Inside Microsoft-scale sales operations with Chinesh Gandhi

Speaker A: Welcome to the Sales Compensation show where we share the latest sales performance insights through in depth discussion with experts. Season three of our show is your backstage pass to discovering how today's most successful sales and revenue ops teams support go to market strategy and improve sales performance. Plus, we'll explore what we can learn about incentives from different industries more broadly. Subscribe to hear how leaders are unlocking new growth, implementing the latest compensation trends and their priorities for improving go to market performance. I'm your host CPU CEO of Form AI Vil Alzam Janesh, thank you for uh, joining us on the Sales Computation show. It's great to have you on.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Nabil. Excited to be here.

Speaker A: So Chinese, it's been amazing. You know, you've had this incredible career and career journey, uh, over 16 years at Microsoft. You've seen you know, transitions in technology from like cloud to phone to now we're seeing AI disrupt and transform the way that we work. Super excited to dive into that and kind of get a better, you know, better sense of your experience over, over that time and your perspective on sales ops. But before we do, I always ask this to every one of my, my guests, like, how did you end up in this space? How did you start your career journey, uh, in the world of sales ops?

Speaker B: That's interesting. It, it was a little bit of an uh, accident or luck and fortune. I did my master's in industrial engineering. I started my career with um, supply chain. My undergrad is in mechanical engineering. I did supply chain. That gave me the impetus to go and look further into the. So I started becoming a champion in continuous improvement. Got myself certified in black belt, got my master's in lean operations management and industrial engineering and management. And as I was solving complex problems for large organizations like GE and others, I uh, was working for a commercial bank and they brought me in to look at incentive compensation. And uh, as I was drawing all the process flows together, I came up with a simple slide that had things like the process, time, rework and cost and things like that. But it gave an end to end view to the leadership and the problems and the opportunities I was highlighting resonated with them and they asked me to join their team and that kickstarted my career in sales operations and incentive comp.

Speaker A: What's interesting is if you think about, you know, sales operations, I mean it's the manufacturing plant for producing an outcome in sales, right? Like it's like you're building all the machinery, all the tooling, all the connectivity points to enable a complex Sales process to execute, end to end in it. And I think, you know, I'd love to dig in a little bit more of like how that experience and your industrial engineering background and kind of working in a totally different world, how has that informed or changed the way that you look at the problem, uh, the problems that you face on a day to day basis?

Speaker B: For me it has always been since my childhood, going into my profession, early in career, being curious and being able to solve problems. And then you go through this exercise of uh, identifying different tools and techniques, leveraging the toolkit in Lean and Six Sigma. That helps you identify where some of the waste are happening and how to kind of drive efficiency. And then you put on the business architecture and the simplest way to kind of look at things is as I'm coaching my team, it's always we have to think of effectiveness and efficiency together. The simple way to explain effectiveness is are we doing the right thing for the business? And efficiency is are we doing it the right way? Like is there speed, is there agility and things like that. And then with the background on more physical manufacturing kind of an environment, you're able to see the flow. When you come into a service industry, the flow is hidden. But having had that mindset of being able to see the flow and being able to create things like a value stream map helps me identify where things might be broken, where things are, ah, bottlenecked and how to kind of queue things up and then always looking at what is it that the customer is willing to pay for and the customer doesn't need be always the end customer who's paying Microsoft. It could be internal customers too, right? Like I'm an internal customer to the finance team and my sales leadership team and their salespeople are customers to me. Right. So I'm delivering, delivering an outcome and output which is being consumed by someone who is still part of the company. So you call consumers or customers, it's like, you know, how do I make their experience the best? So having that mindset is something that is very core to who I am and helps me identify opportunities of continuous improvement. So that's the connection point for me.

Speaker A: No, I love the effectiveness and efficiency breakdown. It's a very simple and elegant way to look at it. And I think the difficulty of getting the data to assess how your operations team is functioning is probably the difficulty because to your point on services, it's not transparent, it's not a lineup of machines that you can, it's not physical to inspect. It takes a lot of work so how do you bring the structure to capture the data, to capture every one of those steps in the process and kind of build that value stream map?

