What does it take to lead - and live - when the world won’t sit still?
Hosted by executive advisor and bestselling author Jimmy Allen, Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is a leadership development podcast that goes beyond the boardroom.
Each episode features a conversation with a prominent CEO—from the likes of Audible, Walmart, and AWS—who reflects on the lessons that reshaped their business and their personal growth. But you won’t just hear from business leaders. Jimmy brings in artists, musicians, comedians, and other unconventional thinkers who explore the same lessons through a completely different lens.
These conversations surface aha moments from some of the world’s most influential leaders and thinkers. Intensely curious and open to new experiences and perspectives, they seek inspiration in unexpected places as they constantly reinvent their businesses and themselves.
In turn, you’ll walk away with a fresh take on how we all grow as individuals, what we are capable of building, and the legacy we leave behind.
So, whether you’re a CEO, a rising executive, or simply passionate about leadership, influence, and business at scale, this podcast will challenge and inspire you—one story at a time.
About the Host:
Jimmy Allen is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company with over 35 years’ experience advising leading organizations. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books on growth and leadership and the host and founder of Bain’s Global CEO Community Forum. James is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, James started his own record label (Abubilla Music) in 2008 and supports Singing Wells, a project dedicated to preserving Kenyan village music.
Bain & Company:
Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is brought to you by Bain & Company, a global consultancy trusted by the world’s most influential business leaders. With decades of experience guiding organizations through growth, transformation, and leadership development, Bain’s executive insights offer what it takes to lead at scale.
Tanuja Randery: I don't think any enterprise wants to move slowly, they just often cannot see a path to becoming faster and remaining risk-free. This is the tension, right?
Jimmy Allen: Big companies are built to deliver, built to keep customer promises and give their customers the benefits of their size on time every time. And in a stable world, that'd probably be enough, but we're not in a stable world. Technology is shifting fast, competitors are fierce, and customers need change overnight. Scale matters, but so does speed. The rules of the game have changed. So how do you develop new solutions for your customers at the speed they demand? How do you rediscover the art of business building? Well, perhaps the answer lies in toddlers running downhill or maybe even an earthling in the oven.
I'm Jimmy Allen, and this is "Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions". Today, I'm speaking with Tanuja Randery, managing director of Amazon Web Services in EMEA. She's held senior leadership positions in Telecom and FinTech. And since joining AWS in 2021, has been helping steer one of the fastest growing tech businesses in the world. AWS, which is Amazon's cloud division, was launched in 2006 and now serves millions of customers with over 140,000 partners in over 200 countries. But it's also about scalers. This is the critical missing community in most companies. But before we get into all that, let's start with a single question on complexity, which is how the hell has AWS grown without becoming a bureaucracy?
Tanuja Randery: We do, we always talk about ourselves as the world's largest startup. And where some people think of scale as challenging in creating complexity in an old sort of peculiar way, we always think about scale from the very beginning of everything we do. So when you land core foundational services or products, you always think about it in terms of where you want it to end up being. When we started AWS, I think if we thought about it differently, we may not have been quite as big as we are today. The other thing that we talk a lot about is these types of lessons that you can only learn them if you've scaled and you won't get to that. So for example, you know, running and operating data centers around the world at the scale that we do, allows us also to manage our energy consumptions in a way that nobody else can, because it is only at that scale that we're able to achieve those kind of efficiencies and learn what needs to be learned to continuously improve it. So that's how we think about scale, so that it's just built into the core of who we are. Now, having said that, though, you're absolutely right. You know, when you're operating in multiple countries around the world, multiple products, multiple types of individuals, the amount of diversity we have, it can very quickly become extraordinarily challenging. And I think that's where we always go back to the core of who we are and the culture of Amazon, which is what makes us. You know, we're living these leadership principles every single moment.
Jimmy Allen: You know, I speak to founders all the time that will say, "When I was there, I lived the leadership principles every day. It's something that we live, but as we got bigger, it became performative." And I'd love to just understand what you mean by living those principles, living the culture. You know, what examples do you have of that, because you must be worried all the time that it becomes performative.
