The Thought Leader's Voice Podcast

Interviewer: Hello and welcome to the Thought Leader’s Voice. I’m Kevin Anthony, Global Sales Director Thought Leadership at iResearch Services and the host for today’s podcast, where we explore the intersection of business and technology thriving in the accelerated now with some of the brightest minds in the industry. Today, we’re thrilled to have Dave Reid, Research Director at DXC Leading Edge, which is the research and strategic thought leadership arm of DXC technology. 

With a passion for strategic thought leadership, digital business transformation and the future of technology, they’ve worked tirelessly to help customers across industries solve their most pressing business issues with a wealth of experience in developing and implementing global IT strategies, David truly understands the importance of business and technology alignment. Alongside advising CSOs and leading workshop for customers, David also has a strong interest in people management and talent development. Join us as we delve into Dave’s expertise into strategy, advisory, and future of technology. A warm welcome to you, Dave. 

Dave: Thanks, Kevin. Great pleasure to be with you today. 

Interviewer: Dave, so it comes down to my first question. So can you tell us a bit more about DXC Leading Edge and what your mission has been since you took over as a Research Director in 2021? 

Dave: Yeah. So, DXC Leading Edge, as you said, Kevin, is the strategic thought leadership arm within DXC technology, a global IT services organization. So we used to be known as the Leading Edge Forum, so some of your listeners may have known us in that guys pre-2021. And our roots go back a couple of decades before that back into management consulting some 20 years ago. So, we’re really proud of that strong legacy that we’ve got.

But, when I took on the role in 2021, I was asked to help to transform the Leading Edge Forum into the strategic thought leadership group within, as part of DXC technology, so effectively bringing that capability in-house. So a very similar mission to what we had before. but focused on DXC’s most important customers rather than an independent voice in the market. So we’re still very active with our customers. so we spend a lot when we’re not doing the research, we’re out with customers, talking about it, advising them how to apply it to their most pressing issues. But we’re also working much more closely, perhaps, than we ever have with our colleagues across the business, because our findings, of course, from our research also inform their strategies, their go-to markets and many of the interactions that we have globally with our customers as well. 

Interviewer: So what’s the most exciting thing for you about research and communicating research? 

Dave: Well, I mean, it’s a real privilege to be able to do what I and my team and my colleagues do, I think. And the most exciting thing about doing the research is really just learning a huge amount from across the technology, the business domains, learning about what our customers are doing day to day. There’s so much to learn and so much to keep track of that it’s sort of very exciting in that two days are never the same; it sounds like something that everybody says. But two days really are never the same in terms of who you’re speaking to, how they’re applying the work, and what they find interesting as well. 

So there’s some really fascinating industry trends. There’s global diversity in terms of what’s important in different regions. Because we span all regions, and all industries, variety keeps it hugely exciting. 

Interviewer: I mean, right from communicating from research, so what do you see as the biggest challenge at the moment in terms of advancing innovative thought leadership? 

Dave: Yeah, it’s a good question, Kevin. I think, one of the biggest challenges that a lot of organizations face with the research, the thought leadership is relevance. I mean, it’s a hugely busy area out there: I mean, everybody’s got a white paper or a point of view on everything these days and then now we’ve got obviously machines topically rather doing quite a lot of that for us. So, getting high quality work seen and heard can be difficult. So we’ve got conversational AI, of course, serving up content without the need for people to go to a website. 

We’ve got, as I say, academic institutions that have incredible perspectives: we’ve got the big global players putting things out. We’ve got blogs. We’ve got LinkedIn. People are just sort of drowning in a sea of opinion. So to me, you’ve got to make sure that your stuff is of a quality that differentiates it. It’s got to be presented in a compelling way, you’ve got to be able to trust it. So it should be underpinned by very strong metrics and proper research. 

And I think also for customers, certainly it has to prompt action certainly for our enterprise customers. They can get, as I said, your opinion on what’s happening from anywhere, but what they should actually do about it is more difficult because you have to put it in their context. So I think there’s a few challenges in there, but to be relevant, you have to address each of those four things. 

Interviewer: that’s great. So, Dave, can you tell us a little bit more about what’s on the agenda for DXC’s Leading Edge at the moment? 

