#91: Knut Alicke Partner at McKinsey and Head of Supply Chain Europe

Knut Alicke, partner McKinsey and Head of Supply Chain Europe. Knut is also a visiting professor of supply chain at the University of Cologne. And one of the global experts on the topics of operations, supply chain, and risk.

Discover more details here.

Some of the highlights of the episode:

• Becoming a supply chain professional vs becoming a musician
• Supply Chain leaders should have an MK budget
• China will no longer be the manufacturing hub of the world
• The difference between excel-heavy organizations and organizations adopting new systems
• 80% of companies plan to reskill people
• Following your passion and building relationships

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Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:00

Hello everybody. And welcome to the leaders in supply chain podcast. I am your host, dr . Calamari managing director of ELCA global. And he's my great pleasure to have with us today. Metallica partner of McKinsey and head of supply chain practice for Europe. He's also a visiting professor of supply chain at the university of cologne, and one of the global experts on the topics of operations, supply chain and risk. Not pleasure to have you with us today and thanks for making the time.

Speaker 2 0:27

Sure. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 0:30

And I want to start, you know, with your personal story, because you had a fascinating career. I know you started as a research assistant at the Causeway Institute of technology, and then you kind of embarked on a , the consulting journey with the consulting company and ended up with McKinsey for many, many years. Now, obviously also the position that you're in whilst at the same time being a visiting visiting professor . So kind of following your passion for education. So tell us just a little bit about, you know, about yourself and how that kind of came into.

Speaker 2 0:59

Sure. Happy to do so. So indeed I spent my life in supply chain. That's what I kind of discovered for myself like 25 years ago, that this is a topic that is super interesting, nicely complex. So first it , my , my PhD and my , my taste tasting as we call it in Germany and on that topic, and then started with today, you would call it a startup. It was basically a spinoff of the Institute I worked on where we did planning software for big companies like Europe , Packard. And back then I thought that, Hey, all of this is pretty cool and it will probably be kind of 10 years from now where all of these topics will be solved. But now we see that people are still working on these topics. So here got into the, into the, let's say technical part of supply chain. And then I joined McKinsey indeed, where I'm now since since 16 years and here kind of even broadening the scope, always working in supply chain, but all topics of planning or physical flow organization transformation and so on, and always looking for the new topics, right? So supply chain for the zero came up looking into what can digital help us. Um, then , um, the , the recent developments in terms of risk and resilience, that always, I found very, very interesting. And at the same time, keeping my, my passion for education and this both within , um , McKinsey , where we have also a huge chunk of capability building that we do for our clients, but then also at the university, right? So I'm in cologne where, where I teach supply chain and an executive MBA, and also run a seminar on splashing games, which is, which is quite interesting to kind of see how students develop games to explain a complex topic. So supply chain is what I, what I'm, what I'm really passionate about. And maybe a kind of a small side story. I was not so sure whether I should become a supply chain professional or a musician. And that's where I did practice a lot when I was younger, played the jazz saxophone. And that's where during my master, I basically took a semester off and studied music and then came back to the supply chain.

Speaker 1 3:07

No , that's, that's a fascinating, so , uh, and actually I'll , I'll tell you a side story one once we finished, but I actually know another professional that has a , you know, has, is also part-time musician. I think he says that he's a full time musician and part time he works in supply chain. So interesting also to , to kind of broaden your horizon and creativity, I guess, on that front now moving to the, to the business side and , and you, in your position at McKinsey , obviously you interact with some of the biggest companies in the world. I'm curious, and let's maybe start with the current reality and COVID-19 and all of that, but what are some of the biggest challenges that your clients are coming to you right now as a, as a speaking and what what's keeping them up at night, right? And what's, what's some of the biggest topics that keep this light chain executives globally wondering how to fix.

