 Hi there. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are joining us from and we have something really exciting lined up for you. But before we get on to that, let me introduce myself. My name is Abhijit Bhaduri. I'm the author of the book Dreamers and Unicorns and I also work as a leadership coach and I work with individuals and organizations to help them shape their social media strategy. Well, today I have a really interesting guest and the reason why I found the gentleman really interesting is he's written a book called, he's written a manifesto called the Co-Innovation Manifesto, which I thought was a little odd because in this world where everybody's competing with everybody else, does co-innovation really work and how does it work? And when I was digging deeper into that, I found some really interesting case studies where his company has worked with some of the largest players in the world and we'll talk about some of them because I want to say some of the questions for the tough questions for Keith Schwartz and without any further ado, let me just invite Keith. Yeah, wherever you are as I say that people join us from all over the world, so wherever they are. Keith, where are you joining us from today? I am in my home office here in Chicago, Illinois in the U.S. so it's about 8 a.m. here and really pleased to have an opportunity to check with you today. So are you fully geared up with your morning cup of coffee or are you still? I might need a little bit later to get me to noon but yeah, I'm feeling good. Okay, so thank you so much for joining us. Keith, I started the conversation by saying that when I came across this whole concept of co-innovation which I'm going to of course ask you about. But when I read that, I was a little skeptical because when you think about this work today which is so competitive, everybody is really competing with the others or everything. Does it really pay to create a co-innovation strategy and how do you do it without competing? What kind of partners will help you do that? So I just thought why not talk to you about it and of course I'm going to also talk to you about the co-innovation manifesto. But before all of that, I want to get people familiar with your company Bounteous. How did that come about? Tell me what Bounteous does and how do you get involved in this and were you an employee? Did you start it? What was it like? Yeah, great. Thank you. I am the co-founder of the company. A little bit about my background. I'm a software engineer by training. I studied computer science and I've been involved in consulting really since the dawn of the internet. I started my first company in the mid-90s before the commercial internet had come around. At that point in time I was building what we called client server systems. But our company back then built a number of very prominent digital businesses. We were known as a company that could take an idea and turn it into a fully functioning digital business. Some of our clients are still around which is not everyone can say that in the dot-com era. We built brands like apartments.com and arc.com. The firm grew very rapidly and we learned so much through that process. That company was started. I started with my co-founder, Phil Hollier. We sold the business and we worked for the acquiring company for a number of years. But in 2003 the business was sold and we were able to kind of think a little bit more about our future. We decided we wanted to go back into doing the work that we're doing. We view our work as very consultative. We're trying to work with businesses, understand their problems and then use technology, design, marketing, and data to make a difference. We view our mission as to help our clients compete and win. We believe all these digital technologies are there to advance business competitive positioning. It takes a firm with a broad skill set to bring all the competencies to bear that are needed to make a difference. That was a little bit of the genesis of why we wanted to create the company. If you had to explain the nature of your company to somebody who doesn't quite understand these complex things, what would you say your company does? I mean, in a very simple couple of words, what would you say your company does? Well, I would say we use digital technologies to improve the competitive positioning of our clients. We have some famous case studies with customers like Domino's Pizza. That's always fun to talk about no matter where you go in the world. People are familiar with things like the Pizza Tracker and the Pizza Builder. We began working with them in 2005. They weren't any online ordering. They had really just a corporate website and we had built some technology to help them with their call center. We were able to take an order over the browser and get it into their stores. That started their whole journey with digital transformation. It's really using this type of technology to help customers sell and engage, acquire customers sell and engage more with their clients. So when you think about the technology that goes behind, let's say when people talk about digital transformation, one of the questions really is that, how do you know that you've gone through the transformation? Is it something that ever gets over or is it a sort of ongoing loop? What way would you describe it? As you said, Domino's Pizza started off with just this one problem of how you take an order over the net and get to the call center. These two kind of ways and you added it probably to the telephone ordering system. So then is that what you would define as the beginning of transformation or that's the complete transformation? I think transformation, I don't think you're ever really quite done as you said, the outset, we live in a competitive world. So you can invest and you can build digital experiences and you can attain a leadership position. But if you rest on your laurels and aren't continuing trying to innovate, people will catch up over time. It's one of the points that I try to make in the manifesto is that businesses really need to aim high. They need to say, I think we want to be category leaders and it's important to kind of proclaim that, to kind of keep yourself honest about where you are because if you're really not first in your space, you're playing catch up a little bit and you may