Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Tanuj, thank you for doing this. Let's get started with maybe an overview, just for a couple minutes about Standard Charter for people that don't know the bank and what you guys do and what's the market that you work in.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Yeah, super. Thank you, Josh. First, great having the conversation. So Standard Chartered is a British headquartered emerging Markets Bank. So 160-year-old institution that is in some of the most exciting, fastest growing emerging markets in the world.
And really at the heart of it, it's about providing cross border business trade opportunities for our corporate and institutional banking clients, but also serving on the consumer side, the wealth management and affluent segment. And again, we serve our affluent clients as part of our wealth management proposition. Not just within country, but also serve their cross border needs. It's a full suite bank, 50 plus market, like I said, three broad divisions. We've got the corporate investment bank where we serve almost 20,000 biggest global corporates. We've got our wealth and retail banking business where we serve 13 to 14 million individual and SME sort of businesses. And then we've got a ventures business. So you know, it's the third of our business segment where we create alternate business models. So we invest in ventures but also in partnership with emerging financial services providers, come up with exciting banking propositions. So we launched the first digital bank in Hong Kong. We launched, we've got a very successful bank, a digital bank in Singapore, et cetera, et cetera. So those are the three sort of broad.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: So you're in a sort of a unique market with competing with HSBC or DBS or Citibank in this global, highly country by country specific banking industry with wealth management and business oriented banking and then securities and trading as well. Is that a good way to think about it?
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: And you've spoken about, when we talk about strategy and skills, you've spoken about our traditional competitors. But as we are thinking about our competitor landscape now, we are also thinking a lot about the new competitors, you know, your fintechs, your private credit institutions, et cetera. So.
But you're absolutely right in the way you talk about the bank.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Okay, so in your role as Chro and chief strategy and talent officer or tell everybody about what you do because you have a very interesting perspective on the whole business.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so look, I'm the chief strategy talent officer of the bank and talent for me it's quite interesting. I was speaking to somebody yesterday and they said you're the chief strategy and chief people officer. Yes, I oversee the people agenda. And you know, that's A big part of my background. But when we speak about talent in the context of my title, we think about capabilities which help us accelerate the delivery of our strategy. So if you look at my portfolio, I look after corporate strategy, but then I look after brand marketing, corporate affairs, all of our supply chain management. So look at all of our supply relationships, our real estate and our people agenda. And we think of all of these as the critical capabilities that are needed to accelerate the delivery of our strategy.
In addition to that, I oversee the transformation agenda in the bank which is a big part of the portfolio. So both in terms of how do we continue the transformation of the bank to deliver on the exponential growth opportunity that our markets present, but also how do we really drive sustainability in transformation. Transformation is such an abused word. Every few years you're transforming. But how do we make transformation a real core part of our DNA? So that's sort of my portfolio.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: So a really to me important part of your particular situation is because you are in charge of or you lead or you're very involved in the strategy.
You're not trying to do skills and capabilities in an island, you're trying to do it as part of a strategy. One of the things we talked about when I was with you a couple months ago was trying to put the bank strategy on one piece of paper.
Can you describe that a little bit to me or to the group? What you were referring to there, Josh?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: One of the big things we have done is the bank strategy has broadly been the same and you spoke about it so well. We are a cross border bank.
We exist as we have existed to finance trade, international trade, international commerce which results in driving commerce and prosperity. That's the way the business has existed for 160 years and it'll exist for another 160. I think we've done a huge amount of work which basically has been about how do we sharpen the strategy. And, and actually when you are a hundred thousand colleague enterprise in 53 plus markets, there is a strategy and then there are strategies, right? I mean I get not very happy when I travel to markets and they say this is the property strategy or they say this is our HR strategy. And they say and I keep saying there is one strategy of the bank, that's the bank strategy.
You have an agenda or a set of priorities that help deliver on the bank strategy. So we've done a huge amount of work a how do you really get very crisp? And that's why I think having the head of communications sitting alongside the head of strategy alongside the head of brand and marketing is really powerful, really very crisp about what are the two pillars of our strategy? We are a cross border corporate and institutional bank and we are an international wealth manager for our affluent clients. We have, we do both these businesses underpinned by a very strong sustainability agenda. So while it sounds very easy to get to a place where you get that level of crispness and sharpness in a page, but then disseminated in a structured way in all of the choices you are making is a really important part of the work to drive a level of organizational alignment. I give you a very simple example.
