Welcome to the Investment Conference 2026. I am Patrick du Plessis I'm Shilpi Nanda. We'll be your hosts for today. The topic of this year's conference is: What's a winning culture? In an age where you can copy a competitor's strategy, poach their talent, replicate their technology, culture is the only true competitive advantage. Shilpi, the hardest to build. That's right, Patrick, which is why this conference brings together leaders that have wrestled with the hardest questions about culture. How do you build it, transform it, scale it without losing what makes it special? Perhaps most urgently, as AI reshapes organizations, will your culture keep pace or hold you back? That's what brings us together today. A very warm welcome to everyone present in the room here. To those of you joining us via live stream from around the world, we're happy to have you with us. We have quite the lineup today, each bringing a different answer to what makes a winning culture. Here's how the day unfolds. Four sessions ahead. In part one, we look at the fundamentals. What's a winning culture? Why does it matter? Part 2 tackles transformation. How do you transform culture in established organizations? In part three, we look at high-performance cultures in the age of AI. Part four closes with something special, a live podcast with Jamie Dimon. What better way to end than in In Good Company? Absolutely. To set the stage, I'd like to invite Nicolai to share why culture matters now more than ever. Please welcome Nicolai. Well, I have a confession to make. When I was a bit younger, I loved earnings calls. I loved first quarter calls, second quarter calls, revenue, margin, cash flow. You know, I read balance sheets in bed, a bit like you guys read poetry. Or do you read poetry? I realized that there was something else which was much more important. Where did the numbers come from? What made them change? That's when I realized I needed to spend more time on culture. Numbers, they tell you where a company has been. Culture tells you where it's going. In the fund, we invest NOK 20,000 billion. We are invested in 7,000 companies across the world. When we invest, we have an investment horizon of decades. When we look at who are successful and who fail, we don't look at quarters, we look at many years, many 10s of years. I've been convinced that it's all about culture. Companies, which in many cases look exactly the same, you know, same sneakers, same elevators, same banking products, some of them end up winning and some of them end up bankrupt. We see it everywhere, but of course no more extreme than in the banking sector. Some end up staying for hundreds of years, others are gone. It's not about the balance sheet, it's about the corporate culture. Who do you hire? Who do you fire? How fast do you make decisions? How worried are you about telling the truth to your boss? That's all culture. It's about speed, innovation, risk-taking. Now, let's think about 2007, for instance. In Finland, Nokia, they controlled half the world market for mobile phones. Half the world market. The iPhone was launched. The mid-managers saw the next day that this was a real threat to the business, didn't dare to tell the top management because of fear of failure. Six years later, Nokia, gone because of a culture of fear. Where does culture come from? Well, it comes from the top. I have now, in the In Good Company podcast, spoken to 200 companies. Now, according to my wife, 200 companies is enough, not enough to become a good listener. I'm trying hard. I sit down with the head of Givaudan, and I ask him, "What is your corporate culture?" He says, "You know what? It's about performance. It's about taking the right amount of risk. It's about empathy." I said, "You're just describing yourself, aren't you?" He starts laughing, and he says, "That's exactly why it's working." Basically, culture is coming from the characteristics of a CEO, and it's being transmitted to the corporation. It's not what you write on the wall, it's what you do every day. Now the world is changing faster than any time before, and AI is reshaping all the organizations. It's not a matter of should we adopt AI, it's just a matter of how fast can we adopt it and what is it that prevents us from doing it in the organization. The companies getting it right, they are the companies where people can make a difference straight away, where speed matters more than hierarchy. The ones getting it wrong have cultures built on fear and cultures where it's about this is the way we've always done it. These companies will be gone soon. There is a new term which I love, and that is called high agency people. High agency people. It's people who do original things with speed and with force, and we have a lot of them here today to talk to you. You will see cultures from many different directions, different countries, and different industries. What all these companies have in common is high performance culture and a level of ambition that is world-leading. By the way beyond the type of ambitions we typically see in this country, because here extreme ambition means beating your neighbor to the ski tracks on a Sunday. Ambitions really matter because if you have high ambitions, you achieve great things even if you fail. If you have low ambitions, you achieve nothing even if you succeed. The companies we are meeting today have extraordinary growth, market share gains, return on capital, and it's been going on over decades, and today we are going to learn from them. They are what we in the oil fund call kick ass companies. What better way to start than with David Rubenstein? He co-founded one of the most successful investment companies in the world. He's a master interviewer who has sat down with hundreds of CEOs and politicians. He knows exactly what separates winners from the rest. Please help me welcoming my friend, David Rubenstein. Thank you, Nicolai, very much. I'm happy to be in Oslo. I didn't come here to lobby for a Nobel Peace Prize. If anybody wants to give me one, I'd be happy to take it. If, if Mr. Nobel were still alive today and I had a chance to meet with him, I would say to him, "Well, if you're gonna have a Peace Prize, that's a good idea. Why don't you also have a Peace Prize or a prize for corporate culture?" Companies that are great and create good cultures can change the world just the way great peacemakers can. Think about it, the iPhone that was referenced earlier, the iPhone was maybe one of the most successful consumer products ever, and it has changed the world, as have all smartphones as well, in ways that I think benefit all of us. When you have a great company that produces a great product or great service, it can help the world just the way great peacemaking can help the world. Now, when I was a little boy in Baltimore, Maryland, growing up, I can't honestly say that my role model was a great corporate leader. I was focused on baseball or sports or other things, and little boys in my era wanted to grow up to be sports heroes. Today, younger people in their teenage years probably don't want to be sports heroes as much as they want to be corporate leaders and entrepreneurs, and that has changed the culture of the world. Think about this. In any given year, there'll be roughly 50 million-60 million new companies started. 50 million-60 million new companies started around the world. About 6 million-7 million a year in the U.S., about 8 million a year or so in Europe, and maybe 20 million-25 million are in Asia and other parts of the world as well. 50-some million new companies started. After 1 year, about half of those won't be around, and after another 2 years, another half won't be around, and after another 1 year, about half more won't be around. What companies actually get to be there for 5 years or 10 years or 15 years? Well, they're companies that have charismatic leaders typically. Typically, it starts. A company might start with one or two, even three charismatic leaders that have a vision of what they wanna do. Second, they have a product or a service that they're interested in selling to people and convincing people their lives will be better with that product or service. They are not as focused on making money as they are on getting people to buy into their vision that this product or this service will make people's lives better. They also have a willingness to try to work hard to get to their end and a willingness to make certain that their product and their service will get a fair hearing from around the world. The companies that survive for 5 years and 10 years and 15 years and 20 years are companies that have more than a charismatic leader and a good product or good service. They have incredible culture, and it's culture that enables companies to go from one generation to the next generation. As we all know, very rarely do you see a great company survive the founder's demise. It happens. Steve Jobs is a perfect example of it happening. Steve Jobs started the company in the late 1970s, and he was actually thrown out of the company, thrown out of his own company. He was out of the company for about 14 years before he was brought back. Then he changed the world by a number of products that, and services that Apple developed. When he passed away, he was leaving behind a company many people thought couldn't survive without the founder. Because it had an incredible culture, the company dramatically grew. When Steve died, the market capitalization of the company was about NOK 350 billion. Today, it's about NOK 3.5 trillion, so it's up about 10 times. How did the company go under Tim Cook's leadership to such a incredible place in the world? Well, it's because the culture that Steve Jobs had built was expanded by Tim Cook, and ultimately that culture permeated the entire employee base and entire customer base of the company. What you have sometimes is you have a number of charismatic leaders who build a company. They sometimes can make it go to the next generation, sometimes they cannot. It's very difficult, very difficult to make a company go much better after the founders are gone. It happens from time to time. We don't know, for example, what will happen to Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway was built by one charismatic, brilliant investor, and he made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Now there's a transition, and time will tell whether it works or not. Generally, if you have a good culture, a good culture will enable a company to survive. What is a good culture? It's a good culture that a company has and enables it to survive not for more than five or 10 or 15 years, but 20 or 25 years or beyond, is it's a concern about making certain that the customer comes first, making certain that the employees are treated fairly, making certain that everybody has a chance to succeed and has to be listened to, and make certain that you're producing a product or a service that really people want and really does something useful for society. Producing a culture like that is like your own DNA. Everybody here has the DNA from their parents, and your DNA is really what shapes you to some extent. To some extent, you can improve upon what your parents did. Some cases, maybe you won't improve upon what your parents gave you. Many companies can improve upon what the founders gave them by using the DNA that the founders gave them, and they can even go beyond that. When you're looking at corporate culture, what you have to do is look at what the founders created, but can that founder's culture go beyond when the founders leave the scene? Those are the great companies. The companies that survive for 25 years and 30 years and 40 years and beyond are the companies that people will always emulate and wanna have as role models because they're the ones that have a culture that people admire. They're the ones that put customers first. They're the ones that put employees first. They're the ones that put the people that provide services to the company, the suppliers first. Making certain that you worry about other people more than yourself is the most important thing in corporate culture. In corporate culture, the companies that survive the most and that really prosper are not the ones where the CEO is making the most amount of money or is worried about the amount of money he or she is making. Worrying about other people is what really makes companies survive and do so well. As we look at corporate culture and we talk about it today, just think about this. In the end, the companies that we all wanna have as role models, the companies we all would like to build or invest in, the companies we all think that we'd like to have our children build, as well if they start their own companies, would be ones that have a corporate culture that puts the customer first, that makes sure the employees are treated well, that has a vision of what they wanna do for society to make the company succeed, and make the world a slightly better place. The concern about making money is not the generally the thing that makes a company prosper at the beginning, certainly. You need to have a culture that really drives everybody and having everybody pull together, and that's what. When I'm investing in companies, what I'm looking for is companies that have a culture where people want to come to work, they like working there, they think they're doing something useful for society. Making money is nice measure of success, but it's not the main measure of what a company's all about. As you think about corporate culture and through this conference today, just think about whether these companies that you're gonna hear about are companies that have a culture that you want to have, as you wanna invest with, they're companies you'd like to work at, you'd be proud to have your children work at it, and the kind of companies you wish you had started. 'Cause those are the kind of companies I think that we all wanna have in our portfolio. They're all the kind of companies we wanna have as companies that are trying to make the world a better place, companies that have a good and everlasting corporate culture that really will survive the founders and that will ultimately make everybody think they're producing a product or service that makes the world a better place. Thank you very much. Thank you, David. Our next speaker started investing from his Harvard dorm room in 1986 and founded one of the world's leading alternative investment firms just a year after graduating. Kenneth Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel, which manages over $60 billion in capital. At Citadel, winning is core. They hire the top 1% and create an environment where that top 1% push each other to be even better. How do you build a culture where the best want to stay and compete? Malin Norberg, the Chief Investment Officer for Market Strategies, joins him to find out. Please welcome Kenneth and Malin. Thank you, Kenneth, for joining us here in Oslo today. I cannot think of a better person to talk to about winning culture. Winning is one of Citadel's core values, alongside integrity, learning, meritocracy, and extraordinary colleagues. Winning is the one that stands out here. Why winning? First, it's just wonderful to be here today. Thank you so much for having me participate in this wonderful conference. One of the things that is very true is that this team, which has done such an extraordinary job of managing the sovereign wealth of the nation, has been focused on delivering for the people of Norway. You have had a winning team which has really delivered in a profound way for the people of your country. Let me be clear. Why do we actually enumerate winning as one of our core values? Regretfully, in the United States, we went through a period of time in which winning seemed to be out of vogue. We lost our way in the wilderness, and great firms are focused on winning. As David Rubenstein put it, can you create a product that the consumer will value, the consumer will pay for, and where the consumer will reward you for creating and for building? Firms that are winning firms do just that, and firms that create inferior products are firms that fail. What worried us is in a culture where participation trophies were becoming ubiquitous, we lost our way as a country and what it took to win. We at Citadel really do believe in the importance of winning for our clients. That's core to our business. I, you know, I was thinking about what David had to say in terms of companies and products. One thing to keep in mind is at Citadel, there's no shame in making money. We manufacture money. Our clients give us capital with one goal in mind. Can we manufacture more money with that capital? You certainly manufacture money in a very impressive way. When it comes to winning culture, Nicolai just mentioned speed as one of the pillars to a winning culture, and your colleague here just told me that one thing that amazes him with Citadel is that you can still move at the speed of a startup even though you are thousands of employees. How do you do that? I wish we could. I wish we could. As you grow, as a business grows in complexity and grows in stakeholders, grows in regulatory footprint, for example, it actually becomes necessary to have more process, more bureaucracy to make sure that what you do is on the right side of the road. Startups have greater flexibility than your established firms, but your established firms have far greater depth and resources. What you have to be very focused on is that you are controlling the size of the bureaucratic state, that you keep a constant focus on the ability to rapidly make decisions and when a decision is made, to rapidly execute upon that decision. Because you have a bigger footprint, you're still gonna have to go through a few more steps than that smaller startup might have to go through. With more resources, with the ability to interact with other global players on a far more stronger playing field. Mm we're able to move quite quickly. On decision-making, though, you know, this is one where large firms do tend to find themselves lost in the wilderness. You know, I'll tell my colleagues all the time, they put something to my desk for input for me. I'll give them a date. I'll be back to you in 72 hours, 48 hours, 96 hours. If you don't hear from me, I gave you a yes. It's your call. Like, don't let yourself in management be an impediment to decision-making by those who are junior to you. In some sense, negative consent to move forward is really powerful. Mm Because it tells people that they have agency, that they can make a decision. You know, one of our key internal principles is the most junior person who is closest to the information, that's the person who optimally should make the decision as often or as frequently as possible. Now, will they make mistakes? Of course, they will. They will grow much faster in a culture where they're empowered with agency to make decisions. They will learn from their successes, and they will learn from their failures. Most importantly, they are rapidly are learning, and that's how we create leaders. It's a good point, and talking about developing people. The Wall Street Journal reported that you spend several weeks every year reviewing the performance assessments for thousands of employees. Why is that where you choose to spend your time, and what does it say about the culture at Citadel? First of all, I think it says that I deeply care about how my colleagues are advancing in their careers. What I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns of where we are not developing talent strongly enough and aggressively enough. Where in the business are newest hires, whether they're out of college, out of a PhD program, a lateral hire from another global investment bank or a global investment management firm, where are people not flourishing? I'm trying to understand, what do we need to do as a firm? What do we need to do differently, whether it's, whether it's professional development, whether it's the experience that people have, whether it's the trusts that are placed in our, in our newer hires. What do we need to do differently to get more out of people? You know, one of the things I'm most proud of at Citadel is the extraordinary amount of human capital that we've developed over 35 years. People who run today one of the world's most successful hedge funds, who run one of the most successful securities dealers in the world, and bluntly, countless people who run many of the financial institutions around the world, whose roots trace back to Citadel. I think these are all a testament to our consistent focus on developing people to be the best that they can be. Citadel was a pioneer in quantitative investing, and you've been using machine learning for, well, longer than most of us knew what that was. With that head start, so 10 years of head start on the AI movement today, how do you make sure you stay ahead? Well, I think that's actually a wonderful story about the kind of firm we want to be. I remember when TensorFlow was released, five of my colleagues came to my office, like, the day it came out, and they literally said TensorFlow, which was Google's machine learning toolkit, was going to revolutionize the world. Like, with complete conviction. I said, "Okay." They were basically saying, "We want to go spend the next couple weeks really engrossed in what this body of knowledge means and how we can apply it in market making and securities." I said, "Well, I mean, of course, like, go for it. Mm. Really the point of the meeting was not the permission, it was their excitement over this transformative technology. Like, they wanted to bring me behind the curtain to think about what machine learning was going to mean for our business. I remember calling one of those colleagues about four weeks later and saying, "Okay, so what are your initial findings? Like, what have you gleaned so far from using TensorFlow?" He goes, "Well, it's in production." I'm like, "What do you mean it's in production?" He goes, "We use it to quote the U.S. equity portfolio. We've been doing that for the last two weeks." I'm like, "It's been four weeks since the meeting." He goes, "No, no. Like, a group of us work pretty much every single day, 12-14 hours a day, 'cause this is one of the coolest things we've ever worked on, and this is going to transform the world, and we're already using it in production. That's very- That's a winning culture. That's a winning culture. Around technology, with gen AI, technology is not only for the technologists, but for everyone. Have you changed the culture around how you manage, well, the culture around technology adoption in the firm? I think it's important to remember that about one in three people at Citadel are a software engineer. The firm is very deeply invested in technology. Like, it's core to what we do. I think it's just important to keep that in the back of your mind when you touch on this topic. For us, with generative AI, I think frankly one of the biggest problems out of the gate was there was perhaps too much enthusiasm for embracing gen AI, that the early generation large language models were really fascinating to people. For the first time, machine learning didn't create a vector of zeros and ones, it created written word. Mm. It could write a poem, it could write a song, it could write a story, it could write a narrative. I mean, it interacted with people in a way that technology has rarely interacted with individuals, and it was incredibly alluring to people to, "How do I use this to change what I was doing at work?" One of the tougher conversations I had with a colleague is I said, "All right. I want a list of all the gen AI based projects that we have at Citadel," he came back with 200 projects. I said, "No. 5. We're gonna do 5." He's like, "Well, what about the other 195?" I said, "We're gonna kill all those. We're gonna do 5. We're gonna actually push them really hard. We're gonna see what works and what doesn't work. Mm. We can't afford to let everybody be pursuing random ad hoc projects. Like, it's just too expensive. It's too much of a distraction. Of the 5 that we pursued, we had a real success with just over half. Of note, the gen AI models have gotten markedly better. I don't think we incurred any cost of killing 195 projects, and I do believe that over the course of the last 6 months, with the introduction of OpenAI 5.0, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 or 7, I think you have a transformative sea change taking place. You've got many more use cases today that are practical, that are implementable, that are meaningful in impact than you did 2 years ago. I think one of the key challenges for a business is always that dilemma between being on the bleeding edge and being on the leading edge, and I think good companies think very long and hard about where is it worth being on the bleeding edge, so it was with TensorFlow. Mm And where do you wanna be on the leading edge? Where do you wanna be a fast follower? Where do you want others to sort of pave the way in front of you, and you can follow quickly and capitalize on their learnings? I think it's very important in running a big business to think about when do you wanna be on the bleeding edge, when do you wanna be on the leading edge? Mm. Pick that path with volition. Don't let that come down to random happenstance. One of the places where you're in the leading edge is hiring the top people. You have hundreds of thousands of applications every year, and you've said Citadel hires winners in life and not just winners in business. Say I'm applying for a job at Citadel and I'm sitting next to you for a job interview. What's the one question you would ask me to see if I was the right cultural fit for Citadel? Oh, I wish one question would do the trick. What's the most essential question? Look, I don't think there's. It's not one. It's a mosaic. Mm. Okay. We're all people. We're complicated. What you wanna understand is what is the mosaic of this person and how does that fit into our team holistically and the team they're gonna be a part