Speaker 2 3:55

Yeah. So in terms of covered, it's very, very clear it's ensuring supply and predicting demand, right? Because with this pandemic, it's kind of the first time that really supply and demand is affected. And this also on a global scale, so question is same . What, what should we do, right. And it's very interesting, kind of looking into the, when all this , this started then in March where clients kind of asked the question, Hey, how will it develop, how will demand be ? But then after a couple of weeks, because the supply chains from China to Europe are a couple of weeks often, if you go sea freight, then the question is to when will we see a shortage in supply? So quite clear question and what should we, what should we do about it? So this is kind of, we'll talk about this a bit more in detail. This is kind of COVID related. If I just look a little bit on the, on the broader scheme, it is the big topics on how can I leverage digital to increase my performance. Then a lot of companies, our clients are still in terms of their organizational setup. They're still kind of in a, in a world where you have more or less a siloed organization, you have the infrastructure is mainly XL . So kind of how to boost this supply chain organization set up operating model to the next level. And with this increase the performance significantly. And then it's always kind of one, one question that then always pops up is indeed how to communicate supply chain, how to make it, make it real for the board, how to ensure that the board understands the importance of supply chain

Speaker 1 5:31

And on this topic of how to, I just want to double click a little bit, how to make sure that the board understands the importance, what are some of the practical and very pragmatic advice or steps that you would suggest? I mean, I know it's hard sometimes to make general advices and give Jim or the vices , but what would be some, you know, top of the mind that you saw work well, and sometimes it can be quite, and maybe supply chain executives are not doing it in their board presentations.

Speaker 2 6:01

Yeah. So maybe to start with, with what is not working, then we are all in supply chain level on numbers, right ? We love more complex algorithms. And if we, if we come with too much numbers, too much complexity than this clearly does not work, so we need to kind of clearly have a business view. So what is, what is supply chain contributing to how our supply chain helping to sell more and to satisfy our customer? Right? So if we clearly take customer back view, then this is, this is the major contribution of supply chain. And in these, in these crazy days of COVID supply chain clearly lifted up, right? So because everyone was talking about supply disruptions, so this is something that we can use to also tell the story. Not only that we , Hey , we do firefighting, we kind of for term have some, some control towers in place that we, that we do scenario planning, but we can also kind of make the story very clear that supply gen helps to secure supply. And with this, we are kind of ensuring that we are able to sell so more and to have a good service level. So it would be super to use the current times to tell the story of the importance of supply chain.

Speaker 1 7:08

Hmm .

Speaker 2 7:09

And I guess maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe one , one idea that I always discuss with my clients is that the supply chain department often does not necessarily have a budget for a supply chain marketing or supply chain communication in place. And this is the best companies where the board understands supply chain. They always have this right. So they kind of see the importance and they also take professionals that can kind of tell a story that can kind of think about what is the important message and with this are successful.

Speaker 1 7:39

Hmm . And I , I want to, because I , I personally believe that they're doing an incredible job at this particular way at marketing. I mean, on top of the fact that the principal is incredibly good and we need to, and more companies need to follow, but I think Unilever in terms of all the different stories that they're putting out, right. And it is ultimately marketing of some very good initiatives that they're taking, right. For carbon neutral for tracing and , and basically making sure that materials that they use ingredients that they use are, are done in a, in a fair and well manner. And they, they , they pretty much do this very well on this, this piece of making sure that they are telling the story and they are telling to the world how they're making a difference. And I would agree with you that this needs to be done more because that's also a part of the way in which supply chain gets even more to the forefront. It has COVID has helped a lot because all of a sudden business leaders and CEOs and boards realized that, well, we don't know where our stuff is. We don't know when it's going to reach our clients. So we have a pretty significant issue and the business can actually go to pieces if we don't. But this, this storytelling and marketing is another crucial piece to the puzzle. So thanks a lot for kind of reinforcing that message. And I know that you put together a very insightful piece on resetting supply chains for the new normal. I think it was one of the well-documented thought leadership articles that McKinsey puts together. And in that article, you, you kind of had a number of 93% of the leaders in supply chain plan to increase resilience and part of the way in which they plan to do that is dual sourcing of raw materials. Inventory increases nearshoring , regionalization of supply chains. So I want to talk specifically about that. I think there's been also the topic. China will no longer be the manufacturing, the factory of the world or China plus one strategy, right? Where you have several alternatives or hopefully at least one alternative to China. Do you see that happening right now in the long, in the short term, in the long term , in the midterm? How, how accurate, I mean, how fast is that actually going to happen? Because in principle yes. In practice with coffee, it's not that easy to achieve.