I spent quite a bit of time earlier this week by our real estate teams. We've got branches in 50 markets.
Typically those conversations would be, this is the cost of our branches, Tanuj, we are exiting X number of branches, we'll save this much cost.
That entire conversation was if our strategy is a cross border corporate and institutional bank and a wealth manager for our affluent clients, what does it mean for our branches? And that led to a very different conversation. What is the kind of experience we are giving to our customers when we talk about an international wealth manager for affluent clients? What is the cross border? How is the cross border nature coming through our head? So yes, we did talk about how many fewer branches we need and how much money we are going to save, but actually it became a conversation around how do we deliver on our strategy through our real estate footprint in a way that feels that there is a consistency in the way our employees experience the brand and the way our customers experience the brand. So I think that to me is we've taken the same approach on our transformation agenda. You know, it's become such a very clear that when you are a bank serving so many customers, regulators, the leadership and the decision making becomes quite fragile, quite distant from processes. So we talk a lot about getting bank on a page. How do we map our processes, our critical processes in a page and actually then think about how many FTE are there in the critical processes. But as we think about transforming that process, we think about is it a build, buy, borrow, bot choice? So skills come in at a work redesign level, Josh. And I mean again, you've been talking about this for much, much longer than I started speaking about it. But the problem is if you think that the skills agenda is just about doing training at scale, don't get me wrong, skill building is a huge part of this. It's not. It's about work redesign and the piece of work we have done on a bank on a page which is mapping our biggest global processes, getting global process owners into a room and then saying as you redesign the process end to end, you in line with our strategy, delivering on our customer. What are the choices you make from a skills perspective? Are you building skills? Are you buying skills? Are you borrowing skills? Is it a strategic partnership play or are you bought in the skills and to get them the skills? Conversation at a work redesign level is where I believe there is a real opportunity in terms of businesses who are transforming. But also when you get all the levers sit around the same table, well.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: What you feel very comfortable talking about is very new to many, many companies I'll tell you since the beginning of the year. And by the way, your book the Skills Powered Organization is a fantastic book. I read it, I have it dog eared all over the book. There's a hundred things in there I want to talk about. But let me just give you some perspective on what I think is going on in many other companies. There is a fairly uniform discussion going on in virtually every company I've talked to that maybe we have too many people, maybe we're not as productive as we should.
We need more AI. We need to simplify the work processes, maybe we need to do some layoffs, our job architecture is out of control. We probably need more internal mobility. Where do I start? And I have heard this 20 times and how do I redesign jobs? Do I start at the top and work down? Do I start at the bottom and work up? Tell us about you've done this now probably longer than most of these companies have even thought about it. How do you go about using this sort of strategy lens to redesign the work and then you can talk about the skill. Stu but what have you learned about the process of doing this? Because I'm telling you, it's kind of a black art to most companies right now, especially with all these AI tools hitting the market.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Josh look, we've been at this journey for a few years and we will continue to be in this journey for many new years few years because as I said to our board when I first spoke about pivoting to skills to our board, AI was if you are lucky, Alexa in your house and Genai was not a thing. So as we are talking about this and I said to somebody last week if I have to write the book again, perhaps I would start with Jenny I, not end with Jenny I but that was, you know, the book was written two years ago, it came out last year, but was, you know, we finished writing it almost two years ago now. So to me, I always say our journey to pivot to skills started with our deep understanding of our jobs. Right. You cannot. And again, you've been a proponent of this forever and ever. HR colleagues cannot speak about this agenda in a language with business does not understand. So for us, it really started with saying this is strategically where we want to go. Right. Over the next five years, our markets are seeing tremendous growth. There are two big trends we are backing on. Globalization. A lot of people say, is globalization dead? I say globalization is not dead. It's being reset. Trade corridors, trade flows are changing. There are new hubs that are emerging for international trade and commerce. That's one big trend. And we are a very unique bank that we have had deep presence in those new hubs for many years. So, you know, we are in a unique position. The other big trend we are banking on is that the percentage of wealthy in Asia will outstrip the rest of the world very, very soon. Right. You know, I think the next couple