Tanuja Randery: I think if you don't think about it and you're not purposeful about it, it can become an issue. And actually, we talk about this idea of never being in day two and always staying in day one, what does that mean? You know, everyone who onboards into Amazon or AWS, we actually go through this day one training. We all go to Seattle. We're all part of this Embark training. When people get promoted to directors, they go through day one director training. So there is a lot of refreshing about these LPs and how they actually show up on a daily basis. And then I'd say the one other thing that keeps it alive is back into kind of the core of the mechanisms that we have in the business that allow us to both help our customers and partners, but also build great teams. So for example, every single product that we have started with something called a PR/FAQ, and that's a press release with questions. Actually, the FAQs are the most interesting part of this. But, you know, if it was Alexa or it was Premiere, or it was AWS for that matter, it started with a doc. And you know, teams sit down and write those PR/FAQs together, about what it should look like in the future. And then they work backwards from that to say, okay, what do we now need to deliver that future? What are the difficult questions? What is the real customer problem we're solving? So I think the mechanisms, the training, the education, the observations, and I think it's those things that actually work, 'cause they're pragmatic, they're real, they're every single day.
Jimmy Allen: One of the things that founders talk about is great companies are built on constant challenge of each other, because, you know, the world is about trade-offs. We're trading off scale and intimacy, routine and disruption. So we've gotta challenge each other. But the danger is that as the organization grows and people have their silos, that they're sort of hallway deals. You know, if you don't say anything bad about my plan, I'm about to present, I won't say anything bad about yours. Or, gee, we're very impolite, you challenged me. How do you keep a challenge culture alive? Because to me it's vital, and it's one of the first things that goes.
Tanuja Randery: It's super vital, by the way. So look, I think a few things that come to mind that I've seen and observed, again, being here, one is one of our LPs is "Have backbone; disagree and commit." And I think it's a really interesting one because it really does give every single person in this organization, it does not matter whether you are two months in or 10 years here, or a tech person or a non-tech person, or it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what your title is. You know, one of our biggest LPs is "have backbone; disagree and commit". And so what you will find is when we do these reviews of, you know, product PR/FAQs or idea PR/FAQs or organizational change PR/FAQs, they are these docs. And you know, very early on, Jeff decided no PowerPoint in this organization. And the reason for that is, is when you write a doc, everybody will actually input into the doc. So we actually use this as a way of, wow, I mean, just getting incredible amounts of inputs. So I think it democratizes in some way this ability to have backbone and disagree, right? You don't have to be the loudest voice in the room. You certainly don't be the most charismatic person in the room. And you certainly don't have to be the only person with the information in the room because the doc has to stand by itself. And what I have heard in meetings is, when doc writers bring docs, and everything is fantastic in the doc, they have the perfect idea. Everything is marvelous. There are no challenges listed, no risks. And then people will just go, will just say, why are we reading this? 'Cause actually what you should be coming with the doc with is, Hey, I've got this idea, but there are five things that I need input and help on, which I see as either bottlenecks or constraints or by the way, ways that I could pour fuel on fire, right? So those are the best meetings.
Jimmy Allen: So guys, this is where I usually jump in to share another case study from another company. But let's be real, nobody has scaled like Amazon and AWS, they've proven that real scale comes from making business building part of everything you do. And to pull that off, you need the right mix of people. Of course you need executors, they're the ones that run the engine and deliver flawlessly and keep customer promises. And you need disruptors. They're the idea generators who push boundaries, but you also need scalers. They're the bridge between the idea people and those that turn things into repeatable models. They go from post-it notes to playbooks. Scalers are the magic glue in the system, but they don't just show up on your doorstep and they certainly don't emerge from most HR systems, which raises the question, how do you actually hire and develop a scaler?
Tanuja Randery: AWS and Amazon are, someone once said this, I think it was our head of people who said, this place is for learners and builders, and you're gonna have a lot of fun and create masterpieces. And so that is probably the core of what we're looking for when we are hiring and when we are promoting is this curiosity. So we have quite a thorough interview process. Actually, I went through it and it's called our loop process. And the loop process is you are interviewed by your peers and what's wonderful about these loops are they're not, you know, your normal interview process you walk in, and someone's like, oh, I've done this. I've been a physicist, I was a VP of X, Y, Z, I have 10 years of experience doing. That's not what we wanna talk about. Everyone's seen your resume, right? We usually ask for a written sample and then each of the loopers are going to be really testing for cultural fit. And then here's the real interesting part. You know, we've got people who are bar raisers. These are people who've done more interviews than anyone else. After everyone's done their interviews, we've inputted all the feedback, we all get back in one group and the bar raiser runs a facilitated discussion. We talk about the strengths of this person. What do we like? What are some coaching areas? What are some, you know, areas that we felt uncomfortable with? You know, what was, could we get there? Could we address it? And there's this phenomenal conversation, all because we wanna help this person be incredible here. So this is the thing. And the bar raiser has the veto by the way, which I think is super important. And the bar raiser is not the hiring manager.