Speaker 2 9:46

Yes, exactly. Fully agree. So let me, maybe me kind of step back a bit on what we researched in this article and then go a bit more into detail on kind of nearshoring reassuring localization. So we were interested in how, how did , um, heads of supply chain of different industries globally managed the corporate crisis and what will happen in the future? Right. So do they believe that things will change or not? And indeed the increase of resilience is it's kind of a natural answer, right? So you are in the middle of a crisis and ideally the resilience should increase if it's quite interesting, if we would have had this question like during Fukushima or the Thailand flood and so on, probably a lot of people would also have answered that we need to increase resilience back then, after six months after everything stabilized, nothing really happened. So what, why is it different this time? Because it's really a global pandemic. There was a lot more shocks than the pandemic there's trade war and so on going on. So that's why we see a lot of our clients are not really looking into, into increasing the resilience. Now the topic of nearshoring and regionalization then is something where we already see. Since, since since many years there was an MTI report out on , uh , on global flows that , um , there is a trend to be more, more regional, right? So this is kind of you to call it . This is accelerated and we'll be, we'll be analyzed. And we also have an MGI report out on supply chain, risk and resilience, where we looked a little bit more into detail of what is actually the volume that could possibly be relocated. And this is a huge number, right? So it's , um , it's a number of North of $4 trillion. And what we did is we basically looked for the different industries we looked into, what is economic factors and what is non-economic factors. And the non economic factor is quite interesting because there's kind of, if you look into the pharmaceutical industry and , uh, in, in, in Europe, there's a lot of discussion , all the ministries of health discuss whether the API production should be localized. So be kind of in the region in Europe, because there is a huge number produce in India and China and governments realize that, Hey, we depend on these API production. So we need to put it more local. There is kind of from a, from an economic point of view, that is probably hard to judge, but there , the governments put, put some regulations on, or we'll put some regulations on that this will happen. So we see that kind of, depending on the industry, the industry, there is kind of between kind of five to 50, 60% of the , the expert exports that have the, let's say there is a probability that this is now, the question is, how fast will this be done? There's a lot of discussions we have with clients. They ask, Hey , but we cannot relocate in six months, right? And this is super clear, and this is also not something that will be done short term. So we will not see kind of a rush of relocation also because companies are now in financial, not all are in financial distress, but everyone needs to basically be aware of their, of their cashflow . So they need to make sure that this is not rushed, but whenever there's a new evaluation of supplier, whenever there is a new evaluation of the location, this will be clearly taken into account. And the resilience factor will be more, much more important than before. So what I see is it's clearly a trend. It's not the short term trend of the next month. It's more the midterm trends and this will lead to more regionalization. And you mentioned already that there is this signup as one strategy that a lot of companies go after and countries like Vietnam benefit a lot from this. And this is something that will be accelerated by, by by company .

Speaker 1 13:47

Typically . I mean, if we were to give a very good example, right? Pharmaceuticals, healthcare in Australia , I think I was reading and I might be wrong about the numbers, but something like all the paracetamol or something like that in U S was 93, or find a 5% coming from India or export, I mean , imported from somewhere, right. Then you probably don't want to be that dependent on that. And that makes a lot of sense that maybe to a certain extent, that can be quite , uh, quite accelerated and move quite fast. However, if we take electronics or, you know, that specifically say, okay, making a laptop, right, you have the whole ecosystem, you have the factories, you have the microchips, you have the ports and so on. I mean, it's not, it's not as easy as just taking the factory and putting it in Mexico or in where at least in Europe or wherever it may be, right. You need to have the whole ecosystem of suppliers. And that just, I actually got asked , and then there's somebody doing a study at the moment in Asia. And then she was asking me to put the question on this and that I don't have the data, but I just don't see this happening that fast because of obvious considerations and, and , and, and difficulties. So , um, to , to your point, it will take, you know, it will happen in phase and then probably some industries will be much faster than others.

