Disrupting Airlines, Streaming, and Healthcare for Good

Foreign. The dynamism of the plan is important. I don't want people to continue working on things when it's no longer relevant. So killing projects to me is more important than initiating new projects. Hello everyone. We're back to another episode of the Shift Code, our podcast about transformation, innovation, leadership. And what brings all of this to life. Profit management. So today I have an amazing guest, Azran Osman Rani. He's the CEO and co founder of Naluri. He has done a lot of things in his life. He's run many companies and by the way, Azran, why don't you tell us a little bit about the businesses you've run in your life. There's AirAsia, Xlori, other things. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Well, it's great to meet you here, Pierre. For Context, the first 10 years of my career in very traditional corporate roles. Strategy, business development, corporate transformation, very similar to yours. But the next two decades I've spent unlearning all that conventional thinking as an entrepreneur, building businesses that dare to challenge the status quo across the range of industries that you mentioned. So from heavily regulated, capital intensive industries like building an airline from scratch, to video streaming with Iflix, and now Nullary with digital health. And the common denominator across all of them is that how do you challenge global giants like Emirates or Netflix or big hospitals when you're starting from scratch? Why don't you tell us a little bit more about you personally. You mentioned you studied in consulting, but before that you're calling in from kl, right? Kuala Lumpur. You sound like an American. What's your story? Well, I was born and raised here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Probably watched a lot of MTV growing up, but I did spend my university years in California. At Stanford. Yeah. You went to Stanford. How did you get there and what did you learn there? Okay, well, you know, what I wanted to do was to just find a ticket to get out of Malaysia and Asia to go as far away as I can. And back in the 1980s, you were given four choices. Medicine, law, accounting and engineering. And I wasn't particularly interested in any but medicine. Oh, I couldn't stand the sight of blood. Law and accounting, those textbooks don't have even pictures, so engineering was the least important. You have a problem with red, right? That's the red color that you don't like. Yes, exactly. So I had fun studying electrical engineering. But you know what I really liked about the US education system is I. I could broaden the exposure, right? So I Took classes in psychology, history, economics and the bare minimum engineering classes to get that engineering word on my certificate. Oh, okay, that's awesome. And you said you wanted to fly as far as possible from Malaysia. Is it curiosity you thought there were no opportunities? Because right now everybody wants to be in Asia. This is where growth is happening. And by the way, you're back there, right? So tell us more. Yeah, you know that's true, right? Because when you're starting from your point, the world is so big, I wanted to just go out, put myself in a place where I had to just figure everything out by myself. There weren't any familiar Malaysians around me. Now interestingly, by the time I graduated in 1994, the US was still trying to come out of a recession and Southeast Asia was booming, right? So the economies here was growing very, very fast. So I started my career in Singapore and have never left Asia since. Okay, that's really awesome. So you mentioned that you run businesses that were disrupting an industry or going after, I don't know, a monopoly or an oligopoly or big players. What is the common thread of the situations where you feel there's an opportunity to disrupt? Well, I think when you see something, why are things being done a certain way? I'll give you one example, right? You would think an airline, especially long haul airline, is very scale and capital intensive, right? So the more airplanes you have, the bigger your cost and scale advantage. When we started, we could only afford one single aircraft, and yet that one plane operated at a unit cost. That was one third of Singapore Airlines, which was then the most cost efficient long haul airline. So they went $0.09 per seat per km. We were at $0.03 per seat per km without any of that scale advantage. By questioning one fundamental assumption that no one in the airline industry thought about, which was how do you schedule your flights on a long haul pattern? If you notice a lot of your long haul flights leave late at night. Well, because it's generally catered for the convenience of business travelers, right? You leave late at night, you arrive in the morning, you want the perfect connecting times. Secondly, you want consistency. So the same flight times Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, because you need that predictability and reliability of travel. What that means though is that these planes are only operating at 12 to 13 hours a day, barely 50% utilization in any of the asset intensive industries like power plants, data centers, hotels, that would have been egregious. The reason they did that was because they wanted the perfect arrival, departure and