Mr Vikram Atal on 'Beyond IQ EQ and the Power of your Brand

Thank you, Professor Malik, for your very kind and generous introduction, and may also thank Mandy who's on the administration at KRM for helping with the efforts to set up this webinar. Before diving into the conversation of the topic itself, I thought I should say a few words to explain why, of all the many different subjects that could potentially have been selected for discussion today, I have chosen to speak about IQ, EQ, and branding. There are a few different reasons that led me to this decision. First, as I came to know more about and learned about KRM, I was particularly impressed in looking at the university and the information there. In a very few short years, it has built and offers an incredibly wide set of courses and subjects across disciplines. So it seemed it might be a good idea to pick a topic that would be of potential interest and value to the broadest possible universe of students and those that are dialing in. Secondly, one of the most interesting and innovative features of the approach at KRM, and one that I think truly differentiates it from the competition, is its commitment to blending academic teaching with real-world experiences. That suits me because I'm not an academic nor am I a scientist, and what we will cover today is my attempt simply as a business practitioner to provide insights that might help to supplement what you are learning in the classroom. Finally, and as importantly, I'm occasionally asked as to whether I know something now that I wish I had known when I was younger. I made plenty of wrong turns along the way in my life, so I'm certain that I could have done with lots of advice on many topics. But as a specific response to that question, I'm sharing with you today what I wish I had known would create clarity when I was a young manager just starting my professional career. So with that as background, moving on to the discussion itself, I propose to split my remarks into three broad sections. There's no presentation, so you'll just have to sort of follow along as I move through this. And certainly, Professor Malik, if at any stage you want to interrupt, challenge, debate, or supplement what I'm saying, please feel free to do so. Then we'll take questions from the audience at the end. So if you think about the title as an equation, I plan to start by explaining why the left side of the equation, what I'm calling 'beyond EQ', is in my mind absolutely true. Not only that, I believe that for each of us, and certainly for us students, understanding that and embracing that and internalizing that is urgent and almost an imperative. Next, we're going to try to cover at a very high and non-scientific level the concepts of EQ and branding. If you get interested and want to learn more, there are hundreds of technical books, web seminars, lectures, etc., that you can find on Google and YouTube. But for today, we're going to keep it at a pretty high level, just as an introduction into these concepts. Then to wrap up, there'll be a few suggestions from my perspective on next steps, actions that you may wish to consider. Then obviously we'll get to the Q&A. So let's get started. When I started my career in US consumer banking, we were a fairly large company. Each year we would need to hire thousands of people across the country, and as I became more senior, I was responsible for more and more of those efforts. We were regarded as a very good company and a really good employer, so as you might expect, we were flooded with resumes from folks coming out of college and entering the workforce seeking their first job. To sort through these and decide who we would place on a short list for follow-up interviewing, hiring, training, etc., we looked for relevant school subjects—whether you had finance, marketing, risk, data analytics, operations, human resources, etc. But beyond that, the main criteria that we were using was to look at their academic scores. In the US, it would be the GPA, a really important and critical filter. What became interesting to me and was a big learning as I got involved in the recruiting, developing, promoting, and assessing individuals was that there appeared to be no direct correlation between how academically smart an individual was when they had joined our firm and the grades that they had carried into the firm and their actual and potential long-term success at the company. Furthermore, this result was not just for what we would refer to as office and white-collar jobs, which is what all of us and most of you will be going into. We found the same results when we looked at the performance of our back office teams in operations, customer service, and collections. Of course, those individuals needed to pass effectively an online test where we had a cutoff score. Let's say the cutoff score was 70% to pass. But once they had done that and joined the firm, there was little difference in performance between those that scored 70 versus those that scored 90% on the test. So let's think about why that might be the case. As students at KRM, you are approaching the end of an academic journey and preparing to transition to starting your careers in a year, two years, three years, but in a short timeframe. Assuming that you began your schooling when you were four or five years old, you have now been in what I would refer to as a highly structured and very objective environment for over 15 years. There's been a lot of training in a structured and objective environment. What do I mean by that? Each year, you and your teachers had a very clearly defined syllabus that you needed to complete, and at the end of the year you took an exam, and the results indicated not only how you had done but how you compared to everyone else in your class. Now you're going to be entering a world where there is no syllabus and no exams. Not only that, in school and college you were evaluated principally as an individual, and your results primarily depended on how diligently you had worked and how good you were at taking tests. Some people work very hard and were useless at taking tests, and their scores reflected that. Others were terrific at taking tests even though they didn't work as hard. But generally, it was a combination of the effort you put in and your test-taking capabilities. Well, the good news is your days of taking tests are soon going to be over. But that's not all good news, because there's trouble ahead. In your career, a few of you may be in roles where your individual performance is measured—let's say you're a salesman, you might have a quota. But for most of us, and for me in my career, and for I suspect the largest group of you, you are not going to be measured on individual performance. You will be measured on the overall team, or your unit, or your division, or the business overall. That's how you're going to be evaluated and assessed. And then there's a further point: up until now, it has been very clear to you as to who is doing the evaluation—it's your teacher, your professor. It's a sort of one-to-one relationship for the most part. Going forward, that's not going to be the case. You will not only be evaluated by your superiors, your bosses, who can decide how you've done, but you are also going to be evaluated by your colleagues, your peers, and the folks that are reporting up to you will also have an influence on how you are assessed. So let's recap: you are now heading into a world that is unstructured, where the measurement systems are subjective, not objective. Your performance depends on others, not purely on yourself. And to cap it all, there are going to be multiple people that are going to have a point of view on how you've done and whether you should be valued highly or not. So in this environment, where academic excellence, which we defined as your IQ, is no longer going to be the main passport to success, the question for you is: how do you stand out and demonstrate your true worth? That's a conundrum and a question that's about to hit you as you move into the workforce. So that's where, in my mind, the concepts of EQ and branding come into the picture and become such an important element of what we need to be talking about and you need to be thinking about and internalizing.

