Michael New: As you're progressing. If it doesn't feel right, act. You've got to do something about it. Don't let it fester. Don't think that it's going to look after itself. You're best to ask the questions critically, review your progress on your roadmap and adjust as necessary.
Olivier Lafontaine:I'm Olivier Lafontaine and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers who want to achieve digital transformation. When we talk about digital transformation in the insurance industry, it's easy to think of it as a sprint, a fast paced race to implement new technology. But in reality, it's more like an ultra marathon. A long, challenging journey that demands endurance, strategy and the right team to cross the finish line. In this episode, I speak with Michael New, Chief Technology Officer at Clearview. As a seasoned leader in large scale digital migrations and a competitive ultra marathon runner, Michael brings a unique perspective on what it takes to successfully transform a life insurance business. We'll talk about the challenges of moving legacy systems into the future, how data readiness can make or break a migration, and why patience and precision are key to building a modern digitally enabled insurer. So let's get into it.
Olivier Lafontaine:Okay, so welcome to the show. I wanted to start you and I exchanged Michael about some personal things that you might want to share hobbies and I had from a wrong source actually that you were a cricket fan. But as it turns out, I was surprised to hear that you're actually an ultra marathon runner. I thought that was so interesting because I won't be able to help it, but I'm going to have to do the link between ultramarathon running and large digital transformation projects. Right. You know I'm going to do that. But before we go there, can you talk a little bit about running 100 kilometer races? Like how does that happen? How do you do that in your life or to yourself?
Michael New:Well, in fairness, I haven't actually run 100 kilometer race just yet. That's happening in May. The largest that I've ran is 50 km at this point in time and it's just something that I fell into later in life. I played a lot of soccer football in my younger years and when I retired from that in Covid, I thought, well, I've got to do something else with my time. So bit forest gump style, but I thought I'll start running. It's funny, you talk about parallels to large program delivery, etc. So there is a big parallel. You start off on a program and you go through the optimism at the start when you're feeling all fit and healthy and then as you get in, you're halfway through, you're feeling a bit flat and deflated and lacking energy.
Michael New:But then when you get to the finish, it's quite exhilarating. So now it's just part of what.
Olivier Lafontaine:I do, a big, big mission in life. So. So when did you start then? The 50k marathon? What is that, in the last couple years?
Michael New:Yeah, in 2021 was my first one. I was lucky enough to go to Montreal last year when we met Olivier and after that I ducked up to Quebec City and ran the marathon up there for funsies as well. So yeah, it's just something that I do now. You can see the world.
Olivier Lafontaine:So kudos for that. I highly, highly respect that. I myself have tried to run a little bit. I gotten up to a half marathon and I think that's going to be as far as I'm going to go. I'm still very proud of that, but can't imagine the sort of preparation that goes into both mental and physical in order to, I guess not get bored throughout the whole race.
Michael New:That is a challenge. That is a challenge. But yeah, it's. My style is slow and steady.
Olivier Lafontaine:That's an excellent style. And with that I am going to link into digital transformation programs. And are they slow and steady? Are they fast and exhilarating? I'm sure the finish is exhilarating. And I was reading your profile actually and of course we've worked and met several times, but I was intrigued by the fact that you've done several of those large programs. Let's start with perhaps what you're doing at Clearview and then we'll get into some of the other projects that you might have done in your past.
Michael New:Yeah, yeah, no problem. Look, Clearview, I started in mid 2023. They were partway through a implementation of a new life insurance platform. Actually the platform had been implemented. They needed to take it to the next stage where they need to move into the simplification stage where they're looking to do a large migration onto the new platform. I was brought in to run that, finalize the original implementation project and then ramp up the migration. Kicked off that in late 2023 and then really got into the migration project in the start of 2024 and it has been moving along quite well and on schedule since that time. A bit of a change in my circumstance.
Michael New:The incumbent CTO decided that he wanted to leave Clearview in late 2024. And our CEO asked me, invited me to apply for the role and I was lucky enough to come on top of that process and I started in the role of CTO three months ago. So, yeah, it's so very early days for me, very early days for me. But yeah, I'm very happy to be in the role.
Olivier Lafontaine:That sounds good. And so are you done with the migration at this point? Is that ongoing? Tell me where you are with regards to moving the data and the new system and calling it an end.