connecting times. So when we Started, we said, hang on. Our target customers may fly KL to London once a year or once in a lifetime. They don't care what time you arrive, what time you depart, as long as it's $500 cheaper. Right. I mean the trade off for them is clear. Maybe they care, but still, if you're given the choice. Exactly. And so by simply tweaking that one factor, we flew the world's highest aircraft utilization rate of 18 hours a day. That alone explained a 50% unit cost advantage. And no one had thought about challenging these standard ways that a lot of industries operate on. Isn't it something that a lot of low cost companies or airlines had been doing for a long time? That's the other challenge. Low cost at that point in 2007, firmly believed that long haul does not work. So they all only flew small planes flying short distances. Right. So Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe. And why was that? What was the thinking like? Why were they convinced that long haul would not work? Because there's not a lot of short haul demand in that graveyard shift after midnight, before 6am and so they tend to just maximize the flights from morning to night and then that's when they do all the maintenance. So they are also operating at about 13 hours a day. But long haul requires you to think differently. You can kind of have a different way of jigging around the asset movements to get that big breakthrough. The other thing is that the low cost airlines believed this one piece of analysis, which was they had measured the unit cost of every airline by every flight. So imagine an X axis, the flight time, 1, 2, 3, 4 hour flights, and the Y axis being the unit cost. And what the data then conclusively showed is that that cost differential between full service and low cost airlines kind of converged at about four hours. So there was this belief historically that beyond four hours there's no longer a cost advantage. But the analogy that I use is like you're drawing data conclusions by simply looking at the past patterns, right. Like driving a car by only looking at the rear view mirror. Okay, that's really awesome. And so what are the common threads between other this vertical? So pretty clear you explained very well the finding, right? So the very simple calculation of asset utilization trade off between what is convenient for the customer and what they are ready to actually pay for. And what like if we use other examples of companies you've run, how does this transfer in a way like to a total different growth? I think the common thread there is really understanding what that customer needs are so how does someone like Iflix, we started with five guys sitting around a coffee shop daring to take on a global giant like Netflix. And the key principle that kind of created that breakthrough was a couple of things. Number one, the standard Netflix model was I offer you a 30 day free trial and then I move you to a paid subscription, right? $10 a month. Now, even when we tried it at US$1 or US$2 a month, hardly anyone wanted to pay for television in emerging markets. So we were scratching our heads thinking, hmm, could it be payment channels? Right. Maybe our target customer segments may not have credit cards. Online banking. And we tried so many things, we even tried the number one payment channel back then for E commerce. Would you be able to guess, Pierre, In Southeast Asia 10 years ago, what was the number one payment channel for E commerce, which was growing at that point? I don't think it was PayPal in Southeast Asia. So I don't know. You know what it was? It was cash on delivery. Oh, okay. Cash on delivery, right. So because it was a very cash based economy then, right? So we even had the guy on the motorcycle go to your home to collect your one or two dollars and he would turn on the service to pay the guy more than $2 to go collect that $2. But we still did it because we wanted to learn was that the issue. Turns out they still didn't want to pay. Okay. The breakthrough came when we realized, huh, if your customers like using it, they just don't like the idea of paying for it. Who benefits when people used Iflix on the mobile phone in emerging markets? And the aha moment came when we thought about mobile telcos. Because 2015 was the year that they lost a lot of their revenues from voice and sms. And data was the only revenue stream that was growing and video was the biggest usage of data. So what if we went to telcos and said, I'll sell you wholesale Iflix subscriptions, give it to your customers for free, and I'll prove that they'll consume more data. And the value that you get from that data is more than the wholesale price you pay me. So like I give you a free car and sell you gasoline. And that allowed us to scale very rapidly to 20 million users across 20 countries on the back of these mobile telco partnerships. A completely different economic model model, because you start to realize our customers are not that Netflix customers with a PayPal account who is prepared to pay $10 a month. Yeah, that reminds me a lot. In our industry of elearning, right? So People don't typically love buying courses, but as part of a subscription, that gives them more value. Overall. That's a different story. That's a different story. Okay, so interesting. What else? Like your current company, what's the