Well, thank you so much for the kind introduction and also thank you to Nogus Bank for this invitation.

And it's a new situation because in the past when I had speeches like this, I would be supported by lots of samples in the back of the room, Kit Kat, chocolate, Nespresso coffee, what have you.

Today, I have to convince you just by the strength of my argument. So, it's a bit of a higher hurdle and um I'm asking for your understanding.

Um, I wanted to blow out Norrisbank for not just the invitation, but also for adding leadership and culture to the roster and the agenda of this conference.

Because many of you in the room are experts at running your DCFS, valuing a company, valuing a business opportunity.

But I do believe that having a handle and having your own thoughts about a business's culture and leadership is an important consistency check.

It's another dimension that helps you tell apart a story that just sounds good on a PowerPoint from a story that is true quality and that's more likely to be resilient and sustainable.

We heard in the previous panel, you know, quality companies are hard to find.

And I do believe that one thing that all quality companies have in common is this strong culture. something that creates a legends between the executives working for that business and the company and also among the executives between each other as a team and uh hence it's important.

Hence it's important.

Now I wanted to share a few thoughts on this.

So first of all to put in the overall perspective of a CEO's job um there's lots of things you're doing day in day out I would group them into three major buckets and this is not by order of importance just to enumerate them.

The first one is portfolio and strategy.

So what is it as products and services you're selling and why do you believe you have longer term sustainable competitive advantage in it?

Second part is structure and incentives.

So basically how do you group the teams in your company in ways that all of these good things are being brought out the door in a successful manner.

And the third one is culture.

And um culture is something that is somehow different from these first two in the sense that you can't just every once in a while revisit it.

You have to live it every day from the moment in the morning you walk into the door to the last email at the end of the day.

What you have to watch out for is not just the factual answers you're giving or the factual announcements you're making.

You also have to watch out for the consistency like what signals am I sending into the organization and uh does that make sense compared to what I said yesterday, last month, last year because if you change your tune um every so often, I think you do confuse the organization.

Because if you change your tune um every so often, I think you do confuse the organization.

So that consistency and being somehow in sync with where the culture is coming from and where you wanted to get to over time is really really important.

Sounds pretty obvious, but look, I mean, CEOs are no robots.

I mean, we're humans and we're subject to um moods of the moment.

We're subject to different, you know, exposures over time.

And so bearing and and and displaying that cons consistency over time is more difficult than it sounds.

Now, as you as investors look at culture, um a few things to think about.

First one is culture is incredibly sticky.

The larger and the more historic and iconic an organization, the more sticky it is.

And the reason that's important to you is when you have CEOs telling you that for a large long-standing historic company, they changed the culture in the course of two or three years. At the risk of giving you a provocative statement here, sell the stock.

Okay?

Because honestly either these people don't really know what they're talking about and are out of touch with what's really going on inside the organizations or they're vastly overselling uh their own achievements.

Both of these are not good.

Uh culture change does take a lot of time and uh the best way for you with your exposure to financial industry to judge that think back to all these banking mergers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

To this day with many of these large financial institutions when you walk into these companies you can sometimes tell apart you know one part from the other in those mergers coming together.

So cultures are incredibly sticky and industrial firms are not different from that.

Next one um culture in most attributes is not a wish list.

So if someone presents to you a culture and it has only positive attributes, it's a good moment to be suspicious.

On most attributes, there's a spectrum.

So think about, for example, speed versus stability.

So if someone claims that their organization can turn on a dime and react in line with fastest ones in the industry, what does that mean for resilience in the face of bad news?

What does this mean for the ability to sit out a poor quarter or a poor year and not lose sight of some of your longerterm objectives?

And most of these things do happen on a spectrum.

You can't just pick the positive one of each and claim that that's your culture going forward.

And so when you have these conversations in the future, when you hear too many of the good ones, ask for the bad ones.

Ask for what it means for the other side of the spectrum.

And you know, is there something in the conversation that's missing?

Next one I wanted to talk about is as a CEO, how do you actually change and shape culture?

And um in my view, there are two levers. A short-term one and a long-term one.

The short-term one is using the soapbox, for lack of a better word, that every CEO has inside the organization, outside the organization, where essentially you indicate the way you want it to be.