Speaker 2 15:00

Yeah . And it's, it's a very important time point that you raise in terms of capabilities. So it's , it's not that kind of China's is the only the manufacturing hub of the world. It's also that this kind of also attracts a lot of capabilities, right? And if you want to move there, you need to kind of build the local capabilities. If you want to move from China to Eastern area , for example, you need to build a local capability. So that's why it's, it's more kind of a midterm topic and not a short term topic. And then there's, it's also very clear that there is industries like semiconductors, where you have huge CapEx and this does not move easy, right? So the huge CapEx combined with a very low or very sorry, very high value density, which makes air freight. The standard mode of transport basically means that the world is only a couple of days away. And with this, there will be no kind of immediate relocation, but there's a lot of other industries, pharmaceuticals and other discrete manufacturing, where this is clearly to be considered in the future.

Speaker 1 16:06

Hmm . And I also want to have to go a little bit deeper on the , you had three big points, right? So one was resilience in the, in the study, you had one that the fact that executives want to increase resilience in supply chain. The second one was changes in supply chain planning, and the third one was on digital supply chain talent . So I just want to go on the second point as well on the supply chain planning side . And you had the number that 54% expect changes in terms of how they do planning and SNOP and IBP or whatever. We want to call that my personal experience with a lot of clients. And I had, I had one sharing actually on the last summit that we organized. A lot of companies still don't actually have a much in this space whilst we like to talk about AI and machine learning and advanced analytics and data lakes and all these buzz words in , in really there's some , there's a lot of companies that even don't have a proper what you would call a proper system of SNOP and the visibility in terms of what is happening. And they can be even within the fortune 500 fortune, 1000, maybe the big ones are not in that position, but I guess, do you see an acceleration of them adopting the systems faster? Or what would, you know , what would the Excel focused or each self bound organizations doing this situation right . Specifically for supply chain planning ? Yeah .

Speaker 2 17:22

Good question. And to start the answer, we also asked the question, did you face any issues in planning during covert? And that is quite interesting that we have basically 48% of the companies that experienced delays. And this is typically the, I would say the , the Exel heavy companies, this is where we don't have an integrated end to end process. SNOP not yet set up in the right way. We don't have the planning infrastructure. 52% said, Hey, it was no problem. And there was also interesting in March. I, I had a couple of conversations where I asked my clients, how are they now kind of moved into this lockdown. And that also reflected this number, roughly half said, look, we have our planning system. We have our end to end processes. We have our people trained. They just are not in the office, they're at home, but everything works. So there's no problem. And the others kind of more working on Excel basically said, look, we have no visibility. It takes very long to plan. So we cannot just do an MRP run every day or every hour. That's just not possible. So every morning we sort of say, go to the receiving area and see whether we received enough components to produce. So this is kind of the reality, right ? Then these companies can need to accelerate . The others also need to accelerate. So if we now go back to what, what is heads of supply chain one , two going forward? And there is basically three, three topics, one S the one tool kind of centralized the supply chain planning. And this is quite interesting if, if you have, and this is kind of more , well , the more advanced that already have some infrastructure processes on set up . If you have everything working, then there is no need necessarily for the supply chain planning to be kind of decentralized. It might even not be necessary for the, for the production planner to sit next to the , to the production line because every , all the data is available, right? So here kind of centralized and then make it much simpler for people , people to exchange, to build capabilities, to jump in. If someone is out, there are some consumer goods companies that are already very good in this way . They have even shared service centers for supply chain planning, which is forecasting, which is SNOP, which is inventory optimization, production planning, supply planning . So that is quite interesting. Then what a lot of companies did is they increase the frequency of planning. So before we were planning weekly, we had maybe a monthly SNOP . So , and because of the crisis, we needed to be much more agile. We needed to be much more to the point. So what a lot of companies did is they just went to a weekly SNOP cycle and guess what? It didn't work, right? So if you kind of forced to do this, then you can squeeze it into a week. Maybe the result is not perfect as it would be in a month, but it gives you a much higher agility because you now have four times where you checked . And this is something that people will, will keep the , the companies that are in the camp that is more kind of Xcel based. Clearly you see the need to do something, right? They might have seen this before already, but now it's even more clear to our earlier point on communication. Now it's much easier now to tell the story of, Hey, we need to do something. We need to have proper processes. Our people need to understand supply chain often in these companies, it's supply chain as, as an organizational entity does exist, but it's often the former logistics guys that just kind of put a new title on the name card. So we need to have also the capabilities increased to be able to plan. And clearly here , all digital tools and advanced analytics and machine learning and so on helps, but a lot of companies need to first fix the basics. Very, very clear. We , we love to talk about digital, but the majority of companies are still very analog and need to fix the basics. But the good thing is that you can then kind of jumpstart. You can sort of say a leapfrog and implement the new solutions already, and this will key then help you in your supply chain performance, but always think about the talent you need for that, right? It's often you need to kind of re build the talent. You need to educate the people that they are able to work in these new processes,