Michael New:We're halfway through. The migration happens itself at the end of 2025 or October 2025 when you do a large transformation program, particularly when you put in a new platform. Clearview's implementation of the new platform also involved launching a new product set. And when you launch a new product set, there are certain things that you, for various good reasons, you deprioritize certain things, things that aren't a high volume, things that you're not going for a period of time. Now what that means is when you then come to the migration, you're instantly going to put a lot of volume onto your new platform. And those things that you've deprioritized, you actually have to deliver. So we've been focusing on getting the platform more functionally rich and we've now prioritized those items that the low volumes meant that we didn't need, we will need before we go live. So we're about, oh, I think we've got 15 build sprints on our migration to supplement all of the functionality that was not delivered in the original one.
Michael New:I think we're up to about Sprint 11. So we're a good way through the builds from the migration mapping. We're a good percentage through that as well. And we're receiving sample data sets onto our test platform and going through our testing of the quality of that data. Now we do have a bunch of issues. We are still many months out from the actual migration itself. So it's still a journey that we've got to go through to get that data baseline correct and then work through all of the functionality that we've built and make sure that that's all correct. So that's where we are.
Olivier Lafontaine:I think in your case, I guess the incumbent platform that you're migrating from is what, maybe 10 years old? If I'm not mistaken. 15 years old perhaps?
Michael New:Oh, I think it's, I think it's older than that, Olivier. The platform, I recall working with this platform in another organization and it was old back then.
Olivier Lafontaine:No, I mean the data, I suppose the Clearview data is up to, you know, some 10 or 15 years. I don't think Clearview existed 100 years ago, if I'm not mistaken. So, so how old? Can you talk a little bit about what you're dealing with in terms of legacy data and the data set that you have to migrate?
Michael New:Yeah, it is, it is about 15 to 20 years old, I believe. So the background of Clearview, it was part of a large general insurer in Australia called nrma. They're the National Road and Motoring association and it was like a wealth management arm. And back in the day they got into financial advice, wealth accumulation and life insurance. And they also had a set of direct products, so accident insurance, et cetera. So you were only covered if you had an accident, that sort of thing. And those products are about 15 to 20 years old. There's about 20 different products that are on the old platform.
Michael New:We have looked at homogenizing and simplifying those and coming up with common features. But because the, as the data has been up to 20 years old, it's gone through various life cycles, it's gone through various adjustments, data patching, which is a swear word in our company, but it seems to happen everywhere. There's been plenty of that. So we're facing into that with our migration and we're finding that there are quite a few issues that we've got to navigate through and that's, that's one of the key challenges in our migration project.
Olivier Lafontaine:How does that affect or who are the key people in addressing those challenges in your organization? I know you're new in the role, but you know, if you can extrapolate from your previous role where you had to deal with it a bit more as a program manager, I think data issues or data patches.
Michael New:
Yeah, we're a very small company at Clearview. We're like a nimble tech enabled challenger is what our goal is. But what that means in terms of people on the ground is we don't have a lot of people that deal with the data on a day to day basis. And we have a few people, probably a handful, about six to 10 people who have been in the organization a long time and been working with the legacy platform for a long time. And we rely heavily on that cohort of people to work through and be part of our data migration working group and provide us the insights on the various data challenges that we've got in the source platform. And we do have a register of all of the data challenges and the solutions that we need to put in place. Some of those we can accept and we can ignore. Others we need to fix on the source.
Michael New:That is our strategy. Fix on the source before we actually migrate for most of them and others we're just going to have to live with. Yeah, so that's the approach that we take. We've got a, we've got a small set of SMEs that really, truly understand the data. We also have a few experts in the project team who write queries, look for various trends and identify any challenges that we might have in the data as it comes through the migration.
Olivier Lafontaine:And when you say those SMEs, those, those five or six SMEs, are they people from the business? Are they people from it?
Michael New:A mix of both. We've got a production support team who have been working with the system for, you know, 15 to 20 years. And so there's about three people in the production support team that know the data quite well. So we do lean on them to identify potential data issues as we go through. And there are people in the business who have used the system and they know where it breaks, they know the various challenges that the old system has. And so we involve them in our working group, our data migration working group as well.
Olivier Lafontaine:That's good. If you were to give some advice to, to your fellow CTOs, I suppose, in other companies that are toying with the idea, I guess, practicing for their ultra marathons themselves, I suppose. Are you far enough in the project at this point that you feel you have some lessons learned already to keep in your arsenal for next time this happens?
