George Jagodzinski (00:00):
Today we explore the many forms of innovation. We dive deep into the amazing complexities of digital supply chain, and we talk about the power of outside perspective. How do you harness it? I'm joined by Arun Samuga, who has deep expertise in digital supply chain. He currently serves as the chief innovation officer of Elemica, the leading digital supply network for process manufacturers. Please welcome, Arun.
(00:23):
Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski.
(00:52):
Arun, thanks so much for joining me.
Arun Samuga (01:02):
Hi, George. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
George Jagodzinski (01:05):
Very timely, Arun. I was just recently having an argument with someone about what is innovation and they were taking the point of view that it needed to be the most bleeding edge. Take you to Mars, take you to space, kind of a thing. But having worked with my clients, I find if you're just bringing something that they haven't done before, maybe their industry hasn't done before, in my mind that's innovation. And I figured I'd outsource the problem to you a little bit and see what's your point of view on what innovation is and what do you think about it.
Arun Samuga (01:33):
Yeah, it's a fair question, right, George? I think when we go back to defining terminology in the current landscape, then it's always interesting to go back and actually look at whether the terminology makes sense and what reflection does it pose in terms of our current actions. I think when I did my research and when I was offered this position as a chief innovation officer, I think one of the things that I did was to unearth what innovation exactly meant and what it stood for. It's not about just transforming something overnight, so there is the time dimension associated to it, which basically translates to the fact that even if you have lofty goals, every step along the way is a step towards innovation. It's possible some of these steps may be necessary and they could be mundane in certain aspects, in certain form. Having said that, it's not always about just waking up one day and transforming everything around you. It's about taking those incremental steps and the time dimension is important.
(02:40):
The second thing that I've noticed is it's not about taking something and changing it completely. Either you could be changing its shape, you could be changing its size, you could make things more scalable, for instance, you could be reducing the amount of storage that is needed to do a certain thing. So all these things, while at the end of the day there might be serious technology companies that are focused on this one specific problem that's going to really transform a lot of areas. I think taking some of those and ingesting it into your workplace, into your technology and your platform and your solutions, and identifying what the corresponding incremental value is for the clients, and that is where the rubber meets the road. You may have felt that you've innovated and created something brand new, but having said that, if you do not have that level of validation and the confirmation from the end user or the client, in all likelihood you may have innovated, but what use is it, right?
(03:46):
So there is utility associated to innovation. It's not necessarily a research project. That's the other thing I've learned, and it's important for you to be able to measure the success even if it's incremental. And then finally, of course there is the grand idea around innovation and many a times it gets pegged around what is the latest in the market. Now, AI aside, we can talk about AI separately. How many other technologies are changing shape so quickly? In fact, if I were to take a look outside of AI, and that includes the chips and the whole ecosystem, outside of that, the biggest changes that are happening, especially in the supply chain world and in the world in general as it relates to demand and supply of goods, is around risk, around compliance, around sustainability. There is a lot of other areas, geopolitical risk being a big one. I think people are unable to handle the business side of the house as effectively as they could before.
(04:52):
So AI or not, if you're able to solve those real problems through innovative techniques, not necessarily innovative technologies, you are on the path towards innovation. So to me, innovation as many shapes could be incremental steps within a process, or it could be learning something completely brand new in a different vertical. For example, direct to consumer shipments are getting very, very popular in the retail space. A lot of companies like Nestle, Mondelez, they're all shipping directly to customers. Even the fashion and beauty industry sector is going through that transformation now, what percentage of their total revenue comes through that channel? Well, it's fledgling. I mean it's not much. But are they being innovative by employing that channel? Of course.
(05:43):
Now, is that channel innovative? Not really. I mean, you're basically saying, hey, consumer, I am ready to ship to you directly as opposed to making you walk into a store or even go to my competitor like Amazon and order from there. But if you take that and maybe adopt it to different industry verticals like say brick and mortar companies, like old chemical companies, Do you think they would ship directly to an end consumer, a mom and pop consumer? A little dicey I would say depending on the nature of the product, commodity materials maybe. So if I employ a direct to consumer channel in the chemical industry, would that be innovation? I would say so because I'm taking something from another vertical, but I'm sifting through all the nuances in this particular industry vertical to make it happen, make it replicable, and make it scalable in that manner.
(06:37):
So that when there are subsequent technology driven innovations in that example, like the direct to consumer channel, in the consumer product, good space, then the ability to replicate it in the chemical industry becomes easier. So I need to take that step. So all to say, I think taking a problem that's been solved, applying it to a new space is also innovation in my mind.