Jimmy Allen: Oh, that's amazing. Okay, that's a big deal.
Tanuja Randery: Mm-hmm, big deal.
Jimmy Allen: So a person who's had extraordinary experience in the process of interviewing and understand how those people end up landing is a person that will do the veto, not the one advocating the hire.
Tanuja Randery: Correct.
Jimmy Allen: And then how could you characterize a builder? Meaning are there things you now look for that says, look, I've got enough patterns here because I kind of understand the learner side, but the builder is a skillset set, a capability set. So what makes a good builder?
Tanuja Randery: I think builders are very curious. They don't think they have the answer. They're just like, you know, someone who asks a lot of great questions, people who are just relentlessly asking about why constraints exist, and how do you break them. You know, why can't we do it faster? You know, why would anyone expect that in four hours, not one hour? You know, you look for people that are really, really, really obsessed and have a missionary zeal around asking those why questions and not just settling for the first answer. I think the other thing about builders are also people who are willing to let go of something. So they actively seek to dis-confirm their belief. 'Cause you can have builders that go, I know exactly what I'm building, this is exactly what I'm gonna do, this is what it looks like. And they have the answer from the beginning. That's not quite really the builder that is going to be able to deliver something of what I would call sustained differentiated advantage, right? A builder is someone who's disconfirming their beliefs all the time. They're looking for people around them who are challenging them. They don't mind if someone says, gosh, that's really not gonna work unless you do A, B, and C, right? And then I think the third is builders also are not just people who are thinking big and creating, they can actually land the planes. So there are also people who have operational executional muscle or will figure out a way to get there. They've got input metrics. We are very big on input metrics versus just output metrics. So we don't chase, oh, revenue, it should be an outcome. Growth should be an outcome of everything you do, right? So they put the inspection mechanisms, they've got the metrics in place, they have a real structured process for how to roll that out, right? And then the builder builds great teams, and those teams have the capabilities to be able to put together what we are wanting to build.
Jimmy Allen: Okay, folks, well, we know this, builders are rare. They're the ones bold enough to rethink systems, curious enough to chase uncomfortable truths and brave enough to risk being wrong. How the hell do you create a culture that rewards that kind of thinking? Well, I think Ruth Handcock, CEO of Octopus Money, came up with a brilliantly simple answer. She calls it stumble of the week. She says, business building is like a toddler running down a hill. And in her world, stumbles are common and inevitable. So at every all company meeting, the team kicks off with wins. What went well, who deserves a shout out? And then she flips the script and she asks, okay, well what did we totally screw up this week? The effect mistakes aren't hidden, they're shared. Failure isn't embarrassing, it's expected. And once people stop fearing it, they move so much faster, collaborate so much more and learn way quicker.
Now for different take on scaling, let's jump from boardrooms to improv. Yeah, really. Now stick with me, I think it's gonna make sense. Let's meet Erika Serow, partner and CMO at Bain and former CEO of Sweaty Betty USA. When she signed up for improv courses, she thought she's picking up a hobby. What she found instead was a crash course in business building and how to scale.
Erika Serow: I did a week of improv because it scared the bejesus out of me, and I thought it would be good for me. And I went in knowing yes, and which is the sort of basis, but I didn't really under understand it. What I came out of it with was life lessons. Mostly that conversation in any form is a team sport. And the whole reason yes and matters is because it means you're listening. So it means, I'm hearing what you're saying and I'm now gonna add what I'm saying on top of that. And it means it's not gonna go the way of the first person who spoke. If you start a conversation with the intent of telling a story or making a point, that's not a conversation, it's a lecture. And so we so often have people say, well anyway, let me get back to what I was saying. And if you say that you're literally indicating that you're not listening, you are not yes, anding, you are, yes, budding.
Jimmy Allen: And it just in the improv context, how did they phrase that or what were the rules that created that kind of understanding of dialogue?
