E33: Leading with Purpose: How to Navigate Uncertainty, Change and Growth with David Oakley

Before I moved into people management, I did an MBA and there was, you know, many things in that that really resonated. But I remember one day, I had no idea who the lecturer was, but talking about if you want to manage people, you've got to be able to manage yourself. And I think that sort of really resonated with me in terms of just, you know, start of each day, checking in with yourself, like, how am I feeling? Am I agitated? Am I tired? Am I really happy? And just being self-aware of that, I think, is a good starting point.

David Oakley is the Vice President of Asia Pacific at Miro. Prior to this, he was the ANZ Country Manager at ServiceNow and took it from a scale-up to an absolute dominant market force. So today we're going to have a conversation about developing yourself, developing the organization culture, and the future of work for sales leaders in SaaS companies. He has been described to me as one of the most inspirational leaders people have worked with. So today is going to be an absolute treat. Let's jump right in. Dave, you have an amazing career starting with some well-known early-stage brands through to working with ServiceNow and Miro. Can you tell me just at a high level, how did this transition happen from some industry-leading names of, I guess, yesteryear, if I could say, to some of the most cutting-edge companies How did that happen?

Yeah, I'd like to say it was all perfectly planned and very deliberate, but, you know, some of these things play out very organically. So, you know, truthfully, I never intended to work at IBM or Oracle. Both of those were through acquisitions. So, I think along the way, I've probably been more attracted to maybe midsize or earlier stage companies. So, very early in career, first sales role was working for a company called Rational Software, which was acquired by IBM, found IBM a little bit big for my liking after a while, great environment, but decided to leave there and go to a company called BEA Systems. And then BEA was acquired by Oracle. So, you know, I'd say on the positive side, you learn a lot in those big organizations around, you know, management systems and a whole bunch of other things, expense controls and lots of back-of-house things. But I think there's more fun to be had typically in a smaller org.

Yes. And I see this transition happening in the industry, obviously, people who've worked for what could be called legacy organizations today, very large organizations through to, I'd say, scale-ups and more cloud-first companies. And what is your take as a leader on some of the benefits that you've seen for people who've had initial grounding in some of the more mature, larger environments?

Yeah, I think you tend to have a bit of a sense as to what maybe an end state can look like. And then when you're in those smaller orgs, you've got a better path in terms of, you know, how might we navigate to being hopefully in a big company. I don't think too many small companies aspire to stay small. They all want to become bigger organizations. So, I think companies like Oracle and IBM, they tend to have a lot of sophistication around industry solutions, their partner ecosystem, the sales specialization. You know, there's a lot of depth and thoughtfulness that goes into a lot of those things. And a lot of, I would say, you know, very thoughtful, longer-term thinking that goes into pricing strategies and various other sort of ways that they enter the market. So, I think that gives you a really good grounding in terms of what might a future state look like when you're in that smaller organization. And as I mentioned, like places like IBM, Oracle, and various other big companies tend to have really good training programs they invest in. people development, maybe a little better than what often smaller companies do. So, I think it's a great place to spend at least part of your career in, is those bigger companies.

Yeah. And with some of the companies that you've worked with in the last 5 to 10 years, ServiceNow and Miro, what are some of the salient benefits of landing in environments like these?

Look, I think it's a growth opportunity. So, you know, there's a lot of interesting phases that you can work through in a company. You can be a a young challenger that no one's ever heard of. You can be a really big player that can have a very big impact. And, you know, for me personally, I had the benefit of kind of seeing a lot of that journey through in a place like ServiceNow, where you're that upstart and you're attacking mid-market and you're a challenger brand almost. And then towards the end of that journey, able to meet with CEOs and ministers and you're doing things that have a really big impacting society. You've got a certain scale to that and all of those things are fun. You just gotta be able to navigate through each of those phases and kind of, again, going back to those bigger company environments, I think you have a little bit more of a sense as to how to play that journey over time as well.

Yeah. And in terms of the demands that are placed upon someone like you as you are leading the charge. How do you manage the pressure and demands that come obviously from both above peer group as well as from people reporting into you? You know, how have you managed that all?