George Jagodzinski (07:00):
I couldn't agree more. And you've used some great examples of learning from different industries. And sometimes I find it unfortunate I talk to folks and I'll hear this phrase of, well, their industry is so different from mine, it wouldn't work on ours. And I'm curious if you can explore the topic of the value of going outside of your walls and what are some methods for really absorbing and investigating what's outside of your walls?
Arun Samuga (07:26):
Absolutely, and I think if we put a boundary around say manufacturing as a broad industry by itself, every company out there, large company that produces an output of social value has some level of manufacturing involved. If they are in the manufacturing space, then of course they need inbound goods and they need to ship their outbound goods. So with those basic foundational assumptions, I think if you dig deep, what happens within the four walls is very inside out in nature. So it may have been inborn, it may have been a research project, it could be building a new molecule that you've synthesized as part of your research. It could be building a new algorithm that consumes far less memory and is able to process 2 million parallel threads at a time, thinking of technology. So all these things are happening. Now, you're doing it by yourself, you're doing it with the help of either your internal research partners or your labs and so on. So that's where the traditional nature of innovation comes about.
(08:39):
But then when you start scaling it out and trying to coexist with a larger ecosystem, I do see a lot of parallels as well as differences. So the end consumer, they obviously care about speed of processing, in that example, less storage. Things are getting faster. Things are getting cheaper. Things are getting better. So yes, the consumer cares about all of those. So you could translate that to value. But then when you bring that value realization all the way into the internal enterprise, you will notice that it is impossible for you to optimize the value without optimizing each and every step along the way. And that could be not just the way you manufacture, it could be the way you do quality inspection. It could be the way you ship, it could be the way you package, it could be the way you market, differentiate, price, deliver, and eventually get satisfaction slash recommendations or feedback from your customer.
(09:46):
So that cycle, if you look at it purely from a process perspective, is very similar across all industries. There's not much of a difference there. There could be a difference in maybe size, scale, speed, velocity is another important one, need for visibility might be another interesting one.f But outside of those parameters, a lot of the supply chain domain problems are exactly the same regardless of industry vertical. My challenge back to the ecosystem is if 70 to 80% of your problems are the same outside your four walls, what is preventing you from adopting network ecosystem driven strategy so that you optimize the entire network for demand, supply and logistics once and for all? Or you've set up the foundation and now it's about making incremental changes to outside your four walls. Because what happens within your four walls, you continue to chisel it or you continue to foster it. You continue to ensure you have the necessary willpower within the organization to innovate, to create, to differentiate. That's your core.
(10:59):
But then when it comes to anything outside of your four walls, it's a big challenge out there because that's the last part you want to be competing on. You want to be competing on your core, which means you have to look at the outside of your core and optimize it, otherwise that can become your barrier that you may need to overcome. And slowly the impetus is going to be driven more outside the enterprise where you have a lot of players trying to mitigate risk, trying to comply, trying to do a lot of financial jugglery, if I may, in order to ensure things match in the way they should be looking, et cetera.
(11:38):
If I think of Goodyear Tires, should they host a supply chain network of suppliers, logistics, service providers and customers within their four walls? Absolutely not. They should be able to focus on what they do, which is make that thing that is circular and black in color and sell and sell and sell and do a fantastic job of differentiating themselves against Michelin or Continental Tires, for example. So that is where the focus of the enterprises should be, and then anything outside of it, there needs to be a focus, but I believe they need to look at it with equal importance. When you stop differentiating between the two in terms of importance, that's when you start having negative impact on your supply chain performance.
George Jagodzinski (12:26):
Interesting. There's a lot in there. It's that balance of that internal focus and the external. Well, one thing that you said there, or a lot of things that you said that I loved, was when you're bringing in a fresh perspective into the organization, you need to bring it all the way in and touch everything. I like to always use golf analogies. But if I see that my buddy's hitting the golf ball a lot better, I can't just buy the same golf club he has. I need to go practice as much as he is and put in the time and do it.
(12:54):
I think of the classic example where maybe I'm working with a client and they want to switch from B2B to D2C. Someone at the board has a great idea of, hey, let's just spin up a Shopify site. And it's like, well, you just ship everything in pallets right now, nevermind and how does that flow through the whole thing? I'd be curious, have you seen when getting a fresh perspective goes wrong? I love those types of stories.
Arun Samuga (13:18):
A couple actually, without naming names of specific companies that went through this journey.