disruption when it comes to digital transformation? Big hospitals were very focused on the telehealth telemedicine model, which is simply about digitizing your existing experience. So instead of going to a physical hospital clinic, you can book a session and have a conversation or a consultation with your doctor, like we're talking to today. But have you realized that model still has three issues that no one was focused on? Number one, it was still reactive. You wait for someone to be sick and you expect that person to come and reach out to you. Now, if you ran a plant, you don't wait for your plant to break down, right? You've built predictive data models to anticipate when it may break down and you proactively do something about it. Why aren't we doing it for humans? Why aren't. Why are hospitals just waiting for people to be sick and expect them to come to you? So what if we could build data models to predict who might be sick in the future and help them when it's less costly and complex? Number two, as big as these hospitals are, they're very siloed by specialization, right? Every doctor looks at only one part of you. The cardiologist, your heart, the oncologist, your cancer cells, the dietitian, what you eat. And no one was looking at how mental and physical health are intricately linked, right? Depression and diabetes, heart disease and anxiety. So what if we could use a digital model that integrated mental and physical health together? And third, we come back to payments. Have you ever noticed your doctor still gets paid whether or not you actually improve your health? Why do we accept this? Right. And that breakthrough idea came from the airline industry. Because in the airline industry, one thing that keeps me up at night as a CEO is when my engine breaks down. Because if that engine breaks down, it's a big cost with spare parts, maintenance fees, and the opportunity cost loss with the plane being out of service, the maintenance and repair company is very happy because he gets to charge you lots of fees. So you can see the incentives are not aligned. Right? So the way. Well, that's a big problem of the healthcare industry, especially in the US where as a patient, you feel like you get a great lifetime value if they can keep you alive as long as possible. But sick. Yes, exactly. Right? So what airlines did was we say, let me into long term, 8, 10 year contract. I pay you a fixed fee for every hour my engine flies. You got to take care of my engine within that budget. It allows me to forecast my costs more predictably and it incentivizes you to take good care of my engine. So what if we could do that with healthcare? And that's how I start. I just start with these three problem statements looking at how things should be done differently, getting ideas from different industries and then build. That's awesome. And how does it work just for audience to understand your solution to this problem. So in the early stages we had to discover who's going to pay for this. Pharma companies were interested, but they really were only doing it because they wanted to check the box. I've got a digital project, but they still wanted to sell you the pill. Hospitals started to be interested because they said, huh, this changes the level of care. We can continuously engage with the patients after they come see us. But the problem is the hospital CEO may like the idea, but doctors are not employees. And they're very territorial and possessive about who talks to their patients. So they didn't want to cooperate. We tried retail, where people be prepared to pay for a preventive health app that takes care of them in that predictive manner, combining mental and physical health together. But like Iflix, they didn't want to pay out of pocket. They'd rather spend that $10 on the Starbucks caramel macchiato. The big breakthrough or the product market fit came when we started working with large enterprise employers, oil and gas telcos, banks, because they both had the real urgent need. Their employees were getting sick, the rate of medical cost was escalating and they had the means to pay. So we had one big breakthrough with a big oil and gas company and that's how it took off. That's awesome. And do you get results? Do you actually see, can you demonstrate reduced healthcare costs? Yeah. So what we do is we demonstrate improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol. But the good thing now is that insurance companies have these actuarial tables to quantify what's my expectation, future medical claims, cost reduction, if I get, let's say a 20% reduction in your blood pressure today so they can at least kind of quantify the factor this in, in the, in the pricing of their plans. You mean? That's right, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so if we, if you look back now and you're still a young man, but you have a lot of experience, no more hair left. What have been the, the Key ingredients of success. I mean, we understand that you're very smart, you find a great idea, a disruption on paper, all that works. But you have to make it work in practice, right? So what are the recipes of success or the ingredients to success and the recipes to failure? You know what I tell my team is when you don't have the balance sheet, the brand, the distribution channels, the one advantage we have is the ability