| L. Dubé: | Before starting the discussion with Mehmood, I would like to frame why I’m here tonight, why I’m pleased to be here, and why I believe that we will have a fascinating discussion hopefully with outcomes. |
| L. Dubé: | My lifetime has been really to bring together various disciplines, various sectors that are needed if we are to tweak what we do we in our everyday life as individuals as well as businesses, as government and society, so that we reap the good benefits of modernity without necessarily having to pay the price that we are having to with some of the challenges that are the objects of Delve currently. |
| L. Dubé: | So, that’s the reason why I’m pleased to be here. Now, why Mehmood is the person on the planet that is the best to talk about what we will be talking about. I have known Mehmood since 2008 when he gave his first formal public talk as PepsiCo’s chief scientific officer here. He was just, at the time, out of Mayo Clinic as a lead scientist there. He was the first ever, I believe, chief scientific officer in a CPG food, and he laid out at the time the plan, very ambitious but very pragmatic also, how can there be a real transformation of the product portfolio and so on toward more nutrition. |
| L. Dubé: | Now, in his role in this new biotech consortium, I will let him explain a bit more later, I think it is opening a whole new perspective of how can we bring the science of biology and the science of understanding human behavior and so on to see, can we reduce the suffering that comes with aging because it happens at some point in life, but also make this lifelong wellness a real reality. |
| L. Dubé: | So, Mehmood, the first question here, the first theme that we are addressing is aging as a challenge for individuals, for science and for society. We have here this diagram from the UN that shows the aging population over where we are now and moving to 2050 and beyond where the population of aging is increasing proportionally more than other sector, but 2050 is also where the world will be at nine billion. So, can you start briefly unpacking that multifaceted complexity that is aging? |
| M. Khan: | Look. We have had the luxury as humanity for almost all of our existence where there have been more young people to take care of a few old people up until now. What isn’t shown on this statistic is one that I think is even more challenging, which is this current decade, this year, last year, in the developed world, Western Europe, North America, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Australia, you look at all these countries, there are more people now in those countries over the age of 60 than there are under the age of five. |
| M. Khan: | If you just think about that for a second, it isn’t just a number of older people. The fact is every one of these countries as a society including Canada, which is somewhat of a pay forward society, the young take care of the elderly and there has always been more young people working than there were older people to take care of. Well, guess what? Now, that’s changed. As a result, this is not just a health burden and a disease burden. It is a major economic burden for which no country yet has figured out a solution. Those countries that have a high immigration rate and then the fact that immigrants are young are able to offset some of that, but that is not sufficient because as the emerging world and developing world economies are getting better, there are fewer and fewer people migrating, etc. So, first, it’s a major economic challenge. We don’t have enough people who can take care. |
| M. Khan: | Second is the cost of taking care of this doubling population. If you think about it, we’ve doubled in the last 30 years. We’re going to double again the next 30 years. Then, we’re going to add another billion people, and so, if you take about nine billion people, one-third of them will be elderly, and that will continue to grow. So, the disease burden is actually breaking our health system’s capability to take care of it. |
| M. Khan: | Coming back to your question, that requires, at the top, a real look at our policy and what our policies are around, and a rethink of our financial pension and insurance systems, which are currently operating under a model that was built 50, 60, 100 years ago, and then, the third is the way in which medicine approaches taking care of the elderly, which is very much what symptoms can I patch, what band-aids can I take care of in addressing, and in essence, watching a decline and hoping we can slow down some of that decline, but usually, and I’ll end with this statement, if we think about somebody living to be 80, 85 years old, our system assumes that we will spend about 20 years of that time period in significant decline and about 30 years, the first 10 years of that, some decline, and it’s sort of accepted as … You’ve all heard your parents and grandparents say, “Well, I’m just getting old,” and so, there’s an assumption. |