Speaker 1 21:46

Since you mentioned the topic of talent. And that was the next, the next one that I would have asked you. And then 90% of the respondents in your study also plan to increase digital supply chain talent in house. Let's, let's talk a little bit about that. And also it's an area that I believe you are very passionate about. I'm very passionate about. So I'd love to hear your thoughts and expand on zoom , zooming on this.

Speaker 2 22:09

Yes. So to the discussion we just had on, on, Hey, do we have the right processes and tools in place, heads of supply chain apparently see , see your needs to increase digital savviness of their, of their teams. What we often see is indeed that we might even have a good planning system in place, but the planner who let's say has had a lot of experience and in the environment and business and so on, but it's not necessarily kind of educated in terms of machine learning, mathematical optimization or so that's not trust. And this planet doesn't trust the system itself. And with this, what we often see is that stuff is then downloaded from the planning system kind of plant manually, and then upload it again. So if we now think about the needs for these new normal, which is, we need to have transparency, we need to have a high cycle of planning. High-frequency we need to in demand planning, we need to make sure that we have all of these external factors considered. Then there was clearly a need to upgrade our capabilities and the question. And if you also think about the future of work, right? So we kind of thought about what is the next generation supply chain organization? How does it look like? And it's before you had the demand planner, you had a supply planner, you had people who will be handling inventory, but then physical flow in the future, you will probably have in the demand planning, you will have some data scientists, right? Yeah . You will have, in order management, you have some people who are setting up the RPA, the robotic process automation system. So there is new needs, and this is something that we need to work on. So where do we get the from? And this is where I also found it interesting that 80% said that we need to rescale . So we have our people, there are good people, they know the business and they don't , they don't yet have, so to say the full spectrum of this, these new tools approaches. So we need to reschedule them, but as well, we need to make sure that we have new talent quite from the, from the labor market, which is 55%. And here it's very important. If you look back in terms of digital, a lot of people started to hire data scientists, which per se also makes sense. Then we had this , um , digital entities or departments in companies where they kind of started to work on topics. And often they were good ideas, but often it was also not so really linked to the, to the business. So what we, what is very important here is that this digital talents that are new, that they kind of work with a translator, right? So someone who knows the business, who also knows digital, and maybe not so much in detail, but can kind of guide these people to have to have impact. So also here , something that we see that supply chain, heads of supply chain, we're already working on over the last years and with COVID it boosted and accelerate.