Speaker B: So I mean value stream map is an area where I have spent a few years and the idea is to kind of uh, as I'm attending meetings I'm kind of building it in my head or building it on my computer and then talking to the key stakeholders and trying to bring the pieces together. Oftentimes what has happened is when I'm m putting things together or I'm looking for someone at a leadership level to validate and they maybe take some time to kind of review it. But once they review it, they're invested in it because there are things that they're learning in the process as well. Right. Like it's not um, unheard of to hear leaders say oh, is that how we do it? So there is this foundation setting that happens when you're interviewing the stakeholders, when you're walking through the process. So let's say that we are building a strategy on developing uh, a muscle on a particular product that we want to sell. So that product is going to be what I put myself into. And then I go and say that how do I start? Who are the different teams enhancing me along the way? Like thinking of it as like instead of dynamics or instead of something else. What if I'm a car in a manufacturing line? What is the starting point? Who's defining the strategy? Who's defining the people? Who's defining the plan? Who's defining the GTM M? Who's defining that? And how are the sequence happening so that the rework can stop? And I think that helps me develop uh, the structure or bring a little bit of a method to the madness if you will.

Speaker A: It is madness and especially at the scale of like a Microsoft. I mean in any large enterprise the number of stakeholders, the steps, the processes, the tools that you need to use across, across that massive investment areas, you know, is quite large. I guess when you're thinking about this from like a you know, maybe tactical or like framework perspective, I think measuring the efficiency and I really like the framework of like, you know, are you doing it the right way versus you know, are you doing the right with effectiveness? I'm curious on the effectiveness side of things I guess like how are you measuring year over year the effectiveness and comparing it so that you're constantly in that improvement state? Because that goal post is always moving in terms of the business strategy.

Speaker B: Yeah, that conversation often comes up Nabil, uh, when we are Trying to think about systems and automations and things like that. Like do we want to do things with speed? Of course we want to. Right? Like my team owns the metric of delivering targets to upwards of 37,000 sellers across 140 countries covering north of $200 billion across multiple different products. So um, having scale and having automation is imperative for us to kind of have a good start for the sellers. And then as we think about the effectiveness, you know, there is one portion of it's like hey, what are we trying to achieve? We are trying to achieve alignment of strategy across a large pool of people spread across the world in different cultures, different customers, different GDP growth for the countries. How are we going to drive alignment of priorities and then how are we going to enable them and how are we going to measure that? Like that is what we are doing from a business perspective. Like are we being effective? That's the effectiveness portion. And how are we doing it? Are we doing it so that there is good role clarity of who's going to do what? When do we have the right systems that is capturing the data? Is there enough intelligence that if the data is having an issue, it auto captures it or we run reports and we get that. How do we eliminate proactive versus reactive? Right. So that's the efficiency portion that hey, how are we going to do this? So that we are doing it fast, we are agile and we are not having much of a rework. So that maximum number of people, when they get the targets, they're focusing on retirement of the target and account planning versus just like how did this come? Oh, this doesn't make sense. Oh, let me go and talk. So that's the measure that we have. Every year it's going to be a different strategy. So we still want to make sure that the priorities that we need for the business gets implemented. And the way it gets done, it's also with speed and with quality. So depending on the strategy we want to say, is the strategy landing yes or no? And if it is somewhere in between yes and no, how are you going to measure that? And if it is about efficiency, it is about like how fast are we doing it, how many errors are we getting, how many tickets are we getting after it has landed? Like I go back to my car manufacturing example, right? Once you get a car, you don't want to call the customer service and say how do I drive the car? Right. Like you want to go and enjoy the car, get the experience.

Speaker A: Obviously you're within your team, within your organization, you're Bringing this very methodical approach to how you're kind of measuring efficiency, measuring effectiveness. Um, but the world of sales ops and kind of just overall like go to market execution, there's so many different stakeholders. So how do you think about how you're managing your team, your function and your dependencies, your requirements with what other teams are doing that are either downstream of what you're doing. Like sales comp is downstream of quota or upstream of what you're doing. Maybe it's kind of like customer segmentation and definition of the target market. And so how are you thinking about those dependencies and downstream functions in the fact that they may be operating differently or they have different incentives, different KPIs that they're being measured on?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, we have an end to end planning team and then oftentimes the way we kind of drive conversations is over the years I have have learned some of the nuances of those. What I mean by that is like there will like we need to look at how are we going to segment our customers and what kind of experience are we going to give them. Right. Like if they are our top paying customers, you know, they will get a lot more attention. If they are in our, the mid range then they will still get in person, uh, attention and if they're in our breath business then you know, how do we kind of drive with AI and things like that. So when we think about the planning and all these different pieces, where we talk about strategy, where we talk about the forecast, where we talk about the compete advantages that we are building, where we talk about segmentation, where we talk about the right parenting structure, uh, global revenue allocation across the global companies, we talk about how are we going to assign uh, uh territories, all of these there are people who are really good SMEs in them. It's like how are we looking at it end to end. Right. And that's where everyone understanding who the consumer is and who the customer is and what is the end product that we are all targeting towards. We all need to have that picture that hey, the person back to the manufacturing example who's going to buy the car is going to have a really good experience sitting in it. How are we going to contribute to it and how are we going to get to that. So all these different pieces, sometimes they are not very sequential. But even if we put it sequential, knowing that it is not and put it on paper, I think everyone starts looking at the pieces and the interdependencies with some sense of clarity. And then uh, of course It's a lot of conversations and bringing people along in the journey because you can go fast, but you'll be alone. But you can go with everyone and then everyone will be with you together. Right. So there is that investment of time and effort of bringing people along in the journey, uh, and helping them see the same picture. And, you know, sometimes they might come and show you the picture that we are painting is not correct and we can learn and correct ourselves.

