which it comes at you with no filters of any kind is not particularly productive at times. So for decision makers, for senior execs when you see people having a bad experience. And the fact that they can take a video of that and publish it immediately is actually good for some things. As we know recently, when you watch all the things that's playing out. But then there are times when a few things without a context can lead to decisions that may not be necessarily the right one for the long run.

[00:19:57.970] - Anil Menon

So how you balance that is probably maybe I would argue, is the most challenging thing for senior executives, or for that matter, anybody today. 

[00:20:08.040] - Matthew Smith

So thinking about that, obviously, you know, you're a senior executive, you've been in business for a long time and you've seen these changes and you've seen how things have changed. But today's entrants into the job market, you know, they all start with these set of digital skills. I mean, there certainly many new languages that I don't understand, complex emojis, all of those other things.

[00:20:29.790] - Matthew Smith

When these people fresh out of school or just recently promoted into leadership positions, you know, when you see them coming into the workplace, what do you look for in them? What is, What are the things that kind of make them stand out to you? 

[00:20:47.820] - Anil Menon

You know. I don't think what you look for ought to be any different than what you looked for before. There might be some technical skills and some other things that you may look at in a very objective manner as you evaluate candidates.

[00:21:05.660] - Anil Menon

But the things that I look for hasn't changed, I would think for the last 25 or 30 years. What do I look for? I look for, obviously, a very bright person. That's the first thing. But that's the price of admission, right? In today's world. And that doesn't mean academically they have a great credential. I'm just saying somebody you can tell the horsepower of a person once you start talking to them and listen to how they have.

[00:21:37.200] - Anil Menon

Have a conversation with you. And the operative word here being conversation is responding to questions. The second thing you look for is a certain level of liveliness and curiosity and inquisitiveness. Is this person actually curious? Trying to understand, asking the right questions? Does this person seem to show and has demonstrated that they have a tendency and the ability to work hard and balance multiple things in a way that that that does not take away from some things that they have to focus on.

[00:22:11.100] - Anil Menon

Like academia. They cannot. They cannot let it go to the extent where you don't get good grades while you're doing some other extracurricular activities. So you look for that. And it's a it's a science and an art. You're never quite sure. Sometimes you think this person is great. Then you realize that as you interact with them over time that they are not as impressive as it was the first time. And then there are others who are much quieter and don't necessarily reflect all their capabilities in a conversation.

[00:22:40.320] - Anil Menon

So it's it's a it's a sort of a learning curve. But I always look for people who are displaying intelligence, curiosity, and then they have shown something in them that would suggest that they have a sense of integrity and they have a sense of purpose and a sense of civic mindedness that they are thinking beyond themselves at a young age. I would argue that might be a very good reflection of how they're going to be when they come into the company.

[00:23:09.170] - Matthew Smith

Mm hmm.

[00:23:09.990] - Matthew Smith

So you kind of set the traits out now for the individual when you look at them. But obviously, individuals form teams. And, you know, when you're looking to pull a team together, how important do you think diversity is in today and tomorrow's teams going forward? 

[00:23:27.560] - Anil Menon

I mean, to suggest that diversity is important, is almost a cliche. So the question is, why is it important? It's important for a very simple reason. Different people bring different experiences.

[00:23:41.480] - Anil Menon

They bring different life stories. They've been different perspectives. They bring different priorities. They bring different assumptions and philosophies. And they also have different personalities. So if you have a really diverse team and if you believe in a notion, which I do, which is innovation comes at the intersection of new ways of looking at the old problem or challenging the assumptions of an old problem, then what happens with diverse people is, is by the way, they ask the questions and the way they frame their thinking, you will get an insight that you would not have otherwise gotten.

[00:24:17.600] - Anil Menon

And so in that sense, having a diverse team is not about the makeup or in terms of gender or sex. But I have also found that gender and racial backgrounds and the others carry with them very often, different experiences, different base of knowledge, a different perspective on life. And what that does is that these individuals, whether they are males, females, old, younger, with all the different ranges of diversity that we can think of, they actually make it work better.

[00:24:50.270] - Anil Menon

But it does put a higher order of skills on the leader to manage a diverse team because when you're in a diverse team, you have to step back. The analogy that I sometimes use is the difference when you're a faculty member or professor. And many of your I would argue all of us remember our professors at university. When you're doing a lecture, it's predetermined what the topic is and the subject matter is and what you are going to say and the logic by which you're going to say it.

[00:25:20.150] - Anil Menon

So there's a certain level of structure and a formality. On the other hand, if you're doing a case method. You don't have a sense or an idea as to exactly how that individual class with that individual students at that individual point in time based on the experience of that day and the day before and some other classes that they may have taken and their backgrounds, how they would approach that piece. So you don't know what problems will be identified and what solutions will be framed.

[00:25:48.950] - Anil Menon

That, to me, is the kind of skill sets that you need to say I I can shift and move and adjust based on the new thinking, new insights. Then the leadership skills become all about asking the right questions and not knowing the answers because the answers will come from that team. 

[00:26:06.880] - Matthew Smith

Yes, I think that that listening element and that comes through very strongly and a lot of the discussions that we've had across leadership and not, as you say, it's not just leadership in the digital age.

[00:26:17.610] - Matthew Smith

It's it's leadership that perhaps hasn't changed so much over time. You know, you obviously speak a lot at universities. You speak a lot to young aspiring leaders. What advice would you give them? And would there be any role of technology in that advice? 

[00:26:36.430] - Anil Menon

You know, so let me let me give you the you know, I look back on my career, I look back on what I would tell my kids. I look back on what I tell the people who work with me and and whether they're reporting into me or my peers when I'm asked the question as to what lessons did you learn.