Dave: Yeah, I mean, I think exciting times, isn’t it, to work in our industry. We are currently launching our next iteration of work, which is an evolution of our work from last year. So last year we took a body of work called the ‘Accelerated Now’, out to the market and that had five pillars in it, which have been enduring, really over the last 12-18 months. So they are, how do you invest wisely in a hybrid technology world? We’ve looked at secondly, platform driven business models. Thirdly, we’ve looked at how organizations metabolize data; so they need to have the metabolism to deal with the exponential increase in the amount of data that’s available to them to drive insights. Fourthly, we looked at human experience, so putting the humans at the center of the technology experience. And then finally, we looked at truly true sustainability. And I emphasize the truly because not a lot of organizations that we looked at were necessarily being entirely truthful with how they painted themselves through a sustainability lens. 

So, those five themes, as I said, are enduring. But obviously, in the last 18 months, a lot of things have got on in the world, which have meant that we’ve had to update our agenda to include things like how supply chains have become one of the issues of the day. There’s obviously increased cyber threats, etcetera, that are out there. We’ve started to look, also at how tech debt, so technical debt, which is not a new thing, but has really become very troublesome for a lot of organizations. 

So blending those new things into those five themes is going to be important, we’re taking to our customers, over the coming months. But those three things are already driving a lot of the conversations that we’re having with customers. So, as I was saying to our colleagues the other day, it’s a great time to be in our industry because there’s so many exciting and interesting things coming out, which really are converging, you know, both the technology world and, and the world evolving world of business together. So, it’s a great time to be doing it.  

Interviewer: Absolutely. So Dave, do you have an example of how shedding a light on data has led to the real ESG change?  

Dave: Yeah. So I mean ESG, so as I said previously, so of this, we’ve looked really at the sustainability kind of angle here. So we wrote a paper just last year called ‘Driving Better Insights for ESG Decision Makers’. And one of the reasons that we started there with ESG, which is very broad topic was that certainly in our experience there wasn’t enough sort of meaningful ESG reporting, going on. 

So if you look at the sort of the increase in the focus on ESG, it was coming really from a couple of different sites for us; one was from investors in organizations looking for sort of greater disclosure on ESG risks and then on the other side from regulators, so far more stringent regulatory requirements being put out by the various bodies, on organizations to report. So those two things have created as sort of a real focus on reporting and of course data, which is surfing another wave, it really kind of underpins that.

So, we went from this notion of we are currently in the ESG data dark ages, and we need to move to this sort of notion of being enlightened or business enlightenment from, from ESG data. So, just to put it into context, that’s the way that we have gone and looked at it. And there’s lots of sort of when we started peeling the onion here of interesting examples of how technology was being applied to that. So whether it is in getting data to be more timely, so the dark ages, you don’t get the data that often there can be a huge lag in it, it’s very reactive, but to a more sort of proactive stance. We’re seeing, for example, machine learning technologies being used to identify risks; so running machine learning against huge databases of information being used by some of the investment agencies and the standard bodies. 

I think we’re seeing machine learning also looking at sentiment of CEOs speaking when they look at announcing their results. So, these emergent technologies are being applied to things that have been going on for a long time in terms of reporting. There’s other examples in terms of Internet of Things, etcetera, applications being used at the edge of organizations. I think there’s some telcos or communications equipment manufacturers, should I say, who are using sensors in IOT to look at energy use down to individual device level. So that enables you to get kind of much more granular data about ESG. 

We looked at indeed some of the telcos, looking at how they were managing mobility providers and fleet management operators, understand their usage of energy, and look at potential sources of sort of carbon savings there. We looked at digital twins, for example. So, there was a paper manufacturer that we found in Denmark had used digital twins to model and optimize their paper manufacturing process; and that was all about sort of reducing, waste and usage of chemicals. 

So really interesting sort of applications of these emerging technologies. And I think one of the most important things to point out is that a lot of these technologies at the moment are emergent. So there’s lots of different types of experimentation going on all over the world with different types of technology and a very vibrant ecosystem of sort of startups and then more traditional organizations that are driving that. So again, a great space to watch. 

Interviewer: And so what kind of shifts do you think we are going to see in terms of using technology to enrich ESG, particularly the S do you think new ways of human tech collaboration are going to impact the social? 

Dave: Yeah. And another interesting one, because of course most of the ESG commentary we see  and did a lot of the research has been in the E area. And depending where you sit in the world or your perspective, that may or may not be the right thing to do. So, we mustn’t forget the S and the G, I think. And I think particularly on the S, using analysis of real time data around climate and energy use cases is good. But if you look into the sort of societal areas, we’ll think about  workforce progression, so how can organizations look at the diversity of their workforce through existing data? That’s kind of one thing. But they can’t potentially then look at employee attitudes that sort of sit below the surface. 