Speaker A: No, and I think you can go fast and do it alone. You get to the first objective quick. But I think, uh, the question is like the second or third order objectives, the future outcome years. Then you might go very slow because you missed that step of kind of. Yeah. What does the broader whole, uh, thing need to look like in three years, five years from now? It's harder to do without that synergy across the functions. So to double click on again your career experience. So, uh, you brought this very different, different background coming in. Obviously we've had people on the show that have come from everything from music to the world of sales is, you know, like actually being on the seller side to more STEM and kind of more technical backgrounds, I guess. Over, over, over your 16 plus years at Microsoft, I guess. What are the biggest things that you'd say like, you know, the biggest experiences that you walked away being like, okay, uh, this has fundamentally shifted how you thought about this or how you've approached, you know, running a team and you know, are there any experiences you want to share with the audience in terms of like, that have profoundly shifted the way you manage and run sales operations?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the two key influencing aspects that I've had is one is I was part of a pretty significant project where we were doing the retooling of the platform for, uh, sales ops. And you know, long story short, that failed and that the failure gave me a lot more learning than most of the successes have. What I learned over there was that make sure that the business process comes before technology. When you're doing something in technology, there is a need to modify the business process because the tools can change key steps up the procedural level.

Speaker A: But do not forget and completely remove the need for a process entirely.

Speaker B: Right. Uh, like, you know, be very focused on what the outcome is and who's going to use that outcome. Right. Like, back to my core of like, hey, we've got to understand what the outcome is and who is using the outcome. Right. So having that knowledge and being able to speak up, right. Like when I was new in one of my roles And I was leading, like co leading this massive project that failed. It gave me insight to say that, hey, just because I'm new, I should not lose my curiosity. Being curious and being able to ask the questions, even if it challenges the status quo, is probably a good thing because we could have potentially avoided the failure if I had spoken up at the right time. So, you know, hindsight is 20 20, but make it a safe environment for people to speak up. Uh, make it like, bring people along in the journey, people who are closest to the work, know the most, and make sure that there is equal balance being given to the strategy and the knowledge of the frontline people who are working on it every day. So a lot of uh, lessons on uh, clarity, you know, like when we, when we started the project, we had a charter. And I would say that perhaps a good practice that we revisit the charter at the uh, midpoint of the project because quite a few things have changed. Like if you think about the clarity that many people have when they write the charter is somewhere around, you know, 15 to 20%. And then as you start working on those projects, that clarity meter keeps climbing up and somewhere in the midpoint, you know, it's in the high 80s to 90%. So it might not be a bad idea to kind of go and revisit the charter and see where we started and what we have learned and you know, do it with pride and confidence.

Speaker A: Creating that safe space to have those open discussions is critical. And enforcing a structure like that where you have kind of a, this is the guidelines, the charter for the project, and then having m like check ins whether it's halfway through a project or if it's a very big project, maybe it's on a certain cadence every six months, every 12 months, whatever it is that, um, depending on the timeline. But it's interesting because you see this time and time again. There's all these massive black swan events that have happened in the world, whether it's the dot com bubble or the 2008 financial crash. And people around the room, they're supposed to be the experts, all miss the signs. And you look at why. It's because there is no real capacity or room to enable someone to put up their hands and say, hey, I don't, I feel like this is off. Because I think there's an element of you are now being the contrarian thinker and it's going against the consensus. And if that culture happens, then, you know, you get the same thing. I was reading something recently, but, you know, 2008 financial crash where the Federal Reserve and everyone was not concerned about the housing market because they thought it would just be, it would be a very small impact and they didn't see it cascade into what it, what it could be. But, but had they enabled the contrarian thinking that could have potentially prevented something like that? I think to me it's the magnitude and the stakes are very high in go to market operations, especially at the scale of Microsoft or any Fortune 50. And I think it's very important to set that up within your team. So I think it's a great takeaway and a good tidbit for the audience of whether it's a charter program or a charter for a project that you review and put that structure in place or something else where you're kind of creating a safe space and creating a mechanism for review. I think that's great.