Michael New:I guess from previous migrations, I've brought in lessons learned into this migration. One of the things in a previous life insurance migration that I did that was a lesson learned is to get your data baseline really correct. If you're doing a build and a migration together, you've got to get one thing right before you focus on the other thing. And we've prioritized data. We want to get our data baseline right. And so we're, we've got a small sample set of data, thousand policies. We want to micro verify that data on the target system being Oracle's oipa. So that's correct.
Michael New:So that as we bring in our functionality, I mentioned 15 build sprints that we've got, we can verify, we Know that any issues it's likely to be the build rather than the data. In a previous migration, we did all of that together and it was the data team was finger pointing at the build team, the build team was finger pointing at the data team and we spent a lot of time navigating through those issues. So that's one thing that I brought into from a previous migration, this migration, it's actually gone to plan so far. And so we've got issues, no doubt we've got issues, but we haven't had any of those big bombs that have gone off and we've thought, geez, if we had our time again, we'd learn from that and do that differently. They haven't quite come up just yet.
Olivier Lafontaine:Okay, knock on wood then. But, but if I heard you correctly, you're what you're describing, essentially you're saying make sure you pre validate the data because if you feed DAT in your previous life, I suppose you, you would feed the data into the new system and then something would error out and then you would never know it's because of the functionality of the new system or because the data was wrong in the first place. And so you spend a lot of time at finger pointing and I can imagine it gets a bit emotional after, after a while.
Michael New:That's right. It was, it was unnecessary effort. If we had a high confidence on our data before we went into the build testing a lot of that like we, we navigated through it, of course, but it was harder than it needed to be because of that uncertainty of where the problem lied.
Olivier Lafontaine:Yeah, really interesting. But how would you go about that, or at least how do you go about that at Clearview if you're, I mean I have to imagine you're getting your data out of your existing system and there are errors in it, but somehow, I mean, obviously you can probably not eyeball all of it and identify errors. But what sort of techniques are you able to use in order to identify what could be wrong or tested out or what process do you use?
Michael New:Yeah. So we've got a sample set of policies that we're using. I'm not sure on the exact number. I'd have to talk to my test manager on that. But I think it's around a thousand policies and they're a blend across. You might have heard me say there's about 20 products that we're migrating over. So it's a blend of those products. In that thousand policies, we're using the mapping source to target what we call data Sheets so that we know the source value of X has translated to the target value of X.
Michael New:And we're basically running analysis over the top of that in the forms of Microsoft Excel analysis to make sure that that smaller sample quality is high. Now we've got 100,000 policies that we're migrating, so it is going to not identify everything, but it gives us a higher set of confidence that the data baseline, the data quality is strong. And so yeah, there will be exceptions to that. Talk about the patching that's been done on the source platform in the past. So there will definitely be exceptions. But if we can get that baseline correct and we can do a lot of our functional testing on a correct baseline, well then when we go into our trial full migrations, that's when we'll tease out some of those anomaly data issues at large scale.
Olivier Lafontaine:That makes sense. And I imagine if you use the subset then you catch some of the patterns in problems and then you can, you can apply that to the whole set. Interesting. If we pick it up a little bit and let's say if we talk about a little bit more about Clearview from a strategic business imperative, we jump right into the technical or the nitty gritty aspect of the challenge. But if we were to pick it up and talk about why does Clearview even bother with this, what are some of the imperatives, strategic needs for doing a transformation like this and taking this risk and making this investment. From your perspective, what is justifying that and what's the rationale around it?
Michael New:Well, Clearview, we want to be a dynamic, digitally enabled challenger in the Australian marketplace. I think I touched on before that we're a small company and we're going through a journey to. Well, I guess our strategic pillars are protect our business, optimize our business, then diversify and explore. And so what that means to us is we want to simplify and then grow in in its simplest form. So we were a small company doing many things. We had an advice team, bunch of advisors that talk to customers and help them with their financial needs. And we also had a wealth accumulation business. So an investment style business.
Michael New:We've divested out of those and we're now a dedicated life insurer. We're actually in the final stages of our wealth business divestment. Actually this weekend is a major milestone. And so we want to be a simple, a simplified challenger to the big players in the Australian marketplace. We're currently, I think we're number four in the marketplace and we just want to be that dynamic challenger that has nimbleness and is known to be a bit different. So that's why we, we've embarked on this. That's why we've simplified our backend by consolidating onto a single PAS. And then the next stage will be what channels do we want to move into? Do we want to move into direct channels? At the moment we distribute our life insurance through independent financial advisors.