So there’s certainly a lot of opportunity for them to look at data and insights from some of the more like emergent topic of the day conversational AI tools virtual agents that can interact with workers on pay and policy and other issues, that could potentially change that. So I think as these technologies progress and emerge and if you see the amount of activity around conversational AI, particularly at the moment, this will mature as we go forward. 

And I think the other thing that I point towards in terms of the S for ESG is that the regulations are catching up now as well. So there is a new act in Germany, for example, called the Supply Chain Act and that actually sort of mandates and requires companies of a certain size to look at risks to human rights etcetera within their supply chains and indeed take actions on managing those risks. So that was put into law, I think, in March last year 2021. So it’s actually become a mandated part of how organizations are starting to think about the impact of their activities on society. So not just the environment, but on kind of human rights and people as well. So that’s an emergent thing. I’m sure it’ll be changed or amended based on what we learned from that. 

But you can expect, I think other regulators more broadly, whether it’s the EU or similar in other parts of the world to take a stand on these things and start to mandate through regulation, that organizations will have to start to pay attention to more of this stuff and take technology will be really important in how we actually gather that data and report on it. 

Interviewer: I mean, that interestingly moves us to the next question, that is so in what ways do you think new technologies and in a way to thought leadership can help us design for circular economies? Do you see this happening now or do we have some way to go before this kind of paradigm shift will be more widely accepted? 

Dave:  Yeah, I mean, it is a great question. It’s impossible to give an answer, which isn’t too much kind of opinion in this regard. Because if we think about circular economy as being part of the ESG construct, the circular economy as you know, so moving to something more circular less linear is, I mean, a bit of a paradigm shift, not just in technology, I think technology is a key enabler, in fact, it would be I think fairly easy to argue that without technology, realizing a circular economy would be impossible, whether it’s in the backbone, the data, etcetera. It’s difficult to see it happening without. But there’s something more fundamental than the technology, which is actually just a shift in attitude with kind of humanity. 

So we, as human beings, consume a lot. And the circular economy really is actually thinking about not just sort of elimination of waste but better use of resources. So, without big societal attitude changes in terms of our need to consume things, it’s going to be very difficult for us to do. And if you’re an organization that’s into sort of kind of production of things, this could be sort of the elephant in the room really around consumption, your principle there, if your business model is to sell more and drive more product. 

So there’s certainly the onus on companies to think about reuse and indeed we see a lot of that. But reuse isn’t just in the product. I mean, if you’re a construction company, you’ve got to think about the reuse of every component within buildings; down to the brick level, for example, they’ve got to be designed for reuse. So, it’s a very interesting space to look at. So I think there’s kind of less consumption. There’s better consumption. 

I was at a conference in Brussels recently where we had some really interesting stats from one of the presenters who said the average car is parked for 95% of the time it’s arrive around and an average power drill is used for under 15 minutes in its entire lifetime. So, great potential for things like sharing platforms to grow further to sort of cut down on the use of materials. But this all has to change as part of a system. So, the sustainability element of this will not just depend on technology, it depends on technology and kind of consumer choice as well. So, hugely, hugely again kind of interesting and emergent space. There’s a lot of urgency around it and there’s a lot of sort of great thought going into how technology can really accelerate this move to a more circular economy. 

Interviewer: I mean, so that moves to another topic that’s technical debt that I won’t cover. I believe we’ve done a program together on thought leadership on technical debt. So my question, Dave, comes in a great deal of business took on a lot of technical debt over the pandemic. How are we seeing companies deal with it now? So generally speaking, have we still got our heads in the sand or are we seeing new ways of thinking about tech debt? 

Interviewer: Yeah. And so tech debt is as you know, Kevin, not a new thing and it’s been around for a long, long time, but it’s being more widely used. And when there’s an uptick in the use of a specific term, there’s usually a reason for that. So with your help, and thank you on the quantitative front, we’ve been out speaking to CEOs and CIOs around the world around what the technical debt is actually looking like today. 