of? There are a few things that I'm deeply interested in learning about you. Nicolai, you spoke about ambition. Okay. I actually prefer the word aspiration over ambition, 'cause I think it appeals to our deeper inner meaning more directly. What do we aspire to do in this world? What do we aspire to create or to change? I wanna know your ambitions or aspirations. I wanna know what does success look like to you? You know, I had a young man from Harvard with me years ago, I asked him, you know, this is gonna be right to the point, "If you made NOK 10 million, what would you do?" He goes, "I would quit, and I would climb the highest peaks around the world." I said, "Okay." I said, "I don't think this is the right firm for you." He goes, "Well, you've already made an offer to me." I said, "That's wonderful. I strongly urge you not to accept it." Because I don't wanna hear from somebody who's 22 years old that, like, there's some number that represents their magic number. If they made that much money, they're gonna climb mountains out, around the world. I wanna hear how they're gonna climb the next mountain at Citadel, how they're gonna grow a business for us, how they're gonna change the firm, how they wanna lead our Asian business. like, "Look, if I made $10 million, I'd like to think it was done because I was very successful at X, and then I'd have more responsibility here to have a bigger impact on the firm." That's what I wanna hear, right? I look for people's aspirations. I look for their track record of being a winner. You know, I love people who competed in competitive sports in high school and college. They're not gonna play tennis for Citadel's tennis team. Their willingness to get up every single day and go to practice, their willingness to put it all out, in this case, on the court, and to win or to be beaten says a lot about their resiliency and their perseverance. Those are really important life skills that you learn in playing competitive sports. In fact, in choosing to compete in any arena, speech and debate, as a musician, competing in any arena tells me that you are willing to win and to lose, and that is such an important life skill. You know, people forget that my average equity portfolio manager is right in about 53% of their stock picks. Okay? Could you imagine, like, you're going to your surgeon, and he goes, "Yeah, about 53% of my patients live"? Right? What a humbling job. You're right about 53% of the time. If you're right about 53% of the time with the right upside-downside ratio, you're actually extraordinarily good as a portfolio manager. That means you go home a lot of days really wrong and really humbled. Do you have the mental fortitude to come back to work the next day and get right back at it? I think those are some great advice and insights to a winning culture, and I think that's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Kenneth. This has been very insightful. I think you can. Yeah. Thank you, Kenneth and Malin. Our next speaker brings a distinctive approach to culture. Michael O'Leary is the Group CEO of Ryanair, and previously served as CEO of the airline. He transformed a struggling airline through a low-cost model. Today, it is Europe's largest and one of the most profitable airlines. His approach, a relentless focus on cost and execution. The result, a culture of extreme efficiency and an airline that has made travel affordable for millions. Daniel Balthasar, Co-Chief Investment Officer of Active Strategies, will explore how he did this. Please welcome Michael and Daniel. Daniel, morning. Morning. Michael, warm welcome to our conference. Thank you very much. Great pleasure to be here. We met in this office a couple of years ago for an investor meeting. We did. After that, I received a letter from you thanking me for the meeting, which made me feel really special. Never happened to me in my 25 years of doing this. What does that tell me about you and Ryanair? Well, firstly, it tells me you didn't buy enough of our stock after that meeting. Which is why I had to do the follow-up letter, to encourage you to buy more. We have a cost focus. That's why we like to buy low. There's never been a better opportunity. Stock is down about 25%. Just don't tell anybody, because we're buying it as fast as we can at the moment. I don't wanna be competing with anybody else in the room. Very good. If the culture is set at the top. How does that translate into how 25,000 people behave every single day? I get very nervous at these culture schmulture meetings. I am skeptical when we do all the cultural stuff. I respect David, but, you know, I don't wanna be running a company that survives 300 years and for 55 generations. We wanna make money for the next 5, 10 years. If we do that, there's a reasonable prospect we'll survive 15, 20 years. Ultimately, somebody's going to come along and reinvent the wheel. I don't think Nokia failed, by the way, because, you know, the management were arrogant or there was a culture of fear in Nokia. Nokia failed because fundamentally, the iPhone came along and totally transformed the technology, and that bedevils all of us. What keeps me awake at night? Star Trek. Because it doesn't matter how bloody cheap my fares are going to be, and when it comes to flying in Europe, no one's going to beat Ryanair on price ever. Somebody sometime is going to invent some way of beaming people across Europe. Although the European Commission will probably find some way to tax it for some bullshit environmental cause. Ultimately, we will get the technology or some sort of transformative technology will come along, and it doesn't matter how good our culture was or how good our cost base was, we're gonna get blown out of the water. Until that time comes, I kind of shout this rant and rave at everybody. We're not interested in explaining our culture. Our culture is we want to deliver the lowest fare, most on time flights, we'll do it by having the lowest costs, bar nobody in the industry. We will keep transforming our cost base. We lead the airline industry across the world. We were the first people to get rid of travel agents. You know, when the internet came along, 'cause we'd been paying 20% for distribution for, you know, 15 years in an industry that had a 1% margin. Why the hell were you paying 20% to mom and pop travel agents? Internet came along, we were out the door, banned the travel agents, and we're gone. We were the first people, 15 years ago, to charge for bags. As you know, as it says in the good Bible, Moses came down from the mountaintop, and the fourth commandment is, "Thou shalt be entitled to bring free bags on board aircraft forevermore." By charging for bags, we went from 80% of passengers on our flights bringing a bag on a stage duration of 2.5 days, to 20% of passengers today now bring a bag. Which means not alone have we gotten rid of huge amounts of labor at our airports, and again, I slightly disagree with David. I want to treat people well. Ultimately, I want to get rid of as many people as I can within the business. The ones who remain I'll treat well. Pilots for example, you know, are egregiously expensive employees. By law they can't fly more than 800 hours a year, which is 18 hours a week, which I think is ridiculously fucking unproductive. For that I pay them about a quarter of a million each. Technology will in time come along. You know, if the U.S. military can fly drones or fly, you know, aircraft across, pilots will ultimately get competed out of the system. I want to treat my pilots very well. I want to treat my cabin crew very well. At the back, I also want to find some way of finding a technology that'll replace them all. The cost of flying across Europe, even with the European EU's bullshit environmental taxes and ridiculous regulation, will become even cheaper than it ever has before. Our focus and our culture is all about make it cheap, make it on time. After that, go away. You're not getting anything else. Then be viciously, obsessively focused on how do we make it cheaper, cheaper by constantly re-inventing the system, and fundamentally changing customer behavior. Charging for bags was one of the greatest initiatives we've ever come up with. Not because everybody's obsessed with, "Oh, I, we just want the money." I would happily give away the money ultimately to shareholders, but give away the money if I could get rid of the last 20% of bags. I would have no check-in staff. I'd have no baggage handling staff. I'd have no lost baggage staff. The aircraft fly about 3% lighter, which reduces my fuel consumption. My fuel bill's about NOK 5 billion a year. The hidden benefits of getting rid of checked in bloody bags is that we're consuming less fuel, jet oil today at about NOK 157 a barrel. Anything I can do to get out that kind of, those kind of costs, we will do. That's why we are the most profitable airline in the world. We are certainly the biggest international airline in the world. Yet we plan to grow in size from 200 million passengers last year to 300 million passengers in the next 8 years by ordering 300, taking delivery of 300 new aircraft, which from Boeing, the Max 10 aircraft, which are 20% bigger in terms of seats, but they burn 20% less fuel per seat. I am going to transform my economics for the next 10 years with this new technology. They'll be flown by the same 2 pilots, the same 4 or 5 cabin crew, which should make us hugely lower cost, widen the price advantage I have over every other airline in Europe, and I'm gonna blow them all up and own the industry. Until somebody in a back bedroom somewhere invents some way of beaming people across Europe, and then I'm screwed. Excellent. You operate in a hyper-competitive industry. Are you a competitive person? What airline industry? Hyper-competitive? Is it not? Europe? No, they're all useless. Government-owned, heavily regulated, hugely government subsidized. All the legacies are running around at the moment trying to get bailouts. God bless the Republicans in the U.S.. They're now about to bail out two of the most bankrupt airlines, Spirit and JetBlue, who should have been allowed to go to the wall many years ago. No, it's not a hyper-competitive industry. It's a very badly regulated industry. It is government-owned, which is why it is inefficient, hugely expensive and inefficient in Europe. All I have to be is modestly competitive to be better than the rest of the competition in Europe. That's not setting the bar very high. Amazing. Most people though, most employees, they don't like an over-focus on cost. How do you keep them motivated? Fear, terror. Stalking the corridors late at night. We don't. You know, the great thing about Ryanair is we've been doing it this way for 30 years. You know, we hire about 50 graduates every year. We hire people who want to work hard. We try to set an example. There is only three layers of management between somebody on the front line and me. Therefore we keep it very flat. The advantage we have is we're a single, you know, we're a one goof kind of operation. It's only an airline. All we have to sell is a seat, we don't need complexity. We avoid M&A. We don't get involved in, you know, buying hotels or buying airports or buying whatever else it is. We buy aircraft, hopefully at times of distress when Boeing or Airbus needs orders, then all we do is sell seats all day long. Mm. We don't need a lot of complicated management. We are very good because I think we have a very flat management structure. We're very good at pouncing on new initiatives as they come along. The great strength of Ryanair is we're not very much beloved. We finished last in almost every passenger survey. We have never won, there's an award in Ireland for the Irish Travel Agents Association, which there's only two airlines in Ireland. Aer Lingus have won those awards, which is the ex state airline. Aer Lingus have won the Travel Agent Airline of the Year Award for 30 years in a row. I have promised that we will, I will quit if we ever win that award. That's. The advantage of not being overly sensitive about my reputation or our image or being culturally popular is we're ruthlessly low cost, and that gives us huge freedom to chase those kind of cost saving measures or to reinvent the way we drive the airlines. Ultimately all the other morons will follow us along. I mean, the American airlines have just discovered charging for bags 15, 20 years after we started doing it. They're trying to make it do it as a way of gaining revenue, whereas we did it not as a way of generating revenue, but as a way of eliminating costs. It's fascinating because most of the CEOs we talk to, they talk about more customer centricity. Keep the customer happy. Put the customer in the center of everything, yet you're doing the opposite, win. That's because we have an enormous price advantage over everybody else. Customers ultimately in every survey, "Oh, I wish they were nicer. I want a refund of a non-refundable." What part of no refund don't you understand? I don't care if your granny died or, you know, your cat was ill and you couldn't travel on the day. It was a non-refundable fare. I want you to fly because I can sell you about EUR 6 of ancillary revenues on board my aircraft. I'm 260 million, and we appear occasionally, it happens even to us, we occasionally mismanage situations. We get a huge amount of adverse publicity, and what I notice every time we get a lot of adverse publicity is bookings go up. Elon Musk, who I have never met, never had any interaction with him, we had this issue. We were trying to put Wi-Fi on board our aircraft at the start of the year. I think Wi-Fi, free Wi-Fi on board aircraft is coming. The problem at the moment is the technology doesn't yet exist. We have to put a couple of dimples on the outside of the aircraft. It would be about a 2% fuel drag, and my fuel bill is NOK 5 billion a year. 2% fuel drag is something of the order about NOK 100 million, and I'm not paying NOK 100 million to put free Wi-Fi on board for my passengers. Starlink, which is a terrific technology, I have no issue with the Starlink technology. Starlink believe passengers will pay you EUR 1, EUR 2, you know, and it'll pay for itself. Clearly they've never met any Ryanair passengers. By the time we've gone up and down the cabin selling them teas, coffee, scratch cards, and anything else we can kind of think to sell them, we don't have time to be running up and down taking EUR 1 transactions. I happened to say, "Look, Starlink is great, but, you know, the system doesn't work. We're not taking a fuel penalty of NOK 100 million a year because that would be, you know, NOK 0.50 on every ticket." He, someone told Elon Musk that I'd slagged off Starlink, so he popped up something on his internet feed going, "Who is this wanker in Ryanair? Who's this Ryanair gobshite?" "He's clearly an idiot. He knows nothing about flying." I popped back, "Who is this eejit in Twitter running that cesspit that is Twitter having a pop off me? I'm correct. It does have a fuel drag." He says it doesn't have a fuel drag. He says, "I know nothing about avionics," which is probably true. I know very little about avionics, but he knows nothing about flying low-cost airlines either. He then ran a poll on his Twitter, X. I don't have a Twitter site, by the way. Thankfully, I have better things to do with my life. He ran a poll at his 1.5 million, "Should I buy Ryanair?" We politely pointed out, "You're American, therefore you can't buy Ryanair. We're European. You have to be more than 50% EU owned. Next thing, it fucking exploded during the second week of January, which is one of the quietest weeks for bookings in Europe, and my bookings just fucking took off. Next thing we're running around, how do we manufacture? We ran a big idiot seat sale. We got AI to come up with some ads of me smacking him over the head with some, and him choking me, da-da-di-da. We manufactured about EUR 30 million of free publicity. I was holding a press conference in Dublin back in January to do my kind of usual, "This summer we'll do 25 new routes, z-z-z-z." They took the press conference live on Sky. CNBC went live to this eejit in Dublin talking, I'm desperately trying to make some news about how Elon Musk is wrong. We-le-le-le. We got about NOK 30 million free publicity out of it, and bookings for about six weeks went up by about three percentage points. Did you send him a thank you letter? Pardon me? Did you send Elon Musk a thank you note? No, actually, we sent him a free voucher for a free Ryanair flight round to the Twitter offices in Dublin. Got a photograph of me handing him the free Ryanair voucher. He hasn't claimed it yet, but I hope he will at some point in the not too distant future. One of the other things we do is we will jump on any bit of cheap publicity we can, because cheap publicity in our business, where you have such a price advantage, drives enormous sales and enormous bookings. As long as it doesn't revolve around safety. I remember Trump getting elected the first time said, "If he murdered somebody on 5th Avenue, that he'd still get elected." We were thinking, "Well, maybe if we murdered somebody on 5th Avenue, would it drive bookings up on Ryanair?" We thought, no, that was probably pushing the envelope a little bit too far. Other than that, if it doesn't involve safety, we're up for any bit of cheap publicity we can get. Okay. To summarize, a cost focus, free marketing, and an incredible sense of humor definitely created a winning culture. Thank you very much, Michael. Please join me with a huge round of applause. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Michael and Daniel. Michael, could I ask you to remain seated for a panel discussion? Okay. I'm getting more by. Fantastic. Far we've heard some very different approaches to building winning cultures. Let's bring those perspectives together. David and Kenneth will be joining this panel. Joining them is Robyn Grew, the CEO of Man Group, a global alternative investment firm with over $200 billion in assets. She brings another lens to high-performance culture. David will moderate this session. Please help me welcome them to the stage. Good seeing you again, my friend. I get to follow that act. That's gonna be tough. Yeah, right. Robyn, you are the CEO of Man Group, right? Correct. You're not a man, right? Well, since I last looked, yeah. You're the first woman to be the CEO of Man Group in 250 years or something like that? Something like that, yep. How did you get to that job? Yeah, determination. How did I get to that job? 1, I worked there for a decent amount of time. 2, I've held lots of different roles, and I've got lots of warnings to show for it. I was the best person for the job when it came open. Okay. The best person for the job always gets the job? I like to think so. Okay. Ken, your firm has been extraordinarily successful in everything it's touched. In the Great Recession of 2007, 2008, you came very close to not being that successful. Were you ever worried that you weren't gonna survive in the 2007, 2008 period? 2007, no. 2007 was actually a phenomenal year for us. There was a day, 2008, I remember getting the elevator at home and saying, like, literally, "I hope when I come back, we're still in business." CNBC had a van parked outside of our four walls trying to get that bankruptcy footage. It was a tough 16 weeks in 2008. The good news is history is written by the winners. We've had a great run since 2008, and that moment's largely become a footnote in our history, but one that I'll never forget. Michael, you're identified as the CEO for a long time of Ryanair, but you didn't start Ryanair. No. Mr. Ryan started it. Had you not been working for him, do you think you would ever have wound up in some capacity like your job you have now? Did you have that personality before, or did you grow it as you kind of were running this airline? In other words, did I always have a deformed personality? Probably. I was educated by Christian Brothers and then Jesuits. It was a miracle I survived that. Would I be in the airline industry? No. I would hopefully have gotten a job in a proper functioning industry where you could make money like Kenneth Griffin. Unlike Robyn Grew, in my case, I got the job in Ryanair because nobody else wanted it. The Ryans had set up Ryanair to be at the start of EU deregulation back in 1987. They wanted to kind of compete with Aer Lingus on the Irish U.K. routes. They lost NOK 20 million in three years. The thing was going bust. I was this bright young guy coming out of college, had my accountancy degree. I was actually very quiet, reticent. I don't want to be, never wanted the publicity. Eventually they ran out of chief executives. There was nobody left to run the bloody place. I was sent in to just staunch the losses, do whatever you want and go whatever you want to do. My first recommendation was close this turkey. It's never going to make money. It's doomed to bloody fail. This industry is for the birds. Tony Ryan thankfully sent me off to see Southwest Airlines in the U.S. at the time when Herb Kelleher was doing what he did so well in Austin, Texas. He was a legend, he was the guy who kinda created the low-fare industry. I was sent off to see him. I have this legendary dinner with Herb Kelleher. What do you? People, "What do you remember at the dinner with Herb Kelleher?" Absolutely bloody nothing. He was at the time about 65. I was about 26. He drank me under the table before the starters had even got there. I saw Southwest. We, I'd come from Europe. Oh, everything was slow. A plane would arrive in, and an hour and 15 minutes later it would turn around because the pilots had to have a smoke and the cabin crew had to have a whinge, and everybody had to call their union to see whether they were feeling like going out on the next flight of the day. This thing arrived in, it was like a Formula 1 pit stop. Aircraft in, everybody on it, aircraft out, gone. Yeah. It was pretty clear if you could turn planes around in 15 or 20 minutes instead of an hour and 15 minutes, you'd get two more, three more free flights per day per aircraft. That's where it all came from. It was the combination of Tony Ryan's stupidity in setting up an airline, but Herb Kelleher's vision in say, you can actually run a very efficient airline, which is the key to Ryanair's success. Earlier you mentioned a couple of times safety as being an exception to some things. Sometimes people would say, "Well, if it's a low-cost airline, maybe they're gonna scrimp on safety." How can you assure people you're not scrimping on safety? You can't. Ultimately we've now been doing this for about 35 years. We have the youngest, newest fleet of aircraft in Europe. We have a fleet of 300, 650 Boeing 737s. We bought them all from new. We own them all. They're not owned by some bloody leasing company, so, you know, we own them all. Depreciation is our only charge. We have no debt on the balance sheet. We train all our own pilots. We have 16 simulator centers. We do all our own aircraft maintenance in-house, and we're about to take the engine maintenance in-house as well. The best you can do is you point to your record over 35 years. Certainly in our first 15 or 20 years it was, "this is a bit cheap," and, you know, "They don't fucking do the maintenance." I think that's kind of disappeared. You're only as good as today. We do 3,500 flights a day. We carry 700,000 people today. Today, we have to do everything safely. Tomorrow, we have to do everything safely. It always makes me worry, statistically, the bigger and bigger and bigger we get, I always worry statistically you're likely to have a screw up somewhere along the way. So far, for 35 years, we've managed to avoid it. Ken, many people don't realize you operate two big businesses. One is the most profitable hedge fund ever, Citadel, but you have a separate business, Citadel Securities. What is Citadel Securities, and why did you start that business when you already had a very profitable hedge fund? Citadel Securities is one of the largest market makers in the world. In fact, we trade about 25% of the U.S. equity turnover every day, and over the course of the last couple of weeks, we've averaged about $1 trillion a day in turnover. It is a firm that is at the center point of liquidity around the world. It is powered by world-class technology, great predictive analytics, and a really brilliant management team. It shares much of the same DNA as the hedge fund side of the house. Great people, great technology, great analytics. It's very much similar to what we do in the hedge fund in terms of the culture and ethos, but we do it with a very different commercial intent. There's a story that might be apocryphal. Many stories about people who are famous have apocryphal background stories. One of the apocryphal background stories about you is that when you were in college, you got Harvard University to allow you to set up an antenna that would receive stock quotes so as a student you could trade stock. Is that true? It was a satellite dish, actually. You know, I was updating my Xbox with my son next to me, and he was about 13. He's 18 now. He looks at me, he goes, "Dad, you were alive before the internet." Back in the '80s, there was no internet. There was no. Stock quotes were actually hard to get. I had a satellite dish on top of the dorm room. The cable actually came through the fourth floor window, down an unused elevator shaft and into my room, and that gave me access to real time prices from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It worked. It worked. If you hadn't done that, or if your early trades hadn't worked, would you be doing something more important like being a lawyer or something like that? Oh, I'd be doing private equity, David. Right. Okay. Well, there's no higher calling. Should have been chasing. than private equity, of course. Should have been chasing girls around the college dorm. Robyn, can you explain. Deferred gratification, Michael. You're a publicly traded hedge fund. Yeah. Most hedge funds are privately owned. Why are you publicly owned, and what's