obtain that leadership position but to keep it, you need to kind of continue to invest and innovate. So is that what Domino's did? So they've been on it, that you did which was called Anywhere, where it's spelled as W-A-R-E. Yes, I just found that fascinating. Tell me about how that happened. Yeah, so a little bit of the history there. I mentioned we started with them in 2005. We helped build online ordering. It was mostly focused on the US at the time, rolled it out to about 5,000 stores. It became a really big, it became a billion dollar channel for them in a very short period of time and their board realized like this is kind of the future of the company. So they really started investing in a digital team and although we had done all of the development work to start with, we recognized that this is a natural evolution of the business and we wanted to enable them to continue to do that. So over time, they used to have a still leadership position but I think they're a great example of not resting on their laurels and they came up with the Anywhere strategy of being able to order through all these different channels. A lot of them are really fun. You can tweet a pizza emoji and get your pizza sent to you and they do things with Amazon and Alexa and a number of things along those lines. Some of them might have been negative ROI as a channel. It took a little bit to build but it really became part of the brand. It became a fun brand. Young people love them. They become known for that worldwide. So for a country which is so young like India is today, you look at it's a very, very young country. So would it be fair to say that for a country like India, if a brand has to be relevant to the young people, they need to be digital? Is that a fair conclusion one should draw? I would say for most brands, if you are interfacing obviously with consumers, that's the beautiful thing about digital and the challenging thing about digital. There's a lot of disruptors, a lot of innovators. If you build a quality experience, it doesn't take long to build an audience. You see with social media today, TikTok is something that didn't exist a couple years ago and all the younger folks, that's their preferred channel. So you need to continually I think build and innovate and connect with consumers digitally. If you do a good job, they'll be loyal to you. If you lag, I say business is a competition and digital business is a competition in public. It's like running a race and all your friends are there to see. So there's really no question of where you stand and that's why it's so important to commit to being a category leader because you need to be honest with yourself where you are and continue to double down and reinvest to stay relevant, I believe. Thanks. For the benefit of our listeners, I just wanted to just recap and say that we are live with Keith Schwartz, the CEO of the firm Bounteous and we are really talking to him about his manifesto which is called the Co-Innovation Manifesto. So before we go on to that, we have a question from one of our listeners, Sri Ram Devi Nanduru wants to ask this question. What impact can be built into people's lives by using innovation? That's a question for you Keith. So he says, what is that impact that innovation will have an average person's life? I think it's limitless. If you look at all the things that exist in the world, these are all ideas at some point that didn't exist, weren't there? That's the beautiful thing about innovation. It really never ends. So medical advances, there's social advances, there's fun and entertainment. All these things have been enhanced by digital. I think if you're a professional and you work in it as a career, the nice thing about innovation is you're constantly learning and constantly growing and that's what's made my job fun. I started out as a programmer and I got to build things and as I've gotten bigger and older, now building companies, not just applications, but there's always new challenges. That's why this field is so exciting digital because it's a constant chance to learn and do something different. So I would say the impact on people's lives is honestly limitless. What does Bounteous mean? Why did you choose that name? That's a great question. So our original name was called HS2 Solutions and I had a co-founder called Phil Hollier and I was Keith Schwartz. So HS was the H&S and it was our second company. I talked a little bit about starting a company even before the dot-com era, but we wanted to create a more modern name for our company. So we went through a little bit of search and we were looking for something that spoke to both who we are and what we do. Bounteous is a real word. It means both charitable and giving. We wanted that to reflect that in our culture. We want to be a very open place and warm place to work. We want to be very giving and free with our knowledge and it also means abundant and that's a lot of what we're trying to do for our customers. We're trying to create abundance, more sales, more opportunities and more growth. So we chose that name and we rebranded the company in 2018. We've had a great reaction. It's a fun brand and I'm glad we picked the name. So I wanted to dive straight into the manifesto. What is a manifesto? Why is it different from let's say a playbook? Why would you have called it a co-innovation playbook or is it the same thing but a different word? I think a manifesto is a kind of a call to action at times and provocative. I wrote this early in the pandemic and I thought we were already seeing signs that companies were doubling down and really recognizing like now is the time. We got engaged with our customers differently. Digital was obviously safe. You saw that in industries like the restaurant industry and many others. So that was the thought about writing the manifesto or calling it a manifesto. The thinking with it, I love working with clients and I've been doing this for 25 years and the fun thing about digital businesses is they often are the core to the business. So you get to work with the CEO. It's strategic. You're trying to make a really big difference for clients. I've seen customers like Domino's just have a phenomenal amount of success. I've had some clients over the years that maybe didn't embrace all the principles were outlined in the manifesto and I