Speaker 1 25:05

Mm . And , and , and , and the , the point that you're making is , is something that we come across quite often, cause on the executive search side of our business, it's almost quite cool. And we've gotten a few assignments where it's specifically, the companies asked to know , we want the chief information officer CIO or CTO, and we want them to come from a gaming or from Facebook or from Google. And they are highly, I don't know, manufacturing company or very product production company. And in principle, it sounds like a good idea for, you know, for bringing in new, new viewpoints, however, also in practice , uh , like you rightfully shared , there needs to be some level of translation happening because it can also be too , I don't know if this term exists, but too revolutionary and too out of whack or out of context, that you basically miss out on the, you know , miss out on the nitty gritty of the business, which, you know, it , it cannot be done. Even if you think it can be done in practice, in theory, it can be done in reality, it cannot be done. So then you, you basically end up with a different, different situation. And we've heard some of the clients that actually tried to train the data scientists in the house. So they took either people that were had very analytical or from solution design or from different aspects of supply chain, network design, and , and then kind of enrolled them in these trainings because those people would already understand supply chain. And then they tried to upskill them to them to get the data science piece. And I want to also bring the educational piece, right? Cause you , you mentioned this a reskilling labor force, but that can be daunting tasks . It can be a , a a , I remember, I remember it's a funny story. I won't mention the name of the chief supply officer that said something to the extent that we have all the technology. We have a very clear where we need to go. We are implementing changes in our systems very fast. Our issue is only one. The people don't want to change. People are not coming on board with the new technology. So I guess I'm trying to formulate the question while I'm asking it , I guess, you know, how do, how, I mean, what are some of your, and this, you have a bit of a double head, right? You have the , the head of McKinsey and they're seeing some of these changes happen. You have also a bit of you as a visiting professor, what works best, right. When you talk about re-skilling and educating the workforce, the new tech to the new way of thinking. Yeah. It's a big question.

Speaker 2 27:28

If you need a big question that , yeah. So maybe what, why, why is this, this Kobo V topic important? Let me maybe start with this. The example you gave is exactly right. So we have the tech available, but unfortunately the people don't want to use the tech. So that's , that's what we often see. And we have, we have a model that we call the influence model. And this influence model basically says that when, when do I change? And there's four elements and one of these elements, there's like, Hey, we need to have a role modeling. So my boss is also kind of following the , this new idea. I understand the purpose, right. I understand why I need to do this. There is clear processes set up, but then very, very important. I have the right capabilities, right. And otherwise I will not change. And this is exactly what happens in this, in this example, you gave that we have all the tech available, but I don't have the capability . So I don't use the new system. So how can we, how can we overcome? This will be what we typically do is so first of all, it's, it does not work. If you have kind of a standard course and you, and you're looking online, there is some, there's plenty of the university professors and they record their lectures. And I find myself also in the situation that if you, if you watch such a lecture, then after five minutes, you start to do your emails. So it needs to make sense for the, for the people that you, that you train. So, first of all, you need to understand what is, what is their baseline. So you need to do a bit of an assessment of where other capability gaps, and then there is often different levels of intervention. There's, let's say a big group of people who need to understand the basics of supply chain, where you have whatever, a one hour or two hour session. Ideally you do this in person where you kind of introduce the idea of supply chain and this, the purpose is really that I've heard it. I like it. And I understand that this will help us going forward. This is often hundreds or thousands of people. And then you're going into the, into the people who, who really kind of work close to supply chain, not only in the supply chain organization itself, but also in , in, in sales and marketing, in production procurement. And here, you know , do a bit of a more intense training. And this is what we always do is you need to have a combination of , let's say, you need to convey the theory, but you need to immediately apply it, right? And this is where kind of all these games and exercises and discussions come into play. You can show pages and explain concepts or something like 15 to 20 minutes, then people are not listening anymore. So you need to kind of help them to apply it immediately. So kind of having an exercise where you, where you apply the learning and then make it real for them. So to kind of tie it to, to the, to the transformation itself. So always link it to this. So what we typically do is we, we use them a kind of , um, a sample company that is a made up and it's from a correct. Ristic similar to the company. We help to make sure that they don't kind of go back into their normal reaction. And then with this company, we then train these people. And then we blend it also with online, where we have fabulous tool to also explain the content and then kind of interactive exercises where you need to then work on a specific topic. And then very important. There is also it's called feed and forum, where you have the small tasks to work on. And this is always related to the , to the transformation itself and this small tasks you then apply immediately, the stuff you learned, right? And then after a couple of weeks, you have the next STEM intervention where you have the next training session. And with this, you kind of continue in your learning journey, which has been often something of a couple of months that you kind of create this , uh, um , this bench of people who know , um , um, supply chain. And then it's clearly kind of an ongoing , um , learning effort where you then also have kind of your share podcasts , like the one, the one you do, right. So we're kind of people then get inspiration from, from other companies and, and ideas to put forward.