I was in school in India. I'll give you a real example. We had a class of 71 people when I graduated in the early 70s. One of the guys in the class—at that time the score was the best you could get was a five, and the worst was a two if you passed. The last passing score was thirty-five or something. This chap got thirty-three, so he barely passed school. He got lucky. After he passed school, he couldn't get into any college in India. The principal of the school had retired just at that time, and the principal for some reason liked this person and said, 'Why don't you come and live with me in England for a few months?' Took him under his wing. A few years later, many years later, this individual is one of the most successful TV executives in the world. What happened was that that principal took him in and probably tutored him in the ways of the world, in life, not academically, but about how to get out of there. So I've seen it in real life, many examples at work where academic intelligence does not necessarily translate. There are few roles where it obviously translates, but for the most part, it's very rare. So I stumbled into learning about EQ when I saw a magazine article some years after I'd started my professional career. For those of you that may not be familiar with EQ, it stands for emotional intelligence. Sometimes when I talk to people, they say it's not a real thing, but it is a real thing. It's not something I've invented just for the sake of this conversation. The technical definition of EQ and how your brain works, a neuroscientist can explain. But for our purposes today, you should think about EQ as a combination of two things: one is how you manage your emotions, and the second is how you manage your relationships with others. If you think about your family, your friends, or those that you may regard with respect in any field, a few phrases that link back to EQ will certainly come to mind in terms of how they handle their emotions. I'll give you a couple of my examples. I personally am very fond of sports, so I use examples of athletes that you'll recognize. For example, if you think about a tennis player like Federer, one of the things that he is known for is being able to keep his emotions in check whether he is winning or losing. You would not know from looking at him at the end of a presentation ceremony whether he won the tournament or lost. He still has a smile on his face and he's moving on to the next event. What's happened has happened; he's already thinking ahead. When he loses, look how fast he bounces back. When he wins, it's not like he's gloating; he's thinking about the other person on the court, thinking about the fact that he's won and somebody's lost, but this is not a time to be celebrating in that capacity. He never loses his cool. When you get closer to home in India, I have recently been seeing a few articles about MS Dhoni. Dhoni in my mind may not be the most technically proficient wicketkeeper—I'm sure there are people that are technically quite good at keeping wickets—and he's certainly not the most technically proficient batsman; there are lots of other batsmen around the Indian team. But when you think about the combination of his attitude, his ability to handle the pressures of a T20 or a tight one-day game, and there have been articles recently about how amazing he is at that, his overall motivational abilities and activities on the field have really made MS Dhoni a legend in Indian cricket. So there's no absolute measure or set of items that you can put into the bucket of EQ. But in addition to these examples, we speak about people with high EQ as those that are resilient—they can quickly bounce back from adversity. People that adapt easily to change, they can embrace change; they know that there's no point fighting change, you need to embrace it and move on. They're people that can handle that. I'm sure in your own lives you see people that are able to do that and people that just get stuck, they can't get out of where they were and they have a hard time. There are people that are perceptive—they can see things from the other person's perspective. That's a fantastic trait if you're ever in a negotiation; you need to be thinking about how other people are reacting so that you can put your position forth in the most productive way. And they have empathy, a genuine regard for others that comes through. Those are all positive qualities. On the flip side, people with low EQ may be people that have a lack of self-awareness, they may be self-centered, they may be people that cannot control their emotions. You see somebody and you might say that he's got anger management issues—anger management issues is an inability to control your own emotions, and that would be a low EQ item. So we will come back to discuss EQ, but I wanted to now switch into talking for a few minutes about the concept of branding. All of you and all of us are familiar with brands. But when somebody says branding, you normally think about branding as a product—it could be a car, a BMW or a Honda, or a brand like a watch, a Titan or a Rolex or an Omega, it could be a hotel chain like Oberoi or Taj, it could be clothes like Nike, Benetton, Raymond's. These are all brands that you are familiar with. Each of these brands has a logo and some may also have a slogan. BMW has a slogan 'the ultimate driving machine', but that's not the core of the brand; that's just items that they have. The core of the brand is the image or the essential attribute that comes to mind when you think about the brand. For Rolex, Omega, or the Taj, in my mind it signifies luxury. That would be one word that you might attach to those brands. For Honda or Toyota, it may be value. For BMW or Nike, it may be fun, it may be exciting. You might have your own tags against them, but directionally you get the picture. But brands can apply much more broadly than simply to products. As an example, countries have brands. When you think about Switzerland, you might think about Switzerland as a brand. But I'll give an example of Japan. In the 1960s, if you said to somebody that a product was made in Japan, it implied that it was cheap and low quality. Thirty years later, in the 1990s and till today, if you say to somebody that something is made in Japan, it generally implies high quality and exceptionally good value. Just like a product or a country, each of us as