So, I think we need new ways to think about it, again, because it’s not a new thing. And I used to work with a now retired CIO who sat on the board of a few large multinational organizations, used to say, look, organizations get the technology that they deserve. And I love that quote, because it pointed to just underinvestment in technology in a lot of organizations around the world. So things would break and they wouldn’t deliver all of the potential that they could because his argument was that it was under invested in. 

So, clearly a lot of these companies have money to invest: they were just choosing not to invest it in technology, they were investing it somewhere else. So one of the things we started thinking about, well, there’s got to be winners with technical debt. So somebody in the organization is winning if there’s technical debt, and it’s probably not the chief information officer. So, let’s take that as a sort of a hypothesis as we move forward. 

And I think the other thing to consider is that technical debt is a broad term and it’s roots of course were in software intensive systems, the sort of notion that short term gains make future changes

more sort of costly or impossible. That was the sort of thinking about it and it is a major source of inertia for organizations. So that analysis with the analogous with the sort of monetary world, you can have good debt or you can have bad debt. But it exists in infrastructure, it exists in applications, it exists in data, probably exists in skills as well. 

 
So we need to sort of, it’s not a one size fits all kind of picture there. So the way that we like to think about is that over time your technical debt will probably become toxic. And that’s quite a provocative word. But toxicity is generally bad for a system, whether it be a human or an organization. So if you end up with toxic technical debt, it’s going to cause you major issues. So that’s one of the things we’ve sort of asserted in our work here, and that’s good because it sort of  it gets attention. 

So it needs to be addressed and with a broader notion everyone talks about sort of the notion of digital transformation or business transformation, a major component we found in our research of addressing, getting towards these more transformative initiatives is you simply have to address the debt and you modernize the systems to enable transformation. That’s clearly an investment path that we see. But there’s also a conversation around, when technical debt becomes public, it becomes an issue. And there’s been some very public examples of systems failing due to levels of debt. 

I can think of the issue of the American Airlines that had to ground its fleet because one of its staff rostering systems had some issues. That gets attention. And that’s actually, I would say, toxic because it’s actually harming the company’s reputation, its ability to satisfy its customers, its ability to collect kind of revenue, its ability to keep, its airplanes in the sky. So there’s a lot of examples there of how this has become a more prominent issue.  

Interviewer: Well, great IT leadership can make all the difference in reversing tech debt mitigating the human cost, that comes along with it and avoiding too much of it in the first place. So have you got an example of IT leaders making positive change in this area specifically? 

Dave: Yeah. I think the best examples of sort of IT leaders ameliorating tech debt are already quite, public. I look to DBS bank down in Singapore, just a fabulous example of sort of digital transformation change. And what I’ve observed is that they’ve all used or made investments in technology, which are very tangibly related to a business outcome. So, considering what the business outcome of the technology change is and use that to drive the business case and the investment cases around these things. And these examples tend to be quite well, sort of celebrated, as well. 

There was a great example I saw recently of, I think, it was one of the big US insurance companies, they wrote a book about it. I forget exactly which one it was called, I think it was the Value Flywheel, where they’d looked at sort of digitizing huge amounts of legacy technology pushing it more to the cloud in the right way, but never losing sight of the fact that they’re 150 year old insurer. So, if a company like that can do it, I’m sure anybody can do it with the right technology investment plan, the right skills, the right strategic choices, that are made around the technology.

But there’s another interesting thing we picked up doing interviews with customers was there was some, you know, transformation leaders, CIOs, etcetera, were actually making it part of their job description, if you like. So they were agreeing to take on these big transformation and change rules on the condition that traditional savings that they would make on deploying technology in a more cost effective or efficient manager manner, those savings could be reinvested in more transformative, more innovative issues. So that’s effectively somebody rocking up and saying, well, hey, I’m not going to come and work here for you unless you enable me to address some of the technical debt and use it to drive technology-led change. 

So, the attitude of leaders towards this, I think is a huge catalyst. That wasn’t the predominant example. But I spoke to five or six different leaders who’d effectively made that part of a requirement for taking on the leadership role. So that was quite interesting. 

Interviewer: I mean, interestingly, we moved to the customer section of our conversation. So, Dave, can you describe how you engage your customer base? 