of years. And those are the big two big trends. If that's the strategy, where are we going to have to invest more capability in and less and what it meant by jobs. So we took a piece of work six years ago now to our board where we said the jobs jobs, not skill. We overdid. It was like which we are going to need significantly lesser off. And we call them sunset jobs and new jobs that are going to come up, we call them sunrise job. Everyone understood that it was a hugely analytical piece of work. It was done jointly with business CEOs and their CEOs coordinated by the strategy and the HR team. But actually it was a joint piece of work. We then put dollar numbers to it because, you know, and I talk about, I talk a lot about progress over perfection. Right. Was those number, Was that number 100% accurate? Don't know, kind of don't care. But once you start putting a dollar impact on what would this changing size and shape of the firm mean over the next three years, five years, eight years, it starts becoming a very compelling number. We then overlaid the sunset jobs and sunrise jobs with skills. So we basically said, if these jobs are going to go away, in these jobs, let's kind of try and do a bit of a golden thread over what are the skills that we are going to need much more of.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: And again, start the jobs and then jobs needed for the business strategy and then you get into the skills.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Right, Agree. I think that was quite important. And to us, I mean, a lot.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Of companies have been doing this backwards for the last few years.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: And so to us what happened was we then overlaid it with skills and we were able to then have the next order organization which basically said these are the skills. But then we had a real moment in our company where we said we don't have an inventory on the basis of skills. And Josh, it's a really powerful insight. You go to CEOs and say, how much coding skill do you think exists in our business? And I'm sure I said this to you. And most CEOs will say, I think we've got 10,000 engineers, 15,000, 25, 50,000. That is assuming that anyone who does not have an engineering title does not have coding skills in the company.
So when we started doing this, what is the commercial case in our company on building versus buying people and the skills over the period of our strategy and put a dollar number to it, we were then able to have the second order conversation which said how do we really get a sense of the depth of skills that we have in some of these sunrise areas in these sunset jobs? And that led to us being very clear on these are the systemic skill building we want to do for everyone.
These are the more role specific skill building we want to do for specific areas.
We then did five very clear proof of concepts. We said we will take people from sunset jobs and reskill and redeploy them to sunrise job only 5, which range from a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousands. Not boiling the ocean, but proving the case that if you get a basic level of skills adjacencies, you can reskill and redeploy. And once we reskilled and redeploy, we tracked performance for the next six months a year to see how do these individual. So to be honest, we kind of did a lot of systemic skill building and targeted building, but did it in a very clear commercial context of our business. And I'll tell you where we've got to today we are getting into our corporate planning process. Now every business does at the same time where when my heads of HR for their businesses sit as part of the corporate plan, they start with skills. They will say if you look at it, this is the amount of green skills we have in our business. Sustainable finance in our market is one of our fastest growing areas and we've got a couple of choices we need to make. But trying to do it in a language which business understands and it really links to the strategic imperatives that they are trying to drive is absolutely critical.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Let me ask you a Question that's been bothering me for the last couple of months. So we have the job titles, job architecture, job roles, and then we have the skills. So several years ago, you went through the strategy discussion of the bank and decided we needed to create jobs or roles in these particular areas because of the growth of Asia, because of the wealth management business, because of the trading opportunities and so forth. And therefore, based on those job families or job titles, whatever they were called, we need these skills.
What happens to the job titles and the job architecture as the company evolves? Because mostly what I find in companies is I've got 100,000 employees and 55,000 job titles. I mean, there's just this mess that companies have in the jobs to make sense of them because then, because if you want to apply AI, you don't really know what everybody's doing because the jobs aren't clearly defined.
Where have you guys landed with a more flexible job architecture, a simplified one, or some other model here?
[00:17:01] Speaker B: So it's a great question, Josh. And one of the things I will say up front is most companies, including ours, that run on one of the two biggest HR IS systems in the world still predominantly run on a job architecture that is quite traditional. That's a fact. Right, right. We did a huge amount of cleanup. I mean, a lot of this work coincided with our own HR transformation where we were replacing tech.