Erika Serow: The first rule is yes, and. And the reason, yes, and is first is because the first person that comes into a scene sets the context. So they are the person who's responsible for telling you that you are a martian and your oven is overheating and we're worried about serving dinner. And the next person accepts all of those things as a given and builds from there. Now the next person might have an idea that actually the thing that's in the oven is an earthling, whereas the first person thought it was thanksgiving dinner, but it doesn't matter, because as soon as the second person says it's an earthling in the oven, you run from there. The other rule that they have that I love, which is you don't base things in conflict because conflict has a predictable resolution and you're trying to find things that are creative. So you're not looking for, well, I told you to turn off the oven because that's a yes, but, you're looking for how do I build on this in a way that doesn't rely on conflict as the central premise. So it's not an argument between two or three or four people, it's a conversation that you're building.
Jimmy Allen: Was conflict the hardest thing to get over when you were doing improv?
Erika Serow: Absolutely. I mean, me and everybody else, again, because it's a pattern we understand. The other thing that's hard, and this is particularly true for non-creative people in a creative environment, is you have the freedom to pick any environment that you wanna start in, anyone at all. And people that are new come in and pick, you know, it's Tuesday and we're doing a podcast. You're like, okay, that's interesting, but why are we human? Why are we on earth? Why are we in the roles that we normally are? Why aren't we the caterpillars instead of the humans? Why aren't we the leaves on the tree? And so pick something crazy and start there because it forces the creativity into a new place. Like let's be the germs or the microbes instead of the humans. And if you look at people that are great at this, they're starting in really weird scenarios. And that's just because of the germ of an idea is like, how do we make a plant funny? And it makes you, I think one of the, you know, unwritten rules I would say is you can't try to be funny. So you can be funny in your one thing, but your one thing is then meant for the next person to build on top of it. And if you go into it worried about is this funny you're losing the team sport of it. So like you try to add something that's gonna make it even more outlandish for the next person to build. You're effectively trying to escalate the humor in a collaborative way.
Jimmy Allen: What I love about this is that Erica shows how improv helps companies move past conflict and unlock the creative flow that is so essential to business building. Conflict kills the scene. And in business, when you're talking about creating new solutions, progress comes from enhancing ideas, not blocking them. In business building, we need the rules of improv. Scaling can't survive a culture of no, improv's yes and accelerates momentum, turning sparks into solutions. And there's another lesson here, playfulness. When people feel safe to experiment, they take risk. And that's where breakthroughs come from, and how companies stay relevant. But of course there's a catch. Doing this inside a startup is one thing, but doing it inside a hyperscaler like AWS, well that's something else entirely. The stakes are higher, the systems are bigger, and the risk of losing speed is very, very real. You know, the incumbent problem, the incumbent problem is they're very big on innovation in the first quarter and then they rob innovation in the fourth quarter to make their numbers. How do you budget two-way door investments? Meaning how do you keep the business building alive, recognizing that you might fail halfway through the year or need to pivot.
Tanuja Randery: In some ways I'd say we don't, you know, let me explain. We know that the ideas are gonna come all of the time, right? It doesn't mean that strategy should stop. There will be things that we'll wanna go execute and we'll go figure out the budgeting associated with that and we'll go land it. And they might require, by the way, further dive deeps to be able to go there. On the other hand, what I want to be able to also do is ideas that come along during the year are also given due thought. And the way we do that is people write PR/FAQs. So let's just say, we've got a number, a quota, a target, segments we wanna enter, customer bases we wanna go serve, you know, products we're taking to market that we wanna be the really leading in, et cetera. We're all our teams are geared towards doing that. But at all times throughout the year, someone might say, Tanuja, I have this really great idea, or Julia, I have a great idea. I'd love to bring a PR/FAQ. Boom, bring a PR/FAQ. We'll sit around and read it. If we think it's great, we'll go figure it out. We'll find the budget.
Jimmy Allen: The line, that strategy doesn't stop just because our planning processes are annual, I think is the highlight of today. I mean, because, and the reason I'm now gonna talk about the other thing I'd love to understand how you do. No incumbent would say that, right? That would be the definition of complexity and chaos. You know, someone to say, oh, but in addition to our annual planning process, any great idea, we could just go ahead and have a discussion. People would be like, no, you can't. That's the, so here you are, this scale insurgent, one of the only that's ever existed. And yet your customers are some of the largest incumbents in the world. The only way they're gonna benefit from AWS is if you bring your mindset and yet your mindset must collide all the time with a lot of the cultures you encounter. So how do you stay the insurgent and be customer-focused in a world of incumbents?