| M. Khan: | Our goal, and a lot of people working in this space, is not to see how humans live longer. Let me correct that. It’s about how do you live just as long but remain functional as long as possible for whatever year. So, if we do not expand lifespan even by a year but we expand health span, the healthy period of your life by a decade … Let me give you the economic numbers. This has been done through auditing companies. If we were to expand in the U.S. and across the developed world healthy period of our life just by two years, it’s a several trillion dollar economic uptake, okay? So, there’s a major reason for this. So, we’ll get into some of the details, but I hope that sort of sets the context. |
| L. Dubé: | Yeah, very good. So, we move now to the second theme, which is if we look at how to bring a scalable solution to this, you use often the term invention vis a vis translating those inventions into innovations that are having an impact. |
| L. Dubé: | So, what do you see as what scientists can do in … They are the ones who do invention, what scientists can do to accelerate or to increase the take-up of those inventions into translation in innovation with impact. |
| M. Khan: | Sometimes, we confuse the term. An invention, of course, is a new idea. It can be an object. It can be a design. It can be a new computer code. It can be a new gene, whatever, but an invention remains an invention, it doesn’t become an innovation because an innovation is an invention that makes a difference in somebody’s life. That’s how I think about it, and so, in order for it to make a difference in somebody’s life, a few things have to happen. First is you have to think about, how is this going to scale? In order for this to scale, you, of course, have to come up with a differentiated technology. That is the new idea. That’s the invention. It has to be different. It has to be unique. It is not sufficient though. |
| M. Khan: | Most scientists, when they’ve come up with a new idea, they publish it, they might patent it, and they think they’ve contributed hugely to society, and most of those, the vast majority those papers and patents sit on a shelf, on a resume, and nothing ever happens. Five years later, they start being cited, and now, it gets you tenure. It gets you promoted, and some of us benefited from that, but it has to do more. That’s what I want to touch on the other two things. The second thing you have to really understand is the domain within which that technology is going to get applied. Every technology has to operate in a domain, and domain knowledge is absolutely critical. If the technology gets ahead of the domain, it won’t succeed. If it’s too late in the domain, it’s old ideas, and if it doesn’t work in the domain, it won’t scale. |
| M. Khan: | Apple Newton was the best handheld ever invented at the time, completely bombed. For all the young people who think, well, Apple only succeeds, completely bombed. It was way ahead of its time, but it didn’t work in the domain in which it was going to apply. There were no software system. There were no apps. Nothing, and it failed. In fact, the device that beat it was a little thing called a PalmPilot. Remember that? |
| L. Dubé: | Yep. |
| M. Khan: | The PalmPilot could do nothing compared to what the Apple Newton did, but why was it successful? Because the PalmPilot, while it was a small technology, really understood the simplicity within which it was going to apply in the domain. You can do this in medicine. So, in medicine, you have to understand the healthcare system, the regulatory environment, all of those things in which application of the technology. That’s not sufficient. |
| M. Khan: | The third pole of this is what your business and operating model is. How is it going to return on the investment the capital that’s been invested to the investors? That might be government investing. It may be a private equity fund. It may be a company, but somebody’s got to put capital in, and somebody’s got to get that return. Now, if you think I’m an academic and therefore, that’s not my domain, well, if you have an insurance plan or if you have a pension fund or if you have a retirement plan, I assure you, you’re interested in where your retirement dollars are being invested. That’s what this is. How is it going to return? |
| M. Khan: | When these three come together well and in a balanced manner, you have a successful invention becoming an innovation, okay? So, much of what CEOs do at the end of the day is think about these three things. |
| L. Dubé: | Back to the health domain, talking about those great inventions, great ideas, don’t you think that there is too much, or is there too much of a focus on the cure side more than the focus on the wellness and so on? From an invention perspective, where do you think we are and where could we go? |