You know, we were building out much greater or design discipline in the firm in terms of, you know, reporting lines, spans, layers, cleanup of position management. So a lot of this work was also done by us focusing on cleaning our plumbing and hardwiring the cleaning of pump plumbing. And it's a great piece of work which geeks like you and me will enjoy. But we realized we were doing a huge amount of work and clearing job titles, position management. But the systems, the HR and finance systems were not speaking in a way that we were being able to hard code this as part of our budgeting process. And we did a huge amount of work to hardwire the cleanup that we have done in our system. So that's sort of done. But to be honest, the point that I reached in trying to avoid that, replacing one set of competency frameworks with skill frameworks and then spending another 10 years trying to do that is a realization, and it's a chapter in the book where I said, look, the kind of business we are, there will be three types of jobs. They will be full fixed jobs. Right. You know, we've got a teller in our branches, we've got a trader in Our dealing rooms. Right. We've got people in regulatory compliance, etc. These are fully fixed jobs and we are going to upskill them on the systemic skill so that they can leverage A.I. well, et cetera. We will create a platform for them which is our gig working platform internally. But we will accept the fact that they are skills which are largely regulatory driven. Who are fixed jobs. There are some jobs which are fully flow jobs. Right. So your technology is classic one. We are doing a huge amount of skills work in our shared service centers which are basic operations jobs, are fully fixed jobs. Yes, you are trade operations, finance operations, cash operations. But if you look at the skills, 90% of them are the same. Right. And the platform they're using. So we've got full flex and then you've got jobs in between where you still have quite a few jobs in hr, for example, where there is a fundamental, quite a bit of it is fixed in nature, but there is a huge flex element. And the conclusion we reached is as opposed to trying to boil the ocean, there is going to be some common platform that we will build which helps us tap into the skills of everyone. So we do skills passport. But actually where we are going to pivot to skills in a much more intentional and full blown way is going to be in the full flex job families. And I think that's the kind of happy medium that. And you know what, can we push the boundary more in the middle classic category which is not regulated, but there is still a level of. Yes, and that's the attempt. But I've got quite comfortable with the idea that when you work for a large global company which is intensely regulated in multi jurisdiction, you're going to have multiple types of workforces and you are having to manage multiple type of workforces at the same time. And there'll be some things which will be consistent and many things will not be consistent.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Well, this is a very interesting idea that there are some fixed jobs and some that are not fixed. It would seem to me, if I understand the way you define it, the fixed jobs are the ones that actually would be automated pretty significantly. Correct. So that's where you could apply AI maybe as fast as possible.
Or do you apply AI towards now that you know? Obviously when you wrote the book there was no AI. But now that you've got this concept, where does AI play in this?
[00:20:51] Speaker B: So look, AI plays across the three, frankly. But to me the point that you get to Josh is a very interesting one. Right. When AI and Genai came for the first time, people just Kind of assume that it's actually going to help make techies the job of techies easier. Right. I mean, you know, look at majority of the initial copilot now actually what's becoming very clear that the real opportunity to augment productivity, drive efficiency but actually drive innovation, the use of gen AI to solve more complex problems. That opportunity is a lot in fixed and semi fixed jobs as well. Right. In functional areas and actually we are talking about it a lot. We are doing a huge amount of work that the human AI collaboration is going to be the next big transformational work pattern. And that's not just in your techie areas actually the big opportunities in finance and HR in, in our bank, in legal, in compliance and risk, you know, the highly paid job that we needed. So actually to be honest, a lot of the experimentation we are doing a deconstruction of jobs that we are doing is this human plus model where we start thinking about how do we get and that itself is a systemic skill building that needs to happen because using AI in the flow of work to augment capability is a very different skill set. And you know that requires quite a bit of work. But again, I mean one of the things I keep saying a lot is humans are not going to lose out to machines. Humans will use out lose out to other humans who use machines. And that's a very different mindset on transformation.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: So that's the concept of the superworker we've been trying to discuss. So you've got these fixed jobs and then these more flexible high value roles. What I hear from a lot of companies is we see dozens of opportunities, maybe hundreds of opportunities for AI in HR and in the business. We're not sure where to start and where to end.
Now you're a little further down the path probably than a lot of companies. How do you prioritize where you're going to apply AI and what is your role in driving that? Or is it bottoms up or is coming from the business? Or is it coming from it is there. I don't know what a chief AI officer is, but I assume there are some out there.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: So Josh, it's very interesting and we are knee deep at this point in time of doing a piece of crystallizing a piece of work which is our AI strategy specifically focused on gen over the next five years. And look, we've been through a journey and we've spoken to a lot of people and I have spoken to a huge amount of people to get to a point which I believe works for us right Most companies started with thousand flowers bloom, right. So anyone could put an idea into the hopper.
You know, there was some seed funding available, there was very little consistent tracking of benefits and there was a bit of a question mark on scalability of the intervention. Right. So loads of artisanal great ideas. So there was a thousand flower bloom approach.