I think it starts with managing yourself. I think before I moved into people management, uh, I did an MBA and there was, there was, you know, many things in that that really resonated. But I remember one day I had no idea who the lecturer was, but talking about if you want to manage people, you've got to be able to manage yourself. And I think that sort of really resonated with me in terms of just, you know, start of each day checking in with yourself, like, how am I feeling? Am I agitated? Am I tired? Am I really happy? And just being self-aware of that, I think, is a good starting point. But I think you need to manage yourself. And we were talking pre-cameras rolling that, you know, you tend to know when you're on top of your game, when you're exercising, you're spending time with family, and all of those things tend to reflect well when you're at work. And when the pressure comes, typically the first thing that drops is exercise. The second thing is that you're impacting family time. And then if you're starting to cut your sleep short, you know you're in real trouble. And that's time to push back on work a little bit and get things back calibrated. But I think you've got to manage yourself well in order to manage through the pressure and be able to lead the team in a really healthy, competent way. I think that's a— a really important starting point. And then I think it's realizing that you're playing a long game. You know, every quarter is the most important company in the— sorry, most important quarter in the company's history is an old line from one of my CROs a few years back. But the reality is that we're playing a series of sprints. It's maybe more like a Tour de France or something where you've got these stages that you're constantly needing to perform well in. But you know tomorrow there's going to be another stage and, you know, in a week there's going to be another stage. And so, you've got to build that resilience and fitness as an organization to perform over the long term. And you've got to be thinking about that future every stage, every hill you're climbing, every mountain you're conquering. You know there's going to be another one that's possibly going to be bigger. So, you can't blow yourself up in a particular month or quarter. You've got to play a longer-term game. And I think steering the local organization and steering, at times, a global organization around that is a really important thing for leaders to be able to do. And having a vision of what that looks like and taking people on a sustainable journey, I think, is really, really critical. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that's simple yet so profound because I think that it starts, like you said, with Managing yourself amidst all the distractions and demands and pressures. Now, taking this a step further, when you start looking beyond yourself to the impact that you are having 360 degrees to the people around you, how does your value set start impacting how you lead others in and through these different stages of growth?

Well, there's probably multiple aspects to that. I think you tend to have in a sales leadership role, you tend to have in most organizations in our region, it's very matrixized. So, you may have sort of direct management and to a degree control over the sales organization most typically and maybe some peripheral parts of that. But very often you are working in a matrixed environment with marketing, maybe Channel. There's all sorts of different functions that are critical to how you go to market and how you ultimately perform that don't report to you, report offshore, have different KPIs and so on and so forth. So I think a really critical thing is building that cohort and linkage cross-functionally. And I think our market tends to make that relatively easy. We're on an island, we're a long way from everybody else. And so I think often we're at a real advantage of building that cross-functional teaming and muscle relative to the US and Europe where it's just a little bit more muddled. So I think that's actually an advantage for our region and I see that play out in a lot of companies. And then within your team, I think you've got to reflect back to the team, whether it's first line, second line, or sales reps, that you're not expecting anything different of them than what you're expecting of yourself. And going back to keeping yourself happy and healthy and well-managed, like, you've got to impart that on them as well, that yes, there's a level of expectation and yes, we want to be competitive, we want to be the best at what we're doing, but I'm not expecting you to have a stomach ulcer at the end of the quarter. And so, one of my favorite lines is, we're selling software, we're not curing cancer. And I can't sort of diminish how competitive as an individual I am. Like, I want nothing more than to to win and be the best in my region or for my region to be the best performing within the vendor I'm working in globally, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't take ourselves too seriously. Like, we've got to have fun in the workplace. We've got to enjoy what we're doing. We've got to build that kind of sustainable success. And so, I think at the manager and rep level, I want people to kind of feel similar to how I do, that I'm working hard, I'm performing hard. I want to enjoy the successes, but I'm coming to work because I'm enjoying myself and I'm learning and I'm kicking some goals. I don't want to have an environment where people are kind of stressed out of their minds and super anxious or not able to show up the way they want to be in the workplace. And I think those things ultimately lead to long-term sustained success because people feel good about what they're doing. They can show up in their best way. They're operating with a longer-term view a lot of the time as well. So, I don't know, Priya, if that's quite answering your question, but that's sort of what's coming top of mind.

Yes, and definitely, because I'm thinking back to the time when I was working with 5 or 6 of the managers, both in the sales and the solution consulting team at ServiceNow, when it went from double digits to hundreds. I think it was 70 to about 300 employees at that time, that earlier stage of growth. I must have placed about 15, 20 people and kept in touch with them. One of the things I kept hearing from them was this combination between, you know, there were— it was a great environment where there was, you know, the team was geared to win and there were— there was a high degree of drive, but at the same time, there was very good retention. You know, we didn't see Like, I have seen, without naming names, some companies where there's a high level of churn because there's, we've got to triple, you know, we've got to triple our revenue in 2 years, for example. So, how do you manage, you know, high demands, high targets, driving a team to achieve those whilst keeping turnover low, retention and satisfaction high?