| M. Khan: | So, look. I’ll use a simple example. We’ve made a lot of progress compared to how things used to be even 20, 30 years ago. Those of us who practiced and trained in medicine 30 years ago, I’m looking at one of my colleagues, the standard treatment for peptic ulcer was vagotomy and pyeloplasty where we actually cut your stomach, cut the vagus nerve and shrunk your stomach. That was a standard treatment. Now, you can just go buy a Pepcid or a Zantac and cure it, right? So, we’ve made a lot of progress. Let’s talk about chronic diseases. We celebrate statins, right? They lower cholesterol. Everybody’s heard of them. They reduce cardiovascular mortality, on average, between 20 and 30% depending on the population you look at. That is great, 20 to 30% reduction in events. By the way, the other 70 to 80% are still having those events. |
| M. Khan: | So, if you want to celebrate the 20%, that’s what we’ve done as medical progress, but we assume the other remainder can’t be done. Now, we start throwing in more and more drugs that costing more and more dollars for smaller and smaller incremental benefit where we might get two or three or four or 5%. Yes, the P-value is less than 0.05. Yes, it’s statistically significant, but 70%, 60, 70% still are going to go on. So, the question we have to ask ourselves is, while we celebrate that progress, what is it that we’re not doing about the biology that’s actually changing the true course of that disease process? The only way we’re going to start thinking about this is to go upstream at the cellular level, and this is where medical scientists, basic scientists, practitioners, all of these have to kind of come together and say, how do we converge? |
| L. Dubé: | In your new venture, let’s start with the Life Biosciences. You want to talk about the actual scientific and business model interface. You are looking at bringing those type of mixtures of basic clinical and so on in bringing solutions for lifelong wellness. You want to talk about your approach to this? |
| M. Khan: | Sure. So, we decided to take a somewhat unusual, non-traditional approach. Let me give the context to this. If you go back 30, 40 years, the pharmaceutical industry would develop about 80 to 90% of the drugs they sold. So, 80 to 90% of research discovery, that differentiated technology, the blue segment, was coming from within a company. As that company identified that technology, they brought it to market, okay? The basic science behind that discovery was still in academic centers. So, when the statins were discovered, the HMG-CoA enzyme was not discovered in a company. It was discovered in a university. If we think about angiotensin receptor blockers, the receptor was discovered in an academic institution, but the application of that at the basic science was developed in the pharmaceutical industry. |
| M. Khan: | Move forward to today. Today, at best, 40 to 50% of the drugs a company markets are actually coming from within the company. So, in essence, discovery, that differentiated technology piece, has left the mainstream pharma industry and separated itself into a separate ecosystem. That’s good and bad, but that’s the context. |
| M. Khan: | Our premise, and the team that I have the privilege of leading has one thing in mind. If you think about the best scientists, wherever they are … regardless, because I am a firm believer, and we believe science doesn’t know borders. Science exists in the best centers, wherever they are. It has nothing to do with gene, race, politics or anything, right? It’s wherever it exists. Then, if we can identify the best scientists in a particular field that we are interested in and we are gathering more and more expertise, we need to first identify who those scientists are, but then secondly, not make the mistake of taking that scientist out of that ecosystem, bringing them into the company and saying, “Now, come and do your work in my lab.” |
| M. Khan: | So, what we’ve decided to do is we actually leave the scientists that are doing the discovery work in the academic center. |
| M. Khan: | We identify the scientist, we sit down with the scientist. You have the best science. We want you to continue, but if you look at this, we want you to continue on the differentiated technology. We’ll work on the domain application, and we’ll work on the business model, but we want to create a partnership where we actually create a strategic alliance with the academic institution, and if the institution allows, make the scientist an equity shareholder in our company. That way, we’re not taking their idea and developing it. They actually have an aligned incentive between the academic institution, us, and the faculty member, but with the governance and oversight of the academic institution overlooking the work. So, that protects the appropriate from the ethics and all of the good things that a university ecosystem does, but it brings our expertise. |