wanted an opportunity to share what I think is maybe the difference between people that have been successful with these transformation and innovation initiatives and some of the companies that have lagged a little bit. And I thought hard about it and boiled it down to a set of principles that I thought people might take some things away from. So when you say one of your principles was that you need to be a category leader. But is it possible for everyone to be a category leader whoever gets into digital transformation? How likely is it that the person would be a category leader because not everybody is going to be a multi-billion dollar business. Some people would just be a neighborhood store or should we say that the neighborhood store can never go digital. So therefore it doesn't matter. Is that how you would describe it? Well I think category leadership. Business is competitive. It's competition. And I would say if you're going to enter a race or a game it's setting your sights to try to win and think about what you need to do to prepare to win. I mean everyone wants to win. Everyone would love to be a category leader. But there's a degree of preparation and focus and tenacity and planning that's needed when you look at people that are successful in that. One of the things I brought up there is sometimes in our consulting we'll see clients that I don't know maybe have an idea that they need to check some boxes. They're like well we're going to get involved in digital. We're going to build a website. We're going to do enable online ordering. We're going to build an application. And that becomes the definition of success. It's like okay I need to complete these tasks and this will be our digital transformation. But we really believe that's kind of the start. You've now entered the game a little bit and you really need to be looking at trying to become a category leader. And one of the reasons is switching in digital is so easy. We all know you can go to a website and try to buy a product and if you get frustrated and stuck in the checkout funnel you're just a couple clicks away from going to a competitor. So I think that's a little bit of the thinking in trying to encourage organizations to kind of set their goals high. Not everyone will get there of course. But I think as humans you do want to give it your all and try to do your best. And if you kind of get in that mindset I think companies will generally do a better job. Your principle, another element that I resonated with a lot was about finding the best talent. And I wrote about it in my post today that when you look at today we've seen the $10 billion IPO of Freshworks. And when you look at their website they talk a lot about talent. And in some senses I kind of found a lot of similarity between the way Bounteous thinks about talent and how Freshworks has done it. I mean it's really fabulous because eventually the only way that you can actually go through this transformation is by having the right talent. And digital talent is that much tougher because everybody's competing for exactly the same set. It's a small pool and everyone's competing. So in which case how would you, what do your clients do, what have you told them to do? Are you referring to having the best talent with Bounteous or with your client or with both? How does it work? It's both and I think that's really why one of the key things and insights into the co-innovation. I think short of like digitally native businesses like Google and Apple, Facebook, it's really hard for the average business if you're in insurance or in another category to get the very best digital talent. And so if you understand that when you think about, okay how am I going to digital transform? How am I going to build an experience that's differentiated? You start to think about, well I probably need a partner to bring in some of the talent that I'm not going to be world-class at attracting. And so a company like Bounteous and our competitors, we get lots and lots of practice at building experiences and that can attract talent. I believe talent attracts talent. People want to work and learn from others and if you can build a little bit of mass, you build a little bit of a brand around it, it just gets easier to build that. At the same time, we're not experts in every single industry and our clients are generally going to know their competitors well. They're going to know have insights about their customers and really building a co-innovation partnership is how do you leverage the best talent in both organizations. I've sometimes seen companies feel like, okay we're going to get into this digital thing and I'm going to build a hip new office, a wing in our office and we're going to hire a few people and it can be really, really hard if you don't have that brand and you don't have that reputation. And so that's a little bit of what we're trying to coach, I think, organizations to think about. Can I compete for the talent? What talent can I truly have? And companies want to retain their knowledge capital and I think that's a big thing that I see in consulting that's super important. I mean, when you work with a client for the second year and the third year and you sort of know how to work together, you understand the business better, you're more valuable to them. It's super important, I think, with talent retention both for companies internally and for when you're picking a provider to know that you can have kind of a long-term team working with you. I think we've all seen that in our lives, right? You get better with more iterations and more practice. And in a time when we are looking at as we speak, that is what is called the great resignation. In years alone, there are 10 million open jobs and there are people who are sort of looking at all this. So how do you keep the talent? How do you retain talent? How do you keep them engaged? How do you make sure they stay with you long-term and it's not a transactional relationship? What are some of your ideas you would like to share with our viewers? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's a lot of things that are fundamental. I think individuals need to feel that there's growth and opportunity for where they're at and that will continue. So providing challenging work, interesting work that's in a non-stagnant environment is super important. Culture is vitally important. We really believe in transparency and trying to empower people. I think the more you can share in an organization about what's going well and the challenges that you have, I think people respond well to that. So there needs to be a real relationship between the company and their team. And I think when your people understand that you're on their side, you've got their back, you'll support them in tough times and whatnot, I think you have a better chance really of retaining talent. I see sometimes organizations have a little bit more of a top-down mentality. We have rules, we have certain things that we can't do. We really believe in, I spent a lot of time inside our company talking about trying to develop understanding. I think when individuals on teams, maybe there's some degree of conflict or whatnot, try to understand the other side and sometimes you need to have some challenging conversations. If you've built up some trust, if you've built up a little bit of emotional safety, you can go in and talk to someone and you're not going to see I die 100% of the time. But when you've been able to do that over time, you can get through those things and that can really go a long way in retaining your talent. You started your life as a programmer and when you are talking about all this importance of talking to people and having these conversations, most of the times the challenge that I sometimes the tech leaders that I've worked with, they say technology is simple because everything is binary, either works or it doesn't work. With human beings, there's nothing which is binary, everything is great, maybe somewhat, perhaps. So this is what is most frustrating. Do you feel the same way because you're a programmer and you feel sometimes human beings would be binary? Would that be fun? I don't know if that would be fun. I like the variety of humans. That's where it's sort of like trying to really understand because I think sometimes you look at how someone reacts to a situation and you think about maybe how you would do that, but often they have other information. I think one of the great things that's prepared me maybe to run a company at some point being as a software engineer was just how software teams interact and they're very non-hierarchical. They're really about solving problems and you could be young, you could be old, it doesn't matter how you look. People bring ideas to the table and it's sort of demonstrable. At some point, if you've been involved in a software team, they're team members that are super productive, they get a lot done, they solve the hard problems, they're coaching and leading others and it doesn't really matter who you are and that's something we've tried to bring into our culture. We've tried to keep our organization very flat. I'm involved in a lot of teams in the company and many of those teams, I'm not the expert. I'm more of the student than the teacher and I think if you have that in your mind, if you're intellectually honest that you can learn from others, I think you can build a really good culture. I think people like that and you'll also have a better chance of retaining your talent. Perfect. We have a question here from Priya Rajan joins us through a Facebook group. He's asking this question, could you specify and elaborate on the skills and the domain experience of talent which you need for digital transformation in a consumer product or perhaps a services business? Are they different or are they the same? How would you describe it? That's a great question. I like to say that we hire in our company hundreds and hundreds of craftspeople and there's all these different crafts that are needed to really build digital products, digital experiences. Design is a craft. There's visual design and information architecture, user experience, copywriting. There's all a set of crafts there. Technology, there's lots and lots of crafts. There's architecture and development and quality assurance and lots and lots of different languages and skills and platforms. Each are kind of their own crafts. Analytics is a craft. Strategy is a craft. Project management is a craft. What we've tried to do as a company is hire people and have them aspire to be the best in their craft but also recognize that all the work that we're doing is really in service of our customers. The North Star is the client. The North Star is to try to make the client a category leader. At some point you need to understand your craft in that context. I think we've all heard stories about sometimes there's organizations. We hear this time for our clients. Maybe the technology organization feels like they have to have the latest technology and everything and they lose sight a little bit of the fact that it's expensive or they're constantly changing it and it really needs to be there to support the business. There are lots and lots of crafts folks that are needed. That's what makes this field exciting is because you can also start in one area and build breadth and you can also build a great deal of depth depending on your career aspirations. Thanks. One of the elements of the co-innovation manifesto talks about the importance of speed and I also want to build it in with another element that you talked about which is you expect change because you plan for it and that's how you build agility. One of the things that comes to my mind is when you are trying to sort of expect change, you know the road is going to turn left or right, you're not sure visibility is poor, you automatically slow down. So how does speed and agility sort of coexist when it's a sort of ever changing world? How would they happen? Give me an example of that. Yeah so I think speed, look we're again in a competitive world if you're trying to build a better product than your customers we all know like if a business gets there first you can sort of build a competitive advantage, you can build an audience, you can build brand recognition. So as companies going through digital transformation think about it, they need to think about okay how am I going to accelerate my pace and some of that's like having talent, having the right craftspeople, having them at scale and trying to move forward quickly. The other thing with the agility and expecting change, I mean the world changes so rapidly right? I