Michael New:There's about five and a half thousand that related to or are able to advise on Clearview products. But we don't have a direct to customer brand and there are some other channels that we might want to get into as well. So that's, that's our goal. Simplify the business, become a dynamic challenger and then diversify.
Olivier Lafontaine:That's good. You touched on this a little bit. But do you see any challenges in the industry that you anticipate in the next five years which would create some of those opportunities you mentioned, direct to consumer and you're primarily going through advisors. Is that because you, you or the CEO or the business stakeholders anticipate that this is a, an important channel for the Australian market?
Michael New:Yeah, there, there are others that have the direct model here in Australia. It is a channel. So there are certainly opportunities in the direct market. It's probably not something that I've really invested a lot of time in thinking about because for me, I just want to make sure that our experience for our current market is as best that we could possibly get it. I will address the market, the diversify challenge when it comes up. Basically, you know, Clearview has a broad strategy and it's something that I guess is not as advanced as. I don't know if I've answered that really to the best of my ability there. It's just not something that we're really focusing on at this point in time, but it's something that we will focus on in the future.
Michael New:A direct to market product.
Olivier Lafontaine:What do you perceive then as the, I guess in your role as CTO and supporting the business, what's the relationship between technology and the business at Clearview? You know, is it very harmonious? Do you sometimes have differences of opinion? I'm sure that happens. But how do you see your role as CTO in supporting sort of that business strategy in the future?
Michael New:It's a very key role since coming into the CTA role. Well, firstly, to answer your question, we've got a very strong relationship between the technology team and the business team. Being a small company, we're very integrated where, you know, the most of our employees are in our Sydney office. And it's not like a large distributed office or distributed situation where technology is hidden off in a different building and you don't have those deep relationships. So the organization size allows you to get your arms around the entire organization and build personal relationships. So whilst the personal relationships are strong, the actual technology relationship I think can be improved in terms of the quality of the systems and service that we provide. We do do engagement surveys, internal surveys to understand pain points and systems and processes does rank low on our, on our survey results, largely within our operations teams. So we definitely do have an opportunity there to improve that.
Michael New:And I think that journey is on its way because they're using the old system, they've got the new system, so they're flipping between the two and the synchronicity between our experiences as we go from front end systems to the back end system certainly can be improved. And I think that's where a strong digital presence, a strong digital backbone could help in that journey. So yeah, I'm getting support from my fellow executive team members. They understand the journey and the challenge that we've got and yeah, we'll keep moving through.
Olivier Lafontaine:They understand technology, you feel?
Michael New:Yes. No, not really.
Olivier Lafontaine:That's why you have a job, I suppose?
Michael New:That's right. I think a lot of executives see what technology can be like. They see the simplicity, you know, they see the slick marketing presentations and they think, wow, this should be easy. And you know, that's the difference between marketing and delivery. It is easy when you look at the brochures and you look at the slick presentations and executives want that and my peers are no different. They want that and I want that too. I genuinely want that.
Michael New:But the reality is that it little bit harder and you've got to plan out a roadmap to get there, create a vision for your end goal and then create a set of achievable and realistic milestones that have visible, tangible deliverables on the way and not be overly optimistic about that. You've got to make sure that it is a realistic journey that you're going on. And since coming into the role, I've just kicked that off with my team saying we've really got to tighten our vision about End state and End state always moves, but end state for me is in a couple of years time, where do we want to be? What's our vision for Clearview's technology and what are the steps that we need to, what are those key milestones that we need to hit to achieve that. And let's not just say it's going to be done by the end of March, because that's unrealistic. That's guaranteed to fail. And I will say, in my experience, particularly with program delivery people, they do have a. A bias for optimism. If I'm doing nothing else, I can achieve that.
Michael New:Yeah, but you're not doing this as your only thing, so you've got to be realistic.
Olivier Lafontaine:I'm sure not many people have told you, like, oh, this is taking so little time. I'm so happy about it.
Michael New:Things that never happen. Yeah. So I think back to your original question. Clearview executives want that, but they're understanding that it is a journey and it does take a little bit of time to get there, to get those results.