to move faster and learn quicker than the bigger guys. The day that we only move as fast as them is the day they're going to overtake us and crush us. So speed becomes the only real advantage. Can whatever they do, for example, over a 12 month budget planning cycle, we got to do that in a week or two and just keep learning and iterating. So more than anything else is just the ability to try a lot more different things. Which ones work, which ones don't, how do we pivot and adjust faster than larger organizations or competitors? And how do you get your teams to. I mean I'm sure they all in theory love this idea of going faster, but how do you make them love it in real life when it's way more pressure? What's in it for them? How do you do that? And by the way, all these companies you set up, right, so you had. Yes, it's not that you had to take a legacy organization and move it from a 12 month cycle to a one week cycle, but still. Yeah, how do you do it? You are right. I think if I had to do that, the challenge would be bigger. My big advantage is I get to pick my team. Now, a few things. Number one, we are much bigger believers in the importance of that weekly sprint as opposed to the annual plan. You can have an annual plan, but we're not fixated on it. But I really want a very rigorous about Fridays at 4 o'. Clock. How do we take that time? Look back at this past week, what's working? What do we want to keep doing? Where are the complaints and frustrations? But the most important thing in that process, the one question that I ask my team members, what have you learned this week from outside feedback from a customer? New technology that you've read about, new regulatory changes, so that they're constantly thinking about what's happening outside, on the periphery that could have impact and what we need to do differently next week? A lot of organizations, you realize they're so focused on executing, they tend to look inwards, they don't spend enough time. Maybe only once a year when they go for that off site Retreat, do they start to learn what's going on around them? So we try to do that on a weekly sprint cadence. So I think that's number one. Pierre. The other big part for me to really emphasize this is the language that we use when we talk to each other. And the two things that I want to really focus on is what I call the victim mindset versus the victor mindset, the knower mindset versus the learner mindset. Right. So the victim mindset is, oh, we're not going to be able to do that. The government regulations don't permit us. The victor mindset says, what would it take to get those regulations changed? Or the Noah mindset. I've been in this industry for 30 years. This is how we're going to do it. Very directive, prescriptive versus the learner who says, look, for my 30 years of experience, here's one way of doing it. Are there any other ways? Opening up the solution space? But here's the thing. It's not that we're one or the other. Even for me, I wrote a book, I talk about this, and yet still today, I'm unconsciously using victim phrases and Noah phrases. So the system I need is for my team members to call me out on the spot. So feedback only works when it's live. Right. So I need a system on one word that they can say, hey, Azran. Victim Hey, Azran. Nowhere. And it jolts me and allows me to reframe and rephrase. And as we start to call each other out on these two things, it really just changes that perspective, that curiosity levels go up, the willingness to keep trying and persevering goes up. How many employees did you have at your peak of employee size? Right. So I guess probably your airline company was. Yeah, yeah. How many people when I left? 2,500. Right. And you were able to instill these principles still at that time, or is there a size where it becomes almost impossible? So actually, a bigger challenge was iflix at 700 compared to the airline, because with iflix, 700 people spread across 20 different countries. I had a team in Cape Town and a team in Melbourne and everywhere in between. So I got just like you, right? Time zone challenges. So here's the big thing we did the last Friday of the month, that 4 o' clock session became a global virtual town hall. And I wanted to give everybody complete psychological safety. Write anything you want anonymously, any issue, complaint, frustration. My job as your leader is to acknowledge and, and raise or address every single one of Them. Now, when you do this, you have to realize that 80% of the time you're going to get hot air. But rather than suppress that, I just allow it to come up, acknowledge it, you know, even things like people accusing each other of having affairs, et cetera. But you'll then uncover 20% of real issues. I'll give you one real life problem. You know, one of our flight attendants was terrified and frustrated that every time the plane arrived at the KL airport, you know how a passenger will need a wheelchair assistance to disembark. It's quite common. One of every three flights, someone needs a wheelchair. It depends a little bit, Right. In some countries, it's more frequent. I've seen, for instance, in India, you see like a whole army of wheelchairs. Oh, yes. Even more frequently. Yeah. Now, the job of that wheelchair is a different team, Right. The ground operations team. And when the ground operations team is