Dave: Yeah. So I mean, we use a variety of mechanisms to engage with our customer base and obviously research-led. But we tried to bring that researched life through direct engagements with our customers, whether that be through workshops or events or facilitation of peer-to-peer exchange. I found a lot of our customers like to share experiences and learn from their colleagues, so they’re the mechanisms we use. And the team we have around us we are or have been at some point in our careers kind of practitioners in enterprise IT organizations or in other organizations around the world. So we can combine the curiosity that we have, the research that we do with our own experiences and what we learn every day from our customers, we can combine that really to great effect to show up and help our customers with their most pressing issues. 

So what we do and how we do I think is a little different to most organizations in this respect. Because we’re from quite diverse backgrounds, we’re kind of a very small group of people. So we do try to engage in a way which is differentiating, and we can’t compete with on a sort of a better sameness level, if you like. We like to act, we call it as a critical friend to our customers. Everybody wants to be a trusted partner, so that’s everybody’s aspiration these days. But we prefer critical friend to our customers because friends care and we build those relationships with their customers, as we go forward. 

Interviewer: And how have you been seeing your approach to thought leadership work in regard to your customer community? 

Dave: Yeah, I mean the customer green communities kind of interesting, so we’ve been through transition as I described at the start. And the pandemic clearly had a huge effect on the way the organizations engage with customers. So for most organizations that’s been a shift to virtual and we, for example, at the start of that experimented a lot in the metaverse with trying to drive, customer engagement as well. 

So, our approach to the delivery of it, I think is we’ve been quite kind of flexible with that to match customer’s ability to sort of travel and move around and do things face to face. And I think hopefully that’s behind this now. But we’re in this sort of hybrid world now, so to me, I think how we engage and deliver thought leadership remains very flexible. So DXC, for example, is a virtual first company, so our initial preference is to do virtual first engagements. But there are some scenarios in which our customers want us to be present. So going back out and taking the thought leadership to them personally remains very, very important. So we’re quite flexible, I think is the answer to your question, Kevin, and that’s a key part of our strategy. 

So as we design our thought leadership, as we design our research, it has to be deliverable across different mediums. So, here we are today doing a podcast, so the written form remains important; but the use of video, the use of graphics pairing that with kind of face-to-face presentations, etcetera, is so important. So I guess if I was in marketing, I’d call that sort of a multi-channel approach. But I think with the way that the world is today, people’s desire to engage differently, I think that’s so important. So that remains very much at how we think about the engagement of our community as well. 

Interviewer:  Absolutely. And what kind of feedback have you been getting from your customers and wider target audience? 

Dave: Well, I think, of course they love it, Kevin. Of course, I’m going to say that. I think, look on a serious note, customers provide the best feedback, right. So the moment that our customers stop giving us feedback that, hey, you guys do this really well, you do it differently to your competitors, then we should stop. But the great news is that we get really strong feedback from our customers and there’s no better indication that you’re doing a good job with your customer than being invited back or asked to do more. So we get great feedback in that regard from customers. 

And of course, as I said at the start from colleagues alike, one of the things that we are working to do now is to bring the best of our wider organization, kind of to our customers as well. So as a small research and thought leadership group we have limited reach, but we have an incredible machine behind us of incredibly talented individuals. So bringing those to our customers is kind of a force multiplier for us. So we’re helping them think. We’re helping them stretch where they probably would go, stretch the thinking in terms of making their strategy thinking go further, consider things they may not otherwise have considered. But we’re also giving the ability to execute on some of these things as well and sometimes should it really work for them execute at scale. 

Interviewer: Or as I say, sometimes, no feedback is good feedback. 

Dave: Well, the other one’s ‘Feedback’s the Breakfast of Champions’ and I like breakfast, so we’ll go with that one. 

Interviewer: Yeah. So moving on further, I mean, I believe, you are also involved in advising CIOs on digital leadership and transformation, so could you briefly give us an idea of your core message? 

Dave: Yeah, so the core message is based around our work, of course, but fundamentally it comes down to me to three things I think that I’ve observed over the last, certainly five, six years in terms of doing this work. The advice really is sort of modernize your core technology. So modernize it, keep evolving it, it is not going to stand still because that modernization that you’re going to do enables so many other things. It paves the way to the second thing, which is to consider business transformation. 
 
And when we talk about business transformation, this is where products and services, how they’re made, how they’re delivered, are transformed. So they look fundamentally different at the end. And that’s what most organizations are aspiring to do when they talk about digital transformation. So modernization feeds transformation, and that came through very clearly in research that we’ve done. 