individuals has a brand. If you just think about the examples I quoted, brands are not one-size-fits-all; they need to be aligned with the objective. For products, it would be the customer set you want to attract. For us as individuals, it has to be consistent with your own goals and objectives. If you are looking to enter a world where you want to be an entrepreneur, a FinTech executive, you might have to determine a different set of attributes that you want to build and develop and represent than somebody who wanted to enter the army. So that's the first thing about brands: they are not one-size-fits-all. And if you think back to the question about Japan, you can develop your brand and position it differently than what it is. The second thing about brands is that they are generally very long-lasting, so they need to be carefully created and consistently reinforced. The final thing I would say about brands is that they are not easy to build. You can think about how much effort goes into building a brand, and what's even worse is that they are even harder to repair. If I had to pick one word to make this real for you, to capture the essence of a brand for you as an individual, I would say it would be your reputation. Think about your brand as your reputation. In the past, reputations would be localized. If you think about hundreds and centuries ago, your reputation and the extent to which people would know you would be in your village, your town, your city. It would not be as universal as it is today. With social media and the way the world has moved, your brand is now a global brand. Just like Sony, BMW, Rolex, and Omega are global brands, each of us as individuals has a global brand. That's a fantastic thing, but it's also a daunting thing. Once your brand is established in whatever way, imagine how hard it is to change a global brand. So each and every day, one needs to be thinking about your brand, your brand positioning, not as a marketer but as an individual. These are very personal items, and I think most of you can start thinking about this as something to embrace and focus on. So in a nutshell, those are the concepts about EQ and branding. To reiterate the points that I've been making, in my mind, your professional and personal success—not just professional but personal success in life—will be determined not purely by your IQ. Obviously, that's an important determinant and it gets you the foot in the door, but whether you can develop and demonstrate a high EQ and a positive brand is key. The good news is that neither EQ nor a brand is carved in stone. Just like you have developed your IQ over 15 years, you obviously don't have 15 years to develop EQ and a brand, but these are items that you can reflect on, develop, and codify over time. How might you do that? Firstly, for myself, I found that the more I read about these topics in general interest magazines, not from a scientific perspective, the more aware I became of the opportunities to develop myself. That would be one suggestion. The next suggestion, if you are really serious about these topics and want to develop, would be to ask yourself some questions thoughtfully and honestly, with a degree of seriousness on the concepts shared today and how they apply to you. Where do you think you are on the EQ scale? Nobody is evaluating you, nobody's looking at the piece of paper. Take a piece of paper, write down some terms, and think about where you stack up relative to the people you know around you. Are you better than them, higher on the EQ scale, or not so good? It's not one-size-fits-all across all these different elements. What do you do well, what are you not doing so well? Then think about what you would like to change. Think about your brand: is it aligned with where you see yourself headed professionally? What is your reputation in your mind? Then I think finally, as so much of EQ and branding is a function of how you are perceived—it's not about what you believe, it's about how others see you—it is absolutely essential that you seek out mentors that you deeply respect. This is not a friends-and-family project. This is not about going to the people that know you the closest and are always willing to say good things about you. For the most part, you need to find people that are independent, candid, honest, and will give you constructive but unfiltered feedback. That could be professors—doesn't have to be the professor that's teaching your subject, it could be anybody else from the university that you regard and think would be a good, honest person. I have found that people come to me for jobs, they say, 'Can you give me a job?' or 'Can you give my nephew a job?' I say I'm not in the job-giving business. But if anybody has come to me along the way that I have taken time to say, 'I'd like to get some input and advice,' most of us who have been in careers have done that. Just like every single Indian is very happy to give advice, I'm very happy to give advice. I'm not so happy to give jobs. So you can reach out to many people and you will find them responsive to give you input and advice and potentially be a mentor to you. It's also not a wide set of people; you're not looking for 20 mentors or 10 mentors. I would say one, two, or three really to find the people that can really help you. As you develop through your career, it might be different mentors. Today you might find a professor that you might be willing to work with. As you get into your role in business, you should find senior people in the company, not necessarily in your division, not the senior department, that you could speak to and get candid feedback from. It may be outside your company because in your company it might be politically difficult to have these conversations. Finally, as you've seen in your own academic career, it requires diligence, hard work, and execution at a granular level. So if you are interested in these topics, you will need to start executing against this, and as I said, it's something that you need to execute against on a rigorous, day-in, day-out basis to make sure you're on the right path. With that, I hope this conversation has been helpful, and I wish you luck on your journey of discovery. So with that, I will open it up, Professor, to any questions or thoughts you might have. Obviously, I'm happy to debate if you feel that these thoughts are not aligned with your thinking.