the advantage of being publicly owned in the hedge fund world? Not my choice, by the way, so I haven't sat in that seat, so 35 years roughly of listing. Advantages. Everybody knows what's going on at Man Group. There is nothing to hide. In those quarterly updates that we do that Michael looks so forward to doing, we are completely transparent, and clients like that. Institutionally, if you're going to be in a space where people are looking at you and saying, "Hang on a second. Are these people we wanna do business with?" Sometimes there's an advantage to having to tell everybody what's going on in your firm every quarter. That's an advantage. Right. You came to this firm, largely as a lawyer and as a compliance officer. Yeah. You can't do this, you can't do that. How did you go from? Didn't say I was a good compliance officer. People are telling you can't do this, you can't do that. Usually you don't rise up to be the CEO. Were you a not that good compliance officer? Stop that. I believe that sometimes the best people to understand risk are the people who wanna take the risk as well. If you sit me and my executive team, they'll probably sit down and tell you, perhaps the person with the highest risk tolerance in the organization is me. That's something that either I've grown up on because I was a sort of a litigator, I guess, in American terms, or a barrister if you go back into the U.K. I'm an advocate. Risk. I've run towards risks when sensible people have run away from them. That makes my understanding of risk management, which is what we do all day, what we deliver all day, quite acute. No, it's not usual. Was I a terrible compliance officer? I'm not gonna. I don't think I was terrible, but I understand risk. Okay. Michael, not long ago you said that you wanted to charge people to go to the bathroom in your planes. Right. Did that plan ever work? Why were so people so upset about that? Couldn't they go for 45 minutes without going to the bathroom if they didn't wanna pay? It's one of the great free stories that keeps on giving. I did an interview with some BBC news journalists about 25 years ago. I don't know, but we were on about something else. I don't know, I think taking seats out and putting sand in cabins and, you know, like the Tube in London, they'd be hanging onto the rails. She said, "What's next? You gonna charge for toilets?" I went, "Yeah, we have a team working on that at the moment and, you know, if we could take out the two toilets at the back, we could put in six seats, and with six seats we'd put 4% lower fares." It still comes back every 25, "You're the guy who wanted to charge for toilets on board planes." There is actually. If you could take out two of the loos, only have one toilet left and charge for the planes. You look at the extent to which people obsess about not paying for our baggage fees on board. You get people packing up and weighing their sca- on the weigh scales in their bathrooms. "I'm not gonna pay bloody Ryanair for the bag." They'd do the same thing with the toilets as well on board, and we could put extra seats on the plane. Well. With extra seats, we'd be able to charge lower airfares. You talked- We're not gonna do it. You talked about once about charging extra for people who are overweight. No, no, we were very good. We actually never did that one. one, because it wouldn't make- Don't give him ideas. Never mind. That was actually, that came out of the U.S., I think where, with respect, there are a lot of physically challenged people. The Europeans are a bit slimmer, although, you know, it's because we're paying so much environment, stupid environmental taxation over here. No, we never planned to aircraft weights are done on average weights for adults and children. Right It would make no difference anyway. You have a good business in Europe. Why don't you just take that business to the U.S.? Why don't you go to the U.S.? That is where the culture starts to go wrong. It's very well in Europe because we have pretty much incompetent competition in Europe. I'd love to have Air France-KLM, these guys run by incompetent European government-owned airlines. The U.S. airlines are a bit more aggressive. They are much stronger and much more well embedded. The minute we, in our management team, says, "This has worked great in Europe. Let's go, all go off to America, California, or Florida, and we can run an airline over there," they'll all be out the door to go to the sunshine. I mean, if you've spent any winter in Ireland, everybody wants to get the hell out of the place. Okay. That would be distraction. The other, I mean, I think Ken's demonstrated over many years at Citadel, zealous focus on your business. Do not get distracted. I don't want to go to Europe is a deregulated market. The only good thing about Europe is it is a deregulated market for air travel, so thankfully I get. Okay. To the U.S., it is hugely government regulated, and the States is already. Right a reasonably well-run although it's quite expensive. Now- It wouldn't work. It would undermine Ryanair because we'd all get distracted. Now, you were trained as an accountant. Usually the accountants I know are usually low-key people, very boring people. How did you get this personality as an accountant? I mean, well, firstly, I mean, a lot of people question whether I was trained or even trainable. I did pass the exams, but only barely. You know, I grew up on a farm. I'm a farm boy. We learned how to work hard. I was always, I mean, if I came through accountancy, I wanted to be very kind of quiet and retired. I did, I don't like the publicity. I recognized when I got into Ryanair, we'd no money for advertising, we had to do something. Richard Branson at the time was running around, getting, you know, do all the cheap publicity. Herb was very good at it in the States as well. It was the obvious thing to do, was, "Okay, you can't be successful here if you're going to be a kind of quiet-as-a-mouse accountant. Let's reinvent." Remember, the Irish are generally good at being brash bullshitters. Right. There is a gene in all of us, where we just talk a lot of rubbish. We're very good at talking- Okay Lots of rubbish. In fact, we've built generations- Would you hire an accountant with your personality? Would I hire an accountant. Thankfully I have much more sense of people hiring accountants than the likes of me. Oh, you're not doing that? I would hire people. I mean, I look at CVs, and Kenny looks at CVs. He gets these summa cum laudes out of Harvard. I want people, if they grew up on a farm, and the thing I look for is not what your degree was. It's what summer jobs did you do, you know, during your holidays from school and from college? If you worked hard and you went out, you know, you got part-time jobs, those are the people I want working in Ryanair. I want people who work hard. Okay. Brains, it's the airline industry. We don't need a lot of brains, and we don't need very bright intellects. 'cause it's a stupid industry anyway. Right. Ken, recently the mayor of New York pointed out that you had bought an apartment in New York, and he wanted you to pay a so-called pied-à-terre tax even though you employ thousands of people in New York, you're building a new building in New York, you're contributing a lot of tax money to New York. Did that upset you? What upset me was the actual, the personal attack. Like, You were at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday? Right ... where they tried to assassinate the president. Not too far from where I live in New York. Healthcare. I think the willingness of the mayor of New York to make this a policy debate, a personal attack, just demonstrated a profound lack of judgment. I understand that New York has bills to pay. Would you like to run New York for us for a couple of years? I'm unelectable, Kenny. Nobody would vote for me. Yes, like you are actually saving- No, I'd be a distraction from running Ryanair. Oh, Ken, are you gonna go ahead with your building in New York? Well, you know, I'm meeting with the governor, Thursday. Okay. You'll figure it out. We'll talk about our future direction in New York. Okay. Here's the real question: Is New York going to put their fiscal house in order and run itself from a position of a strong government that's pro-business, or are they looking to play? Like, why do the Americans think we can do socialism? We're just gonna screw it up. Now, Ken, you are a very large, maybe the largest donor in the U.S. of various political candidates. You've met many of these political candidates. You're probably smarter than all of them. Why don't you just run for president yourself? You ever thought of that? Didn't you just say I was smarter than all of them? I mean, David, like, what a, what a nightmarish job these people sign up for. To be the president of the United States, you wouldn't wanna do that job? Okay, if you could snap your fingers and be in the Oval Office, of course I'd love to do that job. That would be, like, such. Like, I love solving problems. Right ... but it's not that simple. You've gotta go through a campaign cycle, which is just the most humiliating and degrading process in the American society. How do you deal with people coming to you every hour on the hour for charitable contributions? Kasen and Julia. You have somebody that takes care of it for you? I do. I've got two outstanding people that take care of it. you know, my job is to manufacture money. I spoke about it early on. I've got my investment team. I focus on the business as much as I possibly can. I've got great people around me who are involved in our philanthropic efforts, who are involved in our political efforts. They know the values that are important to me. They know the key objectives that we're trying to, you know, obtain. Okay ... like how do we educate American children to be the future leaders of the free world? My day in and day out, it's about driving the returns for our shareholders. The U.S. hasn't had a recession for more than 10 years, more than a technical recession, usually have them every seven years or so. Are you worried about a recession, in part because of the war in Iran or anything else coming in the U.S.? Has been banned. We both know this. You know this. We all know this. Everybody in this room knows this. The business cycle has not been banned. We're gonna have a recession around the world at some point here in the. Yeah in the foreseeable future. What worries me is not the fact that we're gonna have a recession, it's that we're losing the fiscal space to engage in counter-cyclical spending to keep the economy on the strongest possible footing. Frankly, if there were a panic in the credit quality of the leading sovereign debts around the world, the U.S. It happened to the U.K. just, what, about 18 months ago now. Correct, yeah. Was it Liz Truss' moment? 10 days. Yes. 10 days of excitement, yep. I mean, terrifying, is it not? Yeah as a risk manager? Yeah. Absolutely. Right. The key is the Western world has to put its fiscal house in order. Agreed so that we have more flexibility and more capacity in the next downturn to keep people employed, to keep our businesses going, to keep our economies as strong as possible when they're under duress. Okay. Robyn, this week in the U.S., the King of England is visiting the President. Yes British citizen. I am. What do you want to have the King get out of those meetings? There are many people in England focused on that. Why send the King? Why not send the prime minister to meet with the president of the United States? Well, it's great when you're asked to speak about why the King is doing something. I saw on social media, I do that thing, interviews with the American general population about, "Did you know the King and the Queen is coming?" A lot of them said, "Not really, and I'm not sure why." When asked what they should do, the American population, these folks on social media said, they recommended certain burger joints that they could go and visit. Which I thought was very useful. In the U.K. when asked, there were at least five interviews where people felt sorry for the King having to do this visit, because what were they going to do, and how predictable or unpredictable is that conversation? How meaningful is it going to be? I have to say, I haven't spent much time thinking about what I think the King-. Okay should be doing. I, strangely, I'm a little like you, I'm kind of focused on what we're supposed to be doing every day, which is returning value to clients. Nevertheless, these are difficult times, and what we need is sense and stability, and what we need is some version of how we find solutions and things. If the king can add to that debate, terrific, but I don't think I'd be holding my breath. Okay. All right, let's suppose I have some money and I want to invest in Man Group, and I say, "I don't really know much about investing, but I'm gonna give you, I don't know, GBP 100,000, or NOK 100,000. What kind of rate of return could I expect to get if I went into a reasonably safe, but hopefully profitable, investment that you would give advice for me? Number 1, let me just explain, Man Group deals with institutions, and we don't deal directly with wealth and retail, so I'm just being mindful that somebody doesn't ring up the phone at the end of this. Number 2, it depends what you're after at the moment. I think if we really think about wealth portfolios right now, what worries me, or what I think about a lot, is whether wealth and retail are having the access to diversified portfolios that they should have to try and weather the storms of this volatility that we're seeing in markets. With NOK 100,000, it depends on where your risk profile is. It sort of depends on how old you are, sort of depends on how much risk you wanna take, sort of depends about whether you wanna be in Europe or whether you wanna be diversified, sort of depends whether you wanna lock your money up or not for a period of time. I think it depends on a bunch of questions in the middle of that. The thing that worries me, or the things that I think we talk about a lot with the people in this room, about how do you navigate markets at the moment when you have such volatility and such dispersion? Do you wanna go into something relatively flat and relatively safe? In the hedge fund world. Yeah ... there seem to be many more men running hedge funds than women. Why do you think that is, and is that gonna change any time in our lifetime? It's an interesting question about whether the historical bunch of people who have gone into these careers are. Right? There's a certain gender to, nature to this. When we started looking at this years ago, we started to look at, hang on a second, where are we recruiting from, and is there some bias in the pool? Then we looked at the pool, and then we looked at universities, and we looked at who was taking the courses from whom we were hiring from. They were predominantly being populated by men. That is changing, but it's changing slowly, and what you're not gonna do is find us clicking our fingers and finding different populations of gender makeup. We want the very best people to run money, and ultimately there is a little bit of bias in that, or a little bit of gendered nature. Yeah in the pool of people. Would I like to see it change? For sure. Michael, let's suppose you wanna go on a vacation outside of Europe, and would you fly another airline, and do you fly other airlines to find out what mistakes they're making? What airline do you think is the best next to Ryanair? I occasionally have to go to the U.S. on investor roadshows, David, to explain to investors like you, "Don't put the NOK 100,000 into Man, put it into Ryanair stock." Shares at a 22% discount year-to-date. I mean, I'd fly whoever's cheapest going across the Atlantic. That's my only other kind of. You don't, when you fly for, you're going on vacation with your family, you don't fly first class on some other airline? You always wanna be in the coach? No, I wanna be on Ryanair. I wanna be seen on Ryanair. The great thing of flying on Ryanair too is I can't fly, I have to fly in rows three, four, or five, 'cause if I'm up in the front row of seats everybody thinks we're doing some VIP kind of nonsense. That, yeah, so. The great advantage of it too is when I'm flying with Ryanair, I'll go up and pull the boarding cards at the boarding gate. Inevitably I get about 25 Facebook pictures, and I appear on the, all these people's. "God, your man is up there doing, cutting edge, front line, back to the shop floor," kind of stuff. No, actually I'm going on the same flight as you, but it's good for cheap PR. You have complaints, do you tell them right then and there, or do you tell them later? I get lots of complaints. Usually that I'm pulling the boarding passes too slowly, or I'm the reason the flight is going to get delayed. I also run our complaints department, where we have a very prompt policy of responding to all complaints within 24 hours, usually with a polite no. For most passengers, what's the most important thing? Price, safety, or getting there on time? I mean, assume that safety is a given, because without safety you have nothing. 99.999% of passengers want to make a booking, what's the cheapest fare to XYZ? It is not available sim, it is not, you know, destination obviously, route frequency. 99.99%, which is why the internet has transformed air travel, and machine learning, which we had, though, probably didn't spend enough time. Machine learning is going to transform it again for the next 10 or 20 years. Okay. Ken, when you're hiring people, do you want people that are high IQ, are hard workers, good athletes? I mean, somebody comes in front of you, but they're first in their class at Harvard, but they're kind of nerdy and they don't really talk very well. Do you hire them, or you rather have an all-American athlete who looks great? What kind of people do you want to hire? I need both. I need both. I need people who are that all-American athlete with a lot of charisma, a lot of leadership, and a lot of intellect, 'cause I need people who have, like, the innate leadership skills that go with that. I also need some of the people who are just wickedly smart, often a bit introverted, but we've got tough problems that need to be solved, and they know how to solve them. Final question. What is the best sovereign wealth fund in the world, in your view? I would have to say Norges, except they don't have enough exposure to Ryanair, but we're getting there. That's why I'm back up in Oslo again and again and again, trying to persuade them to upweight their investment. All right. Ken, do you have the same view on the best sovereign wealth fund? You have many of them invest with you. Yeah, this is an absolute no-win question for me. Right, okay. I will say this. I will say that the fact that the leadership team of this sovereign wealth fund is so committed to the betterment of the people of Norway is actually really touching. I think everyone should give a huge round of applause to Nicolai and his team for their commitment. Hear, hear. to bringing the best and brightest to this organization, and the consistent focus on how to deliver for the people of Norway. It is really quite remarkable. Robyn Grew, I assume you would have the same view. The best sovereign wealth fund that you invest with or that you're with today? What he said, plus, 'cause it, why say something when something's been said so eloquently? Plus this. We all get better, all of us, on the financial provision side when we work with the smartest people in the world. That, there is nothing better than working with a team, an investor, a sovereign wealth with Norges, who make us better at what we do, and that's what this team does. Thank you all very much. Thank you, David. Thank you. Thank you, David, Kenneth, Michael, and Robyn. We will now take a 30-minute break. We resume at 1:45. Please help yourself to refreshments, and do introduce yourself to somebody new. [Presentation] Welcome back. The second part of the conference explores one of the most difficult challenges in business: cultural transformation in companies Building a culture from scratch is hard. Transforming the culture in an existing organization, that might be harder Our first speaker is Ajay Banga, the President of the World Bank Group. He's led cultural transformation twice, once in a phenomenal manner at Mastercard, where he was the CEO for 12 years, and now at the World Bank. The private sector tends to move faster. The public sector has decades of history, multiple shareholders, stakeholders. How do you drive cultural transformation when the rules are completely different? We'd love to hear more. Please welcome Ajay. They say that culture trumps strategy every time, and the pun is intended. That's where we're going to start from. Everyone in this room has built or led organizations. You've all done something of that type. You've shaped teams, you've kind of made decisions under pressure, you have lived the reality that culture is not something abstract. You've got your own hard-won views on it no doubt. I'm not here to tell you that I've figured it out. I just have an unusual vantage point, as you said. I've had the chance to be the CEO of a public company, that's Mastercard, and now at the World Bank Group, it's quite different. It's 25,000 plus people with 189 governments as my shareholders, with 25 executive directors resident in my building with 20 advisors each, which means a lot of people who want to know what I'm doing. I can't really goof off either. What we all know there is that as a CEO, I think culture is what determines our success. I think culture is what is the single most important thing all of us work on. It's easy to talk about it, but what exactly is the darn thing? I think what is it and how do you build it are the two most important questions that most of us have to answer. In an effort to be faithful to Nicolai, I actually have written a speech down on culture, which is pretty interesting. I've never done that. I'm going to read this out to you so I don't miss a few things. I spent a lot of time working on this one. I think what culture is depends on your organization. I think regardless of your unique circumstances, culture is the glue. It is absolutely the glue. How people make decisions, how they take a risk, how they work together to deliver whatever your mission is. It's how you drive an organization to say yes if, rather than no. Every organization has plenty of people incented to say no. There are never enough people who say yes, if you do it this way. Finding that culture is important. Culture is not a value statement. It is not a poster on the wall, and definitely it is not what the CEO says at town halls. It's just not. At the simplest culture is what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, but most importantly, it's what happens when you're not in the room. That's the culture that I'm talking about. I think the idea of it's what happens when you're not in the room is what makes it a force multiplier. The how is where culture lives or dies. While everybody's context is different, there are some common things between the public and the private sector, and there are some very big differences. First, what I call the decency quotient, DQ. I learned very quickly that IQ and EQ were important when I was growing up, but I believe that now what you need in leadership is what's called a decency quotient. That's why I just named it that. I was making a joke in a town hall, and I'd just come out of listening to Warren Buffett talk about DQ. In his case, that was Dairy Queen, the ice cream. You could see how my mind works, and I was looking for something to talk about to tell people what I meant and to give a word to what I was trying to explain to them about culture, and this idea of decency quotient came. Decency is not about being nice. It's actually about being fair, direct, and consistent. Tell the truth to your people even when it's uncomfortable. Give that feedback with clarity. Speak up when it's difficult. Treat people with respect, all that. It doesn't actually slow the organization down. It does quite the opposite because it allows you to move faster because people trust the system, and it improves decisions because people are willing to challenge and to be challenged. It actually works in the right way if you do it the right way. Fear drives behavior for a while, but it doesn't build judgment, it doesn't build ownership, and it doesn't build initiative. Decency does. Leadership has to feel like a hand on your back. You've gotta push people forward, but not a finger in their face, and that's what decency quotient is all about. That's the first thing. The second one is clarity of purpose. In a large organization, I think the biggest cultural problem is often not resistance, and James can talk to this ad nauseam. It's actually confusion more than resistance. Clarity, in his case, in Morgan Stanley, he very clearly delivered a message of what they were going to focus on, which was wealth management as the way that Morgan Stanley would grow, right? That changed an organization that had multiple ideas of how they would grow to very focused. Very simple, very focused. I think simplicity is the key, and making something simple is actually the hardest thing to do. People think that in simplicity you've lost detail. Actually, conversing in simple terms without jargon is the world's most difficult thing to do as a leader. At Mastercard, the company had to redefine itself from a payments processor to a technology platform. How did I simplify it? I united everybody around one set of mission, and it said, "Kill cash." Just kill cash, as compared to thinking about everything else. That included technology, it included payments, it included analytics, it included data, it included anything that you could do. Financial inclusion, working with the downtrodden, getting social security payments into their hands, figuring out digital identities, all came inside the idea of killing cash. It gave them a very clear sense of direction. At