mean look just look at the last two years. It's been no one new and you know late in 2019 what was coming in 2020 and here we are in 2021 and I don't think we have known all the events of the year and so I see some businesses maybe try to over plan right? They try to have a three-year roadmap and you know at some point I believe especially in digital like long-term planning there's diminishing marginal returns. It's very hard to know you know 18 months is a pretty long time horizon and that's where I think agile and agile methodologies it's so so important and that's the really unique thing about digital is you can relatively quickly build products and get them out in the world and get people testing and using them and use the information and insights you can gain from that and adapt your plan and so I think businesses just have to take this as a mindset that you know you're not going to design a solution from A to Z and get it right especially one that might take you know months and months to build. So speed is important and you want to be able to iterate quickly right but the change part is you need to like measure where you are all the time so you can tell if your iterations are trending in the right direction or you need to make a bit of a pivot. When you look at an organization and you let's say the problem you're trying to solve for is speed how do you build up speed of decision making in the organization so that's the client you're working with. What are two or three things that you would do you know what are good areas that you would encourage them to look at when you start working because eventually you want to move them in that direction of building speed so yeah I think there's a couple things there you know you want to empower the people that are closest to making the work you know adding layers and layers of approval and you know bureaucracy where people don't feel empowered they need to report back and ask what to do next at every step of the way that's not a recipe for speed so you really want to empower your teams to sort of make progress resources are a big part of it I mean if you want to go faster as an organization you know are you giving are you giving you the teams the resources that they need to help you know accelerate that you know that's that's you know kind of an obvious thing I think the other thing really to sort of go faster is this sort of you know measurement framework we talk a little bit about something we call digital flow which is like you know you need to instrument your digital experiences so you can learn from them over time and there's different ways to go fast I mean one way to go fast is not to be going in the wrong direction so you have to pivot and double back so as you can add resources to teams you can empower them you can try to build products quickly you need to be constantly testing them to tell that you're on the right path I think those are three really simple things every organization can do to prove their speed and if you were to advise your clients about building agility you know is that sort of a precondition to innovate and the reason why I say that is you need to be able to try out multiple things and see what scales up and what doesn't and people like this but not everything and how do you sort of build that mindset in the clients I mean what are some things you recommend yeah I think you know no one can again predict the future so I think you have to plan for it right I think building cycles into your product development mindset understanding that you're you're going to build products and deploy them and test them and learn from them and you know review where you are you know quarterly planning cycles you know goal setting is super important like how will you know you're successful I think it's really important to set those things and you know you can set them in a competitive context if you've adopted the manifesto and you believe it need to be a category leader you can compare yourself to your competitors it can take years right to sort of get there especially if you're a little bit of a laggard but you know those are all important things you know with with measurement to to sort of assess where you are and and continue to go I mean a company like dominoes didn't get where they are by plotting out that they were going to build the pizza tracker and the pizza builder and pizza anywhere in a planning cycle in 2005 they sort of adapted over that you know literally over you know many many years bike but they constantly learned to deploy it and got incrementally better and and now they have an amazing lead over their competition and and dominoes is a particularly good example because you know they moved from you know what what's the code I'm just trying to recall what Patrick Doyle the CEO had said that we have moved from being a pizza company that sells stuff online to an e-commerce company that sells pizza you know it was like an incredible sort of iteration of the vision and and I think you know when I was asking you this whole question of what do you do to build speed and agility I would have added one more element to what you suggested which is you know focusing on your communication cycle you know how where do you communicate how often do you communicate your method of communication what kind of communication is it is it you know so some of it is giving information some of it is you're encouraging people to do that some of it is actually building resilience and I said don't worry about it it's failed so we get try something different so I think I kind of also think that leaders underestimate your how much of time goes into communication I very often find that to be a huge gap in what because most people know how to plan their stuff they know how to you know the financials they've done that most leaders have not looked at this entire world that you describe that you know with each time you have a different platform you know your communication strategy changes and you'll find that your audience has moved let's say from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok and there's you know of course TikTok is banned in India but in many of the places you see that that's there so to be able to sort of fluidly move with those evolving platforms is I think tough so how do you encourage your clients to be able to build