 We've got another great speaker for you, Navjot Singh. I told you I could pronounce it. Navjot Singh is the managing partner of McKinsey's Boston office. And before you start throwing tomatoes at me for inviting a consultant, I will tell you that Navjot has 15 patents in material science and engineering. He was an inventor and an entrepreneur before joining McKinsey about 15 years ago. And before that, he was at GE. So he brings a wealth of experience, not only on the engineering side, but also on public policy and working with the social and private sector. So again, sticking with a theme of polymaths who have cross-functional roles and are able to bring people from diverse interests together around common goals. Please welcome Navjot. My biggest problem with my name is that I'm into basketball and I'm pretty short in terms of being a center. And people never pass the ball to me. So I said, call me now and give me the ball. And so I think if you can't pronounce my name, Navjot Singh is just fine. I will not talk about DC today. I will not talk about regulations today. If you ask me questions, I'll respond, but I won't. Because I believe innovation happens. And this is a place where it happens. This is an amazing place. Boston is an amazing place. US is an amazing place, and will always be. I believe in that. I'm a perpetual optimist. I was talking to my son who was a teen, 13-year-old. And we were debating the courses he was taking. And he's into history. And I say, why are you saying about history? Let's talk about the future. And of course, we're having a good debate about that. And we're talking about the big disruptions in history. We talk about electricity. We talk about the light bulb. We talk about stock market. We talk about the banking system. We talk about the Constitution. We talk about many things. And then we begin to talk about which civilization, or which empire, really changed the world or had the biggest contributions. And we debated many of them. But the one that jumped to our mind, and he's a Roman history geek at times, was the Roman Empire. And if you think about the Roman Empire at that time, the amount of contributions that it made and the actual innovations that came out of that are just amazing. So for those of you who may not know, the sewers, the aqueducts, medicine, the Roman numerals, newspapers were all invented around that time, which we all remember for. Now some of us will say, this is old economy. We don't talk about sewers and aqueducts and all that. And that is true. We talk about Mars. We talk about space. We talk about drones. We talk about all kinds of amazing things. But if you look back and say, how come one society in 250 or 300 years was able to contribute so much? And the one thesis out there, it's about openness. It's about openness to ideas. It's about investments. It's about being able to gather a group of people together and make new things happen and having the pride, the courage to be able to do all of this. This is in contrast with other parts of the world where at the same time, 250 years, and I won't name which ones, some of the progress was not as great, at least on the whole innovation side. Here is a cup. And there are two cups, which were 250 years apart. And they don't have as much to contribute in terms of, or as much talk about in terms of actual innovation. Of course, you would say one of them is blue, one of them is nice, and it depends upon either the very, very, very big viewholder. But their focus was much more on their culture and being much more closed. And we would argue that openness does matter. And it is one of the key components of driving innovation, diversity, and bringing all kinds of ideas in to make things happen, and then investing at scale. Now, this is the last place I want to come and talk about innovation. Because you guys are the heartbeat and the whole epicenter of that. I did at some point toy about the idea of writing a book on innovation. And I quickly went on to Amazon and did a search. Can anybody guess how many books on innovation are there in Amazon? Any guess? 60,000. You're close. It's 350,000. They will teach you. So if you ever want to learn, please pick up one of these books or a few of these books. You can spend your whole life reading about innovation. So I will not complicate by another perspective and ideas and thoughts. But I will definitely not write a book. But I think it's useful to reflect on three or four trends that are shaping the word right now, which we are enthusiastic about. First is data agent platforms. And of course, when you talk about data, everybody talks about Google and Facebook and everything else. But in the old industry, I'm an engineer. In the old industrial world, data has changed the world in massive ways. Look at agriculture. John Deere out here, it's just not about tractors that mow or just harvest. They've got sensors on them. They've got sensors that can sense the soil temperature, moisture, nutrients, which can go up to apps. And you can have this scientist analyze them, and you can figure out what is going on. And you can come up with precision agriculture. This is something that would not have happened a long time ago. My favorite is working with an appartment paper car company. They buy wood all the time. You can't make paper without buying wood. Now how do you bring innovation to them? Now what we found was we went in to do some procurement work with them. And we found that the price versus volume curve is flat. And you guys are like Sloanis out here. And you know, price versus volume curve being flat is rare. And we said, why is that going on? And then we dug in and dug in and dug in and looked at years and decades of data that they had. And what we found was it depends on multiple reasons. It depends on the type of the wood. It depends on how many mills are there. It depends upon the temperature of the day. It depends on the slush on the ground, because somebody has to fall the tree and bring it out. It depends upon where it was like fallen. And then it also depends upon the driver who's driving the wood into the mill. And they look at the inventory levels that are open. And if the inventory is slight, the jack of the price, if the inventory is high, they bring the price down. And hence, price versus volume is flat. So what we did was we applied artificial intelligence. And we were able to model 110 different nodes. That depending upon this type of wood, depending on the temperature of the day, here is the right price you should be paying. And now there's an app that the buyers have that as the truck drives in, they can enter a few things and they know what's the right price they should be paying. So while we all get enamored by the fancy stuff, even in the old economy, there are massive changes that are happening. And data and platform does matter. And how do you leverage that counts a lot. Next one is IP. And of course, intellectual property does matter a lot. By the way, in the context of 350,000 books on innovation, does anybody know how many US patents a year? How many US patents get filed? Bang on, 550,000 a year. And if anybody likes to really read, I would say read a patent. Look at the claims. They are much more useful at times. And look at what is going on. And focus on the actual inventions of interest. Because if you think you have a good idea, most likely it has been invented before. I can guarantee you that. And if it does not, please file your IP. But the reason why we actually talk about this is