late, that flight attendant number one has to deal with the complaint from the passenger number two cannot leave the plane. Right. So you're being blamed by the customer for something you didn't do, and your team member let you down. So that's very frustrating. Right? Yeah. So first of all, these are the real issues that as CEOs, we don't normally catch that's happening on the floor of our teams. So by creating this system where these things percolate upwards, we acknowledge it. Now, imagine if you're the head of ground operations and I've just read out this complaint in front of everyone, you get defensive, right. And his reaction, rightly so, said, hey, look, you know, if you want me to solve this problem, I'm going to need a bigger budget because I need more manpower and more wheelchairs, because I cannot follow a set schedule because the flights, the they don't come exactly on time. So I got to make tactical adjustments, move people around the gate. On one hand, you realize, well, he's got a point. Two, right? But his solution is, if you want me to always be there, I need more manpower and more wheelchairs at every gate 24 7. Now, as a CEO, our jobs is to surface this issue, but not necessarily solve all these problems for our team members. But because I brought people from different teams together, the head of engineering stood up and said, hey, I never knew you two teams had this problem. Here's an idea. Every time the plane comes, whether it's on time, late or early, the one constant is the engineering van. Because the engineering van will always have the guy who's guiding the plane to come to the gate. What if you just kept one backup foldable wheelchair in the engineering van so that if ever the ground operations team is late, flight attendant, go down to the van, get the backup wheelchair, sort your customer first, let the ground operations team catch up. We never think about solutions and resources outside of our own team, our own P and L, our own department. And so that's the power for me of bringing people from different teams across different time zones to tackle problems like this. And it turns out to be interesting solutions. That's awesome. So let's move to what you're actually describing. Enterprise agility, right? Yes. So at pmi, we define it as the ability to adapt at scale without losing coherence, right? Yes. So, because on one side you're saying, oh, I prefer weekly sprints to yearly budgets and plans. And by the way, you love looking at what's going on outside, which creates also anxiety. Right. So people may be distracted, suddenly behave like victims. Because you see all the time all these companies that push out press releases with incredible innovation, and it's very stressful. You feel like every single morning you're attacked by a lot of things. So how do you manage this ambiguity? On one side, you want people to think weekly look at outside, but you also want them to follow a direction that is coherent and not get distracted every single day, because otherwise you're not doing anyway. This is the real issue. So here's how we tackle it. So on one hand, you want to encourage people to bring up all these problems, but very quickly you realize, Pierre, if I try to tackle every problem, we're going to be unfocused, chasing too many rabbits, and we're going to be stretched too thin. So prioritization becomes critical. So our rule was that every month the whole organization will only be working on 30 things at any one time. So if you come up with a problem or an idea, you've also got to argue why yours is better than one of the existing 30. And if it is, and we agree, let's say you take number 30, you put it aside and yours takes that spot. What? In real practice though, 25, 26 out of 30 don't change. These are your big core projects. It'll take 12, 18 months to execute. But when a team members see the three or four who change every month, they start to get the idea, ah, you know what? Maybe I haven't fought through this idea fully. I need to come back next month. I'm going to try to get. Get another shot to see whether I can get on the list. So that allows everybody to understand, not just the fact that we have to prioritize, but but we also have to learn what's the basis of that prioritization decision. Do you have people who manage this in your organizations, like an EPMO team or a portfolio management team? Like, how does it work? Kate, she's the guardian of the Google spreadsheet. Oh, you do this on the Google spreadsheet. Okay, well, yeah, so we, well, we had back then, right? So we had Facebook Live so people can dial in or they can watch the recording. So I'm a big believer in Google Sheets and Google Docs because everybody can see it, so we don't try to filter, so you can kind of see what everyone's written. So sometimes I don't have time in that one hour to address everything, but I can kind of just leave my comments there. Likewise, how we make decisions, how we hire people, how we resolve conflicts, how we run meetings. I capture it in what I call the Google Docs document so that it's live, which means on one hand, I want everybody to follow this guide. But if you think, hey, this doesn't work in Pakistan, we've got these unique situations. Make a comment, suggest an edit, and you can see the document being edited live so that everyone has a single source of