Tanuja Randery: The three or four things that we are very focused on with customers is one, I actually think the culture of innovation that we've got within AWS and Amazon is something our customers just love hearing about. The experiences we've had in business building, irrespective of whether they will ever take any one of our services is something they just love learning from. So we actually spend a lot of time with boards and CEOs and their executive teams going through a culture of innovation workshop or set of workshops. How do you set up the organization for single threaded owners? What does that mean? How do they operate? That's one, really building top leadership understanding on how to create a company that has this incredible culture of innovation. Two, investing massively in skills. You know, we have a duty of care around this. We feel very strongly about this, Jimmy. We have so far trained for free and invested millions of dollars, 31 million learners around the world. It is not a small number. And the reason is we know fundamentally, technology can only take you so far. If you don't have the skills and the people and the mindset of the operating model, you're not gonna be able to transform organizations. And then I think the third is at the core, the cloud is fundamentally a scaling mechanism. And actually with the advent of AI and where we are, increasingly, it is impossible to scale without something like the cloud. So I think the platform we've built, since the very beginning is to ensure that our customers have the most scalable, most resilient infrastructure around the world in whatever form that they need it at the edge, so they can leverage the actual technology that allows 'em to scale.
Jimmy Allen: Too often incumbents think the answer is about dreaming bigger. And my God, they create beautiful points of arrival for the business they want to build. I mean, the tapestry of PowerPoint slides is stunning, but they forget about the team itself. Who are we actually gonna hire to make this thing happen? Are they scalers? Have they ever done it before? Do they act like founders? In fact, very often the staff that developed the PowerPoint dream is assigned to nurture the business in its early days. I mean, what the hell is that? Tanuja, of course, she talks about dreaming, they're very clear about the importance of the PR/FAQ, but she spends far more time talking about the business builders, the team that will make this new business happen. And I think for incumbents, the lesson's really clear. You wanna rediscover the art of business building, focus time on developing a community of scalers, people that can scale businesses fast. Which raises a question. How does AWS work with this world of incumbents? They're their customers after all, and they know they've got lots to scale, but they don't necessarily have speed.
Jimmy Allen: I can only imagine that when you're trying to figure out what customer focus means is how do we have empathy for the issues they face without going native and becoming tolerant of the slowness?
Tanuja Randery: I really think it separates Amazon and AWS from anyone else. We are not driven by short term results. You know, we have to do what we've done for ourselves, which is think long term, but execute. I don't think any enterprise wants to move slowly. They just often cannot see a path to becoming faster, and remaining risk-free. This is the tension, right? And so speed is a leadership choice and therefore you have to start with the leadership team. Now I will say it's super, super important, to be able to help our customers also find ways to cascade that through the organization. Because we all know it can stop at the top either, because you are absolutely right. It's not technology agenda, it's transformation agenda. So I think we've gotta give them also mechanisms that allow them to scale. And then the other thing we've done is we've got teams of people that actually will go in and help customers with this. We will send in, for example, in the generative AI world, we built a generative AI innovation center team. They go in and they're helping actually create prototypes, figure out the priorities with them. So I think some of it is rolling up our sleeves and being there by their side and helping them educate, teach, and transform at the same time.
Jimmy Allen: All of this would've been impossible to do. And now we're adding AI. I just love to understand, you know, first how you guys are thinking about AI and what it means for you and then what are you telling your CEOs.
Tanuja Randery: In Europe alone, you know, let alone worldwide, we are seeing five businesses every single minute adopting AI. And this is across the board. People see the benefit, not only by the way, in terms of what you would classically think AI could do, which is efficiency, right? Productivity, right? All of that. They see it actually in driving new sources of business, revenue growth, better innovation. But we do see a bit of a two speed economy. Some of it because of some of the complexities we talked about earlier, where startups are really leading the way. They're embedding AI into the core of their every single process. How they create product. Enterprises are still very much around the edge of productivity, the ability to query my documents better, et cetera. But look, I think it's a matter of time. Our approach is fundamentally around ensuring that our customers have choice. Because we believe that in this world that we live in, no one model is going to be the winner takes all, or able to solve for everything that you're thinking about.
Jimmy Allen: And when you're sitting with the CEO and board, which you're doing all the time of your customers, what is the one thing you say every CEO must do as it relates to AI?