Yeah, like, I think it's partly environmental. Like, if you're in a good place and the company's growing and you've got got a distinct competitive advantage, like that makes life a lot easier than perhaps if you're in a vendor where you're in somewhat of a structural decline and there's a lot of headwinds. Like those places are just fundamentally more difficult to operate in than perhaps faster growing vendors that are taking advantage of some more industry tailwinds. But beyond that, I think it's about, as you say, creating that environment where people feel happy, that they feel connected to a team and feel connected to a purpose. And so, I think that's something that I and the leadership teams that I've worked with have put a very conscious focus on, that it gets pretty boring if all you're measuring is the numbers sort of week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter. It's Groundhog Day. And so, you've got to connect to some sense of purpose, whether that's the customer impact you're making or whether that's the scale of team and career trajectory that you can achieve, but you've got to connect to some more medium and long-term sense of purpose and outcome. And, you know, that's a mixture of things. I think it's ideally, it's sort of customer-oriented where you're helping them change something and you really buy into the change you're making there. Or you're buying into more personal-level goals that you can see a trajectory to change your career, or you can see a path where you can buy your first house or whatever that might be. But you've got to kind of I think find things to attach to that go well beyond the current quarter you're in. Otherwise, it does feel a lot like Groundhog Day and you're sort of grinding it out. And then I think in an environment, as much as possible, there's always people that are great at a certain stage of a company's life. Like, they're really good in a small environment. They're good at kind of taking on everything. They can manage their own contract negotiations. They can do their own security reviews. They're writing professional services, contracting, they're doing it all. That's a different skill set to where you're at a point where you need a bunch of client directors who know how to work with the big GSIs, know how to manage exec relations. It's a very, very different skill set. And I think part of what we've got to be good at is helping people evolve along the way and continuing to find that person's probably no longer best suited in the role that we originally hired them in, but they're a great individual, they've got a lot of corporate knowledge, they get on well with it. Like, what else can we find that person to do? And I think being really thoughtful about how do we try to continue to evolve the organization and take advantage of those people and their skills. And I think that's something that I and, again, the leadership teams I've worked with have had a really conscious mind to of, you know, what is the time to move that person from an account manager into a some sort of specialist or an enablement role or whatever it might be, because you want to try to bring the organization with you as opposed to have to keep refreshing for the time and place you're in at that particular stage of life.

Yeah, that's so essential because, case in point, I was actually talking to a VP earlier today who started in an APAC role. And I said, how did this come about? And he said, well, the CRO that I have just gone to work for had approached me a couple of years back at a much, much larger organization. And I knew at the outset that that organization was just too large for where I am most effective. And so, he said that at that time, we agreed and parted as friends. And as that person moved into the CRO, moved into a more scale-up type of organization, and they came you know, knocking on the door. He said it was not only that it was the right fit, but it was also— and I'll underline this— the clarity of the mission. And he said it was the mission and the purpose that, you know, just, it made me say yes. So, my question to you is that at an individual, the manager and rep level, which often is the bedrock of, uh, you know, larger revenue accomplishments. How does the manager help the rep have clarity about both their personal, you know, goals and clarity about the vision? Because sometimes it's, it's not that people aren't motivated, it's just that they lack clarity about why they exist, what they're doing. And how, how would you— what would you say to managers? How do they help their reps get that clarity?

Yeah. That's probably a difficult question. But maybe first off, just to kind of comment on the role of that first-line manager. Again, I remember a CRO commenting on one of his trips to Australia that that is the most important critical role in an organization. And I 100% agree with that, that that first-line manager is really where it's all at. And, you know, Any success I've had along the journey has largely been because of the quality of that. And second as well, but that first-line leadership and management role is really where it all happens. Like, that's where the company vision gets translated into execution in the field. It's where the field gets to translate that back up the chain and explain what's really going on. And it all lives and dies really with that first-line manager and the quality of those people and how well they—

Yeah.