George Jagodzinski (13:24):
Protect the innocent.
Arun Samuga (13:26):
Yeah. I think there were a few chemical companies that kicked off this notion of a marketplace not so long ago, maybe about 10 years ago. It failed miserably because the idea was there is a lot of additional inventory that we have and instead of it accumulating cost at my site, what if I open up a marketplace which I use in order to not get rid of, but at least convert my existing inventory into profit potentially. So they try to create this channel.
(13:59):
Now there's a problem with that approach. Of course, not all products can just be sold in a marketplace. There are some products are regulated. So obviously you need to do an internal analysis to say, which products am I holding the maximum inventory of that I'd like to get rid of in terms of a marketplace concept. The second problem with that was, and you alluded to this briefly, it's about packaging. Bulk chemicals need to be shipped in special containers. You cannot just ship heavy duty liquid chemical that's used for protecting corrosion on cars. You cannot just ship it in a box. And of course, pricing is always a tricky game. When you think of getting rid of excess inventory, spot pricing comes into play and in some countries it's not legal and you got to be careful about how you price. You cannot change your prices as per your wishes. I mean there's certain limits that you have to adhere to just so that it doesn't come across as being anti-competitive.
(15:02):
So you have to think through a lot while at the board level, hey, let's get rid of excess inventory. Let's create this marketplace and invite a lot of other chemical companies and play along. Sounds fantastic. And then when you break it down, you are like, oh, hang on a minute. There are these 25 different problems within the chemical industry itself and for us to come up with this and make this successful might be a significant amount of effort. And then of course, socializing the concept and ensuring the end customers are willing to go to a website. Agreed, it's signed off and guaranteed by the large chemical companies. But still, you're so used to having a person on the other side doing your business the good old way because you're producing, you have that sense of identity association and respect with your suppliers, the relationships, and now suddenly you just go to a website and that kind of causes a lot of issues for some of the customers as well.
(16:07):
So all to say, I think there are a few other examples of this nature, but best intentions, great ideas, but if you don't think it through fully, then it would become an innovative project of sorts, but it would be truly innovative if it succeeded.
George Jagodzinski (16:23):
Yeah, and there's a big delta between the person with those great ideas at the board level versus those frontline details that truly matter. I think it's probably easier to say, oh, what a bad idea this was. But I think it really becomes about how do you cross that bridge more between the frontline and the people with the great ideas. I'm curious, in your experience, what have you seen that really helps bridge that gap?
Arun Samuga (16:46):
I think with the advent of more and more automation. Information availability, let's say it's a problem that has been solved to a great extent or will be solved because I think that's a foundational layer. As you look at automation and digitization in general, I think it's about saying any data that goes through or gets exchanged between any parties is readily available. I think you can make that assumption. Again, it's not 100% there. I know of large companies where only 50% of their orders are coming in digitally, these are orders from their customers. So all to say it's not there yet. But having said that, if we assume that it's going to get there because everybody has focus in that area, so you would achieve a level of automation as a result of that mindset and attitude.
(17:37):
How do you take it to the next level? Of course, when you keep projecting out in the past 15 to 20 years, one of the biggest challenges that we've faced is not at all technology related. It's actually related to label. It's related to the availability of talent. What do I mean by talent, right? I'll give you an example. There was an issue with a bridge recently without naming names and the bridge fell down, right? My first thought was who are the engineers who built that bridge? Who knew the code? Well, it was built 200 years ago, those people are not alive anymore. So the next new breed of engineers, civil engineers, are they trained on fixing that bridge using the old techniques and technology? Or are you going to ingest new technology into that old bridge in order to resurrect it? Then how are you going to manage the maintenance of that? Are you going to continue to have civil engineers who will support bridges in the future or do they change shape? So it's just a question that occurred in my mind.
(18:45):
Of course, you need to upskill existing people with digital technologies. You also need to upskill and ensure you have the right pool of resources for improving their retention. You don't want people to just come in and leave and then you invested all that effort in terms of training them, and then you have a sudden loss in productivity. Even you look at warehouses, even with Amazon being a great example of a warehouse-driven distribution model and last mile shipment model, the need for their warehouses is going to continue to grow with the number of consumers, with the amount of demand, with the things that are available now digitally for ordering, I mean, and for delivery.