Tanuja Randery: The one thing I would say is you have to embrace this technology right now. Like you've gotta learn it yourself, as a CEO you've got to use the tools. 'Cause if you don't use the tools, you have no idea about the power of this, or the challenges of it, right? I mean, this is not a time, I will tell you this is not a time at all to be in any way hesitant.
Jimmy Allen: As leaders, staying sharp means staying curious. What I'm learning from these interviews is that as leaders, staying sharp means stay curious, about new tech, about fresh strategies, about different ways of thinking. Heck even about improv. On the Founder's Mentality site, you'll find insights from CEOs and leaders who talk about their own learning journey, along with highlights from Bain's CEO forums. To explore hit the link in the show notes. Now, let's get back to Tanuja for some rapid fire questions.
Jimmy Allen: What brings you energy?
Tanuja Randery: Oh. Oh, my God. Listen, here's what I'm gonna tell you. I was interviewing with someone the other day and they asked me what my duvet flip is. And you know, it's waking up every morning just knowing that I am going to create something phenomenal that day. And it doesn't have to be a massive thing. It could be that I picked up the phone, I called someone and I changed their day, you know? And so I think it's just this idea of having deep impact, problem solving, and solving some of not only the world's biggest challenges, but also solving little things along the way to make people's lives better.
Jimmy Allen: What drains you of energy?
Tanuja Randery: People building walls around themselves or their areas when actually opening the door will create so much more success for teams, companies, businesses, and societies. So I think what drains me when I'm surrounded by people like that.
Jimmy Allen: What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Tanuja Randery: To calibrate the feedback you receive? Take the time to really reflect on it, and ask again the why questions around the feedback, and to then walk away with what you think you know can really help you get to the next level of performance potential. But not to catastrophize in any way. Like I think this idea that feedback is personal. It took me a while, by the way, this is something I've learned after a long time. But I think that was the best piece of advice because it just makes you, I don't know, it just makes you more open to listening.
Jimmy Allen: And what's the worst piece of advice you've ever received?
Tanuja Randery: This one I can definitely say to you. I remember when I was a very, very young engagement manager, and one of the directors at the firm said to me that I shouldn't speak up in a CEO meeting.
Jimmy Allen: Oh, my.
Tanuja Randery: And I didn't take the advice, by the way. I did speak up.
Jimmy Allen: Good for you.
Tanuja Randery: And you know, it led to the next job and the next job and the next opportunity and the next challenge. And so I always say, speak up. You need to be heard. It's important.
Jimmy Allen: So let's recap some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Tanuja.
Tanuja Randery: Some people think of scale as challenging and creating complexity. We always think about scale from the very beginning of everything we do.
Jimmy Allen: At its core, scaling is about embedding business building into every decision, every process and every customer interaction. It's not a distraction from delivery, it is your growth engine.
Tanuja Randery: We know that the ideas are gonna come all of the time, right? It doesn't mean that strategy should stop.
Jimmy Allen: But great CEOs know business building takes far more than just dreams. It takes scalers, nurture them and recognize that business building can't be constrained by your annual planning cycle. Strategy doesn't stop or fit within the calendar year.
Tanuja Randery: Builders also are not just people who are thinking big and creating, they can actually land the planes.
Jimmy Allen: Business building is also about making things happen with speed. And that's where the scalers come in. They're the bridge between post-it notes and playbooks, disruptors and executors. Hey folks, before we wrap up, I wanna ask you something that I ask all of my guests. What is the one thing that you learn from business that you actually took home to family and friends? Send in your answers and we'll be featuring the best of these on an upcoming podcast.
So just like in improv, when we swap fear of failure for a culture of experimenting and learning, we're gonna unlock much bigger possibilities. Of course, you gotta make plans, but don't be afraid to break them. In fact, the leader's job is to make space for business building. Yes, we have to deliver, love our current products and the people that sell them. But guys, delivery is not enough in a chaotic world, we also have to develop the new solutions our customers need. And here's the sad fact, incumbent systems are built to deliver and view development, yeah, that business building stuff as a distraction. But you're gonna need to be the master of both. Oh, and by the way, if that wasn't enough, then you're gonna have to stop everything else you're doing and simplify. And what does it really mean to simplify? Well, in our next episode, we'll explore exactly this with Stuart Gent, who's co-head of Europe Private Equity at Bain Capital, and a lifelong student of focus and flow. He'll share how radical simplification keeps organizations lean, sharp and fast while actually expanding their bandwidth. So join us next time. Stay curious and hey, maybe check out your local improv class, you might learn something.