the World Bank, similar issue: how do you kill poverty? I've got Tamara saying, "Instead of having many different causes, let's do this for climate, let's do that for gender, let's build a hospital, let's do a skilling center, let's do schools." At the end of the day, what you're trying to do to kill poverty is to give people a job. Not necessarily working for a big company or a small company or as an entrepreneur or just staying in their small farm and being content with the productivity they get by connecting up with technology to a cooperative. I'm just giving you many ways to do this. The point is, a job earning is the best way to drive people's hope and dignity. If you sort of think about this carefully, a friend of mine once said that poverty is both a state of mind and a state of being. Being you can solve by giving grants, by giving aid, by giving donations, by writing philanthropic dollars. Mind doesn't get solved with that. Mind needs you to feel productive every morning, optimistic, feeling that you've got a future. I think the most important thing is a job gives you both a way to defeat a state of being and a state of mind to drive a nail into the coffin of poverty. That's the clarity that has settled in. I think once you start doing that, you get this multiplier effect of people making decisions on it. The last thing about clarity, just never tire of discussing what you've decided is very simple, because leaders get bored saying the same things. Organizations don't get bored hearing it. I think if you want something to stick, you've got to say it again and again and again and again until it shows up in how people make their decisions. That is the second topic. The third is measure what matters, align your incentives. You guys are all pretty clear on that. At Mastercard, we had some simple metrics. At the World Bank, I had a corporate scorecard. For those of you from the private sector, you will love this. I had a corporate scorecard of 155 items when I showed up. I tried to explain to my board of those 25 people that 155 items is about 130 too many for a corporate scorecard. At 155 items, I will always get an A+ because I would have delivered on 30, and you'll never get me to discuss the other 125. That's how it works. It took a long time. We got ourselves down to 22 items, and all 22 now on our website. You can go and click on them, and you can track where I am every month, project by project, on delivering against that. I keep telling our board, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Transparency of your targets, simplifying them, fewer of what we are trying to do. Now, all this is lovely, but here's the context difference between the private sector and the public sector. In the private sector, pressure comes from markets, comes from shareholders, comes from profit motive, performance, competition, crisis. You've got clear levers, compensation, hiring, firing, capital allocation. At Mastercard, if something wasn't working, I could use all those levers, jiggle with them, fix it quickly. In the public sector, the challenge is completely different. We've got a mission, but we also have 189 shareholders, each with a different and nuanced way of looking based on their domestic politics, which they bring to my office every day. You've got longstanding processes, tenure is long, risk aversion is very real. We're kind of like an academic institution trying to get real work done. You can imagine how complex that is. You cannot reset that system overnight. Compensation is not a lever of the type that you have in the private sector. You work all the levers you have. You align teams around the outcomes. You simplify what you say, simplify structures. You become explicit in what gets recognized. You become explicit in what gets funded. It takes longer, but the principle is exactly the same. If you don't align the system, culture will not move. Alignment comes from simplicity and focus and leading from the front with how you speak about what you're doing. Just a closing thought for you. I have told everybody who worked with me over the years that leadership is not a privilege. It's not your birthright. You weren't born with it. It is absolutely what you have to earn. At some point in your career, someone trusted you, like someone trusted me, with the responsibility for other people. At that point, your job changes forever. It's no longer about just delivering results. It's about creating the conditions where the people who work for you can feel your hand on their back pushing them forward. That is what culture is all about, because actually, you're not going to be there to put your hand on their back all the time, but they have to feel it anyway. That's culture. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ajay. We continue our exploration of cultural transformation. Next stop, Wall Street. James Gorman became CEO of Morgan Stanley in 2010 in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Over 14 years, he transformed the firm, not just the business model, but the culture itself. Today, he is Chairman Emeritus of Morgan Stanley, chairman of Disney, and a senior advisor to General Atlantic. Joining him on stage to explore this journey is Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. Please welcome James and Roula. Hello, everyone. Hello, James. I haven't seen you in a while. I'm retired, that's why. Yes, yes. Looking back at culture, I came across all sorts of statements that I then discovered were actually called Gormanisms. I thought that I would throw at you a few of your Gormanisms. This could be dangerous, but anyway. Well, only one of them, I think. Yeah. I think the rest are fine. You can talk to us about it. Yeah. The first one, "Strategy earns you the right to talk about culture. Mm-hmm. Tell us about that one. Are we talking about mine? Yeah. It's very hard to talk about culture if the business isn't working. You know. Which is what happened when you were at. Yeah ... when you came into Morgan. You can go. How this came up, the board of directors came to me when Barclays Bank had a new chairman, new CEO. They did a global tour, which was a culture tour. They said to me kind of, "Why aren't you doing that?" I said, "Because firstly, we're still figuring out what we're gonna be when we grow up. I don't know what Barclays is gonna be when they grow up." What do you do if you go around the world, you tell people, "This is our culture, this is what it means, these are our core values," a week later you come back and say, "Unfortunately, you're fired, but it's still a great culture"? You've gotta have a strategy which is viable, which gives people an opportunity and promise for the future, and then build the cultural values around it. Those values is what lets you change your strategy over time, because it gives you the confidence it's coming from the right place. Strong companies, I think of it as it's like, you know, different cabins on a train. You've got the strategy, then the culture, then the strategy, then the culture, and the strategy. That's how companies stay around for decades, you know, centuries, is they're prepared to reinvent, and they reinvent with the strong bones that come from confidence in their culture. You've also said that nothing drives culture more than winning. Winning, people have to feel that they're winning before you can forge a real culture. That's something I think I agree with, was it Michael? Today, although I'd have to say, I just wanna say, and I'm not saying this to pander to you, I flew in on SAS this morning. It was a fabulous flight. The food was great. The people were nice. They didn't charge me for my bags. Everything, it arrived 50 minutes early. 50? I was the first person through customs. I loved it. And- I'm sure Ryanair is good. I just haven't been on it. Where the toilet's free. Yeah. Toilets were free. It was good. You know, I think if, again, people will support a non-winning culture, but you'll get a certain type of people who'll support that. If you want real goers, people who are prepared to put themselves, you know, in the line of fire, run to where the drama is, then they need to know that they're part of a winning organization. Charisma works great once. You can tell people to, you know, charge up the hill, and they get all shot at, and they say, "Well, that's not a really good idea." You say, "It didn't work so well, but charge again," and they say, "Have you got another way of getting there?" You know. Yeah. People need to be part of something. If it's winning, it's infectious. If it's infectious, they truly do exceptional things. Yeah, your job as a leader is to figure out a winning strategy that puts everybody in a position where they can thrive. Employees should stop feeling like tenants looking for their next bonus and start feeling like landlords." It's quite difficult to tell bankers not to be thinking about their next bonus. Well, I say it in the nicest possible way. You know, at the end of the day, you've gotta decide. This is another thing I had a discussion with the board. I said, if I have a dream, which is to get a really smart, you know, neuroscientist, a really smart software developer, and a computer scientist, and put them in a room together and say, "Come up with a camera. The camera has to take a picture of the inside of people's heads." When they go to work in the morning, they stand in front of the gates, like, you know, the floppy gates, whatever they are. You don't pull out your card to get in. The gate opens if it takes a picture of your head and you've passed the test. The test is, half of you has to be coming in for yourself. Mm. To deal with adversity, to drive forward, you've gotta have ego, confidence, whatever. Half of you has to be coming in for the institution. The rallying cry to the bankers or the traders or anybody was, you know, it only works if we all make it work. If it's just about you getting your piece, 98% is you, if everybody does that's a war of attrition that won't end well. By the way, you're paid in the stock, the stock is gonna go up if it goes well, why wouldn't you want this all to work? That means putting a little bit of yourself aside to do what's right for the institutions. Happily, our investment bankers did. They were fantastic about it. Blunt language and expressing it as you know, I don't come in for James Gorman Securities, I came in for Morgan Stanley. I respected its history, I respected the people who'd led it before me, and I respect the people after it. Your job is to take the ship from one port to another, not to take over the ship only for yourself. Was it much harder, particularly during the COVID pandemic and with younger, you often hear today that younger people want experiences. They're not necessarily looking for a career in one institution. You know, you've had a few controversial comments, like, "If you're so unhappy, just leave." Which is reasonable. Sort of thing my dad would say to me. Yeah. It's like, it's the truth. You've also said, "If you're in career land, you're building a professional life, and that requires being around other human beings to pick up soft cues. Young people are nuts if they're not in the office. That's where mentoring happens. Yeah, you know, I felt very strongly as COVID was going on, and I was criticized by a lot of people for what I said, and partly was I'd had COVID very early and got through it, so their attitude was, "It's easy for you to say." What I said was, I don't know if it's on your list, "If you can go to a restaurant, you can go to the office. There's one on the HuffPost as well. What happened was I was at a restaurant in New York, picking out my food. I'd been to the gym. I was picking out my food, this little Japanese restaurant called BONDST. A big dude walks up to me, he puts his arm around me. He says, "Great to see you." I said, "Who are you?" He said, "I work in the organization," blah, blah. He said, "It's fantastic," in a crowded restaurant, and he said, "Can we get a selfie with this table?" We all did a selfie together. Everybody's high-fiving each other and I said, "How are you finding being back in the office?" "Oh, I couldn't go in the office, not safe." Like what? What about all the kids? He's the senior managing director. What about the young kids who are coming back to an apartment with three other kids in them? There's no privacy, there's a dog barking, you know, the neighbors are yelling, and they're supposed to be doing work, and they wanna go in the office, and their bosses aren't there. I said, "It doesn't work that way." We got the opportunity. We were mentored, we were developed because other senior people were around. Even as simple as, when I was a young lawyer, one of the senior partners one day said, "Would you walk with me?" It was, like, four blocks to the court for a trial he had. I wasn't involved in the trial, but he was smart enough to realize that just being together for four blocks would change my day, change my month, I think. I got to talk to him and, no, you've got an obligation, if you've come through that mentoring, to give back. I feel that very strongly. One of the most important things that you've done at Morgan Stanley was to manage the succession, and you've become a bit of an expert in managing successions smoothly, and you've been charged with doing that more recently at Disney. Mm. What does it really take? Isn't it just throwing money at the other candidates, which you also did? Well, we certainly gave sign-on bonuses to a couple of people at Morgan Stanley. We did none of that at Disney. There's not, like, one model. I mean, this could be a very long conversation, the cliff notes are transparency. Yes, we're having a process. These people are the succession committee. The board will decide. There'll be a start date, there'll be a transition date, and there'll be a finish date, and after the finish date, the old CEO will be gone. They won't be, like, hanging around the hoop. They're gone. The new CEO will be put in place, and they'll either have a non-executive chairman or an executive chairman for periods of time. Transparency of process, total respect. Tell people the great news is you're being considered. Mm. If you're really ticked off about the to-ing and fro-ing, there's an option here. Take yourself out of consideration. Nobody did that, right? You're considered. I want to give you absolute respect, but our job is to find the best candidate for this company for the next 10 years, and that means we're gonna be rigorous. We're gonna ask you questions. I had the Morgan Stanley people write strategy papers. I only gave them 2 weeks. I said, "Come to my office. Send it to me in advance. I'll read it. I don't want any paper. I'm just gonna ask you questions." That way if somebody wrote it for you, it's not gonna be good, right? It's gotta be real. It's what you think. We did health checks. We did all sorts of stuff. Clarity around the process, honesty, transparency, when the king has to be dead for the new king to succeed, so the king has to leave. I left. I said to the board. They said, "Stay," you know, "You could stay a little longer." I said, "We can, but is it the right thing for the company, for the institution? You need somebody to do it 10 years. The fact I can eke out another couple doesn't work." All of those are the elements, but it really starts with clarity, transparency, and intentionality. There will be a result. You know, Disney had messed up succession. It had problems, I should say, for some years going back many decades, and we were absolutely convicted as a board it was gonna be clean. Bob Iger, to his credit, did a great job through the transition. We have a terrific new CEO, Josh D'Amaro. He was his choice. What's that? He was Bob Iger's choice, wasn't he? I mean, but. No, it's the board's choice. No. That's. No. The board- He was happy with it. Yes, very. You think he won't, he will, he won't come back anymore? Absolutely not. The job of a CEO is to present viable candidates fit for purpose. The job of the board, with the succession committee doing a lot of the legwork, is to ensure. Inside and outside the company, you've considered all options, and then properly test and arrive a decision. It requires a board vote. We looked at I mean, I had so many people giving me names of people they thought could run Disney. It was a joke. I said, "Do you even know who the internal people are?" "No, I don't know them, but my guy is the right person." Right? I said, "Fine, I'll look at anything." I went on, looked at podcasts, I looked at TV interviews they did, I looked at speeches, I did reference checking on a whole bunch of outside people. We decided the best person was inside, and they beat all comers, and that's the right answer. It's a board vote. You managed to also keep another internal candidate who didn't get the vote, right? We kept- Right ... we kept 3 internal candidates at Disney, and we kept the 2 other alternatives at Morgan Stanley. All of them were kept, and everybody said it wouldn't happen. I said, "We'll see. Um, is it- Treat people with respect. It makes a real difference. Is it true that you reach out to all to new CEOs in the U.S. and share your advice? What do you do when you hear somebody's a new CEO? Call them up and you say what? Yeah, I didn't do it in the early years. In the later years, I called every Fortune 500 CEO within a month or so of getting their job, and many of the international CEOs, really European more than Asian, to be honest. It was just say congratulations, I'm not here to sell you anything, I just wanna introduce myself. If you ever got issues you wanna talk about. They immediately start talking about their chairman won't leave, they've got an activist a dysfunctional member on the board, their kids are unhappy about them doing the job, they're going through a divorce. I mean, suddenly it was like, whoa. I didn't mean that. I was just saying hi. You get into a long therapy discussion. There was only one guy who turned me down, a French guy. I forget who he was. He said, "I don't talk to bankers." I said, "Well, that's good, 'cause I'm not a banker, anyway, there you go. We've got exactly 16 seconds, no, yeah, 16 seconds actually left. Last night, the president and the first lady both demanded that ABC get rid of Jimmy Kimmel. The journalist in you now. What are you? is sneaking. Yeah right at the end. Yeah, yeah. On to you. What are you gonna do? What am I gonna do about what? About their demand? Yeah. There, I have 12 seconds. The role of directors on any issue, of consequence is to advise not to do. The reason for that is the people who make the decisions live with the consequences. What would your advice be? I'm not gonna share my advice. That's obviously between the board and the CEO. These kinds of issues happen at time to time in large companies, and it's the job of the CEO with their team to figure out the right answer, and they'll be guided, you know, by the board. It's like anything, if you throw 10, 15 people together, they might have different views. We have a terrific new CEO, Josh D'Amaro. He's world-class, I'm sure he'll rise to the occasion and do what the right thing is. Okay. You wiggled out of it. Thank you, James. Thank you. Thank you, Roula Khalaf. Our next speaker faces a different kind of transformation challenge. Karin Rådström is the President and CEO of Daimler Truck, the company that invented the truck in 1896. That's 130 years of industrial heritage, which today is both their strength and their challenge. As the industry reinvents itself, how do you transform a culture built on engineering perfection to move at the speed this moment demands? Please welcome Karin. I started as the CEO of Daimler Truck two years ago. Didn't get called actually by Morgan Stanley, but maybe I'm still waiting for that. One of the first things I did, which I think is quite reasonable when you start as a new CEO, working through the strategy. I worked with my management board, of course strategy department, some consultants who wanted to give us advice. Top down, bottom up, bringing in the talents and sort of coming out with what I thought and the whole board thought was a really, really strong strategy. Five pillars, very clear vision, mission. We know what to do. The first time we were gonna present the strategy was in our top leadership meeting with the top 200 leaders of the company. Just a couple of days before, actually, just kind of out of curiosity, I started looking, you know, what have we said in the past in these conferences, and what did the former CEOs talk about? Then I realized when we started flipping through the old slides, a lot of the strategy was kind of the same as what we had been talking about for or not me, but my predecessors, for, like, the last 15, 20 years. For sure there were new elements like digitalization, AI, servitization, et cetera, but if you looked at the bulk of it, really, to be very honest, a lot was quite similar. We realized that we actually don't really have a strategy problem in our company, we have an execution problem. This is really tricky because as you mentioned in the introduction, we're 130 years old, engineering excellence, always innovation leader. Today we're the biggest truck and bus company in the world. Obviously we did a lot of things right to get to where we are today, but that does not guarantee success, not even the next quarter, and definitely not for the next 10, 20 or even 130 years. Besides that, as we talked about a lot, the world is really changing. You have everything kind of macro or on a large scale that's happening in the world with AI, technology, geopolitics, the shift of power balance in the world. Besides that, in our industry, we also have the transformation of technology. We've been developing diesel trucks for the last 100+ years. Now we're looking at electrification, hydrogen. We have software-defined vehicles. We also do a lot of work into self-driving vehicles. There's new business models. People don't wanna own the assets anymore. Our industry is also changing. Besides that, Daimler Truck is changing. On the one hand, we're 130 years old. On the other hand, actually, we were spun off out of this big Daimler conglomerate just 4 years ago. In many ways, we're just a 4-year-old company learning what it's like to be a listed company, and to function in that environment. Without putting any blame on the past, we needed to focus a lot more on how do we drive transformation going forward. We came up with these three kind of simple words: simpler, faster, stronger. That's a mindset that we now try to bring into everything we do in the company. It sounds very easy. Someone else also talked about doing things simpler. I mean, we are a German company. I would say we're a global company, but our headquarters is in South Germany, and we're very proud of our heritage and what we come from. For sure, we had in order to build the engineering excellence that built our strong history, we needed to pay attention to detail. I think German success is really built on strong structures, clear decisions, strong direction. That's not so easy to change. It's not enough to put simpler, faster, stronger on the wall and expect everyone to run. Where I see it really positive is it's actually a license for anyone in the company to question how we do things. That's maybe also not the historical strengths of German companies, that people really stand up and ask, "Why do we do it like that?" I've heard now from many people in the company, it's like, "Yeah, is there a simpler, faster way we can do this?" We wanted to do it even more, let's say, concrete. We started looking more broadly on culture, and what is culture. The way we defined it in our company is the culture is the sum of all the practices you have in the company. Practices can be couple of different things. First of all, it's the values. It's kind of the words on the wall and what you put in your annual reports and what you say that you stand for. Practices is also all the processes that you have in the company. The formal processes on how you recruit people, how you pay for performance, budgeting, whatever. Then it's also all the informal processes, which is the way you do things in a company, which is actually not a formal process, but everyone just kind of knows that's how we always do it here and that's how it always has been done. We started looking at all these practices. Actually, we found a very structured way that we are picking 3 to 4 practices every month that we wanna change. We look at it. We describe how do we do it today, and what's the desired state on how we wanna do it in the future. Then we're rolling out new practices in waves. Every 1 to 2 months we have a wave. There's 3 to 4 new practices coming. I think that's a very concrete way to drive a change of culture in a very old company. It can be, you know, some of it is like super. Well, sounds basic, but even the small things are not easy. What we do now is we start every meeting by looking at who's sitting around the table. Why are you here? Are you here because you want to add to the discussion, you want to be part of the decision-making? Are you just here to gather information? Are you here because this guy is presenting and I'm his boss, and then the boss of the boss, and then the boss of the boss, so I just have to be in the room to be sure what's being said? By doing that, we have realized, actually, we can walk a lot of people out of the room, who are not there to really contribute to a result. Also, I got crazy when I joined Daimler. There's PowerPoints for everything. Every meeting I get a PowerPoint. It's like 50 pages I have to pre-read. I come in. We have not totally banned PowerPoints, but we have stopped having PowerPoints by default. We see that it drives a completely different quality of discussion because you really focus on the problem and how to solve it instead of spending a lot of time describing all the backgrounds. Those are some small ones. There's some bigger ones, trying to kill the budget process right now. Normally we would already now actually start to plan the budget for 2027. It's, you know, starts with what's the total market gonna be, what's macro, et cetera, and then we build from bottom up. It's a huge process, very structured. Now we're killing the budget process. We will not start until October, November, because then we have to prepare it for the board. That's a really interesting one. It's very fundamental in our company because it's one of the real core processes that some people love. Yeah, not me. Maybe that's a little bit just the practical approach to how to change culture, and I think we're just getting started on this journey. When people already now start to get frustrated, I tell them, "You know, this is not a campaign. This is really something we need to go out and focus on." I think I will do it for my whole CEO tenure, to really push, push, and slowly move step by step by step by step. That's what makes it so fun and interesting to be in these old industries that are transforming very fast. Thank you, Karin. We now move from industrial engineering to retail with another story of transformation. A company where the culture itself is the brand. Jesper Brodin served as CEO of Ingka Group from 2017 - 2025. As CEO, he led major transformation, making IKEA sustainable, digital, ready for a new generation of customers. Here's the paradox: IKEA's culture is what makes it IKEA. Swedish values, affordable design, accessibility. Evolving that without losing that which people love could not have been easy. Please welcome Jesper. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I feel terrible. I have a PowerPoint, Karin, so I don't know what to do now. But listen, I think for a couple of moments, I will take the opportunity to actually try to give a couple of images of culture. The tension, the harmony, and all of it. Let me start. 8 years as CEO, a little bit more, I had 30 years in IKEA last August, and you know what happened? I got an email from myself congratulating me to 30 years in IKEA. Here comes the culture part, offering me 3 extra days of vacation. I can't remember the company who was on the stage before talk about cost consciousness, but that sets the level, I think, for all of us. I wanted to bring a couple of bad pictures from my own iPhone as well, but just to share how does actually culture look like. For me, there are a couple of things we can talk about. For me, it's really the notion of that if you're a leader, you have to live the culture. You have to be the culture. The first picture I brought is this beautiful picture of me doing, if you look at our files, it says we're doing front weeks in IKEA because we think it's genuinely important for us to follow our decisions in reality. I am absolutely crap at selling kitchens. I don't know all the mistakes I've done over the years, so my people recommend I do the dishes. I do that quite well, actually. Now I tell you a story about the culture. This is actually me on the first week of being CEO. I was on a trip around the world to meet a lot of countries, customers, coworkers, and get myself an opinion about where we were as an organization. This actually happened. I was doing the dishes, and the restaurant manager at this store, he came up to me and said, "Are you actually a manager?" He said to me, and I was doing the dishes, very occupied. I said, "Yes, I have to admit." He didn't recognize me. Then he said, "Are you reporting to the Swedish country manager?" I was doing the dishes, and I said, "No, it's actually the other way around." He looked at me, and he burst out in laughter hysterically, then he gave me a hug, and he said, "Keep on dreaming." That's IKEA for you. There you go. The interesting thing, this is also absolutely the truth. I went on this trip because I felt, I think I felt some sort of obligation to show up and meet people. I was a bit nervous in my role, and I, for once, I didn't wanna get lost into the boardrooms and in the head office. I went out there. When I came back, I had a report, a travel report, brought to my management group. At the moment when I shared it, actually, one of my colleagues said, "That's not a report. It's a strategy." I said, "No, it's a report." He said, "No, it's a strategy." The interesting thing with the trip was the report was only listening to customers and to coworkers. We, having a very strong culture at IKEA, with all its benefits and all its strength, had actually over the years stopped listening. I think our front window became smaller, and our back, review mirror became bigger. We almost missed the digital transformation and the online because back then we were absolutely just analog. I will fast-forward in a moment to what happened during the pandemic because actually, that trip and that moment, potentially saved the company. I wanted to talk about this man. Some of you might recognize him. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Somebody asked me yesterday, "What does the name IKEA come from?" Actually, he was 16 years old when he went to the registrar to form his company. His father had to be with him. He told me this story himself. The registrar said, "What is the company name gonna be?" He had no clue. He said, "What's your name?" "Ingvar, I. Kamprad, K." "Where do you come from?" "Elmtaryd, E. Agunnaryd, socken, that's A." That's IKEA, how it was actually started. He passed away 9 years ago, I haven't told this story before, but I think it also says something about culture. I was in the boardroom last time I met him, trying to convince my board to actually make historic investments into digital. That was seen as a problem by the board at the discussion we were having. In came Ingvar. He could hardly walk, 91 years old, obviously all the attention went from me to him in the room. Then he stopped and he said, "What are you doing?" he asked. I think I was a bit annoyed, and I said, "We're trying to solve a problem, Ingvar." He started crying and he said, "Oh, how wonderful to have a problem." Then he left, and that's actually the last time I met him. This was not part of my job description, but this is what happened during the years. Probably a couple of more things, and we could add to the, I think the weight on the shoulders that are on all leaders of today, I think potentially the generation who's been leading in different positions the last 10 years has had more trouble than any of the generations before. We certainly got our share of, challenges. At IKEA, we decided among all these challenges, we believe, and we're happy to speak to it, that climate change is going to be the most dramatic. It's based on ethics, if you like, a morality that we are happy to claim as leaders, but also that a majority of our customers and our coworkers are deeply concerned and expect us to take action on it. Which I want to talk about, is what we discovered down the road, the economic benefits, which we didn't know when we committed ourselves a few years ago. I'm going to skip to some of the achievements, and I'm not here to brag about the numbers that we have produced the last years, but in the backdrop of all these crises, IKEA has had an incredibly strong path of growth. There are three real reasons behind it, and probably more than I, you know, will ever know. The first one I would claim is culture, because during crises, IKEA, as a constituency, I found out during the pandemic, the benefit of a culture that has invested years and years in acknowledging people to do mistakes. We didn't experience paralysis. Actually, people all over IKEA took action simultaneously. We had to steer up some things, we have to coordinate, of course, but we had a lot of willingness to actually be part of the crisis. I think the 24% growth we see here is mostly dedicated to a bloody strong culture. Secondly, it comes from the transformation into online. We went from a fully analog company to today do about 30% thereabouts in online. During the pandemic, we had 100% online. Note that IKEA, at the start of the pandemic, had only one market out of 40 up and running on online. We had a plan of 2.5 years to scale out online. It took 6 weeks due to the crisis that we were into. The cool thing I wanted to share with you, because I think it's less known, is that during these years, we have actually taken the company from a carbon perspective, -30%. +24% in business revenue, -30% in absolute carbon. This is not scope 1, 2, only what we buy or what we do in the company. This is the full value chain, upstream and downstream. I have brought the numbers to you. Now, somebody talked about nerds before. Now I'm gonna get super nerdy here and share with you the equation about this, because I find it fascinating. To start with, we were having all sorts of speculation about what our carbon footprint was until we actually got data. This is the Paris Agreement approximate numbers of IKEA's carbon footprint. It holds a couple of very interesting elements. First of all, most people would think transport was our biggest element. It turns out that customers' transport or home deliveries is the inefficient one, if you like. But the transport of flat packs around the world, as you can see on the number here, is not the biggest one. Raw material, stay with that, raw material is actually IKEA's Achilles heel, if you like, both from a carbon point of view. Now, would I transpose the cost elements of IKEA's value chain from retail and upstream, the numbers will actually resonate quite similar. We have about 36% of our cost today sits in raw material in IKEA. Production, transport, retail, approximately the same. What we realized when we looked at these numbers is that if we touch carbon, we might actually touch cost. It turns out, when we go a few years down the line, what you see is that IKEA has actually managed to reduce carbon in each and every segment of the journey. Audited reported numbers, this has led to the minus 30 in totality. Last 2 years, the biggest financial contribution within the P&L has been cost reductions thanks to being climate smart. I think it's worth to tell that story. In all this mythical environment we have about sustainability, I think this is just a goldmine. How did we do that? There were not, like, 1 single strategy, but of course, investments in renewable energies has saved us a lot of money. By the way, made us independent on some of the crisis we see today. Electrical mobility, innovation within materials, circularity, which is still, I think, one of the biggest opportunities to ripen in the future when more people will share less material of the planet. Here you have it. What I wanted to finish with is talking about, I wanted to go a little bit pessimistic first. This is not my quote. It's somebody I met a year ago in Geneva actually, on a World Economic Forum meeting. This is like the best pessimist I ever met, who said, "Things are much worse than last year, but they are much better than next year." I mean, it's just wonderful. I had an argument with this gentleman. I said, "I like to be a pessimist, because if I'm wrong, I'm happy." I didn't argue against that, I left it. You know what? I have chosen to be an optimist. IKEA, if you study us, we actually have said that optimism is not something that comes to us. It is a choice we have made, because we think that makes us solution-oriented. I think it's actually how we drive the business. I'm gonna finish with three things that I picked up over the years. The first learning being an optimist is that I and we, in the management group of IKEA, felt that we were almost stuck in being problem-solvers. With all these issues on our menu, it almost felt embarrassing to talk about dreams and opportunities at the moment. We actually agreed, and I shall count on, that we're gonna be good at managing problems, but we will lead from opportunities, because that's how the world is created. Second, I think this is a picture I took, by the way, when we took the world to a forestry to bring activists, people critical to us, our board was part of this picture as well, to go deep on a topic, just believing that transparency will make us better. Culture saved IKEA during the pandemic, made us actually a much stronger company. I think the aspect of building culture is probably the most modern, effective way of leading with speed of today. Finally, I think, I truly believe culture is about allowing visions and dreams to be real. When you combine that with the financial power, that's when I think you get the true power of leading a company from a culture point of view. I'm gonna finish with. Oh, it's red now. That's bad. That means I need to wrap it up. I will do so. The second last time I met our founder, we're having a coffee on the porch, and we asked him, as we used to do, I said, "Ingvar, how should we think about the future?" He said, "Oh, you should think longterm," he said. He always said that. My colleague Anders said, so a genius question, he said, "How long term should we think?" Ingvar thought and he said, "200 years is good." I can't get that out of my system really, you know. I tell you this, when we look at the issues today, we look at what's gonna happen in Hormuz, what happens in the year to come and so on, which we need to do, widen your gaze. Maybe not 200 years, but look five, 10, 20 years into the future. Some things will disappear. Some politicians will. Some of the challenges that we are combating in this time will not, unfortunately. I think that perspective helps us build culture and drive business in a better way. Thank you for listening. This is, by the way, this is not an IKEA furniture, so I'm not allowed to. We apologize for that. That's great. Thank you, Jesper. Jesper, could I ask you to take a seat for a panel discussion? Thank you. Far, we've heard four very different cultural transformation stories, but what connects them? What's universal about transformation? We'll explore that now. Roula will moderate this session, and she'll be taking questions from the audience present here. If you have a question, simply scan the QR code on the screen and send it through. Joining Roula and Jesper are Ajay and Karin. Please help me welcome them to the stage. Inspiring talks from all three of you. Let me first ask a question of all of you. First day in the job, what shocks you most? Ajay. Depends what job you're talking about. World Bank, definitely. World Bank. Yeah. The quality of people was amazing. They have lived in everywhere. Their knowledge base is amazing. They have taken their families from one difficult situation to another. The quality of people is amazing. The dysfunctionality of how the place worked was frightening. When you brought together this quality of people with this 189 shareholders and 25 resident executive boards and 20 advisors each, that was a daunting task. In all this, I was trying to make the place, Karin Rådström was talking about three adjectives she used. Mine were, I was trying to make it faster, better, and simpler. Trying to get the place to be faster, better, and simpler when you have 400 advisors and 25 board members, all well-intentioned, everybody's well-intentioned, but the combination is complicated. Karin? Yeah, I was trying to remember. I mean, I started in Daimler Truck not as the CEO, but I was. Yeah one of the divisions. I think, I was a bit. Still, when you are in charge, there are things. Yeah, I was- ... suddenly jump at you. Yeah. I was running one of the biggest divisions. I think my first was very simple. I moved from Sweden to Germany. I thought, "I have to buy a lot of suits, and people are gonna be really dressed up." Actually, they'd just been running this culture program, so I came in really dressed up, but everyone else had started dressing down. I was totally overdressed. That was my first culture shock. When the meeting started, then it turned a little bit the other way, so I was a little bit shocked. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned some it, like, there were just 18 people to discuss very simple topics, so just the amount of people and how complicated we were making everything. Jesper? Well, I think maybe the thing that was striking for me was meeting a lot of customers. 1 customer, a lady in Japan, told me, when I visited her home, said that basically she liked IKEA and she was an old customer of IKEA, on a Tuesday night, she said, "When I put the kids to bed and I've done the dishes, I'm not gonna go to IKEA. If you don't show up in my telephone, I'm gonna choose somebody else." That shook me. What shook me secondly was that we had stopped listening to customers. I think there was an intent and a drive within the company to stay away from unnecessary cost and so forth, we hadn't really got a 360 of what happened in the world. I think the interesting thing was we were so used to be the disruptor, so we didn't see when disruption happened to ourselves, and that was an interesting moment. It's always, there's always a question, as you know disruption is coming, and I think everyone in this room is now going through, this phase. Everyone, you know, we don't know exactly how AI will change a lot of businesses. We know for certain that it will. What you chose to do was to sort of confront it head-on and rush into it. Doesn't culture often prevent you from doing that? I mean, we've spent most of the day about the positives of culture. Mm. There is also a negative in that it can breed complacency. Mm because you are so comfortable in the culture. Mm. That you have a strong culture and this is what drives, you know, this is what has driven the institution to excellence for a long time. Mm. Did you feel that? Massively. I think it was one of the themes during my years as CEO was this debate. I think what I learned. Now, if I would describe it mathematically, I don't know why, but we tend to put the future and the past against each other in a linear way, at least I experienced that in IKEA. Strong culture means strong legacy, strong beliefs in how we have always done it. Of course, there comes a point where you start to shut down to the curiosity of what the future looks like, even if your value is curiosity. I think the beauty is love the past, understand the past, and create the future, but not as a linear equation, and then you will be able to find, I think, the beauty in it. If you drop the past, who you are and all of that, of course you will take enormous risks, but that is easily- You had moments. ... open to as an intellectual exercise. Yeah. You have to fight for it. You had moments. I know you've been quoted in the FT as saying sometimes you just have to go with your gut. Did I say that? You have, yeah. Okay. I have to admit. I have it. I can prove it to you. The thing is the problem with the future versus the past is that the past has proof, but the future doesn't. Therefore you need to invest more than 50% of your energy in the future, and you need to be prepared to make all sorts of mistakes in it. I liked the conversation before about calculated mistakes. Can somebody get hurt? Can the company go beyond? I think I just heard that, in IKEA, even in IKEA being an entrepreneurship culture, I met so many people who said they were afraid of making mistakes. I invented this go banana card, which is it was a sign of desperation I think from my side. it's basically the card that gives you, if you make a mistake and you're in trouble, I've already co-signed the mistake together with you. That gives you. I think I've issued thousands of them. Yeah. The first one I issued to, he came back and said, "I have made a mistake." I said, "That was fast. What did you do?" "I copied it to all my people in my organization." 10,000 people, anyways. One thing that you often hear from, I think more American CEOs, talking about Europe, is that what we lack in Europe is a culture of risk-taking. This is why, you know, we're afraid. We don't actually promote, build a company, but fail. Failure is okay. To what extent do you, do you feel that? I was just reflecting on the question before. I worked 16 years in Scania. That company hasn't had a negative quarter for 100 years. I think in that context it was harder than when I came into Daimler Truck. Yeah where in Mercedes-Benz Trucks, my first job, I mean, we needed to change things because we weren't earning any money. I think then it's much easier and the culture supports driving change. I think it depends a little bit. And I, and now we're not, you know, a restructuring case anymore. We're doing pretty good. I think to focus on the why- Mm why we still need to change is very important. In terms of this European versus American, I mean, I have almost as many people in the U.S. as in Europe. One thing that we started doing much more actively the last couple of years is to move people between to get a little bit more American optimism into our, into our European part of the organization, get a little bit more of maybe German diligence sometime into some of the American parts of the company. I think that helps to balance. It is true that in our culture as a company, people are still quite afraid to make mistakes, so we have to become even better at allowing that to happen. Ece, do you feel that in your interactions with your members, but also with staff? Yeah. Well, you know, Roula, in my case, I deal with members who are governments, and then my clients are both, governments in the emerging markets, but also private sector companies and it's quite a wide range of people. What I'm trying to instill in the bank is, 3 values that I brought with me from when I was at Mastercard. My 1st year at Mastercard as the CEO, I got a calendar. You know, the old things we used to get when you actually had a calendar, you would turn pages. I got that, and on the other side was sayings, 1 for each month. I found 3 of them very useful. They're in my office. You can see them any time you come. The first one is, "Done is better than perfect." I think people don't really understand how deep that is as a thought. Mm. At the bank, it's a pretty, really challenging issue, done is better than perfect. The second one is, "Fail faster and harder." That's kind of the idea of taking a risk and taking the risk of failing is kind of important. The third is the most important, in the bank and earlier, was, "Question everything, always." The issue there is you get told when you come to a company or an organization with an old history, legacy history, it will tell you, "Oh, no, we tried that 28 years ago, it didn't work." Yeah, that doesn't matter because 28 years ago, you know, oil was priced at NOK 20 or NOK 9. Today it's not. 28 years ago, X had changed, Y had changed. This issue of it didn't work and therefore it won't work now is kind of a cancer in an organization. To be able to change these things, those three I found useful. I kind of carry them with me even now, and I've converted it to in our development plan for employees at Mastercard and now at the World Bank. This is common across these two, private and public. There are only four. Every employee gets every year a conversation with their boss, and it has four boxes. The first box is what do I like about you, the second box is what you can do better, the third box is how do I think about you on three attributes: a sense of urgency, a sense of thoughtful risk-taking, and the willingness to be empowered but then be accountable. The last box is what do I think you can do in 1 to 3 years and 3 to 5 years, and whose job is it to get you there? If you can't fill up that box for one of your subordinates in less than 5 minutes. I, in Mastercard, used to keep a, you know, those old things that sand runs out? I had a 5-minute measure, and I would keep it in front of the employee and say, "Write the card." If you couldn't finish in 5 minutes, you didn't know your employee well. How does the staff react to this? In the beginning, they thought I was crazy. As you go along, they begin to realize the value of this idea. I think in the World Bank it is similar. When I first started talking about this, they began to think that this is crazy and he doesn't know what he's talking about and it won't work in the public sector. Today, I think if you walk around the halls of the World Bank, there are three kinds of people in every organization. I have them, too. One third of the people are delighted I am there and want me to succeed every day. One third of the people just wish I would die tomorrow morning. One third of the people are waiting to see what happens to me. Your job as a cultural change leader is to get the last one third to come on the side of the first one third. You're never gonna win over the ones who want you to die. What do you do with the ones in the middle? You just work at them. I'm busy working at the guys that are on the fence to come to the correct side. I think if you get that right, you get two thirds on your side, and two thirds is a winning combination. You will change the whole place. That is the point that James was making about winning. You have to get that one third onto the side of saying, "I'm on the winning side," and then you're, you know. It is much harder for you, though, because you're not in the private sector, and that must be quite a culture shock. Well, I chose to leave the private sector. I retired a year or so before James, and he and I had talked a lot about succession and planning. I went through this whole process. I chose to leave, and I thought I was retiring. David knows me from a long time and knows I was busy trying to do this retirement thing. Then I ended up doing a combination of three things. I joined General Atlantic, where James now is as vice chair. I became chair of John Elkann's family holding company, Exor. He stepped down and became CEO. I became chair. I joined Temasek, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I used to work half a day and make more money. So it felt very good, until I got called into this job. Now I earn no money, and I work 16 hours a day. There's something wrong with what's going on here. I don't know what it is, but I'll get there. The thing is, at the end of the day, I am very proud of what the bank is. I