(19:30):
And the new generation, I mean they are so used to using their phone and ordering stuff. Just the sheer demand for goods that need to be delivered through an electronic order from your phone or an electronic shipment is just going to significantly grow up. It's doing that already across the world, not just in the U.S. The U.S. was at the forefront. Now if you take that and extrapolate it and say your average middle class is going to double or triple in terms of its net worth by 2030 from say 2010, then effectively what you're saying is you need more and more people with the right skills at these warehouse locations to be able to deliver those goods, to be able to package it up for you and ensure that nothing is lost in the process, take care of returns.
(20:26):
All to say, I think labor and talent, specific talent shortages are extremely critical and they're going to be critical and they're going to become even more critical as we embark on more technology-driven benefits that we see.
George Jagodzinski (20:42):
Yeah, the labor is for sure a challenge. But even worse I see is if you have the labor, will you have the discipline and the room to give them the space that they need to do what they need to do. I mean, if you use the bridge example, how many bridges are we driving across that you see that they've just kind of patched over some serious problems? Or in a digital world, how many times do I see systems that are held together by bubble gum and duct tape and the engineers are probably yelling, hey, I'd really like to fix this. I'd like to fix this, but we can't have any downtime.
(21:14):
You're in the supply chain world. My favorite example is in distribution centers. I feel like every distribution center I've gone on has this really old belt that goes around the whole building and no one makes that thing anymore. And if it was to break, there's no way in heck to find it, but they don't want to shut it down to replace it with something new. I don't know, how does society or organizations find the discipline to not only invest in the labor, but then give them the time and the space they need to make those improvements?
Arun Samuga (21:42):
So it goes back to where we started from, right? Many a times the most impactful changes in society were because of great leaders, I think they come in and they're able to change the shape of a problem. So where I'm going with that is I think if you have great leadership with an innovative mindset, I think the ability to come in there in that example and try to see how emerging technology can actually replace that old setup, and it doesn't need to be just replaced that belt overnight. How can I make incremental changes around that? Do I need to proactively change my electric system set up so that the motors that need to drive that huge belt. How can I make incremental changes in each one of those areas so that when the time comes, I can replace the belt with X, Y, Z?
(22:40):
I think it's about having that foresight to take care of the building blocks that support the problem. And even in technology, the earlier comment you made around bubble gum, I think one of the things that I pushed back to our, not board necessarily, but it was mutually converged upon, was this notion of segmenting, I would say, software engineering capacity into different buckets, proactively. Instead of being reactive and saying, holy cow, we have a problem with our system. We need to fix it ASAP. We knew this could happen five years ago, but we did nothing to prevent it at that time because speed was of the essence, et cetera, et cetera.
(23:21):
My point is this, and you could say this is innovation, right? Because what we're trying to say is come up with an acceptable financial accounting structure where say you have 100 software engineers, 35 of them or 40 of them are purely related to forward looking roadmap items. You are looking at your future. You have your expertise. You have your core strength, chisel it, foster it, add new technology, test it out, drive new products to market, be fast, be agile, fail fast, et cetera. So you're left with 60% capacity. And can you envision a model where you say, I had these seven or eight customers who are always complaining, so let me allocate X percent of the remaining 60% to take care of that?
(24:12):
There is changes in technology that happens so fast at some point in time we got to make the leap and say, I'm running Java version 14 or 16 and the latest version is 22. Let's just upgrade it because you don't want to wait till it's at version 30 and your subsequent software is not supported. So allocate Y percentage of budget for technical maintenance. And the last part is where the bubble gum comes in. Usually you need a bubble gum to patch things up because you did not take care of technical debt while building it in the first place.
(24:49):
So allocate Z percent of the remaining 60% towards technical debt, have a senior resource look at it through a very, very sharp lens and give them the freedom, as you mentioned, right? I mean, do they have the space? Do they have the freedom to actually translate it to value? So that you're building out these roadmap items that's going to give you marketing girth, that's going to give the salespeople the necessary ammunition to go compete, create competitive differentiation, keep the board happy, whatever the case may be in terms of the outcome, but the remaining percentage, and I'm not hard on like 40, 60. It could be anything that works for you, and that's where the innovation comes in.
(25:33):
You're looking at it from the outside so that eventually you're wearing the customer's hat to say, was that a faulty product? Why do they keep releasing upgrades every now and then? Why does the system keep going down for maintenance so often? Is there a problem? So don't do any of that, right? I mean, you have proactively allocated capacity so that the customer doesn't have to even see any of this, they don't have to think about any of it. Would that be innovation? I absolutely think so.
George Jagodzinski (26:02):
I completely agree with that, but I'm also challenged with, I see so many CEOs and boards, they get so frustrated when they see that line item of tech debt. They're like, how much are we going to allocate to tech debt? I thought we need to move things forward. We need to move faster. The pace of change is changing. Have you had those meetings?