Olivier Lafontaine:And I think that's the general rule in any industry around technology or large technology programs in the enterprise, because you have such instant interaction with technology as an individual in the enterprise. These are long, complicated projects, and it's difficult to understand why that is unless you have your hands in it. But that's a big part of the CTO job is you said something that I thought was interesting around the Clearview vision and how you present that or how you see this for the next two, three years. So tell me more about that. How do you see this for Clearview? What is the vision? How do you see yourselves addressing the market in that horizon?
Michael New:Well, we're in our optimize part of the strategy at the moment. Our CEO Nadine has outlined three horizons. 2024, obviously gone now, but that was around protecting what we have and building on what we have. 2025 is what we call our bridge year, which is around optimizing our business, and that's completing our exit out of our wealth business. So the divestment there, completing our platform migration, consolidation of our backend platform, and there's a few other items in there as well, but they're probably the two big ones that we've got to achieve. Then 2026 is where we really need to think about how we're going to diversify or what's next. Now, for me, I think we've got a bit of work to do on our digital side of things. The presence that we have, like the digital experience that we have, can be improved and can be a lot more functionally rich.
Michael New:I'd like to see us move towards a, a digital presence that faces our financial advisors. It gives them the information that they need through a portal, so it gives them a good view of who their customers are, what levels of insurance they have and then also allows them to do activities, transactions activities, request things, submit information through to our backend and have that seamlessly come through in a digital backbone that gets into our internal processing. And I think we need to start turning once we've done our big optimization, we need to start. Well, I'm actually starting to turn my head to it now is we need to turn our head to how are we going to stand that up in an integrated and seamless way.
Olivier Lafontaine:So I think I might have miss, I guess misunderstood your comment from earlier, but when you say digital or invest in digital, you don't mean the direct channel or direct to consumer channel. I think you're, you mean that the distribution model will remain the same. You want to have a better interaction with your customers even if they go through a broker. Am I getting this right?
Michael New:Yeah, you are, you are. That needs improvement and that should be our number one because that's our core business right now. We distribute insurance through advisors and so we need to make that experience for advisors and customers to be better. So that's where we need to move to. We do have diversify as part of our strategy as well. Now that could be direct to consumer digital and we touched on that earlier. But that to me will be secondary unless my priorities get changed for me, which could happen.
Olivier Lafontaine:So it's a changing world. So advisor experience in investing in that and maybe we'll switch gears a little bit and talk about AI because I guess we have to if we're in technology these days. There's not really any avoiding of the AI subject and I'm sure you've been thinking about it and your peers are asking about it as well. And that's one of the things I, I would suspect all CTOs in the world right now are being asked about AI and how we leverage it. But before I ask you specifically about what you guys do at Clearview, I've heard or I saw some research that talked about that AI and you know, data readiness in the Australian market is top ranked around the world in terms of maturity of the data. So I don't know if you've heard about this and if you have any explanations for that or comments on that information.
Michael New:It's a little surprising. But I think I can talk about Clearview, that we are in an advantageous position where we're a small company and we have a single data backbone in the form of a data warehouse. We have a dedicated team of. I don't know if we Call them data scientists, data people who understand that data and can generate portfolio insights. And we rely on that as lead business that provides us lead indicators of business performance and other core management functions, et cetera. Why Australian companies think that their data is quite strong. It's a challenge for me because I've worked in some large companies and one thing I will say is that companies are good at generating data, but they're not so good at managing that data and understanding that data. So maybe it comes back to my optimism bias that I was talking about previously.
Michael New:We've got a lot of data, so we must be in a good position. I'm not sure on that one, Olivier.
Olivier Lafontaine:Maybe other countries are just doing really bad. That's also a possibility, which from my own observation, I think there's some of that happening. But anyways, interesting something to maybe catch up on later. But if we go back to Clearview then, and you personally in terms of AI initiatives, so I'm sure you've been talking about it, but are there any initiatives that you guys are pursuing, any projects that you're exploring at this point?
Michael New:Not overly, there's been a couple. But as I said, our focus through 2025 has been on simplifying our business and small company. We've only got limited resources that. And there's not too many things we can run in parallel. But having said that, I think our approach to AI will be not to invest in a insights platform or an AI platform as a separate piece of technology. We want to work with our, our core technology partners to adopt their innovation in AI and apply that to our business scenario. An example, we did have a, we did a trial with one of our reinsurers to look at a lapse propensity model. So which customers have a likelihood of lapsing their insurance and what can we do about it? And I found the results quite underwhelming.