I very clearly reached the view that actually why you need to create a bit of a space for innovation. So I spoke about our global process owners. We always speak about you should be targeting a 5 to 10% process improvement every year and you've got to create a little bit of a space for people to be able to do that. But to be to roll out gen AI scale in a way that drives real commercial benefits both in support of growth and to drive efficiency. You got to have a much more centralized, coordinated approach and pick up a few experiments or a few ideas that you can drive at scale. So thousand flowers bloom versus really pick up a few areas. And I talk quite a bit about the Jenny I to say what should that framework be? And we've spent a lot of time crystallizing the framework is what area of AI will create the biggest opportunities for our clients. That's the first question.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Can you give some examples of what some of those are for you guys.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: As a company in wealth management for example? So you know, if you see the ease that our affluent customers can get information, the more we can work with our frontline RMs in providing copilot giving them access to information, the conversations with the clients become far richer. You can penetrate much deeper set of clients and each of the RMS will manage 100 affluent files.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: So let's talk about that one as an example. So getting back to HR for a minute. So I'm the head of wealth management or I'm the operations leader of wealth management. I want to do a bunch of AI to make everything, you know, faster, better, cheaper, more interesting. Does is HR involved in that project or are you guys working on your own stuff?
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah, well Josh, you know when I talk about area strategy it's much more with my strategy hat on as compared to my people hat on. And to me it's the same criteria we are using in hr. So what we have said in HR is there were thousand loads of ideas that came in and we now do a central coordination of the idea. And the other thing I will say is I don't believe the ownership of the AI strategy should be with the technologists. In our case we have taken it as the joint lead by the head of strategy and our chief data officer. They are the two people and I am the accountable executive and the chief executive is the accountable executive for it ultimately. But that was a very important change as well.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: So let's suppose, I don't know how far along you are on this. The head of wealth management or the operations leader says I think we need to use AI here because we have this, this, this, this opportunity. What happens next? Is there like a SWAT team of people from IT and HR that fly in and say okay, let's work on a prototype.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: So the way we do it is the ideas come up. We've got an enablement forum which is sort of chaired by strategy and cdo. Very clear set of criteria on whether we said see this is something for us to go enterprise wide. You know, is it linked to our strategy? What do we believe is a scalability option? You know, is this a service that our clients really want? Is this something that they are sort of experimenting it? What would be the long term impact of doing this on talent data? Risk management capability. So again that's a risk, high level criteria. We choose this, I'm giving this example because we have chosen this example because it's really a no brainer. It helps our relationship managers penetrate much deeper into their client base. Much better quality advice translating into greater share of wallet, you know, increased aum, et cetera, et cetera. We do the clearinghouse and what we that the ownership of the initiative of course is with business. You know, ownership is with business.
But what we are doing from a skills perspective is a central AI squad that goes in to do that piece of work sitting alongside business.
But then the central AI squad comes back to ensure that we can sort of replicate the experience that we have and be able to do it at stage. So when I talk about a centralized model, to me centralized is not control, it's enablement coordination.
Being able to take the artisanal ideas and industrialize them and scale them and generate the proof points that's going to make a real difference to the organization.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: You know, I just have to say I love talking to you because you have such a big picture of the business strategy, of the bank, the operating strategy and then the people in HR and skills issues all in one whole picture. I think the last thing I'd like to hear from you is the people in HR that I talk to are fascinated with and intimidated by AI at the same time. They know there are massive opportunities for their companies, massive opportunities for their personal careers, for their roles and the same old HR Stuff we always did is still there too. Hiring, recruiting, paying people, talent management, leadership development, all that. What has been your experience and you've seen our sort of models of systemic HR and full stack HR and all that. What would you say to an HR professional listening to this podcast that you think they should do to maintain their level of relevance and importance as this all evolves and add more value in their career based on what's happening at Standard Charter?
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Just three years ago, I took my HR leadership team off site to the offices of one of your previous employers and I put them into two groups and I wrote out, I gave a set of case studies. One group solved that case using ChatGPT, one of the earlier versions of ChatGPT. The other one did it the manual way and we compared the outcomes and it was a really important moment. We had a lot of fun, huge laughs. But there were a few preconceived notions we had going in and I asked everyone to write it. So one of them was AI or Genai cannot be empathetic. Right? You know, they cannot be empathetic as humans can be.