[00:26:55.830] - Anil Menon

And I do read biographies more than I read history books, because for this particular reason that you learn through the life experiences of some leader or some extent, or if you're reading about what happened during World War Two. So you learn by people. People make history, not the other way around, although there are some cases where context has given somebody to shine. In that context, I always say when I look back at my career such as it is, what, what, what would I tell my younger me to do it much more explicitly rather than learning over time?

[00:27:32.420] - Anil Menon

First what I would do and first when I would say which has not changed, is do good work. Whatever you do. If you're going to do it, do it as well as you can. Put in all the effort and the energy and the time and the passion and the devotion that you can and do a really good work and have the standards to be of really high quality work. Second one is always be relevant, and that is something that a lot of very good people forget to be.

[00:28:01.130] - Anil Menon

They get promoted and then they start becoming irrelevant because they haven't learned new skills. In this context. If you are a middle manager, if you are a senior middle manager, or if you're a senior or a senior executive, and if you haven't kept up with how digitisation is going to transform the business and the business models, then you are no longer relevant. And you will find that many of these people who have worked very hard at the existing job suddenly out of the role because they are good for today, but not relevant for tomorrow.

[00:28:34.370] - Anil Menon

So in that context, I think the key point here is to make sure that we are always relevant. So that's a second skill, and that is that you have to constantly say, what more do I need to learn? What more skills do I need to acquire? 

[00:28:48.800] - Anil Menon

The third one is financial independence, and I always say that this is one of the most important traits you need to have, which is don't be driven by compensation or by making money, but by being financially, but rather by being financially independent.

[00:29:04.660] - Anil Menon

If you are financially independent and that level of what that financial needs to be for you to be independent is your own decision but whatever you choose. If you're not in debt, if you're not dependent on the job for your financial independence, which is that you have created for yourself some buffer by creating multiple options of what you do, then you will be fearless at work. You are not going to work and try to protect your job because you're afraid you lose your job.

[00:29:30.580] - Anil Menon

So the effort should not to become rich, but to be financially independent so that when you do work, you work and you don't have to compromise your ideals, your values and the quality of your work because you need the job for financial reasons. That, to me is the hardest thing you can do. But the one thing that you should all aspire to, which is financial independence to always be relevant and to always do good work. 

[00:29:59.520] - Matthew Smith

I mean, that's that's a wonderful insight, you know, relevance and fearlessness, and I suppose, you know, going back to that point you made about reading biographies, a lot of as well and looking and learning what people have done, a quick sort of one word answer.

[00:30:14.520] - Matthew Smith

Leaders made or born. 

[00:30:19.260] - Anil Menon

Made. 

[00:30:21.320] - Matthew Smith

Do you want to elaborate a little bit? 

[00:30:25.380] - Anil Menon

So to me, leadership skills, the way I defined it, along with followership skills, are developed. You are made. You make it yourself, the environment, your parents, your society, your teachers, your peers, your your your bosses, your company provides you a context to become better at it, to become a leader. And so for me, you may be born with some innate abilities, but what you do with it is when you become a leader.

[00:30:58.520] - Anil Menon

And that is entirely made. And the point here is not whether it is entirely on an individual. The question is what the society and the company have to make sure that people are given enough opportunities, given the right environment, given the right support and mentoring, so that they do develop the skills and they do develop the capabilities needed for really high quality leadership. So that's why I say it's it's made. 

[00:31:27.840] - Matthew Smith

Yes. And so. So final question. And it's difficult not to bring it up in this current sort of environment of, you know, we're living in Covid 19. Probably one of those things that we may see once in a lifetime, once in multiple generations. You know, the workplace of tomorrow. What are you seeing that's coming out of this Covid 19 outcomes that you think might influence how you work, where you work for? Or, how you lead. 

[00:31:59.530] - Anil Menon

So Covid, clearly, irrevocably has changed the way you, We are going to work. I think some of us have learned that there is a different way of working which does work. And some of the new ways that we are working is not working. We'll have to fix that. But the fact of the matter is, digital first has kicked in. People are learning how to use Zoom or any other technologies as as in a very different way. And the younger people are already have already learned how to do it.

[00:32:34.560] - Anil Menon

But some of the older folks are learning it now. So digital first is a very different mindset. And then then using technology. Second, I think what will happen is we will learn that we have to be a lot more frustration, proof. We don't know what we don't know with Covid. And by the way, to the extent that you can learn how you're going to make decisions when you don't know when the next vaccine is going to come, you don't know when the next eruption might take place.

[00:33:05.430] - Anil Menon

So we are not going to be in a shutting down mode. We're going to be in an open and then shut, open and then shut. So it's going to be a lot of waves and it's these different kinds of uncertainties that is going to make you if you're a leader or even if you're not trying to figure out how do you prioritize? How do you shift? How do you become agile? How do you become resilient in the way you do it?

[00:33:28.740] - Anil Menon

We've been talking about these things, but now it's real. And then, of course, the last one. But we like it. And I also highlights that we do live in a global world. And the things that you do in one part of the world does have an impact on the other part. And I don't think we're going to walk away from that. We might make some shifts to the global supply chains. We might make some changes.

[00:33:50.850] - Anil Menon

But I think this also tells us that we are connected not only as society, but as a planet. 

[00:33:57.880] - Matthew Smith

Thank you. I mean, that that it's been a very, very insightful 30 minutes, and I really want to thank you for your thoughts, your comments and the passion of your answers. And so it's been it's been amazing. Thank you so much Anil.

[00:34:10.710] - Anil Menon

Thank you Matt