firmly believe that you need more of it in the coming 20 years, not less. I do believe it needs to change to be perfected for the next 20 as compared to living off the last 80. I think that's what all of us are trying to say. I wanna pick up on your decency, topic. Thank you. ... because. Very queen. because we often, I mean, we often talk about, decency, and every company wants to treat its staff, decently. You know, to a certain extent you can explain some of the difficult decisions that you, that you are making. You often also need to let people go, right? Yeah. How do you, how do you handle that? Karin Rådström, I'm looking at you. Is that one of the most difficult things that you've had to do? Is there a good way of doing it? Yeah, I think it's always difficult on a human level. The way I try to think of it personally is, I'm doing something which is better for the company long term, and I know it's the right thing, so I have to do it. I've, to be honest, I've done it enough that it's something I'm quite used to. Then it's about really explaining the why. Doing it in a respectable way. Different in different countries, exactly the process, but always showing respect and just being honest and straight on it. Do we show far too much respect in Europe? Show too much respect? In Europe. Wow. I didn't know there was something that said. It's very difficult to let people go. You mean in that sense. Yeah. Well, you know what I don't have that experience. I think I had the unfortunate situation, many occasions to have to let people go, and organize for it. Once when I was in China, it was structurally we were sort of totally outdated strategically in the structure. I think, yes, a transformation hit IKEA and such, we had to do a lot of changes. Now I think I hate it. I'm not sleepless about a lot of things, but this is one of them. I think in the, how to say, the coward within me who would love to delegate this says that you have to confront people and be part of it. I think the only way I know of it is to engage, and be present, and be around when it happens. I've not had anyone I can remember that questioned the decision. Combining professionalism and being caring, I think, is the model, because you have to care also for the people who stay with the company. Mm. The best thing you can do is to remember when you're done that you don't wanna do this too often. Be a little bit mindful of your decisions. In particular, the complacency that sometimes come to us as leaders, right? Because basic organizations are like plants, they grow whether you like it or not. They won't shrink or get more efficient or simple by time. They're gonna get more complicated, bureaucratic, and outdated. The more you can be there and garden it, I think you can avoid bigger things in the future sometimes. You might wanna spend a bit more time with Mr. O'Leary. It will stiffen you. There is a question from the audience about AI, which I think is a good follow-up. Will leading people and AI workers or agents change the way that you lead as a, you know, as a CEO, as a, as a business- Mm ... leader? If you were Okay, very good. Yes. Good. Massively, I think, I think it's maybe in ways that we don't fundamentally understand today also. It's incredibly interesting. It's one of those topics that in our conversations we like to draw some sort of average. In AI, I think the opportunities are amazing. Quality, efficiencies, whatnot. The risks from a human perspective I don't think we have fully embraced yet. It gives us an opportunity, I think, to maybe go a bit deeper in ourselves also as leaders and as humans to reflect on what is truth, what is the value of something that is human-led and human-created, and those questions. I think the thing that IKEA and I did was. I belong to the first generation of parents, I think, that thought we gave our kids a telephone, but it was something a little bit more powerful. Today we in our family, we are okay, except my wife. She's not listening. She's the only one we have to help sometimes with the addiction to social media and whatnot. The promise of making us connected in social media came with an incredible depth of loneliness and mental damage. Personally I think after listening to people who know much more than I do about AI, the risks with AI might be much higher than some. Therefore, I think we need to work faster on catching up to the negative sides, how it's gonna impact us. You think of it more as a, as the societal impact? I think so. Yeah. I think, again, wonderful opportunities for us. It will happen. It always been in, I think, history of humankind, whatever can be automated or made efficient will be made efficient, automated, so. It gives us an opportunity to ask, where do we as humans add value? In this case, maybe also, are we okay to be do we see ourselves as mastering a tool or are we the opposite? This is the first time I think, we've been in that situation, so it's very interesting and scary. Karin, how do you think about it? Well, first of all, I think it brings new business opportunities. One big bet that we do, we have a software company in the U.S. to figure out how to make these trucks self-driving, which would take away 25%-30% of the cost for our customers when we make that happen, and that's only possible with AI or at least greatly accelerated the path to productization. On, like, the company side, I think it just kind of amplifies what was already starting to happen with technology and software. Mm ... and so on, which is we guys on the board, we're definitely not the experts, even if we all grew up in engineering and did a lot of great things. Mm ... puts demands on us to be able to push out decision-making and make sure that people are enabled to. Mm ... business who are closest to it. Ajay Banga, do you find your employees excited about AI, or do you find that, you know, there are very few people who actually use it? Do you Yeah usage. Employees are beginning to use it quite a bit. You know, in our case, for example, if you're gonna put up a water project to do desalination in Jordan. You would love to be able to learn from 10 prior experiences. To actually dig through those 10 projects, find the learnings, synthesize them, produce them together would take weeks of work for a loan officer. Now you can actually go onto a platform they have and ask that question, and it'll dig out all this for you, and it'll also allow you to know when the AI may be hallucinating, because you can scroll over the numbers and it shows you the source of the data. It's useful. I will say, if I could just zoom back for a second, my clients are the emerging markets, not the developed world. I'll speak from that perspective. The AI we all talk about in the developed world is large language models and the like. That requires four things: computing power, lots of it; electricity- Mm a heck of a lot of it. Data, lots of it kept in its simplest form with privacy, and the more data you have, the more predictive the model is. Fourth, people who know how to do all this. The emerging markets don't have these four. You know, computing power, electrification, data, and people who know how to do this are not exactly what the strength is of a developing country. To me, they could get left behind if that's the only thing we think about. What we're talking about to the emerging markets is actually the use of AI to create applications for a illiterate woman farmer to be able to use a phone and look at the backside of a leaf and say, "I don't know what that disease is, but that insecticide from my cooperative for 25 rupees will kill it." A nurse in a primary health center in a village in Egypt gets somebody coming in and says, "I have a rash," and they can go to their doctor who's remote and figure out whether it's eczema or something more serious and needs an appointment, and so on. I think the use of AI apps, which is kind of what we're all playing with, is actually quite interesting for the future of what I deliver. I think getting stuck in LLM being the only model is gonna be hard. The last part I'd say is LLM assumes that the global flow of data is seamless. I would tell you we need to be very careful thinking about how quickly, how long before governments start thinking of data as a national security asset. Mm. Mm. When that starts happening, just as today we've all realized that energy is a national security policy. We kind of didn't know that it feels till one month ago, but now we're all thinking that way. In the same way, I believe data of your citizens will become something that'll be a fairly complex national security topic. I'm not fully sure that I know that I can predict which way this AI development will go. I think right now it just feels there's only one way. Big box centers, lots of data, stuff getting churned out, stuff coming out the other side, and it'll replace you in your job. I think that narrative is a broken narrative. That's me. Could I, can we end with some advice? This is a question from the audience. What's the best advice that you would give to a younger generation, people in their 20s? I don't know if there are many of them in the audience. I don't see one. Someone did ask. Jesper, you go. Well, I'm gonna pass on the advice I got from my mother when I was in that age. "What am I gonna do with my life?" She said, "Look for what you're good at, look for what you love to do, and if you find both, you will be happy," she said. Now the advice is yours. That goes for elderly people as well, so it's-. True. Karin? Yeah, I completely agree. I think do the things that you're passionate about. I would also say something I would have needed to hear maybe when I was 20. Just believe in yourself, you know? Ultimately, you can do much more than what you might think. Mm. Who says you're not gonna change the world, you know? That's in your head, just go for it. One truck at a time. Yes. One truck at a time. I think life is 50% luck. The other 50% is what you do with the luck when it comes your way. Most people don't seize their luck when it comes their way. If you're not willing to take a risk, you're gonna be left on that platform, and the train will leave, and you'll be waving goodbye to your luck. You have to learn how to take risks. Take them, play with them, embrace them, embrace your passions. Be optimistic, number one, two, and three. It will all be fine. It'll all be fine. Well- Wonderful ... most of the time. Well... Thank you. Thank you, Ajay, Roula, Karin, and Jesper. We'll now take a 30-minute break. We'll resume at 3:35 P.M. [Presentation] Welcome back. We explored what makes a winning culture and how to transform it. In this third part, we ask what does high-performance culture look like in the age of AI? AI is reshaping organizations, how they're structured, how decisions get made, the impact that young people can make on day one. Before we meet our speakers, let's hear a message from Anthropic's Co-founder and President, Daniela Amodei, on how AI is already changing the way we work. Hi, everyone. I'm Daniela Amodei, Co-founder and President of Anthropic. We build Claude, the most trusted AI used by enterprises. I want to thank Norges Bank for having me. 600 people across the organization devoted to building AI fluency is what it looks like when leadership treats AI as a culture decision, not just a technology decision. At Anthropic, our mission includes a core belief, which is that AI will have a vast impact on the world, and we're honest about both the opportunities and the risks. In fact, one of our cultural values is to hold light and shade. That's why we publish research like the Economic Index, which details how AI is affecting jobs. Some of what we find is complicated, but we publish the Economic Index because our mission calls for honesty. One of our other values is to put the mission first, and this value is put to the test in challenging moments. At times, we've delayed product launches because of safety concerns, and we've turned away brilliant candidates because they didn't share our values. These are not easy decisions in the fastest moving industry on Earth, but that's what makes our culture so unique. Something I've learned in this role is that culture is a mission amplifier. If you're consistent, these actions create a culture that your team and your community rally behind. Nicolai and the whole team at Norges Bank have been forward-leaning on exactly these topics, rethinking the work, not just the tools. That's a leadership story as much as it is a technology one. Thank you again to Norges Bank, and I hope you all enjoy the rest of your conference. That's the world we're operating in. What does a future-ready organization actually look like? Our next speaker may have the answer. Christel Heydemann is the CEO of Orange Group, a world-leading telecom with 340 million customers across 26 countries. She's now leading it into a world being disrupted by AI, where the technology never stops moving and the competition never slows down. In a fast-moving industry, how do you build a culture that can keep pace? Pedro Furtado Reis, the Co-Chief Investment Officer for Active Strategies, joins her to find out. Please welcome Christel and Pedro. A big welcome to Oslo, Christel. Thank you. Great to be here. Let's just get, jump straight into it. As we just learned from Anthropic, there's a lot of change happening in leadership and in technology at this stage. How are you leading Orange to operate at a new and much faster pace now? Well, I think a company like Orange that operates in 26 countries, that have a mission that's so clear, it's somehow. We've been passionate about technology. Of course, we started with copper networks and 2G, GSM at the time. We had Nokia phones, as we've seen earlier. The company loves technology changes, so that's the easy part. Now, the difficult part is speed. I think AI is just mind-blowing, and it feels like it keeps accelerating. The speed, of course, in a company with 130,000 employees in 26 country is not a startup. It's all about taking decisions, understanding what are one-way decision, what are two ways where you can go backwards, and that makes a huge difference. We are just testing, testing. Of course, there's a number of things we are. we have to address, not just Orange, but as a society because security, I mean, Anthropic knows with Mythos. Mm-hmm. I mean, there's a lot of debate that are happening with country leadership, with security agencies about, okay, what are we gonna unleash when this technology goes in all our hands, whether they are bad or good hands? Beyond the need for speed, where is AI already having the most impact for your teams or for your customers right now? We've trained thousands of our teams, and we've put tools in the hands of our teams so that they could use gen AI. Of course this, if you use gen AI to, I mean, go faster in your analysis, email, work, et cetera, that's the basics. That doesn't really change the company itself. Mm-hmm. We've launched a number of assistants in our customer service, of course. When we serve more than 300 million of customers, that's a lot of data in terms of, I mean, how do we manage the portfolio of offers we have across countries? How do we simplify? We have AI tools for our sales teams, I mean, to be able to propose the best information and to know the customer journey, and these are things we just cannot do without AI. We have, of course, our networks and cybersecurity. I mean, today we have Orange Cyberdefense that's preventing and helping customers cope with cyberattacks. I mean, our networks are so complex, the data that flows through your network, through our networks is so complex that without AI, it's just not possible. Mm-hmm. There's, I mean, many, many areas where we already see the potential of AI. We are not a software development company, so when I meet with Anthropic and I'm told that I'm gonna have unlimited capabilities to develop software, I like that promise because it feels like we're gonna be able to do things that, frankly speaking, we just could not do because of. I mean, now, the cost of it is still a, something we haven't- Mm we haven't tackled. I imagine that there's a lot of experimentation going on at the moment. How do you create that room for bold innovation and risk-taking in a company that, at the end of the day, is built on critical infrastructure that simply cannot fail? Well, that's a very good question, and that's really the culture of a company whose purpose is very clear. No matter what happens, extreme events, cyber attacks, I mean, our networks, our connectivity services have to work. Mm-hmm. Which means that the design and the way we work is absolutely zero risk, to a point where now, of course, if we think about AI, we are not gonna let AI agents manage our core networks because that's not an option. We've made it very clear, and the company and especially we come, I mean in France or in many countries actually, we have been the incumbent, so we come from being an administration. The company value, and when I joined the company I was very surprised that people think that doing good is applying the process. If I apply the process, I'm safe, I'm doing my job, that's all good. Sometime we have to challenge, actually very often, we have to challenge because the process is not fast enough, the process was designed for different intents, and sometime we have way too many processes that end up being contradicting each other. Mm-hmm. That's all the work we're doing on changing that. In the end, it's been said earlier, the winning mindset, and I've been reflecting on what does winning mean in a company like Orange? Because our teams are excellent in managing crisis. You would think that the today's world is awful. We go from one crisis to another. At Orange, our teams are excellent because extreme events, network outage, cyberattacks, this is when the company unites around one purpose, which is very clear. Restore the service, serve our customers. That's the good thing, given the current environment. Of course, when we think about innovation- Mm-hmm We have to move from a culture where we were thinking, you know, we launch a service for millions of customers, tens of millions of customers, so everything has to be ready, training the salespeople, et cetera. Which does not work if you want to incubate new solutions. We've been designing things where it's okay to fail. It's okay to test and not scale a solution, and to fine-tune it. One of the challenges, of course like any big industrial company, you're not launching a product for tens of millions of customers unless you know it's gonna work. You can launch a solution beta test, like software development, and then when it's ready, you really scale it. We've had to change that, and we've done a lot, I mean, on cybersecurity. Today we talk about satellite connectivity complementing our mobile networks. We talk a lot about AI solution, AI agent for our sales team, AI agent for our customers, I mean customer service. It's back to, you know, telecom operators somehow have been good at taking technology and bringing it to market, but I don't think as an industry we are very good at coming from the customer needs, the real needs, and then pulling back what type of innovation could go with it. Mm-hmm. When I joined the company, I was amazed by the number, the failure rate we had when people move into a store, they sign up for broadband fiber. Guess what? 40% of the time we would send a technician, fail with the connectivity. I was challenging the team, saying, "Think about companies like Airbus. If 40% of the time you ship the plane, it crashes. Why are we not collectively in the company trying to address that?" The mindset of the company was, "Well, it's for a fact that it's 40% failure rate," and they did not realize that maybe we could optimize that. We've been working on that. This is the type of innovation that maybe is not visible by the engineers, maybe it's not very visible by the shop people because they turn up that people are signing up for broadband, and they get the service, and then they get the bill, and they pay, and they get their bonus. When on the contrary, we had people waiting for weeks and eventually canceling their order. Oh, okay. that's the type of innovation Mm-hmm ... which is focused on quality customer experience, going into the details of our processes and working with our partners on it. You've mentioned winning, and we heard many simple words from many companies today. You chose for Orange bold, responsible, and caring. My question is, how do you move that? How do you bring that to life to the 26 countries from France to the rest of Europe to Africa? To Ajay's words, before, how do you make sure that those are the values when you're not in the room? Well first, when I joined the company and I ask, "Okay, what are our values?" There wasn't one answer. We had values in Africa, we had values in France, we had values for our B2B business. I told the team, "Okay, what makes us a group then? What's the many-in-one value that brings us, which is more than just a sum of divisions?" We spent a lot of time. Given our purpose and the service we provide, it was actually very easy to come up with what creates excitement for our teams. We worked on these values around caring for our customers and our people, of course. Responsible, responsible people think about responsible, we've been very clear that responsible is also you're responsible to call it out and to speak up when things go wrong, et cetera. Bold is probably the value where the company is more eager to transform because this is an expectation from our teams that we want to innovate, we want to be bold. If you think about the Orange brand, when it was created, I mean, more than 20 years ago, it was very bold. There's also a link with the past and where we come from, in the end, it's all about leadership, it's all about, as you said, it's when you're not in the room- Mm-hmm ... that things happen. It's about. I mean, if I take bold, for instance, first of all, the values work together. It's not just one or the other. It's also about speaking up about our failures, being it. I mean, it's okay to fail. I mean, it's not okay to lose NOK billions. It's okay to fail, and to fail fast if you fail. It's okay to speak about it as part of our culture. There's a lot of things we've changed starting in the management team. Of course, we worked on how do we assess leaders, who do we promote, why do we promote people? That's where you connect the dots between the values that can't be just words on the wall, and the different actions we take on a day-to-day basis. It's very clear that I realized, I mean, being a CEO, that sometimes there's a lot more comments in the company about the type of questions I asked than about the answers. Mm-hmm that we make to this question. Sometimes people tell me in the field, "Oh, it seems that you're interested in understanding what we do there." There's a lot of myth as well about the CEO, what I say, what we discuss in the management team, and that's also how we shape. We tell stories about as well, the way we work as a management team and then it's about being in the field focusing on customers. Again, I mean, our teams are super proud. They are very knowledgeable. They have deep technical know-how. So the, I mean, we spend a lot of time understanding what are those jewels and talents in the field that we are not, I mean, enabling to do. Mm-hmm more for the company. There's a lot of reasons for that in a company of our size, of course. You spent five years in the board before becoming CEO. How does that experience influence the way that you dealt with the company from day one? Well, first of all, I have a very direct relationship with my board because I've been sitting on the board. I realize, I mean, of course, I came with my experience from different companies, very different culture. When I came to the company, I knew about, I had a feeling about the culture from the topics that we were not discussing in the board, and I thought they were important to discuss. Of course, I mean, the CEO is not being a director. There's a lot of thing I still discovered by joining the company. I had already very clear ideas about what are the things we should fix, what are the question I was frustrated somehow as a director of not having answers. I remember, and I had a lot of discussion with our investors, there was a kind of myth that Orange was a company where I mean, the French government owns 23% of Orange. Mm-hmm. There was a lot of myth around, I mean, investors and the French government and things that we could not do because of that. Being on the board for five years, I was very clear on the type of debates we had, where there was absolutely full consensus amongst shareholders and board members. There was a lot of I mean, myth around some of our shareholding structure that actually were neither true in the company nor on the board. That's the type of thing as well that was very useful engaging with investors. Mm-hmm All type of stakeholders, having that history of the five years, having in mind some of the debates where we couldn't, I mean, conclude as a board. I think the world keeps on having a very direct relationship and transparent relationship with my board. I've met with a lot of CEOs when they get appointed from the company, and they have difficult times understanding, "What should I discuss with my board? Why should I hide from my board?" Et cetera. I've been very open from day one saying, "Look, these are the things we really have to tackle as a board," because I felt like I was a peer joining, and I'm still a director on the board as well. Let's bring it home for a second and focus on Europe. There's a lot of chatter around competitiveness of Europe in the global stage. The scale. Is scale required for high performance? It depends. Depends on your business. If you are in telecom is, I mean, capital intensive business where we invest a lot in our infrastructure, scale matters. We're a fixed cost business. It's very simple to explain that if you're number one in