| M. Khan: | So, that’s how we start off. We initially invest in that. We bring it through a certain level, and then, as the technology continues to progress, of course, more and more of the work becomes pre-clinical talks, eventually going to development. We have not yet reached human. We’re about 12 to 18 months from our first human studies with these, but in three years, we’ve already progressed to the point where we have line of sight to several programs going into human at the end of next year and first half of 2021. It’s unprecedented in that collaboration, and that’s what makes us unique. |
| L. Dubé: | That is interesting because your company has been created two or three years ago. You have raised 75 million in capital, and you operate in the discovery phase, and the time to market often is long. So, you have patient capital in the … So, you see what I mean? |
| M. Khan: | So, we’re fortunate. I have three criteria when I think about as a CEO who do I want invested in my company. People think capital is difficult. Capital is available, but you have to be very deliberate on who invests in your company. The first criteria I look at is, is this investor actually going to bring value other than just capital? What sort of value are they going to bring to the table? Do they understand the field? Are they going to bring domain knowledge? Are they going to help us with the business model? How are they going to help us grow not only watching their investment, but as much as possible, that? |
| M. Khan: | The second is, are they going to be here for future subsequent rounds of investment because I want to see them as we progress to continue to invest behind us? Then, the third is the point that you touched on. Do they understand the timeline we’re talking about in the patients? Related to that, and we’ll come back to this, I know, later as based on what we talked about, is do they understand the purpose of our mission, okay? If their purpose is a quarterly return or an annual return, then I’m the wrong business to invest in. If their purpose is we’re truly going to make a difference in a lot of people’s lives, then, and we don’t know if we’re going to succeed … I’m the biggest critic in the company. I’m the biggest skeptic. That’s my job, chief skeptic officer. |
| L. Dubé: | He has always been skeptical. |
| M. Khan: | Yeah, and you have to be and sort of say hold the scientist true to the mission, but that’s important. |
| L. Dubé: | Thank you. Let’s move now to the other very important part of your business leadership and achievements at PepsiCo. Well, as Life Biosciences can be seen on the angel side of health, when it gets to the food, the CPG, in the context of food, in the general opinion, it is often sees as the dark side as it relates to health. We were briefly alluding before how powerful has been the transformation that you have been doing over the, I don’t know, eight years that you were there. |
| M. Khan: | Twelve. |
| L. Dubé: | Twelve, in moving toward a serious shift into the health promoting quality of the product portfolio and so on. So, what did you do? How did you do that, and how did you get everybody on board? |
| M. Khan: | So, there are two sides to this equation on the how, and we’ll talk a little bit about the what. The how part on one side was the easy part. Hire really smart people who know more about it than you do. |
| M. Khan: | Let them shape the house, and as a leader, basically say, “Here’s what we want to achieve,” but not direct them on the how. So, the first thing was very simple. When Indra Nooyi who retired about six months before I retired became CEO and I joined the company literally months later, it was just one of those unique points in history when you had a new transformative CEO who sets, “We’re going to change this company.” Then, she and the board wanted to go outside the industry. I had never worked in the food and beverage industry or the CPG industry. So, I get hired from the outside to “come in and help re-engineer the portfolio and the way this company operates.” |
| M. Khan: | Let them shape the house, and as a leader, basically say, “Here’s what we want to achieve,” but not direct them on the how. So, the first thing was very simple. When Indra Nooyi who retired about six months before I retired became CEO and I joined the company literally months later, it was just one of those unique points in history when you had a new transformative CEO who sets, “We’re going to change this company.” Then, she and the board wanted to go outside the industry. I had never worked in the food and beverage industry or the CPG industry. So, I get hired from the outside to “come in and help re-engineer the portfolio and the way this company operates.” |