truth for how we do things. And yet having also realizing it's not cast in stone, you are co owners of that document. Do you like plans or do you hate plans? I'm not a big fan. I realize it's important for when you've got 1,000 people. You need everybody to understand. These are the 30 things we're doing this week. The reason why we chose these 30. These are our four big priorities and goals, not just for the year, but for the next 10 to 20 years. That's how we make our decisions. But the dynamism of the plan is important. I don't want people to continue working on things when it's no longer relevant. So killing projects to me is more important than initiating new projects. Right. And so what is the role of the CEO in all of that, in managing this enterprise? Agility from a system standpoint, like, how do you see the role of the CEO? The first part is finding the right team members who bring that curiosity, the different perspectives, but yet are kind of aligned on the kind of the same core goals and missions. Two, encouraging being, in a way the cheerleader that talks about the language. So I'm the big champion of the language that we use in meetings, these rituals that we do. So I don't focus on what decisions, which of those 30 things I allow my team members to debate and decide maybe once a month there'll be one issue that people need. So my decision as the tiebreaker, but I try to avoid getting too focused on what these projects are, but to keep reminding people about, why are we doing this? Hey, what are we missing? What are we not learning from outside? So kind of dragging the perspective beyond what they're just normally doing day to day in the work. And of course, ultimately dealing with your board members and shareholders and your external stakeholders. I was going to go there. What is the, you think the mandate of a CEO, increasingly in these days of disruption and change and uncertainty, especially because of AI? We'll cover AI in a second. But what is the evolution of the role of the CEO? Well, I've experienced certainly in the last couple of years, I end up spending a lot more time with board members and investors and our key clients because in a way, they rely a lot on your confidence, your direction, your assertion. Because the moment they see hesitation, they then start to panic and they'll pile on and you're going to drown. Right. And so you need to be able to kind of manage these stakeholders, despite the fact that things are moving fast. It looks very uncertain, but they just want you to know, or they just want to know that you're dealing with it. So that FaceTime I find very critical. And do you think the employees are in the end, the same? They don't want you to be too directive, but they also don't want the CEO to be hesitating. Right. It stresses them a lot. Exactly. So for me, my job is not so much what particular AI tool, but my big challenge is, guys, are we falling into the trap of just using AI to do things better, or are we. Where are. Where can we do better things? Right. How do we completely reinvent this process? Why are we just looking for that 10% improvement versus where can we get that 10x improvement? So these kind of, these challenging points kind of forces them to think beyond just how do I become incrementally more efficient? Do you consider yourself as helping people make decision on AI, or you feel your role as a CEO is to drive the direction that your company is going to take in the AI space or leveraging AI or whatever it is, right, that AI is relevant to? I think not so much direction, because honestly, I don't know where AI is going to be this December, you know, let alone three years from now. But I think the role as A CEO is the boldness of it the single biggest challenge? I find people get so excited about using AI and all I see is just incremental process improvement. Right. If you know, sure, it makes our process more efficient, but our competitors can easily do that, so we no longer have any advantage. Where's the source of that advantage? What are we doing that no one else is thinking about doing? And I think that's a key role, is pushing the teams to focus their time and energy on doing better things rather than just simply doing existing things better. And so how do you practically do that? Do you leverage the people managing projects? Do you have people managing projects in your organization? Or do you consider that everyone is managing a project? Like, how do you see that? Yeah. So I have kind of four business unit CEOs. They for me, are the real project leaders, so to speak. They've got their set of key projects, and we meet whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly. So I don't have a separate project team. But the P and L leaders are effectively the key project leaders because they are the ones who are allocating resources to which projects that they want to work on. And are you aware of specific methodologies that they use or to you, it's indifferent. This is like a problem of execution. And as a CEO, I don't want to be involved with that a little bit. I don't want to dictate it. But what I want to make sure is where's the cross fertilization? Because what I also don't want is everybody doing it their own. One team likes to use Claude, another one prefers Gemini. It's going to be a mess. And so at some point, our jobs