Arun Samuga (26:21):
Yeah, absolutely. I think no technology executive would've escaped that ever in their lifetime. I'm 100% sure the balance sheet integrity is a huge problem. I think especially when you look at the ownership structure. It's one thing to report out, be a public company, report to the people who have invested in you. Of course, you're measured there by your stock price. Absolutely. Of course that's related to net profits and so on. So there's a big chain there, but it's not very different in the private equity space either because your EBITDA comes into play and it's extremely important to manage your top line with your cost. I had to face it many a times.
(27:06):
I think one way to treat it is, one of the problems in the technology space, especially when you have people who've, I wouldn't say who don't have real experience in technology, but maybe there are financial engineers who've come in and they're CEOs, which is all good. It doesn't matter at the end of the day what your background is. I think what matters most is what your attitude and mindset is because that's what's going to govern the future of the company. Are they able to look at technology and say, this is not an event, it's a process?
(27:41):
If you adopt a quasi infinite mindset to problem solving, then you're going to look at the problem as a flow as opposed to just an event that can be fixed. So to take something as complex and complicated as technical debt and treated just as a line item is actually not a good thing at all. It's not healthy. Because that's like treating it as an event, I just need this to go away, or I want this to be ridiculously close to zero. That's not going to happen. I mean, as long as people are building software, and even if machines are building software, ultimately it's edited by people or it's deriving it from people's inputs from the past. So you might not escape that ever. So why don't you accept that, you're better off accepting it, treating your software development life cycle as a journey and not have an even driven mindset, but have a quasi infinite mindset towards it.
George Jagodzinski (28:40):
And maybe I'm open up a can of words into a whole nother episode here, but maybe part of the problem too is people think of "tech debt", that's the fixing the cracks in the foundation of the bridge, maybe repaving the surface of the bridge. When it's, if you really pull the thread of innovation through that, it's great because those cracks in the foundation, they tell you bigger things. Oh, there's a lot more people. Why are more people coming through here? Trucks are heavier now. Why are trucks heavier? And if you can really incorporate and infuse innovation even in the tech debt and people can think about it in that sense, then it does truly become the way that you're moving forward rather than just trying to keep up.
Arun Samuga (29:22):
Absolutely. And I reiterate this all the time, right? Innovation again is not about just coming out of your home tomorrow and creating something brand new, right? It's about a mindset. It's about continuous improvement actually. I think that's the key, where you're constantly thinking again. So I am reading this book by Adam Grant called Think Again. I strongly recommend it. It basically tells you that most of the issues that we face, be it in technology or any advancements in society are because of mental laziness and the fact that we want to be done with things and we don't want to go back and take a look at it because now we've moved on to the next thing, and that to us is a sign of progress. While in reality five years from now, it might just pull you back to where you started from because you've got to fix that thing again. So in other words, you're better off keeping that under your umbrella and being focused on it so that you can continue to rethink. And that I think is a key pedestal towards innovation, in my mind.
George Jagodzinski (30:27):
I love the idea of continuing to rethink and in your role as chief innovation officer, I would imagine inside of your own brain, there's probably a lot of rethinking and things going on, but then you're bombarded internally with people, ideas, and I would imagine externally with folks not only with ideas, but trying to sell you solutions to those ideas. How do you prioritize and try to manage all of that?
Arun Samuga (30:51):
It's very tough question to answer, and I think it may vary based on who you are as a person, what your role is within the company, what the expectations are of that role, and then how does the company actually create value. I think those three items have to be looked at in conjunction in order to effectively address some of these challenges. So I think on one hand you could say that if you are there and you are basically trying to create positive change, then these are the areas that you would like to investigate.
(31:32):
So say maybe I have my two or three pet projects, for example. But then the company actually needs to make progress in these three other areas and we'll put some names against it. But then finally, we noticed that the world is moving towards a direction that needs or mandates investing in some other ideas. For example, if we say one of my pet projects as of now is to identify how I can take all the digital transactions that are flowing through our supply chain network and associate a risk weightage to it. So say an order comes in from a customer to a supplier somewhere in Korea, customer in the U.S., the goods are going to be shipped via Malaysia to Rotterdam, all the way to Savannah, broken down, shipped by road. Just imagine the failure points there.