A combination of both, I'm saying. My thought would be that this is something that you have to embed right upfront. This is not something that you stumble into. Just think about how quickly things can explode on you with the way the world is today. Going back to ancient days or even a pre-internet world, you could develop something and change your brand more easily if you were going outside the location. Today, a brand is established very quickly, and once it's established, it becomes really hard to change. Imagine, it took Japan 30 years to change their brand. If a brand is destroyed today—of an individual or a product—it's very hard for it to come back. If Facebook, for example, loses its viewers because privacy was not part of its brand components, it would take years and billions of dollars to reorient and recapture that brand image. So for a company, for each of us, if you're getting into a business, you need to be able to say: what is going to be my plan? Am I producing a product that is a value product or a luxury product? What sort of customer set am I talking about? What are the values that I'm going to espouse? What would be the return policies of the product? What would be the hours? It gets back to that level for a company, and you cannot change it along the way.

Yes, you stick to that. You can't build a reputation and then not follow through. You have to really deliver on whatever you say. Your brand—KRM's brand—is already in a sense getting established. Every single professor that is active at the university, every single student that has been at the university and graduated, is actually a representation of your brand. If people find a hundred people from KRM that they regard with respect, they would say that creates a good brand image. If the opposite, it's not going to be good. Trying to control that—your brand is already out there, not only with what the governing body might say, but it's actually being delivered every single day by every individual. Even the vendors and suppliers that are bringing product into the school, even the catering guy that is coming in and serving food, has a point of view about KRM. Is it an organization that pays the bills on time? Is it an organization where people seem to be kind and empathetic? You really need to be thinking about a brand in a broad way. If you really want to be a different organization, you need to be thinking about that. The brand, the reputation, permeates all the different parts of the body of an institution.