are to harmonize the approach, but making sure that I don't want to dictate it, but I challenge them so that we're kind of rowing in the same direction. I want to go back for a second to the kind of leaders that companies will need in the future. What do you think about that? So what we talk about is that curiosity, the connectedness, both your ability to bring people together, your ability to connect your customers, and courage. I think more than anything, we have to now make decisions under extreme uncertainty with very limited resources. And there's this real to me, that character differentiation is the ability to act in that phase, that courage to take that first step into the unknown is what separates a great leader from the rest of the pack. Is it something that can be learned? And if yes, how would you learn that over time? Yeah. So what we try to do so the way we try to, in a way institutionalize. How do we encourage people to be bolder and braver? We call it our think framework. So we break it down into five parts. T taking control, meaning what are things that are within your control versus things that are out of your control and you don't want to waste too much time on those. Right. Eight is hopeful outlook. So where's the glass half full. Right. Rather than people tend to focus just on the problems rather than the opportunity. Are you making an informed action to respond intentionally rather than react impulsively? So oftentimes in the face of extreme uncertainty, people react out of anger or fear. But how do you get them to take a more informed action? N is nurturing our energy. Right? Because you've got to know, how do you recharge yourself and your team? Because it's a big, bold challenge ahead. And finally, K knowing your goals, why are you doing this to begin with? Are you clear? Is your whole, all your team members clear? Why is it that we're doing things so you don't just fall in love with the tool or methodology, but at the end of the day, why are we doing this? That helps us at least explain and help leaders grow to develop these five things, how they need to be more courageous leaders. Beyond the message, do you have programs in place to train your leaders to develop their abilities in each of these five letters? Yes. So there's a whole one day program. We run it in house with our own team members. There is now an E learning version so that every six months you get them going to do these video and E learning courses just to emphasize these principles. So there's that element. But nothing beats the fact that in the key team meetings, we're using the same language. Wonderful. Ezra, I got to ask you a question about sustainability. And I know you, you operate. I mean, when you were in the airline industry, obviously was probably very important to you, but in your current businesses, how do you think about the long term sustainability of the businesses you create? I think right now the single biggest thing that's really overwhelming all of us is the cost of compute. Right. The sheer amount of energy and water, the impact that data centers have on the ecosystem here. Because you realize right now we're not really paying for that true cost of compute in a way. Claude Gemini they're kind of subsidizing this, right? So at some point it's going to bite us all. And so what do you do to prepare for that in your companies? Are you already trying to control the volume of compute, what is your conscious beyond being worried. Right. So yeah, so I think one of the principles that we like is the kind of Apple's approach to this, which is rather than really using large language models for everything, how do you localize it? So it's almost like small language models. Right. So you're solving more specific problems rather than getting a big clot to do everything. That's also when we do a pmi, right. Especially with our platform, PMI Infinity. We try to do that both for long term good of the planet for sure, but also because we feel that this will be the only sustainable way of operating once. Absolutely, yeah. Once the whole subsidy space will phase out, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Exactly. Super. Okay, that's interesting. Can we talk about risks? What does the word risk evoked to you? And I'd like our audience of project professionals to understand that because of course risk is a, in the project management world is seen as a both risk and opportunity. It's just a way to get prepared. It's not necessarily negative, it's usually positive. But for many CEOs, it's a little bit what you were saying before with the victim or victor attitude. So when you hear the word risk, does it trigger like a reaction of caution on your side or do you feel very comfortable talking about risks? Number one, very comfortable. But it's a harsh and sobering reminder. We look at risk very similar to how a startup investor looks at risk. So think about how a traditional big company, right, if you want to do something new, whether it's a new product innovation, new market entry strategy, you spent so much time on this one business plan, 10 year cash flow forecast, you go through multiple rounds of approval and once it's approved, boom. You run with a startup investor, they go through 2,000 to 3,000 business plans a year and they'll probably deploy capital to 3:30. But so number one, you realize