| M. Khan: | So, my first six months was traveling the world. To give you some idea of our scope very quickly, we had operating businesses in 198 countries. There were only two countries on the planet we didn’t have a business. The second was about 1.2 billion people consumed one of my products every 24 hours. So, unlike virtual businesses, we were reaching a billion and a quarter people every day, right? Physically, that’s making the product, moving it, shipping it, and our ecosystem was everything from the research that was done on the genetics and the DNA of the crops that were planted for us, all the way through to packaging material science and actually, the design of how to put them on the shelf. So, innovation was this end to end. |
| M. Khan: | So, the challenge for my team was if we take this breadth, how do we transform our existing products so that we really can move the needle at scale? How do we add other products to the portfolio that actually help not only shift the existing, but diversify? Then, the third is, how do we bring not only the company along, but the consumer along because you can change a product, but the consumer won’t follow you, okay, especially if there are competitive products already sitting on the market that “are more appealing” right? |
| M. Khan: | Well, let’s check the endgame very quickly. What did we achieve? Today, and my data’s about six months old now, about one-tenth of PepsiCo’s business is the brand Pepsi. Only a tenth of the business is that brand. 90% of the business is not Pepsi. Second, only a quarter of the global business by volume is soda, and it’s a declining proportion, both because of the underlying business but because the diversification. Third, more than half of all the beverages Pepsi cells are either zero sugar or low sugar. So, we’ve changed the brands, we’ve changed the composition of those brands, and we’ve changed the proportion of our business that is legacy business. Now, it didn’t happen overnight. There’s massive system to change. Took a lot of research and a lot of technology. I won’t go into that. |
| M. Khan: | The second was, what are the other pieces we can add? Now, most people won’t associate our brands with PepsiCo anymore. The number one hummus brand in the U.S., Sabra, is a Pepsi brand that was created and launched as a business under this transformation. Russia’s number one dairy company is PepsiCo. Russia’s number one in the weaning food products for children is PepsiCo. So, we have transformed … I can give you lots of examples across the world. |
| M. Khan: | The last piece that I’m equally proud of is we thought about the environment. We said about changing the way in which food industry looks at water, carbon footprint, plastic, and packaging, all of those things. Did it very quietly. I’ll give you an example of why we had to do it quietly, but in 2014, the top prize, which is the equivalent of Nobel Prize in industry for water is called a Stockholm Water Prize. PepsiCo won, my team won the Stockholm Water Prize in 2014. ’19. We led the world 10 years ago to win the prize five years ago, okay? So, in that process, we invented new things of how to do things. That was important. You may not appreciate, but we have been developing with biotech the ability to create compostable food packaging that starts on a farm. |
| L. Dubé: | Interesting. |
| M. Khan: | Right? So, we’re looking at waste farmland where we can grow a crop in northern climates that wouldn’t grow a food crop. So, we don’t want it to convert food to packaging, but take northern crops, convert them through fermentation using microbes to polymers, which can then be converted to film, which can then be converted to packaging, and ultimately with the goal that that actually becomes compostable. That technology has been going on for over five years. It won’t come in overnight, but these are sorts of time periods you have to think about. So, I can give you lots of examples, but this is not the company that Indra and I took over in 2007. It’s a very different company and with lot of external recognition. |
| L. Dubé: | So, what prevents then this to become more mainstream, this progress with purpose? What can government or what can other actors do to make it … |
| M. Khan: | Companies work in an ecosystem, and I’m giving you a U.S. example. I [inaudible] chose not to give a Canadian example. This is on the left shows you the U.S. Department of Health’s food pyramid. Very simple. It says you should eat very little sugar, oil, and starch. Eat a little bit more in protein but most of that from vegetables and as little as possible from animal protein, meats, dairy, et cetera. Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and a lot of whole grains, right? That’s the food pyramid. Department of Health. |
| M. Khan: | On the right is the subsidies subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. Same government, by the way, reporting to the same president and the same administration. The number one subsidy goes to meat, followed by grains, followed by sugar, and last, 0.3% U.S. federal subsidies goes to fruits and vegetables, 0.3%. So, 99.7% of federal policy is completely the reciprocal opposite of what the health secretary says we should eat. |