I think that's a... I don't know what becoming a CEO of BMW entails, but if you're thinking about yourself and saying, 'I want to aspire to lead large global companies, I want to have impact,' the question is—I would flip it around. You're looking not to be just a leader of a large company; it's really a means to an end. You want to serve a large set of customers with high-quality products. It could be a leader in the motor industry or some other industry, but that's what your ultimate purpose is. So think about the leadership qualities that you will need to be delivering. I found that one of the lessons I had early in my career was not only is it not about academic intelligence, it's actually not about yourself. It's about how you can leverage others and the wider organization to serve the ends of everybody. So you need to start thinking about not yourself; you need to start thinking about your ability to harness the energy of those around you. How do you do that in a way that would support whatever organization you're part of, and as part of that, support yourself? Leaders have to have followers. Why would people want to follow you? So I would say, not to say that you should not become the leader of BMW one day, but think about that aspiration in a slightly different way. Start to think not about yourself, but about the elements that you would need to develop to start engaging and harnessing the productive value of everybody around you on the team. I made that mistake. I actually almost got fired from my job in the bank because I thought it was all about me. I thought I could accomplish a lot, but I didn't really think about building up a team. There was a very major project that I blew up, and the CEO called me in and said, 'This won't happen again.' I got lucky. But it really is about the organization and the people around you.

I'm not an expert on China. I know pretty much almost as much as anybody on this webinar. Unfortunately, because I spend so much of my time in the US, I might have a US-centric perspective on China, where our president is promoting the interaction with China on a daily basis. I think China, as an example similar to Japan from a branding perspective, the initial view on China has been like the view on Japan in the 60s—products are cheap, low-cost. I think China is migrating towards higher value products, higher value engineering. In time to come, you will see a branding repositioning of China not as the low-cost manufacturer of the world, but providing higher value services. Separately, we in India and also in the US have a view on China that it's a fairly closed, not open society, not only in terms of its political structure but the way interactions go on. I think that brand is going to be around for a long time. I don't see that changing in the short term. I hope it does, because to integrate fully into the world systems, you need to have a more open architecture. But I don't see that today. So I would say it's migrating from a low-cost manufacturer to a higher-end, value-added engineering, but the open and closed society I don't see changing.

I think consumer banking is actually going to be a fascinating transition. It's been evolving over time. If you think about consumer banking in its purest sense—taking deposits, making transactions, dealing with customers—even in India, until fairly recently, the way you expanded your business was to put down a branch. That's why State Bank of India has 15,000 or more branches. Everybody thought about banking and expanding a bank by finding a branch location and creating a branch. That's how banks were built. The same thing happened in the US, but it was much worse because there was a restriction on interstate banking. If you were headquartered in New York State, you could not open up a bank in Ohio or Pennsylvania or New Jersey unless you got a license in that state. So banking was a very localized business. Your competition was very localized, and you could see a competition for a few months before they showed up because they would have to rent a branch and build it. You would have nine months to react. What's happened now, in the West and obviously in India as well, is digital banking is here. Interstate regulations have disappeared, and your competition is everywhere. The COVID-19 situation has accelerated the migration of customers from a physical infrastructure to a digital environment. Consumer banking in the US has moved very rapidly over the last six to eight weeks. Consumers have become aware and familiar with digital banking. If COVID-19 disappears tomorrow, people might go back to the old way of working. But if the pandemic and its implications last over the next three, four, five, six months, I think you will see a sea change in consumer receptivity to digital banking. This will have enormous implications on the downside for people that have very large physical franchises like Bank of America, which has 5,000 branches, and JPMorgan Chase, which has a similar amount. They have white elephants. So I think consumer banking is on a very interesting journey, challenging but a lot of fun. Goldman Sachs, which I am on the board of the bank, has zero branches. In the last couple of years, we have built up a deposit base of over seventy billion dollars. In the last two months, our deposits have grown by about twelve billion dollars in six weeks. Money is flooding in, and we don't have a single branch; it's all online.