find that balance. And it is a really interesting juggle to get the most out of the company for the people and get the most out of the people for the company. And that's kind of very, very much frontline for those individuals. So, how do they go about doing it? I think they need to understand both ends of that spectrum. They need to understand their team really well and what their team's personal motivators are, where that team, where those members are kind of really strong, where maybe they've got some growth opportunities. And being mindful about developing those people. And then similarly, they need to be pretty well dialed into what the company's trying to do and align with that. And so that's on the company to set a clear vision. You can have sort of, I guess, more team and geo-based visions that, hey, I want to be, my vertical wants to be the strongest team operating in ANZ or whatever that might be. But I think it's really important for the company to be clear on that vision and then invest the time to make sure the first line and IC are really clear on that. But I think the manager has to do both of those things really, really well. They've got to understand what the company's trying to achieve, push back where it's not right and be loud about that and be forceful about that, but ultimately translate that out into the field in that day-to-day execution. So whenever that customer scenario comes up, they're able to kind of navigate that appropriately, that yes, we could take a short-term view, but hey, we want to do XYZ because that's right for the customer and company longer term and taking the people on that journey. Yeah.

And I think that some of the most successful first-line managers as well as reps that I get to talk to have that connection between what are their personal goals and what are the goals that they're trying to achieve for the customer so that they can take them on that journey whilst achieving their own goals as well. And I think that that really creates that longer tenure, multi-year achievement, you know, personal development, as against the 9 months here and 18 months there bouncing around from role to role because one of those 2 critical components missing.

It's very dependent on where the manager's at in their journey as well. Like there's a very big difference to someone that's 3 months into their first sales management position versus someone that's maybe 5 or 10 years experienced. And, you know, again, I think that's on their manager to help kind of guide how to approach that and making sure that they're getting the support they need as well. Because, you know, I quite often find there'll be managers that are exceptionally good at managing deals and doing various other things. And then just have a complete blind spot about how to navigate territory design or how to navigate sort of difficult conversations in different areas. And again, I think every layer of the organization, you've just got to be clear about where are your team at, what are they really good at, what are maybe things that they need support on. You know, I think that just keeps layering up.

Yeah. Going back to something what you said earlier, you know, for those who have not worked for larger organizations where there is infrastructure to train managers, right? You know, I remember going to manage-the-manager courses at, or workshops at companies like FedEx, where I was a country sales leader. That's not available in smaller scale-ups. My question is, how does a manager develop their management and leadership skills When you don't have that necessarily provided to you in-house, what advice would you have?

Yeah, I think it's a really pertinent point because I don't see a lot of it. For me personally, and I know one of my current managers, we both did the same MBA. And for me, that was a really foundational part of wanting to be a manager and maybe getting some of the tools to be a manager. The time I first moved into a sales leadership role was at Oracle, and they had a great management program and really invested in that. And I appreciate what they did and the sort of investment that a big company like that makes. I think for a lot of the time though, you have to go and self-direct and self-learn. And so, I think I've got a couple of managers that I've worked with that haven't done maybe some of that formal management training, whether that's at a university or in-house and have had to kind of work it out as they go. And by and large, they're sponges, like they learn from those around them. They are typically very successful reps that are moving into a management role. And so they bring a lot of credibility to that management position as they kind of develop their chops and develop their experience a little bit. But I think the advice would be you have to be a sponge and you have to be thoughtful about where you can learn from. And There's usually things that you can learn from other managers. There's hopefully things that you can learn from your own manager. But I think it's also important to think about investing in some more formal training and whether the company provides that or not. You know, good training and good education will always carry you a long way. And it's, it's something I would advocate for, whether you're an IC or a manager, is to think about formal management training in a university environment or elsewhere. But I think— People that don't have maybe some of that formal structure, I think they— the ones that do well are sponges. They're constantly learning. They're listening to Pri's podcast. They're reading books. They're doing whatever just to kind of enable themselves. And I think also I see some people very good at this, that they know they've got a conscious— they're conscious of a gap they've got and they'll go and seek someone out that they think can be an expert to advise them on that. They go and find coaches or enablers for areas that they want to get better at. And sometimes they're conscious of that and sometimes they're maybe not. And that's where, you know, the more senior leadership need to kind of guide people on that. And I find, as I was saying earlier, there's often people that are incredibly competent at a lot of what they do will just have these gaps that sometimes blow you away when you realize they're there, but they need to be worked on. And, you know, territory planning or deal engineering or whatever it might be, you know, are sometimes things that people just haven't had the exposure or structure around previously. And most people are hungry to learn. You just got to kind of point it out to them and give them some steps to follow.