| M. Khan: | So, if you really want to bring about change, and I challenge you, take a look at what Canadian subsidies are versus what the Health Department says. I suspect they might be that not too dissimilar. So, if you’re going to bring about change, first of all, we’re all voters, can we get alignment between our health departments or ministries and our agricultural departments because if you don’t change that subsidy, then how do you expect the private sector … and yet, the private sector is the first one that’s picked, starts with policy. Change the policy, right? I’ve given you evidence right there. |
| L. Dubé: | I want to push the policy because as you know, I’ve been very much involved. I’ve been spearheading policy convergence in Canada between agriculture and health, and exactly, health wants everybody to have fruits and vegetables, but agriculture is still very much like that. So, where do we go? Where do we break this inability to get policy and political convergence for real? |
| M. Khan: | So, I think to understand this, there’s another major demographic change that’s happening. One is of the nine billion people that we anticipate by 2050 will be on the planet, seven billion approximately are estimated going to be living in cities, okay? Today, about 50% of the population in the world lives in cities. By 2050, it will be 70%. As that urbanization continues, and by the way, a significant part of that growth is going to be in mega cities, North America will only have one of those mega cities. |
| M. Khan: | As this urbanization happens, understand, just think about the impact of this for those of you who are business and supply chain professors, the distance between the food that you used to consume and the food that was produced 100 years ago was measured in yards, maybe half a mile or a mile. Most of what you ate. It then became tens of miles, then became hundreds of miles, and today, in this city, your food travels a thousand plus miles, which is why you can get fruit and vegetables all year round, right? Your grocery store is the most complex global supply chain in any industry. |
| M. Khan: | What’s going to happen with this continuing is the cost of carbon, transportation, and availability of water, coupled with the right climate … Canada and parts of North America have lots of water but not the right climate. If you look at where the climate is, there’s shortage of water. As that starts to play out, we are going to have to rethink completely what our supply chains are going to be like and how we’re going to deliver food to seven billion people living in mega cities where distribution can’t be done with a 16-wheel truck anymore. Mumbai, Shanghai. Just go through all those cities. |
| M. Khan: | Policy is likely to come not from agricultural alone. It’s going to come from the other departments, energy, transportation. All of these are going to have to play in it because if you go to Manhattan today, the grocery store delivery trucks cannot actually deliver. We did a study. Let me give you a figure. We did a study in the city of Sao Paulo. The average speed of a delivery truck for a grocery store in the city of Sao Paulo is about five kilometers per hour. The average distance from the distribution warehouse to the city across Sao Paulo is 45 kilometers. So, in one day, one truck gets to deliver one time, burning the same amount of diesel with one full-time employee to deliver the grocery store. So, as that city grows, you think that’s sustainable? So, private sector is going to actually have to figure out a completely different model of supply chain management, production, distribution, and the economics will change. So, some of this is going to be forced to be changed by other things. |
| L. Dubé: | The last theme now, which is about this getting serious about this convergence. You just talk now not just about convergence between discipline but convergence between sector, between government and so on, and you have how many initiative in U.S.A. or here where, whether it is governmental investment in transforming research toward more disciplinary convergence, more multi-sectoral and so on, and you have been active in many policy and research body, and now in your role at the U.S. Council of Competitiveness. What are your thoughts on where we are currently in moving toward a real disruptive convergence that will break the blockage between agriculture and health and so on? |
| M. Khan: | So, I think I would put the journey as we’ve started the conversation. |
| L. Dubé: | Yeah. |
| M. Khan: | So, I think the good thing is there is now increase in broader recognition that the future, the way I like to teach it is the future is not an extrapolation of the past. You can do a plot of everything that’s happened, and then extrapolate that line. It doesn’t work anymore, okay? So, there’s recognition of that. |