Michael New:So it was a trial. It didn't, it wasn't too hard and too taxing for us to do, but the results were underwhelming. We ran large data amounts through there and found that it was two customers. And so, okay, we rang those two customers so, you know, wasn't overly groundbreaking that we had. And I, I guess that's taught me to just sit back a bit. Everyone has an AI solution. Just ask them. They're all doing AI in a wonderful way.
Michael New:And I think we've just got to apply some critical thinking to any AI offering and how will it apply to us? And learn and think. Not all AI projects are made out to be as good as what they're saying. You know, there isn't gold in those hills. I've been through the various things that have happened in the past and I think AI is a little bit different. You know, that generative or computer logic that comes out to take activities off humans, I think that's quite groundbreaking. But we've just got to sit back and just wait for the hype to come back.
Olivier Lafontaine:Yeah, I agree. And of course, me being in the vendor space and technology partner space, we kind of have this race to come up with the widgets and the stories and all of that because the stock market is going crazy with Nvidia and now Deep Seek and other things. Right. So there is a lot of information going on, a lot of things being told. I, I think that I'm hearing this from other insurance companies as well. But I, I think that the key is going to be, okay, where, where do I get real value with this? Like, this is pretty cool that we can do this and that and predict this and that. So how much does this save me effectively? What does that improve in terms of customer experience? I think that that's the next step. Would you agree with that? Like, how do you pinpoint what are the specific benefits for any particular innovation?
Michael New:Yeah, I would agree. You know, I've seen some interesting AI in respect of customer service agents seems to be a trend at in the last few months. And that's interesting. You've got to weigh that up with your market, your customers and your advisors, et cetera, not perhaps liking some of the technology driven experiences. So you've got to, you've got to make sure you get it right. And I actually don't know what the answer is. It's great to have a digital agent that can answer your questions, as long as what the digital agent comes back with makes sense and doesn't send you on a mindless loop, which I've seen, I've seen that. And there's memes all over the Internet, you know, where people screenshot these mindless loops that digital agents have sent them down.
Michael New:You've got to strike that right balance. And I actually am just holding off and just going to apply that critical thinking and have the right AI experiences that make sense for Clearview.
Olivier Lafontaine:And you also mentioned the reinsurers. So obviously the reinsurers are the end to some degree. I feel they are the ancestor to the AI because they've been doing actuarial and I guess analysis in order to predict risk. Are they very receptive in your experience, to helping you out or coming out with, like you mentioned, one example that was a bit underwhelming, but you feel like they're very actively trying to bring something to the table in that space.
Michael New:Me personally, I haven't been approached by our reinsurers other than this first lapse propensity modeling exercise. So I personally am not seeing a lot of activity that have been proposed to me and I am new in the role, so that's, that's a bit of a gray area for me. I haven't seen it. I'm sure they are. Look, I'm sure the reinsurers, as you said, they're all about data. They're all about working with that data and making sure that the best outcomes occur. So I'm sure they're definitely doing some work in that area. But personally it hasn't, I haven't seen it come through onto my desk as yet.
Olivier Lafontaine:Okay. I guess to wrap it up, I was going to ask what advice do you have to other CTOs? But since you're new in the role, I was thinking what about advice that you've received? What's the most interesting, whether or not you've put it in practice yet, I'm sure you, you did receive advice or comments from people. What do you feel is the most interesting advice you've received so far?
Michael New:Oh, I don't know if it's interesting, but I've just had some advice that you can't fix it all or you can't fix it all straight away. So you've just got to make sure that you work out where you want to be by a certain time horizon, build out a plan to get there, and as I said before, make sure you've got realistic milestones along the way. The other piece of advice that I did receive, that as you're progressing, if it doesn't feel right, act, you've got to do something about it. Don't let it fester. Don't think that it's going to look after itself. You're best to ask the questions critically, review your progress on your roadmap and adjust as necessary. And don't just deliver for delivery sake, for a deadline sake, make sure that you've got the sense and willingness to put your hand up and say,
okay, we've tried this, it doesn't seem to be working. Let's course correct, let's stop.
Michael New:Let's stop and say no to this in this particular initiative, this particular investment, and move in a different direction. And that takes a bit of courage. So, yeah, so that's the advice that I've received.
Olivier Lafontaine:That sounds very wise, actually, given my personal experience. So I think those are good. Those are smart people that gave you that advice, as far as I can tell. Listen, thank you. I think we can wrap it up here. We went in different directions here. I thought that was interesting.