Yes. I really like the word sponge because I was— one of the guests that I had a while back, Simon Horrocks, you know, he came and actually He intentionally shared 5 leaders who made a significant impact on his learning journey. And I think that was brilliant because he really called out people who've actually— he said, most of us are not self-made. We've been lucky or we've chosen mentors formally or informally along the way whom we were going to watch, we're going to listen, we're going to allow their words to shape who we are. Because he is exceptionally successful at what he does with the companies that he's worked at. But I thought that was so true that even today, I think when people are so caught up in operational mode that they're not necessarily actively investing in themselves. And that gap that you mentioned sometimes can follow you around from role to role. And when I do reference checks, it's amazing how 5 years on, some of those gaps are still there. So just saying.

Yeah. And just on that, like, I think, yeah, I have approached people in the past and people approach me around being a mentor. And I think my 2 cents on that would be you're not going to find someone that's going to be able to mentor you in a really, really broad sense on everything you want to learn. So just be really targeted about What do you want to learn and find a good mentor for that particular area of expertise or topic? Like, if you see someone that's a fantastic public presenter and you want to learn, like, go and ask them how they do that piece. Or you see someone that's fantastic at negotiating complex contracts, like, go and learn about that specific thing. But be mindful about what it is you actually want from someone as opposed to just deciding that You want person X to be your mentor.

Yes. And I'll just add, somebody said this to me and it stuck with me. And he says that sometimes you have people in your life for a reason, for a season, or a lifetime. And the best thing that you can do is recognize that. And I think that that's really You know, very poignant in terms of being targeted with your mentors and being specific about what you're going to learn from them. Because at some point of time, you know, like they say, don't meet your heroes because they will disappoint you. Because, you know, people are very good at some things and not good at others.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I like the way you phrase that.

We're going to wrap up in the next few minutes, but I'd love to get you— you know, the environment we're in now is different from what it was 2 years back, which was more different from what it was during COVID and then what was the 2016 to 2019 run-up, right? We've gone through so much change. So, in terms of where companies are now in terms of profitable growth, what are some of the things that will help leaders navigate now and the next couple of years? What are your thoughts on how to lead and navigate your teams and give them clarity, purpose, in terms of growth motions, you know, where companies are right now?

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of change. And for me, I'd almost say my time at ServiceNow was largely pre-COVID, and then my time at Miro has been sort of during and post-COVID. And, you know, there's a lot of big differences I've seen in both organizations. So, I would say ServiceNow was quite an almost traditional model the way we set up where we had teams deployed out close to the customer. So, we had people in Brisbane and Canberra and Auckland and Wellington and all around the place versus at Miro as a strategy growing up during COVID most of the meetings or all the meetings were on Zoom. So, we've deployed globally much more of a hub-type setup where we have larger teams aggregated in a single location. So, that's a very different go-to-market design, ServiceNow was much more of an invest and then see what happens kind of mindset. So we'd put a team in place, see what happened, and then whenever we were ready to, we'd expand that team. Miro, I'd say, is much more data-driven, much more kind of engineered for profitability. And so there's probably more science in terms of how you deploy headcount, how you think about the different delineated roles, and how you kind of wire all that together. It's a very, very different I would say, mode of designing the organization and engineering things. I think ultimately, those 2 worlds are almost converging a little bit now where, you know, whilst we were doing— we had this huge pivot to digital marketing and online marketing and away from face-to-face. And, you know, I think there's a lot of good science and thoughtfulness that has come with that. But I think we're now coming back to a world where We need to do more face-to-face. We need to do more physical events. We need to kind of be in front and connecting. We're never going to get away from doing a lot of our customer calls over Zoom. But I think those 2 worlds are kind of colliding in a nice way now in terms of we're sort of coming back to— it's not COVID time and it's not pre-COVID time, but it's kind of like the new time. And, you know, there's a lot more science in the way we go about doing things. We're able to get incredible insights and instrumentation around how our customers are using our product and solution. We're not sort of guessing at what they're doing or what the next steps in that account might be. We've got real science and data that kind of directs what that should be. And so it's a very different way of, I would say, engaging with the customers and the role of AEs and the role of GTM teams is far more data-informed and kind of scientific than it was even 5 years ago. And then the other big thing that I see happening in the workplace now is just the impact of AI. And we're obviously, you know, I think every single vendor on earth has some sort of AI flavor that they're pushing out to their customers. And it's very real. It's having a big impact on customers, but I think it's having a profound impact on go-to-market teams as well. And so, I can see that playing out right now around things like the role of an SDR and the research that account teams do and the way you can leverage different tools to kind of dramatically accelerate that research and target messages to individual personas. It's quite mind-blowing seeing what people are coming up with. And I think as a leader, I've had a bit of an aha moment in the last few months where it's like, I really need to lean into this and not be the old guy in the office that doesn't understand how this stuff is working. And so it's been a really interesting journey for me over the last couple of months of actually leaning in and learning how to write the correct prompts and do things and applying it in and just sitting back before I do something and going, how could I leverage some of the tools that I know I've got available to achieve this task in a better way? And it's actually been a really interesting thing to experience. And it's a great customer conversation as well because all of our customers are going through the same thing. They're under pressure to work out what tools do I use, how do I deploy that, where are the benefits, how do I shape a business case around that? And so I think The whole go-to-market model is evolving pretty quickly. As I said, we're kind of far more data-informed and scientific than we ever used to be even 5 years ago in terms of the usage insights and just the kind of disciplines around being profitable as a company and how we kind of engineer for that. And then the impact of AI, I think, is pretty profound on go-to-market and customer relationships as well. So, All of those things make it super, super interesting. And, you know, back to the sponge, we've all got to be a sponge and kind of learn along the way and be able to adapt to that and make the most of that. But it's definitely interesting times.