And then in addition to all the communication events that you have, whether it's small groups, individual meetings, or large group meetings, when every time you're facing a decision, you're trying to essentially link that decision to some of these attributes you're talking about.

And this way, you kind of reinforce it.

But that's communication.

And um while it travels pretty fast in an organization, you can only you can only go so far when it comes to the sustainability.

Uh the long-term part, the true stickiness that lasts over generations is the one that happens through people.

And there it's about selecting and promoting the people that you believe embody the cultural attributes the best way that you would want to see for your organization or in your outside hiring selectively advancing those attributes.

And there you see why it takes a lot of time because you can't turn over entire large groups of leadership teams at the same time.

So this takes patience and it's always a balance between the change you want but then also not destabilizing the organization and hence that's the reason why it can easily take 5 10 15 years as you know not just your senior leadership team but also the next layers of the organization um get changed in that regard.

That's the more lasting one. That's the one that leaves a legacy behind.

And then obviously as you change from there as your environment changes and you would want to evolve and migrate your hers you again have to be very patient about that there is no shortcuts uh again those short-term situations usually um do not have staying power and it's important to keep that in mind.

There is no shortcuts uh again those short-term situations usually um do not have staying power and it's important to keep that in mind.

Now when it comes to large organizations um let me highlight two common pitfalls.

And this is not a specific reflection on any specific company but from many conversations with COP simply what I heard and what I also experienced in my own professional life and large companies may have many strengths but there's two common weaknesses to watch out for.

And large companies may have many strengths but there's two common weaknesses to watch out for.

The first one is inside focus.

In many large companies especially the ones that have a deep vertical structure. You may spend a long time in your professional career before you really have to deal with the outside.

Remember, a salesperson, a junior salesperson may see a lot of the outside, but they're applying decisions that are made at the senior level like a price list for example.

So, it's only at the top of the organization where you get into these trade-offs like raising prices versus market share or some other key decisions that link the outside of the company to the inside of a company.

And the larger a business is um the longer it takes executives to get to that level and before all of your advancements your your career progress usually gets determined by playing the inside game.

And um that's why I believe when it comes to schooling senior leaders, usually a smaller company tends to be the better breeding ground.

And with larger companies, that whole notion, what do you do from the top to counter that inside thinking that requires constant attention?

The other one is accountability or the lack of accountability.

And here again, the larger, the more complex the organization, the more matrix the organization, the more you find that people oversell the good things.

Like 25 people claiming that they were the ones who created the good news and underell the bad things.

Look the other way hoping that it doesn't get attached to you.

And that's also a very common pitfall and one where like with the inside focus there is no simple recipe for how to counter that.

What you have to do as a leader dayto day is to try and call out these situations.

Try to be sure you instill that outside thinking.

Try to be sure that you do find the people that were responsible for the good things but also for the things that didn't go so well and that there's justice in the organization because once people feel that they can get away with a lack of accountability it goes downhill from there.

Because once people feel that they can get away with a lack of accountability it goes downhill from there.

So those were some of the high level thoughts I wanted to share.

I wanted to leave on something that's a bit of a gear shift from what I was just covering before and that is I wanted to tell you that um in total I've been serving as a public company CEO for 21 years.

And when I look at how leadership teams have changed over those two decades I've seen a remarkable change coming from diversity inclusion.

And I've seen very significant changes not just in the sense of correcting historic wrongs but also I've seen tremendous benefit to the businesses because the quality of the discussion has improved so much.

It's a whole different discussion that brings different views to the table a lot more bandwidth and kind of enabling organizations that are designed to serve society to actually do that.

Because society does come with a much broader cross-section than what leadership teams used to have in the past.

And um what I wanted to tell you is obviously in the current debate it is important that for a large company everyone follows the local laws in every jurisdiction where they work.

But I do hope and I also hope that you as investors pay attention to that that the overall spirit of what can get done with more diverse more inclusive leadership teams that that doesn't get lost.

Because I do believe that is one of the true areas of progress over the last few decades.

And I do I also believe there is ways to go and I do believe that in addition to the moral ethical standards I do believe there's also business rationale with it.

I stop it here and look forward to the panel. Thanks.

Thanks.