those capabilities that's a great question and I think it's a good call out for communication I think you know there's inward a lot of people love to take information in and they sort of assess and if you're analytical like I absorb all this information and I have you know I think a plan or a path forward that's only the start of the job right you need to communicate that you know in communication so much gets lost in you know translation we've heard these mantras like you know you need to tell someone what you're going to tell them you need to tell them and then you can need to tell them what you told them and we've heard things about you know with brands right I mean it's only on the seventh time you've seen a brand where you really it really kind of sticks with you so that's super important and in a great call out you know I think with our clients I think your question was a little bit about how do they how do we adapt when the audience is moving around you know I think have you know that's where measurement and analytics and being data-driven is so so important you know because you can you can be communicating through a channel and and you know luckily in today's world there's lots of ways to sort of measure you know digital interaction to figure out you know if what what your audience is you know also they're just simple things I mean sometimes you need to ask for people to kind of hear it back from them right I mean that's sort of you know you've closed the loop with the communication you you know ask someone to put it in their own words and and ask what what they've heard back you know from from you is an important I think technique when you talked about you're one of the elements that you speak about was go for the best talent and then on the other hand your sixth principal actually talks about mastery when somebody's already at their best I mean why is mastery even in question man I think that's that's the thing I try to point out to to our team all the time that you know you need to stay sharp and it is a struggle I use an example there's an American football player Tom Brady and he is a quarterback he's won seven Super Bowls and he just won his seventh now and I showed our team his game right before the Super Bowl and in the second half you know he threw three interceptions it looked like the team barely won and he had he had a tough game and I'm like here's the guy who's the highest at his craft if you had to say who is the best at their craft he would be in a short list of of humans and it's still a struggle right so you know practice and repetition and I think that that gets into this a little bit in the co-innovation manifesto of like why I believe a lot of organizations need partners that do this all the time you know we have people on our team that have you know I'll take a Monday and think of like deploying a website to servers you know they do this all the time right they they have done it so many times we can do it skillfully and so your website is always up they know the technique to do that if you the very first time you do that you're you haven't mastered that you're you're not going to be able to be good at that so not only do you want to have talent that has the skill and ability to do it like most got people in the NFL are or in a professional sports team have a high degree of skill but you just need to continually hone that and you know practice makes perfect your repetition does matter as humans we can learn and get even better and better at our craft with more practice so that's a little bit of a thought behind you know mastery when you look at professional sports you know the other thing that I always am intrigued by and I say this to a number of my clients that when you look at the best in any sport I mean from a federal to you know you talk about Tom Brady and there are many others I mean cricket has its own set of superheroes and all that it's without exception each one of them has a coach they'll work with them and you know they'll be improving their craft and the coach will sort of really go back and sort of analyze the game talk to them about improving this entire thing on the other hand when you look at businesses in business it's almost you know very rarely do you find people who will voluntarily seek out a coach or a mentor and I think it's such a miss because your game could go up dramatically you know when you're doing that why do people hesitate to do this you know do we have different norms for success in business or why has it in most other fields you would notice yeah that people don't have you know master craftsmen would happily guide the apprentice or even the ones who are slightly less experienced music has the same thing you will work with a you know one of the masters and the gurus and this sort of why not in business what is so I mean I do I do see some people take advantage of that I've had the pleasure and opportunity to work with some fantastic executive coaches and mentors we all have blind spots right we we can't we can't we don't know how we're perceived or maybe gaps in our communication or or whatnot so there's a huge opportunity to sort of take advantage of that and elevate our games I use this quote with our team and it's something along the lines of you know average players want to be left alone you know good players want to be coached and great players want to know the truth and that's you know that's the difference right I mean the people that really really excel they have thick skin they they recognize that their performance isn't always great right and you know people that lean into that and really look for feedback and and you know we have saying that feedback is a gift right when someone's trying to tell you something like there's a reason they're trying to tell that for you I think that that is really really profound and there should be more coaching in the business world for sure what do you do to stay grounded what is your personal methodology of doing that I do I have a coach that I work with I you know I have a board I also have a great leadership team here at the company and you know we have a type of relationship where you know we we can share with each other it's not hierarchical ultimately I'm charged as you know the company I have to be the decider at times and have to make a tough call so it's not