your market, you have more margin to invest and to do things than if you're number two, three, or four. Mm-hmm. This is, I mean, very easy. You look at the math, et cetera. That's the type of discussion where, I mean. I've been very open with, I mean, all the stakeholders in Europe, being country leaders, regulators, that, I mean, we have to change something because, I mean, first of all, our networks are critical infrastructure, and I think nobody would challenge that these days. We've been in Europe for quite some time in a situation where many telecom operators had to sell their assets to continue to invest in next generation assets. That doesn't sound right, I think this is where we need. We've probably gone too far in a number of areas. We need regulation. I mean, our business is very critical, so we need regulation. Europe is missing the scale of Europe. I mean, I operate in eight countries in Europe. I mean, I can't copy-paste a service. If I have a successful service that we launch in Spain, it's impossible to copy-paste across Europe simply because, I mean, I'm not gonna go, but the list of things we would have to unleash to be able to do that is quite long. It's, I mean, it's easy to say simplify. If we go into the details, there's always a good reason why. Sometime, by the way, the company itself love this type of complexity, because I have country CEOs who love to be the king of their empire. They don't want to share. We need to create pride as well in copying from others and being fast. I think speed is really the thing we use now to measure, because, I mean, in a world of unlimited capital, unlimited time, it's very easy for everyone to do the same thing. That's not the world we live in these days. That's also the type of thing we're driving in the company. Well, it's clear that Orange is not just about being everywhere. It's about, like, leading from the front in technology, in speed, and in culture. Thank you so much, Christel, for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Christel and Pedro. Our next speaker leads an organization where milliseconds make the difference between winning and losing. Stefano Domenicali is the President and CEO of Formula 1. F1 has a unique cultural challenge. Hundreds work behind the scenes, but only the driver gets to stand on the podium. How do you create a high-performance culture when only one person is in the spotlight? F1's approach, obsess over marginal gains. Every detail compounds. Milliseconds add up. Please welcome Stefano. [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I hope that my voice is loud and clear. Nicolai, thank you for this opportunity. Thanks to Norges Bank. I mean, it's for me personally, but also for our organization, an incredible opportunity to stand here today in front of you. If you think that back couple of years ago, this was not possible. Great responsibility on board, but we want to take our opportunity to explain who we are in this context. I was listening, you know, to all the things that have been said today. I'm not a teacher. I'm trying to explain who we are and to be effective, because at the end of the day, I do believe, if I read behind me, high performance culture, what does it mean? Personally, me, it's a state of mind, state of mind that you have to deliver, first of all, to yourself and to the people that are around you. F1 is not a sport. Is a platform of entertainment, where a lot of stakeholders are part of it. It is true, it's a matter of milliseconds to the top performers to be the winner or to be the loser. Not only on the track. If I look back of what our organization has done in the last couple of years, not many years ago, a lot of people were thinking that the investment in Formula 1 has been very bad, or were thinking that F1 was almost there to die. The beauty that we are here, it's the other way around. I mean, we are very strong today. I would say worldwide sport platform today, we have been seen as a reference because we were able to turn, you know, the situation in such a short term. There's no secret. It's just we were able to have this approach in all the elements we are trying to control. I give you one example. We were hit by COVID, that all organization, all people. For us, COVID could have been a slide into a moment, taking our bags, go home and say hello to all the people watching us. We were able to create, in a very, very short time, the possibility for us to run our show, our business around the world, to create protocol to travel. Of course, not be able to perform in front of the fans at the track, but able to perform around the world, because at that moment, there was the need to have contents that was be able to be seen on the screen of a television, computer, iPhone. That was a moment that was really a sort of great spring for the push of being what we are today. At that moment, we were able to change completely our way to communicate with our fans. We basically open up, and to say that today seems to be ridiculous, to the social media. We were the first to create the new contents, trying to keep our drivers as our jewel to communicate behind the scene. We did something that, at that time, even to present that project was crazy, to say that in front of the traditional people, like Drive to Survive, a Netflix product that had been instrumental for our growth, mainly in the new markets. The other way was trying to be effective in connecting with the new fans that were approaching us. Of course, we have to be respectful of all the ones that are love Formula 1, but the only way to be relevant, that is the word I want to keep connected to this kind of a sentence is really to try to understand who is watching us, who is needs to be connected with the right way of working, with the right narrative, with the way, the right rhythm and the right content that they want to listen. Of course, by doing that, we have changed completely the way to explain who we are. We are now in a situation where if I divide all the things that are relevant for us, is a sport where all the countries wants to participate. We have 24 events around the world, and the beauty that we have today is that a lot of countries, more than 24, would like to host Formula 1, because they see that as a possibility to showcase and to create business opportunity in the country. This is behind the scene. I give you one reference in term of numbers. In a big events, we are hosting today around 450,000 or 500,000 people, and the global chain of work that is behind that, we're talking about 25,000-30,000 people working for an event. If I compare, you know, for other sport, I would say one thing that is very relevant in American culture, and I will come back to that because I think it's a very important point for us, is, we were able to be in the same place, in the same city when there was a Super Bowl. In term of business, we were bigger. You can imagine for an American to recognize that a small sport is creating more opportunity if you compare with the legends, well, it's something relevant. If I take the other stream of our important portfolio we're managing, of course, managing the technology behind what we are doing, big manufacturer, teams that are working relentless to try to be the best. Of course, on that side, I would say the beauty of what we are doing is that we are able to capture the attention of the highest company at all the technology level that is relevant for them to be seen in our platform. One thing is mobility for sure, one thing is motorsport, but if you look the involvement of the automotive industry in a moment of crisis where we're living, that wants to be with us, it shows that the platform that we are offering is the right one. Partnership. Just a couple of years ago, there were not so many who believed in what we are doing. Not so many invested money in our platform. Today, thank God, we moved to B2B partnership, to B2C partners that are very, very strong. They will enable us to get in touch with the younger generation that, for us, are the future because they want to be connected with us, and this is something that is not given for granted. I go back to the last point that for us is relevancy related to who we are there for, that is our fan, our people to watch us, who wants to live the event either on the track or watching on the devices that they are connected with. That's the most important thing that we want to keep at the center of the attention. To be relevant for them, we need to make sure that all the dimension that they, everyone wants to be connected with are activated. Every moment for us in Formula 1 is really important to understand what is the landscape. Today, our, I would say, race is not only with other sports. I always said to my people, "You know, today, if you want to be successful in a entertainment platform, you need to understand what is the ecosystem. You need to understand that we are competing with the theater, with music, with, with movie." That's why we did a movie last year that has been very successful in an audience who are not really keen on understanding what is Formula 1. In other things that are socially important to live together. In this moment, we need to have people with a lot of energy, with a lot of passion, because without that, you cannot be once again on the track the day after when you lose a race. This mentality is part of all the people that are involved with our ecosystem. This is absolutely, totally relevant for us. If you think, you know, we are big one today, but we are a very lean company, when the example given by our leaders is affecting all the people that are working in our organization. Technology, as I said before, we are always talking about AI today. What I can assure you that F1 will keep the people at the center. You will never see our cars driven by automatic or autonomous driving. There will be always people that will maximize the work that the engineers will bring to them, because at the end of the day, it's a teamwork, but that's the beauty of what we are having. We want to give emotion to the people that are coming with us. We want to give something that is, in this moment, quite unique, because we connect people. Above all, we, going back to this important sentence, we try to be reactive of the situation that we have to manage. You know, the world is complicated. We travel all around the world, and we have to cancel to races because of the active situation. We have to be ready to react on what is happening today. We won't give up. We have plans. We want to make sure that everyone understand that no one can stop us. That's the mentality that we need to have, and that's what I want to share with you, because I know that there is already a light that is blinking to me that I said it's time to go. As I said, I really hope that you can follow us. I really hope that one day you can have the time to experience what we can offer to us, because without the people that are loving our sport, we cannot be here. Without the people that are cheering for the drivers who are aspirational model for our fans, we cannot be here. We cannot be here if the world of technology is not coming with us, and if it's coming with us, that means that we can offer what they need. In a nutshell, we are here to serve the emotion and the world that is moving ahead with something that has to be unique. F1 will be definitely, you know, endorse this important moment of our life to be something that we can rely on to have fun, to connect and enjoy. Thank you for your attention. See you soon. Thank you, Stefano. Our next speaker has spent four decades at the forefront of technology's evolution, from the rise of software to the age of AI. Nandan Nilekani is the co-founder and Chairman of Infosys. He built Infosys from Bangalore in the 1980s into one of India's premier IT companies. Came a different challenge. The Indian government asked him to create Aadhaar, which is the world's largest biometric identification system. He's of the view that in the age of AI, the most important thing a company can protect is a strategic autonomy, and that it's culture that determines whether they get to keep it or lose it. Please welcome my fellow Indian friend, Nandan Nilekani. Thank you, Shilpi, it's really wonderful to be here, I want to thank Nicolai for this opportunity. I thought I'll tell you a bit of my story and the connection to today's topic. I am one of the founders of Infosys, a company set up 45 years back. In these 45 years, except for 3 years, there has been one or more founder in the company. The 3 years where there was no founder, the company went through a tumultuous time. In 2017, because of a certain situation that had arisen, I'd left by then. I'd done all the work at UIDAI, Aadhaar, and all that. I had to go back. I thought I was going back for a few months. 9 years later, I'm still there. I'm the last founder. You know, like the last dinosaur, the last Mohican, the last founder. I was already in my mind grappling with the issue, how do I do a transition to a leader who will not be a founder? In other words, while we have normal succession planning where we replace one CEO with another, when it comes to replacing a founder with a non-founder, it's a order of magnitude more complicated because it's all about, you know, the values that you have and, and the culture and so on. I was already grappling with this question of: How do I do this transition? Then this whole AI thing came along. People started questioning why we exist. If software development is going to be done on Claude or Cursor or Codex or whatever, then why do we even need you people? Do you need to exist? We had suddenly come to this existential question. I realized, you know, I also then realized that maybe this was an opportunity for me because being an optimist, I always look for the upside. I said, maybe this point where there will be a transition to a future leader at some point, as the chairman, I could also use this opportunity to embed the values once again into the company so that it would be instead for a long time. In some sense, I made the AI transition of Infosys actually become also a way to change the culture, to create a sense of urgency, to get speed. Getting speed, this is a company with 300,000 people and NOK 20 billion in revenue, so to get speed in these companies, you know, over 40 countries, how do we get all this? You should welcome Jamie. Good, Jamie. Have a seat. Yeah. It's like the head of state had come in or something. I think my first job was: How do we get this? I also realized that we have to do this only by ensuring that we have strategic autonomy in the world. How to be relevant in the world of AI? A few things that stood out to us. One was that the role of a firm like Infosys would be to orchestrate all the things in our company, in our enterprise, because a enterprise needs orchestration of all the various tools it uses and so on. It was also about helping our clients retain optionality in the choice of the AI tools. We firmly believe that the leaders in AI will keep changing. There'll be new companies, new ways of doing things. All that is going to come in, and that's going to require therefore companies to be nimble and agile in being able to adjust to these changes. One of the key value adds we could offer was how do we allow optionality in the choice of our technologies? The third thing is we realized that enterprise context is so important, that an enterprise is defined by its context, its rules, its policies, its processes, its data, and some of it would be tacit knowledge in people's heads, Post-it notes stuck on the computer. Fundamentally, getting enterprise context together, we realized, was something very useful for our customers. We figured out how to think about what would be our value proposition and relevance in this new world. Equally importantly, I think we use this as an opportunity to get speed because we had to move very quickly. We had to move the whole company, 300,000 people. We had to train everyone to be ready with these new skills. We had to learn how to do agents. We had to learn how to combine agents and humans in doing things. All this required a lot of work. It was also an opportunity to break down the silos of the company because there were different silos, people are doing different things. We said, "Let's use the AI transformation as a way to completely break down the silos and have everyone in the company working on the same. Have the same way of doing things." That took some effort because people were quite possessive about the way they did things, but we have used this to actually break that down. I firmly believe that you cannot have AI benefits and AI productivity unless the company works with one voice, with in unison. Everybody has to work to the same goals. I think AI is not just applied artificial intelligence, it's aligned individuals. All the individuals in the company have to be going in the same. Otherwise, AI could make it worse. A dysfunctional company can go into warp speed with AI. You know, if I'm sending a mail to somebody, I may write a one paragraph email, use AI to make it 10 paragraphs, send it to that guy, and he'll AI to reduce 10 paragraphs to one paragraph. What have we achieved? Both of us have used AI on either side. The company's productivity has not gone up. If you have a company which is having camps and different people, then for all you know, agent swarms of one business will be fighting with the agent swarms of another business, and they'll be doing it 24 by 7. In other words, we have to be very careful that we don't implement AI in a way that is dysfunctional because that could actually be counterproductive. Therefore, I think the lesson I learned is use this AI transformation to also get the company to march to a single drummer, to get everyone aligned to do the things that they had to do, and to make sure that innovation was captured from every part of the company onto a common way of doing things, a common fabric. I feel now that while there will be at some time in the future a transition to a non-founder, the AI has actually given us an opportunity to also recalibrate and re-energize and reduce bureaucracy, reduce silos, and take people to a different level. Finally, I think I feel confident that whenever we do the AI transition, we will also do a chairman and founder transition. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nandan. We've heard about building culture, transforming it, making it perform under pressure. Now it's time for something special. You may have already heard Nicolai's podcast on your morning run. Today, you get him live right here on stage. His guest, someone who spent nearly 20 years building one of the most resilient cultures in the world. We'll let Nicolai take it from here. Please welcome Nicolai. Yeah. Well, first I have to say a big thank you to all the speakers today. We have actually had 10 of them on the podcast, so you can binge this weekend. Now, one person we've been trying to get since we started the podcast 4 years ago is Jamie Dimon. Now, I have a philosophy in life that no is a rest stop on the way to yes. In this case, it has worked. Just Jamie, before we welcome you onto the stage, just a few snippets here. [Presentation] [Presentation] Welcome. Just going there. You are there. Warm welcome. Warm welcome. When we look at these pictures showing the history, the first question has to be what is the culture that has. Yeah made you able to be so successful now after 200 years? Well, first of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. He is persistent, by the way. 'Cause when he asked me about could I come in 2025, I said, "I can't." He said, "What about this date in 2026?" Here I am. I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. Look, My whole life I was always cautious about when people talk about culture, 'cause you can say all the words. A lot of companies say, "Employees, customers," and they don't mean it. The real way you develop a culture is you're just driving it with grit and courage. Like, every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, every person you hire, every person you fire. It really is about doing the right thing for the customer eventually. Obviously you do, you gotta take care of your employee. A lot of cultures on Wall Street, as you know, it was about money. How much money can someone make? You know, some of the things in Wall Street are built on their compensation schemes. They're not serve a client scheme. So I've just been relentless. You know, I. When we first did the JPMorgan, Bank One merge in 2004, I had a book of how we do business. Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said, "You gotta send it out." I was like, "No, let's do it first. Let's let people experience the detail, the diligence, the fortress balance sheet, all these things. The follow-up, the open meetings that you have to speak up. It's not even a choice, hopefully, so. If you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture. You say you have to fight it every day. Yeah. What are the kind of things you do in meetings? You gotta get out. Whether you do it in a meeting or on a bus trip or on a road trip, that you're talking to your people. Everyone knows that you're only trying to do the right thing for the company. No one at the company can stand there and insult me, as long as I say, "Because I think it's in the best interest of the company, the client." That I didn't bring my list. But that we take a trip, I come back with a long list of stuff. Matter of fact, my management committee doesn't like when I come back from a trip, 'cause they know I'm about to lay on them. Why do we do this and why do we do that, and why do we do this? This is across technology and just about everything else you do. Even in that room, you know, I tell people on my management team, "The agenda is your agenda. Don't say to me you didn't put it on the agenda. You have to say that, is everything important on this list?" It actually puts the burden on the other people to say, "Well, you skipped this," or, "What about, you know, that issue?" Or something. Every business has a follow-up list. Every business, when you travel around the world, you know, knows each other. It's hard work, you know? I mean, it's harder than I thought. Looking back, you actually do build a common culture. Why is it so hard? You have to be relentless. I mean, if you know, when I go around, I try not to let even one little thing skip my attention. I read a customer complaint and someone says to me, "Why are you paying attention to that? It's so minor." I say, "Well, I'm paying attention to that because we might be doing the exact same thing to 1 million people. It's not that minor, you know? It was a teller who told us something that shortened how long it takes to open an account. I've been in buses with management teams, they don't want to hear from the teller or the branch manager, you know, what's going on in the branch, 'cause they find it insulting. I look at them, I realize they probably shouldn't have that job. What's the thing you still have on your sheet which you haven't managed to solve? I have a list of calls I need to make, a list of people who owe me something. That's the most important one. That one is relentless. Well, I for sure owe you one now after this. No, no, not owe me like that. Like, I've asked a question, I'm waiting for a follow-up. Yeah. I want to know why this happened or why that happened. Do we fix this customer complaint? It can be on anything. I have a list of things I need to think about. Mm. I have a list of things which are gonna go on another list, but I just jotted it down because it's follow-up dates, calls, immediate issues, and I probably burn through that list, you know, once every two or three days. Yeah. This you've done. Then there's a much longer one. This you've done now for a long time. if you, if I carry a little folder which has one by each business. Much more detailed. Like, very detailed. By the way, you write a fantastic letter every year. Yeah ... and the letter which recently came out, you talk about, you know, bureaucracy and the way you have to. Yeah You have to fight it. How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? 'Cause you are now a huge organization, right? Yeah. I really believe it's bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy's like the Petri dish of politics and everything else. You could be a small company and have it, you could be a big company and have it. You can have it in your branch, you can not have it in another branch. It's always the manager's stupid. I mean, almost always. The way you fight it is, with me, all the information is shared beforehand, so, you know, it's, there's no secret. I remember going to companies, you know, you, this wouldn't share with that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting. That, you know, if someone comes in and says, "You know, Nicolai wants X, and I don't believe that's right," I say, "Well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him." Everything, no matter how small, get on the road, go see clients. You know, clients are a gift because, you know, look, they're demanding. They should be. They also tell you know, in our case, what our competitors are doing better. Why we didn't get something. What, you know, if we don't do this in that country, you're not gonna give us a big piece of business because how important that is for you. I uniquely know it might cost NOK 30 million to build a payment system to hook up to a country, you know, it's easy to say, "Well, we're gonna do it now." I just found out why, you know, the staff isn't doing it. When you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it. That's a mistake. When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying, "That was a great meeting. We'll pick it up again next week," it's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, "Okay, David, you're gonna do X. Talk to these people." Not hierarchical. It's just you could, you know, cut across the company. You talk to HR. You know, consumers got the most people. This change in their programs is gonna affect, you know, their branches. Talk about it, come back, make a recommendation. I always ask the, if you're king for a day, what are you gonna do? 