Speaker B: Yeah, lots of learnings, uh, and that happens every day. I keep learning every day.

Speaker A: Obviously I think uh, this is something that can't not talk about given the time, but also I think the importance and the impact it's had what you've been able to do with quota setting. So this is going to seem like an obvious question, but I think I'd love to dig into this today with you and kind of get your perspective on this and to share the audience. Do you believe that AI has a role in quota setting and if so what is that role and how should it be deployed?

Speaker B: Yes, AI has a significant role in coda setting. I would go and say it that AI ah has a significant role in any process where we have very well defined structure and we can use a deterministic model and then we can bring in intelligence for it to be able to excel in a probabilistic model. So when we are dealing with all these different complexities, some of it is operational and repeatable in nature. Whatever activities we see as operational and repeatable in nature are the ones we quickly identify to go and automate so that the system can do a better job than a human and do it quicker. Now you bring AI on it and it starts looking at with certain different kinds of constraints and does an excellent job on it. It's like how I explain it to my daughter, like hey, she want have a birthday party, small one, bring kids at home and we are going to have uh, a cake and some pizza and then some games and then if I'm making the cake I can go and make the cake based on a recipe. In the world of AI, I can go and ask My agent and say hey, I'm having a birthday party for some 12 year olds. Three of them are uh, lactose intolerant, two of them are vegan and two of them don't like carrots. Can you help me find a recipe for which I can get the ingredients within a uh, three mile radius of my house? Now that is what AI comes and does really well for you. So being able to go and look for recipes on the Internet and then trying to balance all of these things compared to what I just gave as a criteria agents can help in a lot of those. Bring that back into the world of compensation that here we have some parts of the uh, world where we cannot sell these products. We have some parts of the world where we have workers council and we cannot change things later. We have some parts of the world where the compete scenario is very different. We have some parts of the world where the government is a lot more influential than this. As we bring all of these constraints and how we are developing the model, AI brings a lot of efficiency in that space. We are scratching the surface on it. But uh, I think as we think about the models and we get mature, uh, I do see a significant role that AI would play in ah, quota setting and mostly many operational processes in

Speaker A: the scenarios that you just brought up in terms of both on the sales comp side of the constraints that you have and the potential solutions. The interesting thing there is sales compensation does need to be deterministic. It needs to be 100% accurate. It needs to derive at a number that you can actually credibly reverse engineer and show the math of. But the ideation phase can actually be probabilistic and it's very good because then you, you can you know, spin up a hundred different ideas, then you know, select and filter within that based off of set of parameters. And obviously before you go to deploy that last 1% you need to do the final validations, make sure that there's nothing that's kind of missed and go back. But I think for the ideation and surfacing up uh, AI has this like connotation of oh, it's, it's the averaging and therefore uh, it can, it can be very negative and not creative. That's tr if you just ask a very simple answer or question and you're expecting to get the final result. But I think as a tool it can enable sales ops teams and sales comp teams to just massively increase their creativity and the unique ideation of solutions that would be very difficult potentially or actually hard to solve for on your own because if you haven't touched that area or that experience. And so I think the example you brought up is great because it really is perfect example of like hey, what are my options for this compliant change given my constraints, you see 10 different options and then you can now start to dig in. None of that is dangerous unless you just deployed it to uh, the production environment without even checking the math or the context behind it. But it's a great use case um, and kind of explanation of where AI could be tremendously helpful.

Speaker B: I mean ideation and probabilistic model is an area that I think we'll get mature on, right? But let's say even if we're in year and we're doing forecast, half the year is over and we're doing a uh, forecast for another half of the year and things change, right? Like geopolitical things can happen which is happening right now. Now if we can get things like the Moody's and the Dun Bradsteeds and some of the key news channels as a feed into the AI and then have that based on that go and do some analysis and forecasting like even when we are doing the operations it can give us a lot of data and insights on how we want to kind of think about uh, changes as we are in the execution, middle of the execution stage. So opportunities are there and I'm super optimistic on uh, what we are going