you know purely a democracy but you want to work with people that you respect and you know and you see this in professional sports all the time right I mean you see people team members you know describing they'll be on the basketball court or the soccer field and they'll tell someone they're a little bit out of position and sometimes it's a heated and animated conversation but that's all about trying to improve the game and about you know we all have unique insights right there's there's a lack of perspective sometimes with self that you really can improve by taking feedback from others you know when you look at the we are talking so much about talent I will ask you a somewhat different question which is India is you know as we said it's a very young country and it's the hub of an enormous amount of engineering talent and when you look at this talent pool in India you know what is Bounteous planning to do with you know to leverage a talent pool like this what would you want to be doing what's your dream yeah in India you know is just a deep deep ocean of talent in the country you know you can see it here if you look at some of the most esteemed us technology companies being led by people from from India Google and Microsoft and Adobe and others you know the the engineering talent is unquestionable you know we've grown quite a bit as a company and we have how larger you know we're just over 1100 people which includes an exciting announcement we are entering the India market we have just today are announcing publicly we're partnering and have acquired a company called Lister Digital in Chennai which has about 350 people but you know we've seen our customers we have global clients and they you know there's just so much need and we've been hiring you know and trying to build the talent pool in North America we're in Mexico City and Toronto and many many markets in the United States but you know India was a logical place to go to even deepen that talent and so we've been looking at this for a while we found a fantastic company which will allow us to you know continue to recruit here and and and build up build up our team you know the there's so much needed I mean digital transformation there's so much demand today I think everyone in the field knows that you know there's unprecedented growth so having the talent having the ability to you know say yesterday customers and enable things because you have the people to do it is is absolutely phenomenal and in India is just such a wonderful country like the diversity of the people you know it's a little bit easier for us with with you know with English being spoken so ubiquitously so we're super excited we intend to do quite a bit of hiring in India and we're going to start in Chennai and we'll see you know where we are in a couple years I wouldn't be surprised if we're in other cities throughout the country and and what kind of so do you anticipate and you mentioned your partnership with Lista and and do you expect to use Lista to do them you know to do some of the work on the global clients out of India or is this going to be used for you know working with the Indian clients you know that you have what's your approach going to be I think Lista is you know somewhat unique and this was really attracted to us 90 to 95 percent of their customers are US based corporations so that gave us a lot of confidence that you know they had a model that worked for global delivery right they they've worked through the time zone issues they are used to you know standards cultural norms and expectations maybe of US companies so that would make that a little bit easier and they're they are very successful and fast growing company so they're going to continue to serve those clients maybe we can do a little bit more for them with some presence in the US but we have a lot of customers that would do more with us if we had more more people so you know we'll work that out from kind of the other side here and work on a global delivery model at some point we'll do more work with Indian companies you know as there's kind of the end market and Lista is doing a little bit of that today but the predominant driver for this is really to satisfy demand that we have from from our North American customers and is the is the expectation that you know when you sort of when you work with another company from very different company culture different country all together so I I think one of the things I picked up is he said that because Lista already does a lot of work you know bulk of their clients majority 90% of their clients are in US so you kind of expect a degree of comfort in that however when it comes to two companies two different cultures I mean you know your company was born in USA sort of grown from there to other parts of the world here is Lista which is born in India gone to other parts of the world how do you plan to sort of synchronize the culture of the place and how do you sort of do that what are some of the things that you're going to be specifically focused on or careful about yeah you want to keep in mind what would you say I think you know when we when we select a company that we may partner with a company like Lista there's a couple things that are really non-negotiable you know we're looking for thriving and successful companies it's very hard to teach a performance culture if it doesn't really exist and when you find a company like Lista that has you know loyal customers retains their staff customers that give them repeat business is growing is profitable you realize like there's a there's a core there that you know you can kind of work with right I think the other thing is really important is that the management teams have a similar vision for the future right and a similar set of values and you know if those things are in place you have a chance to be successful if those things are not in place it's you know m&a can be can be you know challenging right because there are different cultures even even within two Indian companies or two American companies like people have sort of different norms so I think we try to start there I mean the other thing I believe is I talked about working in software teams and the idea that you know it doesn't matter you know who you know who is ours or who doesn't matter who's right it's more what is right and I think we