But the third aspect of it is to pay real attention to what’s going on outside of your organization. So look at those external forces which are in many ways so much more powerful than anything we can do with technology. So, emerging technology, pay attention to that. We talked in ESG about the potential of some of the emerging technologies. So they’ve got huge transformative potential in a lot of areas. 

But then, of course, look outside of the technology realm into kind of geopolitics into what’s happening with the climate, I think obviously overstated now, but the pandemic was a huge transformative catalyst for organizations aside for all the terrible things that happened with health outcomes, etcetera as well. You have to keep an eye on how ready are you for the next seismic shock that might come in from outside of those organizations. 

So there’s three things that sort of really underpin a lot of what I personally learned over the years about how you think about your transformation strategy. And I think around those three things clearly sit strategy, how to do strategy well, leadership, what’s leadership going to look like in this kind of new world, what skills are you going to need in your organization? So they’re all sort of fascinating in huge areas to look at. 

And when you’re talking to leaders most of whom are certainly, in my experience, hugely well informed about technology and how to operate it in large organizations, they often want to talk about some of these issues of leadership. And I think the move into this sort of digitally transformed world ask some incredible questions around future leadership. We see ultimately a move away from what I call the ‘Hippo model’, which is the highest paid person’s opinion to, something which is a little more sort of flatter, more data-driven, etcetera. But that’s kind of a whole other kind of podcast, Kevin. But those things, I think, fundamentally underpin the advice that we give to customers in that space. 

Interviewer: So, Dave, this comes to, my last question, which is the most interesting one that I like the most because we’ve been having a discussion around this whenever we meet. So, you are a self-described sports-nut, so do you see any interesting parallels in the world’s of high performance on both sides of the coin? 

Dave: Well, that’s a whole other podcast as well, I think, Kevin. But yeah, I mean, look, for sure, I love live sport particularly because it is just so thrilling for me. But, yeah, I think there’s a lot of parallels and it really was brought to my attention five years ago now, doesn’t time fly, back in 2018, I had the great pleasure of introducing a hero to the audience at one of our executive forums in Chicago. It was Michael Johnson, the sprinter, he’s won four Olympic goals and eight world championships and had the world record for such a long time, so hugely sort of inspiring individual, a real pleasure to speak with. 

And he gave a really amazing talk to our audience on how to change your strategy in-flight. And if you were Michael Johnson, you were running the 400 meters in. 43-44 seconds, something like that, so you had to have a strategy about how you ran that race and you can’t run, I think, 400 meters race flat out, I don’t think anyone could. So you had to have a strategy about when you were going to go flat out, when you were going to check where the next person was, where you were going to conserve, etcetera. And you had that 43 seconds to execute on that. So if it wasn’t going right, you had to change your strategy pretty quickly. 

And I think for me there was a huge parallel, in terms of how we think about a business strategy actually, because, you shouldn’t be designing your strategy for stasis: you have to think about how things change. So, for me, it forced me certainly to think about and indeed we fed this into a lot of our work about how do you design things to continuously evolve, so if your strategy has to change, you should change it. Nobody should be writing a strategy in the digital world and saying, right, for the next five years I’m going to be doing this because you just don’t know what’s kind of going to happen. So you have to be able to respond to those, we talked about earlier those external challenges, those external threats, those external factors. So, it was Michael Johnson that really made me think about that.

And I guess from a sports perspective, so many of our sports today, we’ve talked, Kevin, about Formula One before and I like football or soccer for American friends and I like golf and just watching them now, the amount of stats that you can get, the data that’s available to you as a viewer, I mean, you can just geek out on the data, right, you don’t even have to watch sort of any of the action. So how do we make sure that that’s used in the right way? But let’s not could it be too obsessed about it because the beauty of the sport for me, and I think there’s a big parallel in business is just how passionate the player on the pitch or the spectator is about that because that’s a huge component of the sporting world. So, in terms of business workplace, our attitude, our enthusiasm, etcetera, how we lead has massive parallels with the sporting world. 

So, anyway, I think that should be another podcast, Kevin. Maybe we should, I could talk for hours about it. 

Interviewer: That’s fair. So Dave, and that wraps up our insightful discussion on the challenges and opportunities in advancing in a way of thought leadership. Remember as thought leaders, we must stay agile, embrace change, and keep a communication concise. Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to bringing you more thought provoking conversations in the future. Stay innovative and keep pushing the boundaries. This is Kevin signing off. Thank you, Dave. 

Dave: Pleasure.