Speaker A: to learn for quarter setting and forecasting. Like AI is like it's a no brainer. The future is not fact. It is completely predictive and probabilistic guess and whether it's a human doing it or an AI doing it. Like clearly AI is better at probabilistic guesses with the, the occasional exception of like intuition because the data is not there and that human being has it. But in aggregate I think what we've seen from like where we've deployed AI models for quota setting versus the humans is in aggregate it's almost always a better result when it's driven and powered by AI. And the beauty to your point is the data collection doesn't stop at the year end, right? You can constantly ingest more data and feed it more information and see the result. And so maybe this kind of moves, moves to the second part of this which is okay, if we're, if we're going all in on leveraging AI to set targets and be more predictive and provide a better outcome for the business, what does this mean for the quota setting process? Like before you'd Set a process, you set a quota, walk away. Like, does this make quota setting more dynamic and how does that actually impact all the downstream processes that uh, that depend on that?

Speaker B: See, I mean we are in the journey and we are going to learn a lot. I think some early indications we are seeing is that when done right, it gives time back for us to do more. And then we are spending a lot of time in learning and then validating to make sure that the models are working. They're perhaps not there yet, but the speed at which they're getting mature gives me uh, a realm of being extremely pragmatic and optimistic on the future. What happens to the process? It's like think of the days when you know, email didn't exist. People were sending letters and cards and then email came and then that three to five day period all of a sudden became a second. So. And then it's going to be the need to kind of reinvent ourselves, do some soul searching ourselves and then make sure that hey, how do we kind of go build on that? When um, you know, data management became uh, a big thing, we started seeing the dashboards popping up in places where perhaps we didn't need one. So we have to be cognizant that we are not putting AI where we perhaps don't need one. Right. And over complicated. So I think there's going to be a journey that we're going to learn. The processes will change. And I think given the background of continuous improvement, the biggest room in the house should always be the room to improve. And how do we make it different, make it better? Because that's where real learning and growth happens as individuals and people too. What will the change look like? I'm not 100% sure yet. But I think uh, we've got to go in with the right positive mindset on that.

Speaker A: The impact on technology, like technology has on changing process. I mean there's you know, entire parts of office buildings that were just the mail rooms and the swaths of people that would work to kind of deliver the content and the importance note of that important email, you got that important letter, right. And kind of the infrastructure to do that radically changed. And it radically changed for the better. But at the same time it does mean that you have to be open to changing roles, changing what those individuals are doing completely, like eliminating certain processes in place of others. I mean, I guess, you know, people are resistant to change and I think that's part, you know, that's an area where it's very difficult to get buy in to making that change. And so this kind of uh, feeds back into maybe like what are the metrics that you're tracking? And like you, when you think about running your quota setting process, what are the metrics that you're tracking? And I ask this because if you're tracking the right metrics, then the information becomes the validation for the change management, right? Like hey, we're making this change because these things are getting better with this new change in process. But yeah, you're obviously at the forefront, you're leveraging AI in quota setting. Like how are you making sure you're capturing the right metrics to bring that continuous improvement?

Speaker B: I um, mean people aspect is front and center, making sure that they're willing to learn and they're willing to try and they're willing to experiment and then celebrating every success, whether big or small, maybe even celebrating failures because you attempted to try and do something and you failed fast and you learned fast. In terms of measure of success, it's going to be as we are thinking about situations or processes which have lot of complexity and there are people, given the size of the company, there are a lot of people in the field who are going to spend a lot of time on one single scenario, right? Like we have customers who do business globally, they have offices in 10 plus countries, they make a deal in one country, they make the revenue go in another country and then the salesperson is influencing in another country. How do we drive the behaviors, right? Because once the money comes to Microsoft, we want to minimize any internal friction that happens, right? Because we've got the money, we've got the revenue, let's go go for the others. So uh, what are the places where some of the SAL people are finding the time and how can we create an agent when these can be proactive? So identifying specific places where we want to reduce time and going back to like, you know, what is it that's going to be most effective? Most effective is make it easy for the seller to sell and make it easy for the customer to buy. And what can we do to kind of get to that and how do we kind of make all of our decisions that enable us to do that? Because that's where growth and market share is going to come from. A lot of it is going to be operational in nature, but let's not forget why we are doing it. Different metrics, but a lot of focus on quality, getting it right the first time, um, being proactive and things like that.

Speaker A: It is the sales ops function's job to streamline Sales and ultimately, you know, ensure that, you know, the customer and the ability to execute is driving to the right business outcomes. Uh, you know, we'd love to ask this question around. What is your like hot take or what's your kind of contrarian opinion within the world of uh, sales ops or sales compensation?