that top end of the funnel is much, much bigger. Rarely do companies consider 3,000 ideas for every 30 that they actually execute. And so I think top end of the funnel is important because otherwise we tend to just focus on things that we're familiar. We're not willing to try things that seem extreme, but maybe really game changing. The other thing about startup investors is even if I really like you, I'm not going to give you all the capital you need. I'm going to give you enough just to get to that next hurdle rate. If you get through that, then I'm going to double down and double down. So they're Also very good at killing the ones that don't show promise, don't show enough traction, kill, redeploy capital. So they're much more active capital allocators than traditional companies are. And third, to me, here's the biggest risk. We tend to fall in love with our projects so much. To me the biggest factor is who's actually executing these projects. That people factor, right. Because you just can't predict whether this is the right project. But I know if I've got the right guy or girl, they can make the right decision, course correct accordingly change along the way. And so picking the right people for the projects becomes super critical. And that's our most important role as leaders. And if I was to run a project for you, how would you select me? Wow. Number one, I realized this. I'm very bad at interviewing because we've got all these biases. So I don't try to spend an hour with you. I do it. But I want to make sure not only do other people see you, but I generally take a chance on someone at the point when we feel this is the right fit. But we're much more aggressive at the 90 day period. Because after 90 days I now know with 95% certainty you are the right fit for us. And if you're not, Pierre, it was good, but I think you, you've got better opportunities elsewhere, right? I think we don't spend enough time at that point. We're so focused on trying to make the right hiring decision. But what if we realize we're not very accurate there, but we're a lot more accurate in the 90 day period and that's the most critical point. But I'm sure you don't want to waste someone, right? Because they might leave a job go to you. So how do you help them during these 90 days to make them as successful as possible? Yeah. Okay. So that's where that whole, you know what this is? We're big believers in writing things down. How do we communicate? What do we do in these weekly sprints? Performance management, conflict management, we write it down even. I also have a guide to Azran. I can even send it to you. Pierre. This is how you deal with Azran. This is my hot buttons. This is how I like to communicate. Because if not, it's going to take you too long to understand how to work with me. But if I can give you a user manual for Azran, it's going to help you figure out, ah, this is how best I work with them. Okay, that's awesome. It Would be interesting to see if you're close team, actually agree with your guide. Absolutely. Yes. I got one last question for you. Yes. Before we conclude and wrap up. So you've disrupted many businesses. Has it ever happened that someone disrupts your own business? Oh, absolutely, for sure. And how did you react? What lessons did you learn? How did you deal with this? Like when you are the disruptor being disrupted? I'll give you one real life example. You might not know this, but Iflix was the first to introduce Download and watch offline in 2015. The Netflix CEO said, that doesn't make sense. Internet access is going to be ubiquitous. It's all about streaming. But in Southeast Asia, as you can imagine, people don't have unlimited bandwidth. They've been on airplanes, you know, and all of that. Now it's getting a little better. But for years. Exactly. Right now, download is hard because A, you got to convince Hollywood studios to allow you to do that, and they were terrified. They saw what happened to music and B, the compression algorithms. That was a hard technical challenge. And we were able to do that. And that allowed us to grow very, very rapidly. The then Chief Content Officer, who's now the CEO of Netflix, stormed into the Hollywood studios and demanded, how on earth did you guys allow these Southeast Asian punks to do this? We wanted to. And within seven months, they deployed 800 engineers and they too launched Download and Watch Offline, and probably much better than we did. Which means whatever new breakthrough innovations we have, it's not going to last long. Right. So you cannot rest on your laurels. You got to think, what's next? What's next? And what's next? Because otherwise the bigger guys, they'll have the big balance sheets. They're fast followers. Yeah. Okay, Azran, thank you so much. I'm going to ask you to do something for me. If you had to distill your old leadership philosophy, everything you've learned into one principle that leaders should live by when they lead change, when they lead through transformation. So what would that be for without using ChatGPT? So, remember I talked about how I look for curiosity, connection and courage in my leaders. To me, I would distill it as we need to have the flexibility of rubber and the fortitude of steel. That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Azran. Thanks, Pierre. It's great having a chat with you.