| M. Khan: | The second is there’s also recognition that there is not the domain expertise of any one sector to actually solve this whether you’re academic, business, and we have to stop this arrogance of the different players where the academics think, “Well, we’re not going to talk to the private sector because their motives or incentives are different to ours.” The business people say, “Well, these guys are just going to write papers and not actually do anything.” The government people say, “Well, we’re just out to make sure you don’t do anything wrong.” Well, doing nothing wrong doesn’t necessary actually make any progress either, and so, we’re recognizing that everybody’s got to be at the table and doing that. |
| M. Khan: | One of the powerful things with the U.S. Council is that it’s made up of over 50 CEOs from some of the largest companies in the U.S., 50 university presidents are members of the council, and we have the 13 directors of the federal national laboratories, as well as the director of the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. So, with these decision makers and leaders at the table, we’re now able to launch a series of initiatives, which are advisory in part to the administration regardless of which administration’s in power. I mean, the council has been doing this work since President Reagan. The second is we’re actually helping shape where federal investment goes, right? When you can do that, you can start to shape because of that, how things go from there to the NSF, the National Academies, et cetera, this level. Dollars change things whether it’s federal dollars or it’s private sector dollars. So, we’re shaping that. The conversation’s happening. |
| L. Dubé: | Thank you. One last question that goes further because in some way, what we are talking about is rethinking a bit the way we have structured modern economy and modern society where you’ll get the business, the commerce side on one, and then, you’ll get the social and the healthcare one on the other. I shared with you a very interesting Financial Times article a few weeks back, I think, about, does capitalism need saving from itself? |
| L. Dubé: | Does healthcare need saving from itself? Currently the biggest financial threat to many countries is healthcare costs, and we still have a model of healthcare, in my view, that needs as much modification as capitalism. So, what are your thoughts on where we are and where we should go? |
| M. Khan: | So, look. You’ve given healthcare as an example. You’ve given capitalism. I think it’s a time to think back and say, do our institutions need saving from themselves? I can give you lots of institutions. We are at an all-time low in trust in government, an all-time low in trust in industry, all-time low trust in professions, and I think if you think around what the political environment is around the world, North America, Europe, and Brexit, and you name it, it’s a reflection of these two things: lack of trust and this increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots. We’ve talked about it in how I’m thinking about my company, but at the end of the day, if we don’t rethink this, history has taught us that eventually, disruption happens. We don’t want to see any of that. |
| M. Khan: | So, the question really is, how do we go back to equity, trust, transparency? Unfortunately, we can’t do that by sound bites. We live in an era where people are rarely trying to understand the issue. They just want to read the headline. Let’s admit it. How many of us go through our phone in the morning and in like 30 seconds, have read the five headlines and think we’ve got the news of the day, right? Far from it, and yet, you can’t read a scientific paper or an academic paper just from the title, right? That’s the first thing you get taught as a student. How do we interpret news? Just the headline. The rest, we assume, is reflected. |
| L. Dubé: | That was really my last question. What about some few takeaway that you would kind of put together before we open to the questions? |
| M. Khan: | Let me give the takeaways on … I’m an optimist by nature. You never want to go see a doctor who’s not an optimist. Just a personal piece of advice. So, it’s good to be an optimist as a medical doctor. I’m an optimist, and I always believe that while there’s challenges to take on, for the most part, we will figure them out. There’ll be plasticity. There’ll be some pain. We’ll reconfigure. There’ll be parts of us that never want to change, and it’s time to move beyond that, and the others will lead the way. That’s why we have to get the different perspectives. If we do that, all of these complex issues can be taken on, and I think technology is a tool, but to deploy that technology, go back to my triangle. Figure out the technology. Figure out the domain, and really get to understand it, and then, make sure you have an operating model, financial or not. If we don’t get those three pieces, ain’t going to work. |
| L. Dubé: | Thank you so much, sir. |
| M. Khan: | Thank you. |