Speaker 1 31:34

No , some great ideas and examples. Thanks a lot and very practical as well. One , one last question in terms of, I wanted to ask you, you know, looking back on , on, on your progress and for the younger, you know, for the younger generation and the younger people that are following the podcast, what would be some pieces of advice that you would have for them in terms of explaining their careers or thinking about their careers and in general, in their professional life?

Speaker 2 32:00

Yeah. So it's very simple, always follow your passion. I never planned my career. I was always excited to kind of do supply chain. That is my topic, right ? Others have, have, have other topics and then make sure that you, that you work in an organization where you can kind of further develop your skills, where you have a great people to have good limits . So exchange of ideas, and with this, you develop yourself forward. There's often in my lectures, students ask whether how you should I stay in academia, should I go into industry? So they go into consulting and there , there is no right or wrong way. So it's kind of, if you, if you, your passion and

Speaker 1 32:40

Your passion and whatever, if you're a young is more to do deep research there in university, if you're passionate is , Hey, I want to help the business go into industry. If you want to go broader than going to consulting, but you need to personal , you need to be passionate about it. And I never planned my career. I'm not so sure whether the business would advice for , for young people, don't plan your career, follow your passion, but that's what I would do. No, thanks for , I just need, I just feel the need to add something to that because, you know, we have Korea letters and I recently read a book by Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook. And she, she mentions that, forget the career ladder because letters , another good analogy goes letters . You can go up down on and off. There's four options. That's about it. We should think about careers as she named them jungle. I think it's a junk jungle gym. I had to Google it. But anyway , it's kind of like a playground for kids, right? Where you have a , and I have two small kids, right? Where they have, you know, the letters and then you have the ropes and then you have all sorts of different ways in which you can climb. You can jump, you can go sideways, upwards, downwards, you know, basically infinite possibilities. And , and that analogy to me is a very good one because it's, to your point also for us was to be , you know, in head hunting. And a lot of people ask us, you know, what's the next move? Does this make sense to all careers? And , and for me, it's , I am kind of the same as you. I never planned for my career in that way. Right. As long as you're , you're following what you like to do, but at the same time, of course, you need to deliver and add value and all the good stuff, things kind of it builds upon . Right. Then it's almost like building blocks that, you know, like steel jobs, right. When you look backwards, it makes sense. You can't really figure it out necessarily all the time and plan for, for all the steps looking forward. So I'm glad that you, you know, you also mentioned that and I look great sharing and thanks a lot for joining us today, and I'm sure we can talk for hours and we'll have you back, but really appreciate, really appreciate all the good examples that you shared. So thanks a lot for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to all podcasts . If you liked what you heard, be sure to go to www.ellicottglobal.com and click the podcast button for all the show notes of the interview. Also subscribe to our mailing list to get our latest updates. First, if you're listening through a streaming platform like iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher , we would appreciate the kind of view five-star works best to keep us going and our production team happy. And of course, share it with your friends. I'm most active on LinkedIn. So do feel free to follow me. And if you have any suggestions on what what to do and who to invite next, don't hesitate to drop me a note. And if you're looking to hire top executives in supply chain or transform your business, of course, contact us as well to find out how we can help.