I started my career as a UK CA. The first ten or fifteen years were purely focused on financial management for the companies I was working with, and then I migrated over time to the business side of it, actually running the franchises. Finance is very core to my background and history. I used to say to people that were in finance that as a good financial individual, you have really four different roles that you should be thinking about playing. The first thing that finance people need to be doing is to make sure that they're keeping the books and records in a good way. I would regard that as making sure that assets equal liabilities, debits equal credits. That's the necessary evil part of financial management; it's got to get done, but it's not creating enormous value. The second thing is financial individuals need to be good at the planning and budgeting function. That's not just about creating big PowerPoint documents. It's about saying, when you're part of the company, if we have a forecast that we're going to produce this many cars at the end of the quarter, do I as a finance manager know enough about the business to know that the raw material coming in—the steel, the widgets—is sufficient to hit that target or exceed it? So where are you with regard to your understanding not just of the financial equation, but of the business process? To say, 'I'm a better planner because I really understand the underlying dynamics of how this business works.' The third thing is that as a financial person, you're meant to be ensuring that you are stewards of the shareholders' money and that you are helping the company make smart choices. Smart choices could be in vendor management—are we paying the right prices for the right product? But it goes beyond paying the price; it's saying, are we using those products in the correct way? I'll give you an example. In the credit card company that I managed, we would buy two billion envelopes a year to send out to customers with their statements. That's a big number. I was debating with a person about buying the envelopes because even if you pay one paisa per envelope, it adds up when you're buying two billion of them. He came to me with a very interesting suggestion. He said, 'Vikram, we're buying two billion envelopes, but we're buying them in 72 different flavors—some are long, some are short, some are big, some are small, some are rectangular, some are square—because every manager is deciding to send out their statements in a different format.' So we moved from buying in 72 different formats to buying much fewer formats, maybe six or something. The value of the finance person was not just in getting a lower price from one paisa to three-quarters of a paisa per envelope; it was in changing the way that we ordered. To do that, imagine how much you have to know about the business to say, 'I can actually move from buying all these envelopes to buying fewer formats.' This is a very small tactical example, but I want to give you a sense of at what level you could be operating as a finance person. If you can do one, two, and three—if you can do the debits and credits, the planning and budgeting, and actually understand the business at this level—then you are going to be the most valuable person to have a seat at the senior table with the CEO and the most senior people in the company. That's what I would say your aspiration should be. Once you've done that, you could be a wizard finance person or you could be a business person. The world is yours.

I would say EQ is definitely... If you go to LinkedIn and look for anybody that you regard and respect in any field, you can go back in history and think about people that you regard. But if you go to my LinkedIn, you won't find my GPA there—either at St. Stephen's or the London School of Economics. I can tell you that when I finished from St. Stephen's, I went to the Delhi School of Economics and asked for an application form. The registrar said, 'Great ki hai?' I told him, and he said, 'Formally, Malaga, write as a poem 20 min ago.' He said, 'Whose great case? Our form name was like that.' So I left. I applied and got into a course with Professor Denis Singh. That same week, I got an acceptance letter from the London School of Economics saying, 'We're delighted we got your application, we'd like to have you here.' So I went off to England. In my career, I know personally that the academic score had nothing to do with what I actually accomplished in my career and my life. If you go to LinkedIn and look for anybody's GPA, you won't find it. Maybe one person is there, and I would say they have low self-awareness if they're putting that GPA in there. It doesn't matter. As a leader, as somebody that is going to achieve something, people that have achieved something are not putting the score in there. They're talking about what they've accomplished, the teams they built, the people that have engaged with the businesses that they've sponsored or developed. So it's not about academic IQ; it's about the other factors. From an EQ perspective, from a leadership standpoint, I would emphasize two items: being perceptive and being empathetic. Do you have a way to understand how other people are feeling and reacting, and what can you do to motivate them? As a leader, you're not just about yourself; you obviously grow yourself and your skills, but you need to be getting the best out of everybody else. To motivate somebody, you have to understand who they are, where they're coming from, what they need, what they're aspiring to do, and how you can help them do that. Helping them do that will help you get bigger and better and broader. So within the EQ components, which are many, perceptiveness and empathy would be what I would think about. Where are you on that scale? In all of your careers and lives, there are going to be setbacks. We have them in personal and professional life. If you're going to succeed over time, you need to be able to embrace those setbacks and bounce back. Resiliency is something that I value very highly. People say, 'Have they been able to come back from whatever situation they have?' But as a leader, perceptiveness and empathy would be some of the things that I would guide you towards.

Just as well, because look, as a topper, by definition only the top 10% are toppers. So if you did that, then all the 90% of the rest of us are toast, we're done. So thank God there's hope for us. I think it's just about saying, look, what's past is past. Whether you are a topper or not doesn't really matter. Obviously, you need to spend time academically learning and getting knowledge. This is not about saying knowledge doesn't matter. It's about how you now emphasize other aspects and other attributes.

As soon as the travel ban is lifted, I'm there. I'm looking forward to seeing you in person. I want to thank everybody that dialed in, and I hope this was helpful. All the best to each of you.

Take care, thank you.