Speaker B: Look, we in the industry, we often talk about the pay for performance goal when people read it. There are books and there are articles that are written about it. We just got to get comfortable that not everyone's going to be above 100% and part of it is a good design. If not everyone is at 100%. Like, you know, how do you know where they are stretching? Like, you know, places that, you know, having a red on a dashboard is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone's green. They're like, hey, did we do the right stretch? So I would say that, you know, thinking about, um, how do we think differently about averages and median. Because when you think about the pay for performance, it's always going to be more expensive to the top and on the right hand side who are getting really well in their attainment. And then how do we kind of find the coaching and the right opportunities for those who are on the left hand side? And how do we make sure that, you know, there is constant, uh, learning that is happening as part of that process and it's okay that not everyone's going to be at 100% because that's not the design. So that's. If someone thinks that, hey, you know, more than 20% of people are not hitting the 100%, probably not a bad thing. Maybe that's the design.

Speaker A: Especially in sales. It's like if you want to make it very, very lucrative for your, the best performers, you gotta pay, you gotta fund that right investment somehow. And so, yeah, I mean, to me, you know, it's interesting because it's again, this goes back to the people side of yeah. What makes sales comp so difficult. But uh, no, I mean to me it is the math behind sales compensation. Janice, this has been amazing. I feel like there's so many practical and very tactical frameworks and I think if everyone kind of brings that to their own, like for the audience that's listening to their own operations or team management. And really I love the focus on efficiency and then the focus on effectiveness and kind of thinking about how you measure and track those. You put it, ah, very, very succinctly and very nicely. Um, before we wrap up, I always ask my guests two questions. Ah, so first is, uh, who in the industry would you most like to take out to lunch? And why?

Speaker B: Well, there's so many people that I look up in the industry, but there are a few people that I follow very closely. One of them that, uh, I have been following, following and I have been seeing the journey for is the Chief Revenue Officer Judson. He just has this amazing way of bringing in people along in the journey and then kind of continue to push everyone on kind of being able to better themselves. So I think, uh, if ever got a chance, I would definitely would love to invite him and go and get some golden nuggets of uh, wisdom from him.

Speaker A: It's not easy. Yeah, that role is not easy. It's a very difficult role. You have to orchestrate a lot, like the CRO role of a very large organization. I mean like you're orchestrating a massive organization. You're orchestrating very different types of roles, the operations, the M machine, all the way to kind of the people side of it. So, um, I imagine, yeah, there would definitely be some very, very.

Speaker B: Now he's a bigger uh, remit on that, right? Like he's the CEO of the commercial business.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And then my, my second question is what book, podcast or resource has helped shape how you lead today that you'd like to share with the audience?

Speaker B: It's a book that has been there for ages, right. It's been written by Dale Carnegie and you know, I seem to keep going back to it because it's not industry specific from sales ops, revenue or comp or any of that, but it's more about the people, which is always the foundation. And you know, being fortunate to work in a company that is global in nature and being able to understand that, hey, different people have different cultures, but some things stay constant. And the uh, 30 principles that Dale Carnegie has written in his book of how to win friends and influence people and then another one that he has written on how to stop worrying and start living are something that I have found myself going back to often enough because it's simple, it's effective, it's proven, and it's a good reminder, you know, every time I go off the path, right, the busy period is June because I have to get things out. And that's when my test comes into picture that how am I managing my stress and am I still being people first or not? And uh, he has a cheat sheet that I often refer to, often keep it on my desk and, and it's a good reflection moment oftentimes.

Speaker A: So yeah, I uh, find like the Books that have a very, like, tactical framework that you can then kind of reference back again because, you know, you read these books, you get this, this insight. But if you don't proactively, you know, kind of set yourself up, whether it's like a cheat sheet that comes with a book or, um, you know, you jotting down notes, I always find that it's very hard to kind of get that, like, you almost like lose that insight a year later, two years later. Uh, so it's very helpful. And I like that that you keep it on your desk and it kind of helps reframe you and brings you into that mindset. But, uh, yeah, I think that's a, that's a great pick and a great recommendation for the audience. Um, Dinesh, thank you again for joining. Uh, this is. Yeah, I really enjoyed the discussion and, uh, I appreciate you taking time out in what is your busy period, um, to come share your knowledge with the, with the audience and with the community. So thank you and, uh, really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you, Nabil. I really appreciate you having me here and I look, uh, forward to continuing to learn from the people that you'll be talking to. So. That's awesome.

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