(32:23):
As soon as the order comes in, can I just relate a risk factor associated to it based on past events and what I know is going to happen in terms of weather, poor disruptions, maybe one country bombing another country or whatever the case may be? And I don't say that jokingly, but what I mean is risk has various flavors and the ability to associate risk events and probability of risk as early as the customer is thinking about demand, I think is a brilliant idea.
(32:54):
Now, what does the company actually need? Hey, Arun, we've not made any progress in AI and we absolutely need to make a statement here. We need a marketing driven statement. We need to go back to our clients, show value in terms of what we're doing in terms of AI and get adoption from them, et cetera. But where is the world moving towards? You see all these geopolitical tensions, the biggest problem at this point in time is tariffs of all things, because it's impacted so many countries that from a supply chain perspective, what manufacturers are wrangling with is who are my alternative sources of supply? I'm forced to near short now, who is actually going to be able to even produce this material to my specifications in the timeliness that I need it in? That happens to be one of the biggest problems at this point in time.
(33:49):
Europe has issues with power. It's got issues with, of course, the war and then commoditization of specialty chemicals going through a cycle because of which the stringent competition from Asia and the tariffs in Europe are different from the ones that were levied by the us. So it's become so complicated that supply chains are struggling. Of these three, which one would you prioritize? Right, that's the question.
(34:14):
There are two ways to look at it in my mind. One is, you employ the good old methodology of being extremely rational and saying, let me come up with the weightage. Let me come up with the timeline. Let me look at my existing resource capacity. Let me look at what's my partner ecosystem to see if I can do something there. So that's one way of dealing with it where it becomes more like a continuous process where you're trying to evaluate and you're trying to play with all three of those, right, at different levels.
(34:45):
The second way to do it is to just put in a very strong, I would say, a draft or a very strong statement with your opinions and say that these are the three areas that are creating a lot of push and pull. As a management team, what should we prioritize? Let's pick one because that's all we can do and let's do it really well. Now with the second approach, if you bet on the wrong horse, just because something else changed that kind of pulled the rug out underneath you, then you're sitting there scrambling going, why did we invest 18 months of effort? So there is risk with that, right? But technology companies do undertake those risks, especially startups. So again, it depends on the size of the company, where you are in terms of your maturity cycle.
(35:29):
I would say the way I handle it is I fall back on the first approach because you need to be in the game. You need to always look at the different threads. Of course, that means you need to be able to optimize things at a different level. But having said that, if you have these threads open, the probability of you being able to correlate these different threads also becomes stronger over a period of time. So it's more like hedging when it comes to investment. You look at your portfolio, they keep saying you've got to have a balanced portfolio.
(36:03):
So I would say making slower progress by focusing on three things is okay. Many people just to not buy into that idea, they want speed and they want speed over stability, and I push back solid. I say, no, you never sacrifice stability over speed because once you fall, you're going to fall so hard that you really have to change shape from that point in time. Here, at least you're stable and you can make incremental progress and add agentic AI on top of these risk signals. Then fine, you can boast that you have agentic AI capabilities, work with your partner ecosystem to see if I can partner with a company that does supplier sourcing and add it into my network as an added capability. Those are things honestly, I can do in the next three months. Why wouldn't I go down that path? As a result of this I not only have [inaudible 00:36:58], I'm playing in all three games, I might not be the best at any one of them, but if anything fails here I have not invested so much where I just get burnt. I would say that's an approach worthy of consideration.
George Jagodzinski (37:10):
Yeah, it's an interesting combination of risk profile, persona, and then the timeline. Because if you look at the index funds over the last a hundred years and you zoom out, it's all up to the right, and some people would say that that was slow, but it's up to the right pretty consistently no matter what's happened there.
(37:28):
Arun, I could go on forever. I love this conversation. Something I'd love to finish with is in your life career, what's the best advice you've ever received?
Arun Samuga (37:36):
If I were to pick the best, I think it was from one of my bosses from the past, he always motivated me to learn. That's one of the reasons I would say I continue to read. I like to read a lot. I don't read 25 books. I don't have a target like that. I had rather read it very slowly so that I understand and digest what the author was actually thinking, and then you think again. So I would say that probably stands out to be the best advice. Don't stop learning ever, because once you stop learning, that's when you will realize that the forces that are outside of you are going to take over you and you don't want to lose yourself as an identity.
George Jagodzinski (38:21):
I love that. I love that very much. Arun, thanks again so much. This was great.
Arun Samuga (38:26):
Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity, George. I appreciate it.
George Jagodzinski (38:30):
Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite platform and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at EvolvingIndustry@Inevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.