And the one of the case studies where the Genai solution was significantly better than the human one was writing a redundancy letter. So managing a redundancy conversation, the machine did it significantly better.
I've got a very, very capable HR organization. They did it.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Why?
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Because the machine was able to hyper personalize the experience and the human team that was designing it, was designing it. So to me, we had that conversation three, three and a half years ago and that was a real moment of me spending time with my leadership team and taking them on the journey of. We are approaching this debate with a set of preconceived notions which we have not tested, but we have been led to believe that's true. And that led to some fascinating experiments that we did within HR which we've been able to turn up. So for example, at the end of the performance cycle last year, all of our performance management is Genai enabled. So you know, Josh, you write your appraisal to me, your commentary to me. You have an option to make it more action oriented, to make it less passive aggressive, to link it to the learning programs that exist. And why was it important? Because I wanted to do a Genai experiment for all of our colleagues globally in the flow of work. But I also wanted to get our HR organization the confidence that by doing this we were able to show the number of people who put a performance management commentary in the system increased by very high double Digit percentage. Because a lot of people are nervous, especially when English is not your first language. People are nervous putting things on the system. Right. So the conversation with the team was we now have so much more written commentary, so much more data.
Now we move to the higher order stuff about how are we going to leverage this to build a high performance culture in the team. I guess my advice is you got to get comfortable as a team playing in the sand pit and then you've got to do an experiment with the team where you're able to show that by leveraging the data and the scale as a function, you can move up the curve in terms of the kind of activities you spend your time on. I mean, the, the amount of the HR function that used to be chasing line managers to complete their appraisals on the system now doesn't need to do that. But what they need to do is look at the data to drive a much stronger performance culture in the firm.
My encouragement to people, leaders within the HR function is get into the sandpit with your team and pick up an experiment and then see it through like that.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: That's fantastic. That's exactly the way I see it. Get your hands dirty with this stuff so you're not intimidated by it. Okay, one more question. I'll let you go. We started a lot of research a year or so ago on the chro role and the conclusion we came to, and I don't know if I went through this with you yet, is there is a sort of a big gap between what chros believe their job is and what their job is becoming.
Many chros believe this is the job of the head of hr, but actually it's much bigger than that because as a chro, as you know, you have the opportunity to see things across the organization that have to do with transformation and productivity and orgs. Org issues and leadership issues that are bigger than running hr. What. And you've obviously been through this process and have a very senior role. What is your advice to someone who is a chro or wants to be a chro that you've learned to develop this higher level business role in the company, level of credibility and influence beyond running HR itself, which is a big enough job alone.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Josh. I mean, it starts with having the curiosity to learn. And I know it's a generic thing. You know, I've spent.
It's been a busy week and I've got a couple of weeks of travel coming up from Monday, but I've spent an hour and a half this morning getting quite deep into private credit and how the world of private credit will disrupt financial services. And I got two private credit experts in our business to say, will you do a teach in to me for an hour and a half? And I think the thing is, look, we are all busy, but the reality is that conversation triggered so many thoughts around the value of partnerships. You know, how I think about our skills agenda in the context of skills which we will never build, buy or build, but we will find the partners who can supply us those skills. But I think the idea of really going quite deep and having the curiosity around, you know, the way the world of business is changing, how your own business is changing, how the world is changing, I think is absolutely critical. I also find a lot of HR professionals are quite nervous of technology.
And I think that to me, the whole world around digital and data is going to explode. And it is exploding, has been exploding for a while. It's going to explode. And I think having real curiosity around it and being in that sand pit is going to be quite critical. The last thing is, look, I love the operational bits of hr. I think, you know, and again, you have written about it so much, we talk a lot about so strategic hr, but you can't do strategic HR without fully understanding how does the plumbing work. I think really being able to really understand how the plumbing works and what needs to change in the plumbing to ensure the sustainability of the initiatives that you are, I think sometimes people ignore that and, you know, it's not as sexy and it's not as exciting and. But to me, I mean, I've always been very interested in the plumbing and that's something I spent disproportionate amount of my time focused on because it's critical. That's the only way you can make the transformation sustainable by tackling the way the plumbing works.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Well, Tanish, thank you so much for your time. I really think you have an exceptional perspective on business transformation and organizational transformation in hr. And I really, really want to thank you for your time. I know I'm going to see you in a few weeks when I'm over there, but to speak to you, Josh. Okay.