You've so well articulated my last question. So, you know, I'm going to throw one bonus question in for my listeners. And looking ahead in the next 2 years, going ahead with the theme that you've talked about, AI, you know, there's been a change in funding, there's been a change in the access of information. We are still— we are in the early stages of yet another wave of transformation. What are 3 to 5 things that you would give advice to yourself even 6 months back or 1 year back? Somebody, you know, in terms of what are the things that you should be focusing on or building in yourself to have both relevance and impact in the next few years?

Relevance and impact. So specific to AI?

Specific to the changing role of a sales leader in a SaaS organization with AI, with all the demands and changes that are happening. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think one of the big changes in leadership generally is the sort of move away from almost experiential-led. And I was sort of certainly Guilty, I would have leveraged that in my ServiceNow tenure previously, where you kind of know what it's going to look like in a year or 2 years or 3 years, and you're able to kind of bring that to the table in terms of, let's design the org this way because I'm pretty sure it's going to end up looking like this in a year's time, and that will set up nicely for that. Or recognizing that, hey, this is probably about the right time to pivot into more of specialization or whatever it might be. I think that still exists and experience is really, really important. But I think more and more what is required in the workplace is more of that sort of facilitation-style leadership where you're able to kind of collaborate around something, bring a lot of data to the fore, and then utilize that to make decisions and kind of guide the organization. I think that is quite different to what it was even just a couple of years ago. And that experience is still critical because there's, you know, the experience is real, but you have to be more and more informed by data and you have to be more and more informed by points of view within the team. And so, I think that facilitation and collaboration leadership style is becoming more and more prevalent and more and more critical because, you know, the past is not necessarily a great indicator of the future, you know, and things are moving So, so fast. The other thing that I would emphasize is just the value of stability, that yes, things are changing incredibly quickly and there's all this data coming at us and there's so many tweaks we can make. But, and that's fine if you're engineering a website or you're engineering a product, but most of what we're doing is engineering people in terms of how they're organized and how they work and how they interface with the customers, and you can't change that too much. And so, I think it's really important to be thoughtful about, is this an initiative or a change or a tweak that is important enough to make in terms of the level of disruption and just the team's ability to kind of absorb things? And I think what I see in a lot of, you know, people I speak to out in the industry is People are pretty tired. They've been running pretty exhausted for a long time. The level of change and speed of that is forever increasing. And so, I think there's huge value in continuity and stability, like continuity in terms of, hey, that rep, let's keep them on that set of accounts if we can, because yeah, look, it might be 2% better if we will move this around and more optimized, but let's keep things stable. And yes, we could do XYZ, but is that a meaningful enough impact? And I think as leaders, again, back to that data, you've got to make informed decisions of what are the things you change as opposed to changing everything constantly. Because I think we're kind of being more and more driven to make a lot of change, and not all of it is absorbable by the people that we're trying to lead.

Fantastic. Dave, I will close with this comment that I got from someone who's worked for you in 2 companies. And he said to me that Dave is one of the most inspiring leaders that I've worked with. And I just want to thank you for your insights because this is going to be really informative and very useful for a number of listeners as they come across this podcast.

So thank you. Thanks, Priya. And I appreciate that quote from my mom that you've just read back to me.

Much appreciated. Thank you.