it's about partnerships. It's just on the IP. This is what we live living in, where partnerships matter a lot. We just have one case example here, BMW, Audi, and Daimler Daimler. Just imagine Google and Apple controlling the interface in terms of maps. If you're into automotive, imagine a lot of data that resides right there. And they chose to invest in a Nokia, like that's been out here, to be able to get access to a mapping software. Imagine three major players putting the resources together and going after a very different type of partnership. I live in the pharmaceutical world. I live with a lot of biotechs. If you look at pharmaceuticals, almost 60% of the pipeline of large pharma originated from somewhere else. 60% of the late-stage pipeline is coming from elsewhere. So partnerships are becoming even more critical. I'm sure all of you like to play with the Legos or your kids, I hope so. I had the pleasure of witnessing a speech from the Legos, like see one of the conferences. He's also a McKinsey alum, and he really is enjoying himself. But I think the few things I picked away from that was they just focus on one big thing. It is not about 100 different things that they're doing. But the amount of research that they're doing around the neurological aspects of that for kids is just mind-blowing. But they're also mining the crowds. Have you guys been to a Legos site and contributed any ideas yet? If you have not, maybe you should. Because if your idea is liked by other people, I think there's 10,000 people, they may take it up. And then they may commercialize it. And if that happens, one person of their sales are yours. And some of the best of Legos have come from ideas that were crowdsourced. Now, you don't think about the crowdsourcing because of many other things you talk about. But crowdsourcing is happening in the old economy also in massive ways. And I'm not saying Legos is the actual economy, but crowdsourcing has become a very critical part of it. And then the speed of the speed has to show above working. So this is like satellite on the left. It takes one to three years to build. Now, one web is talking about making in one to three days. Have you guys heard of one web here? They're talking about putting 900 satellites up, which are made at this space so that they can cover almost the whole world. So if you've seen the live Verizon ads, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? It will almost not be required. Because if that works, they will just transform the whole place. And they can put many more like satellites in a very short time, and this is a major innovation. I didn't put Big Uber and others, because you all know about that. But in the old engineering way, there are massive innovations that are going on. So how are we applying this to at McKinsey? McKinsey was founded almost 90 years ago by James O. McKinsey, who unfortunately passed away in almost 8 years afterwards. And then Marvin Barr on the left lectured us for the longest time. And Marvin really got us focused on our values. And our values are about impact and about great people. And hence, we want the world's best people, and we'll fight for them. And we want to focus on sustainable climate impact. And those values have not changed and will never change for us. I mean, if I had spent a full day talking about those, because that's our core. But what we've added on, what you may not know, is that we have an ongoing effort on what we call McKinsey Ventures for the longest time, where we are venturing a lot more. We have made almost 13 acquisitions, five equity stakes. We have invested in design. We are the fourth largest design firm right now. We have 800 data-like scientists. We have some of the best platforms there. We have an annual or a biannual venture compilation where our 14,000 folks who are just amazing, we hired some of the very best. If they have an idea, they can contribute to it. And we fund some of them. And they are eight-line experiments ongoing. So McKinsey is just evolving in massive ways. And if you just thought about McKinsey as a place where you make PowerPoint slides, likely you don't know what we are today. But as we went on this journey ourselves, there was some lessons learned, which I think are relevant for the topic here. One is, how do you stay true to your core? What is your core? Our values are our core. Impact is core. You don't need PowerPoint slides for impact. You need impact for impact and how to drive the impact. And how do you not deviate from that? And how do you have the top CEO mindset while you're driving all of those change? That was one of the critical issues that we have right now. And we'll keep working on that. We've come a long way. But that is always a question that people ask. And I think that's true for any company also as to what is our core and what we want to do. Next one is, how do you trial and error at speed? How do you get multiple experiments going? Because by the time you build a business plan, in my mind, I'm sure all our VVVCs you worry about plans. Plans I can assure you in the VC stage are likely wrong. Because things evolve so much. By the time you build a plan and you have all of these things, things have evolved rapidly. How do you just get going? So we want to create an infrastructure where if you have an idea, just go do it. In front of the Boston office, we often say there's a 90% chance. We will not say no. So why do you even ask? Just go do it. And if it works great, we'll make you a hero. If it fails, go on to the next experiment. But how do you experiment at speed matters a lot? And people will often say, oh, we don't want to have 1,000 flowers bloom. You know what? No one has 1,000 flowers. They're good flowers. People have ideas, but they're not flowers yet. I would be fine with 1,000 flowers. They're hardly 1,500 flowers, right? But you don't want to have the randomness, but you do want creativity. You want people to go off and actually experiment. The last one is, look, it's all about people. And this is our design team over here. And you wouldn't have thought McKinsey is a place where something happens. But I would say innovation is all about people. People talk about Apple. I think about Steve Jobs. People talk about Microsoft. I think about Bill Gates. There were some big innovators that made things happen. And those guys often have the track record also. They keep doing it again and again. So attracting the right talent. And I would say that three groups of those, there's a 0 to 1 who can bring an idea from an idea stage to making it somewhat real. Then we call it 1 to 10 that can make it from 1% to like 10% of opportunity. Far tougher, but you can do that too. 10 to 100 is the easier one. And how in the organization can you groom the 0 to 1 and the 1 to 10s and take care of them? That is a big issue we have. So I think all I would like to close by saying is that I think the question should be asking is, are you worrying about data? And how are you taking care of that? What type of partnerships you are talking about? How are you crowdsourcing these ideas? How do you go off and move at speed because you'll likely be disrupted? And how do you stay to your core? And how do you experiment with speed? And also, how do you attract the very, very best people because it's all about people? So on that note, I will end to say I hope we will be remembered for being Boston and just not Rome. And we will be remembered for going to Mars. And that is what history is going to write about us. Thank you.