try to bring that approach into kind of our in our creations with with with new companies sometimes we'll be the teacher and sometimes we'll be the student right and we've we've been very I think excited about what we've seen with with the Lista team they're already beginning to teach us you know some new ways to think about how to you know integrate work across our different domains they have some different organizational models that are interesting to us and we're looking at adopting so I think you need to kind of go into it also with that mindset that both companies can learn from one another you know there's certain things that are just really important right to to certain cultures and you need to know what those are and and respect them because we are I mean we have different backgrounds and experiences and you need to respect those things but I think there's a lot of things that that you can learn and adapt and change and working with others. How does the role of the CEO change as the company expands from one particular country where you started on different countries and as I look at it you know in my book I talk about dreamers where you know you are really in one particular geography you're really trying to make your mark you're trying to find the product market fair etc then you move to the unicorn phase where you really have you know presence across the country in a country like India it's a large place to have national presence and then potentially also start moving into other geographies which is when you really define the category you become the market shaper but in between as you drop off that list you become one of the incumbents and so that's the model. How is the role you know when you look at the story of Bounteous it has grown from very late at some point of time everybody is a dreamer you start small and then you become a unicorn you've sort of moved and now of course you are also a unicorn in the financial sense and then you are expanding globally. How does the role of the CEO shift in that? Yeah that's a great question I you know I think I bring it a little bit back to what you're asking about earlier with communication and I spend a lot more of my time working on communications than ever and I think as a CEO you need to really help hone a vision with your team like what is the vision for the company and you need to continually repeat it to people so we all know like we're we're headed right and it needs to be inspiring it needs to be bold I believe and you know we need to have an audacious future vision for the firm so we're all kind of motivated and aligned that you need to share that with people. I think you need to work on the strategy okay so now you got the vision how we're going to get there and that is also a process of you know a lot of consulting with people I talked about some of the coaches that I have get some feedback on that you know continually hone the strategy own the strategy at some point you have to make some calls and as a CEO you need to you know you need to own it right it's your ultimately your decision so you got to feel good about it but then you know a lot of it is is is communication and sort of cultural modeling right it's a people business I remember early in my career as a college student reading in a business magazine about Ford a Ford Motor Company and they were talking about their new CEO and he was very very successful Ford had had a tough time in the 70s but in the 80s had you know kind of rebounded and over became the world leader in automotive sales and they're asking him a little bit about you know what made him become the CEO and it was interesting as a student you thought it was his intellect or his work ethic or something and he said honestly it's my ability to work with people he goes I can work I've found a way that I can be successful working with anyone and you know that that's kind of stuck with me right you have to meet people where they are and try to get the best out of them and that's a little bit like coaching right on a on a team you've got people with all different skills and you know some people are amazing at some things and weaker and others and I think understanding that and trying to get the best out of her on and meeting them where they are that's a big role I think it was CEO what are the goals that you set for yourself personally you know what is your what do you expect to be doing you know differently in two years 18 months whatever take your pick differently you know I think we're going to continue you know to the company is going to grow we're we're just in a field that's growing so you know I think we're just sort of responding to that trying to elevate other people we need to make you know some some adaptations to our organization as we grow and we go global so I think getting involved you know with that and trying to do a quality job of that is something that's a little bit on my future roadmap and empowering others we have so many talented people in the company we want to find opportunities for for for lots of folks to contribute I've always believed in a flat organization we want to empower people you know down in the org and so we're looking at ways you know training and empowerment and making sure we can communicate our culture and what works for us as we scale as we bring in new people and as we acquire you know companies in other markets such as such as India do you have a last question do you have a phrase that inspires you if so what is that great question I have many phrases that inspire me look I believe I believe I've told my team we have a really unique opportunity in this company we're in a field that's growing we have we have capital backers that believe in us and will give us capital to help grow the firm but what's really exciting is we get to build it right I mean we get to we do we get to do the hard work of architecting the future of the company thinking about what's needed and do that independently and there's you know very few I think teams in the in the world that get that chance so I believe in you know Carpe Diem let's seize the day let's go out and and try to make it happen so thank you thank you so very much Keith wish you all the very best and especially with your new venture out in India with Lister all the very best and thank you so much for joining us here