'Cause people walk in and they admire a problem. If you ask them what they're gonna do, they say, "Well, I'd look at this, I'd look at." I say, "No, no, what would you do?" Honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling to have to try to answer that question. Have the right people in the room. Very often people are making decisions, like people think you go back to your office and you think. No, usually you iterate over and over and over, and it gets you to the right place. Why should teams be- If you don't, if you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen. Talking about the right people in the room, you said teams should be small. We, we- Like Navy SEALs, right? Yeah. Meaning also we don't do a lot of super presentations where you're just running through how great you are. Like, I think you should celebrate all the time, but when you're in a management meeting with me, it's what does the other guy do better? Stripe kicked our butt. PayPal kicked our butt. Okay, I can go 1 after another. No matter how good we think we are, I point out who's doing better. You know, we're the number 1 FX trade in the world, but we're number 7 in Vietnam. Why is that? You really drill down and you find out what you're not doing well, what people aren't collaborating on. You have to get rid of the jerks. You know? If you don't, no one believes you. That takes a long time. Who are the jerks? What makes a jerk? It's all about them. They admire problem. I say they're could be your crutch too. They like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome. I like, also I look at the inputs. You know, they're, like you, when you talk about business, you talk about your output. Your output is your performance, your branch, something like that. What was the input? Did you train the person properly? Did you build the right technology? Why don't we put more bankers in Oslo? The input will drive the business for 20 years. The output's just the result of what you did all that time. The sharing part eliminates a lot of it. Not allowing rope-a-dope meetings. You know, and like I said, they're good bureaucrats, but some people it's always about them. Mm. They simply can't get beyond the fact that they want. They're always talking about, like the next job, the next thing and, you know, pounding their chest. Obviously men do that more than women. But you see these diseased behaviors, and so I have to earn my trust and respect every day too. It isn't like I walk in a room and somehow you have to trust me. You don't. You know, you're gonna be watching closely, what does the boss do? What does he say? Does he really mean it? Does he follow up? Hopefully I'm trusted by people that, and they know just it's okay to say anything to me. It doesn't bother me whatsoever. I, you know, I say that to regulators, to prime ministers, bankers, tech people. Just try to do a better job. That's it. My board, and this is important for governance, my board, I've been doing this since I got to Bank One in 2020, meets without me every single meeting. I ask them to do it because, you know, I'm full forceful, I have my opinions, but every time there's a biggest decision, I have the other senior executives come and say, "Tell me you think. Tell, I want you." And they say what they think. They might disagree with me on a people decision or, you know, my risk decision or something like that. After that, I leave the room and the board meets 100% without me. Usually the lead director usually gives me a call afterwards, or David Novak, when he was lead director, he would give me a handwritten note. You know, like, he'd say a little coaching, what I could do different, what they want to hear about, what they're concerned about. It made me do a better job. I was never worried about it. They're allowed to talk to any and all senior management. They're. No one, I have never done a presentation at the board, at least not since JPMorgan, that I can remember. I asked. They do it all. I let them do it. I may comment afterwards, but I don't, I don't do preambles. I don't say that, you know, this person's gonna talk about A, B, C, D, and E. I don't say, "Why don't you talk about A, B, C, D, and E?" I say, "Go ahead, shoot." You know, keep it fast. A lot of the presentations are verbal, so if you went in there, you'd hear the person say, "Hey, in investment banking, we did great in fixed income. Let me tell you about how we're gonna expand bankers in these 8 cities with these various things. We think over time they'll deploy so much capital and so much this. Here's the risk associated with it. We looked at other options A and B, but we picked this one, C. It's just a verbal. The board loves it, by the way. I asked the CEO of one of the other big American banks what made JP Morgan really special. He said, "Well, it's about the firm. It's not about the individual people." How do you install that? I think that. You know what it is? It is right. Look at it, we all know sports teams. When you see a sports team, you know, jiving or you guys look at football or American football or your football or basketball, any sports team, you know when a team's working. They're doing their job, they learn their plays, they all want to win, they pass off. You know when there's someone on that team who is just rooting for everybody. It, business is the same thing except you can bullshit about it. Literally, you go, "We did a great job. We're the best person. The reason we didn't do as well as Goldman Sachs did is because of A, B, and C." I always say, yeah, that's because they're better generally. You know it when you see it, and you know that person who's ruining it. That's the team. You know, I just wear the jersey. I'm not even the senior coach, I'm like the general manager. You know, we have people running the businesses who are actually, like, they're the quarterbacks. They're making the decisions. If you look at the team, they communicate all the time. I wrote in my letter about JPMorgan's like a neural network. Liv over here, she can call anyone around. She knows people all around the world to help our clients, and they'll get an immediate answer. You know, it could be a different balance sheet, different currency, different problem, a local revolver, a great idea for an M&A that, you know, someone wasn't thinking about. That neural network, you can't replace it, by the way. AI won't be able to replace it, at least not for a long time. You say the teams need to operate a bit like Navy SEALs. Yeah. What do you mean by that? I think so. I think you have to have the best of both. You gotta have small teams that are fully authorized, dedicated to accomplish something. I remember trying to do digital account opening years ago. The first reaction you get is tech says, "Okay," you know, AI, this person says, "Okay," sales says, "Okay," marketing says, "Okay," branch says, "Okay." It's 1% of each person's job. It will not get done. You need a dedicated people authorized to build an account, a digital opening. That is the team. They obviously have to rely on lots of people. They have what they need on the team. That might be a lawyer in some places, it might be compliance, it might be somebody like that. It's hard to do. You also need the platform. You know, we can't all have our own separate additions of applications and stuff like that. You kind of need the best of both. Kind of like these Navy SEAL teams, they all have common equipment, common languages, common intelligence. They don't pick their own guns and their own tanks. That's common, you know? You got to have the best of both worlds, but you got to make sure that the common one doesn't create an enormous bureaucracy that kills the ability of the team. That does happen. Everyone wants to review it. Everyone wants to go through it. You have to have, like, little war rooms. Okay, we're going to pick. Are we going to do this with Databricks or Snowflake? Are we going to do this?" Get the people in the room and work it out. Don't allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year. Nandan Nilekani built. He, this guy did something unbelievable, by the way, in India. He built that system that identifies, you know, I remember 700 million people. It's probably more than that. I think by eye, by finger. The transfer payments and bank accounts for 700 million people now. 1.4 billion. What? 1.4 billion. 1.4 billion. He did it out of the goodness of his heart, literally. Built this unbelievable system of ID, and now you can go in India and pay people with QR codes and stuff like that. The corruption on real transfer payments, I don't know if it went to zero, but it used to be kind of cash that got handed from the state to state to state to state to this thing to that thing to distribute it to the poor person over here. God knows how much didn't get passed on. Just to fill in the people on the, who are listening in, this is Nandan Nilekani. Yeah from Infosys who has Yeah who has done this. Yeah. You have a very deep bench, or you are known for your very deep bench. How do you prepare people for the next world? That when you get higher up the organization, it gets harder because you only have so many choices, and that is a issue about, you know, you can't move everyone at the same time. Lower down is easier. We move people around all the time. We've had people go from, you know, banking to CFO, from, you know, from this to tech. The woman running AI ran Prime Services for us for years. She's a great businesswoman, she wanted to tackle AI. We do move people around, and that is important. Also, my management team meets every week, around a table, open conversation. Everyone hears everything. They know almost everything about what's going on. Even though it's not in their business, they're gonna hear us talking about consumer, payment systems, wealth management products, mistakes, errors, litigation problems, regulation problems, tech problems, customer complaints. That same group meets once a month with a detailed agenda, with pre-reads, and then we meet by business. It's been written about, you really should read it. Then geopolitics. I'm not, I'm not worried about the U.S. I don't worry about the U.S. economy. You know, the economy is like the weather. It's going to get better, it's gonna get. People talk about it all the time. It's not the most, the most significant thing for the future of the free world, free and democratic world, is the geopolitics. Which part of the geopolitics? I'd say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship, that NATO has to stay strong, that we need to work with our trading partners to keep the Western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. Remember, economic relations are not just tariffs. There are investment rules, there are regulatory rules, there are, you know, there are all these WTO rules. There are, there are some people just don't allow it. There's a lot, agriculture in almost every country has its own special rules. What we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the Western world together. America has 60 military allies and partners, more than that, economic allies and partners. I think that is important. You know, the fragmentation of that would be the reason that a book is written one day, How the West Was Lost. I'm quite conscious that, you know, I'm going to Copenhagen tomorrow, I hope they don't, I don't know if I should bring more security or something like that. You know, I'm quite conscious that we should do that to strengthen our economic alliances, strengthen our military alliances. There are legitimate complaints, no problem, we can deal with those, but we should make sure we don't fragment the world we have. That, which is precisely what Russia and China wants, by the way. You run your risk scenarios, is it every week? I think you told me last time we met, or was it every fortnight? Yeah, there's this, we do this Fed CCAR stress once a year. We do hundreds a week. Hundreds a week? Hundreds. Yeah. If you said to me- What's the worst one? It's usually the great financial crisis, you know, but, you know, we would, we'd be fine the great, if that scenario happened again. That's, the one we never anticipated was home prices being down 40%. That was just not on the list. There's always something new out there, but we got plenty of capital and liquidity to handle, you know, shocking scenarios. How worried are you about inflation at this stage? Well, I'm not worried about it, but on the list of scenarios would be lower interest rates, higher interest rates, and higher interest rates with growth is one, higher interest rates with inflation is one. The worst case is stagflation. I just wouldn't take it off the list. You know, I'm just saying, okay, if you do that, what would it mean for us? What would it mean for our clients? We run our clients through tests like that. We run our clients through tests like high oil prices. How many people would be under a lot of stress? At high interest rates, you know, what happens to all those rollover loans that people have to pay a lot more interest on? That would put a lot of stress on the system. Mm. You know, we'd survive it. We would be fine, but it would put a lot of stress on the system. You know, again, companies are assuming that debt would be rolled over, well, maybe 100 basis points more. Well, why not 500 basis points more? Who said that, you know, we've had 3%, we've had over 2% inflation in the United States for five years now. I think there are a lot, my view, I, again, I'm gonna put the probabilities are higher than the market thinks. My view is that there are a lot of inflationary things out there, including the Iran War, the remilitarization of the world, the infrastructure needs of the world, and our deficits. I just, I ask all my economists, I know you have a great economist in the room, I don't know how the world running deficits like this isn't inflationary. You just may not have seen that yet. That die may have been cast, it just hasn't happened yet. When I look at scenarios, you know, I'm not, I'm looking for early indicators, but it is possible that inflation ticks up, and that will catch a lot of people off guard. Not if it's 15 basis points, but if it's 50, 75, people will sell a 10-year bond, et cetera. When things which we know are volatile, when they move up and down, it's not so worrisome, but if something we think should be stable is moving a lot, it's pretty scary. Given the level of government debt around the world and in your country, how worried are you about that? You know, I'm not, again, I'm not that worried. We'll be able to deal with it. I just think maturity should say you should deal with it as opposed to let it happen. The way it's going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis, then we'll have to deal with it. It will be okay, it's just not the way to do it. By doing, you mentioned to us, the level of things that are adding to on the risk column are high, like geopolitics, oil, government deficits. They may go away, they may not. We don't know what confluence of events causes the problem. If you look at all economic history, it's different confluence of events, different tectonic plates hitting each other. They may affect 2026, they may not. They need to be resolved. If they're not resolved properly, they will cause real additional problems down the road. Mm-hmm. Should we move to Europe? Say again? Should we move to Europe? You? We should move to Europe. Oh, we do. 25 years ago, the GDP of Europe and America was the same. Europe is 70% of the U.S. levels, and you say that Europe never finished its economic union. What do you mean by that? Yeah. We're slow walking into a real problem here. I think the European Union was one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. After millennia of war, not just World War I, World War II, but the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the War of the Roses, the Spanish Wars, these wars, you know, that's a lot of killing, and they decided they wanted to live in peace through political means. Fabulous. Started with the Coal commission, et cetera. It never got finished. If you look at Part of the point of the European Union is to have a common market so that all of the companies in the European Union can compete across all countries, just like you can in the United States. That common market creates a huge competitive advantage for American companies. That competitive advantage helps American companies in America, it helps American companies with economies of scale outside of America. Also bureaucracy, anti-business, taxes not conducive to growth. You know, capital formation has been the thing that's driven most productivity in the world, and you have a lot of countries that put in anti-capital, anti-business. I think we should be taking care of all our citizens. That's not what I'm saying here. I'm saying that policies conducive to growth are really important. Draghi, Mario Draghi, who I have enormous respect for, wrote the Draghi report. He listed them all. 300 recommendations, of which they'd done 7 or 8. Okay. They're needed. Capital markets union, some common bankruptcy laws. For your banks to merge, they need to have probably common insurance schemes. You know, which means handing more power to, you know, unelected bureaucrats. The common market would be a huge benefit. I think it's in America's interest to help you not slow walk into it. Now you all know it. This is not an American saying something bad about a European, but it needs to be fixed. If that number becomes 60% of America, 50% of America, you and your companies will not be able to compete with American and Chinese companies. The Chinese are building juggernauts in almost every industry, and you're gonna need scale and scope. Not only is it important for business, it's important for your civilians, all of them. All of them. You know, affording social safety nets, affording national defense, you've got to be a little more competitive. One of the things I wrote about in my letter was, I know this is maybe a dream, okay? I don't know if President Trump's gonna read it, which is if they do the Draghi report, I would give them one big, beautiful free trade bill. How would that work? Okay? How would that work? Well, we have trade agreements with, you know, the EU today, and the U.K. today, and other countries. You know, they're, and they're only. There's some problems. You'll never fix all the agricultural stuff. You should. The digital tax thing could be negotiated that's fair. You know, it was kind of one-sided. The CSDDD thing has got to go away, because it doesn't work. Other than that, we should have free and open trade, other than keeping what you need for everyone to keep their own national security. That was the lesson we all learned. You know, you need to do some things. In this case, that would include friend sourcing. Mm. You know, I met a great company we have here today, Kongsberg Gruppen. They make naval missiles. Friend sourcing works too. It doesn't all have to be the U.S. We do have to rely on each other for that. So how do you- I- Sorry. I think if we did that, Europe would grow, be stronger, which would be good for America. Europe being weaker is actually bad for our long-term health and the long-term health of the free and democratic world. This is more like a 20 or 30-year thing. I'm not talking about the economy here. I do think it's important that we try to accomplish that. Now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start? That's, you know, that's the great Kissinger quote. If you need to talk to Europe, who do you call? I think it has to start with Friedrich Merz, Macron, and Macron won't be there much longer. Actually, they're talking about the coalition of the willing. You're not gonna get all 28 nations, but if you get the six big ones to agree to do some of those things, I think the other ones will have to do it. It'll be good for their citizens. I'm not trying to impose on them something that's bad. You'll have more growth, you know, more wealth to share. It should be shared. We should help all of our citizens. You know, usually, anti-capitalists act like that's just good for business. No, it's not just good for business. It's good for creation of everything that feeds the people and houses the people. In America, I suggest some ways to get more income to lower paid. A lot of ways, considerable ways. I think it'd go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide, there's no question about it, and I think some of it needs to be fixed. I also mentioned that when business goes to capitals, they should also ask the question, what can you do for your country? Like John F. Kennedy asked. Not what can your country do for you, because a lot of people that go to Washington, it's just about their tax break for sugar or cotton or corn or. That, that doesn't work anymore. You know, in business, you know, in Norway you have very sophisticated businesses, but, you know, businesses back away from the government because governing is really hard. You know, it's almost like don't go there. I don't think if we're not part of the solution, it won't work. Moving on. What will AI do to JP Morgan and the way you work? You know, we are not gonna put our heads in the sand. We're gonna use AI to do a better job for you. That's what we're gonna do. We already, we've been doing it for 13 years. We've got thousands of people deployed in it. We have six or seven use cases around risk, fraud, marketing, hedging, design, location, prospecting, note-taking, AML, BSA, KYC, and it's just started. It is really powerful stuff. Deploy it. You know, my suggestion would be, when your management team meets, they should always talk about it. It should be part of every business review you do. What are your projects? How are you doing it? What's your competition doing? It is also used by bad guys. Part of that conversation is how do we protect ourselves from the bad guys. You know, we spend a lot of money in cyberdefense. That's network segmentation, passcodes. You know, everything you download at JPMorgan goes through multiple, you know, protection to make sure it's not polluted. It's so much just hygiene. You know, you put these rules in place, follow them. Don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it. I don't use it. People sometimes give access to the CEO. Well, you should have access. That includes everything, like allocations. You report everything important. MPS, systems, compliance, rules, regulations, not P&L. P&Ls, are they accurate P&Ls? I give people a million examples. This is just a little bit. If I open a branch, I have to expense it. It's not earning money for 3 years. At the end of 3 years, it's making NOK 1 million or NOK 2 million a year. Is that an expense or a profit or an investment? If it's software, I'd capitalize it, and I would start to depreciate it. I tell people, when you even look at numbers, don't believe the number. Think about it a little bit. There are good expenses and bad expenses. There are good revenues and bad revenues. In our business, you take on a lot of bad business, you will pay for it. They're bad revenues. Quality, how you do things. Then you want to have complete openness with management teams, detailed follow-up lists, people that have a little grit, you know, a little bit of courage to speak up. You know, some people don't. Treat everyone with respect. Earn your respect every day. Like, you know, I look at my company. I want everyone to say, "The company treats me well and gives me opportunity, and I like working there, and I trust them." We make a lot of mistakes, so you also trust when we make mistakes that we'll fix them, you know? I have a list of those things I gotta fix. It's hard. You know, it's like. It's gotta be everywhere, and we kind of have that. We've kind of a consistent discipline. I travel around. I see our people. It makes me. What we do for companies, countries, communities, companies is extraordinary. We do it in philanthropy. We do it. We do it in research. It makes me very proud. It motivates me. You know, I go to somewhere, I understand there's stages with 2,000 people in the room, thanking our top branches. You know, not even the branch manager, the people who work in the branch who got the award. Some are crying. Some have never been in an airplane. We stand for hours shaking their hands and giving out awards, spend two days with them. You know, I tell you, it motivates me tremendously that we're giving opportunity to people, and they appreciate it, and they like their jobs. Sometimes they whisper a complaint in my ear, but I check if that's true. I always check. Jamie Dimon, it's been extraordinary. Thank you so much. All right. Nicolai, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie and Nicolai. What a day it has been, Patrick. Absolutely, Shilpi. From the fundamentals of winning cultures to stories of transformation under pressure. From building high-performance culture in the age of AI to building cultures that survive crisis after crisis. To all of our speakers that have shared their stories with us today, thank you for your openness and willingness to talk about what works and what doesn't. To everyone here in the room, thank you for your attention, your energy, and your questions. To those joining us via livestream from around the world, thanks for being part of this. To our colleagues who made this happen, months of planning, countless details, thank you. We hope that you leave with some new perceptions, new questions. Perhaps a few answers, too. Which brings us to next year, Investment Conference 2027. Save the date. The topic is innovation. We already have an exciting lineup of speakers in store for you. We can't wait, and we'll see you then. To those of you in the audience, can you please remain seated? To those on the livestream, thanks again for joining.