Paul Ricard: Welcome to Reinventing Insurance.
For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome Mick Moloney, Oliver Wyman’s Global Head of Insurance, Asset Management and Actuarial, and special guest Rick Chavez, Partner and leader of our Oliver Wyman Customer First platform.
In this episode, Mick and Rick will discuss how insurers can reignite growth, by taking a customer-led approach to reinvention.You’ll be hearing perspectives on the macro-economic outlook, industry success stories, ways to deepen relationships with customers, and their views on the path to accelerating growth. Enjoy!
Mick Moloney: Hello, everyone. My name is Mick Moloney, I'm a partner with Oliver Wyman. I lead our Insurance, Asset Management and Actuarial practices globally. This is one of our Reinventing Insurance Podcast series, and I'm delighted to be joined today by my friend and colleague, Rick Chavez.
So Rick and I are going to spend a little bit of time talking about our views on igniting growth in the insurance and asset management industries, a topic that we're discussing with a lot of our clients, for reasons that we'll go into in a little bit. But Rick, do you want to introduce yourself first?
Rick Chavez: Well, I'm delighted to be here, first and foremost. It's always good to be with you, Mick. I'm a partner also in New York, and I lead what we call CustomerFirst, which, in a nutshell, is our offering for helping incumbents deal with disruption and channel it in their favor to grow.
So, hence the topic of growth. And I tend to take a cross-industry perspective, but have spent, as you know, a fair amount of time with you in the insurance sector.
Mick: You want to talk a little bit about your background before joining?
Rick: Well, sure. There was a life before, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. So I actually bring to this conversation probably about 20 years of work in the tech sector. So I spent about a decade in the startup world, sold one company, took one public. Mercifully, for my family, I got that early growth stuff out of my system. In the aughts, I shifted my attention to work with big tech companies.
And I very fortunately ran into a fellow, Geoffrey Moore, and worked closely with him. Geoffrey had written this book about crossing chasms to grow, and we both got very interested in not the start of chasm crossing, but how do you reignite growth at scale? And I say that because that's basically been my passion since then.
And I took that kind of passion and was able to activate it to help Adobe launch a new business, which has morphed into the Marketing Cloud over time, which is a pretty big business for them. And then, was really fortunate to be part of the Microsoft transformation, just as Steve Ballmer handed the keys to Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft).
So, I've seen the transformation kind of inside out and outside in, from a couple of different vantage points, and obviously. Now I'm delighted to be working with incumbents, with some of the same thinking, but applying to their unique challenges.
Mick: Excellent, I know we get into the Microsoft kind of example as we –
Rick: Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll come to it, yeah, sure.
Mick: Great. So, I think let's kind of start maybe by giving a little bit of context that you're very familiar with, Rick, on the insurance and asset management industries, and in a way, why we think this conversation is so important as we kind of look at the dynamics there.
And the first thing I'll say is, is obviously as we talk about insurance and asset management, there's a number of sub-sectors which are in quite different places, I would say. And anyone who reads my Reinventing Insurance newsletter will kind of recognize a graph that I'm about to describe, in terms of how we think about that, which is five-year total shareholder return on the vertical axis and forward price earners.
Rick: I love that graph.
Mick: I love that graph too, yeah. So, and that graph, if you look at it, as you know, Rick, has the life insurers largely in the bottom right-hand corner, which in other words is saying that returns have not been that great, and investors, at least as they look at those, are not rating them for growth going forward.
And we'll kind of double-click on that as we go through it. The property and casualty players, as you know, are kind of dispersed. You have players like Progressive who are in kind of the top right-hand corner, have had a kind of very good run and are rated for growth going forward.
You have some of the commercial property and casualty (P&C) players, that while they aren't in the same spot as the life insurers, are not kind of telling and engaging a fantastic growth story as they kind of look out at the shareholder landscape.
You then have the brokers, of course, who are in the top right-hand corner, and as we'll get into, the brokers, arguably, I would say, are the set of players there that are closest to demand and getting customers that we get into. And then, we have the asset managers where that space is being very heavily disrupted by a move from public asset management to private asset management.
You have players who maybe are a little late to that game or struggling with it in the bottom half of the graph. And then, we have a constellation of the private asset players in the top right-hand corner who are moving very rapidly, and a good number of those, Apollo, KKR, Ares, have insurance balance sheets.
So they're actually innovating to kind of bring an insurance balance sheet into the piece. So I thought as we head into the conversation today, and you and I have been in lots of these discussions, the two or three places we might spend most time kind of talking about examples are how to reignite growth in life, and how to orient around growth in property and casualty.
And then, I think a little bit of that will be kind of relevant to other parts of the space as well. But at least, as you and I have had lots of discussions and conversations with clients about, the life space I think is always a little bit of a conundrum, in that you look out, and we've been involved in these conversations, you look out, and on any measure, there seems to be a wealth of opportunity for insurers.
We've got a global aging population, we've got a mass market that, by any measure, doesn't consider itself financially well. But we've also got a set of insurers that historically have been very product channel oriented, rather than customer and demand back oriented, and I would say, in general, are struggling a little bit with how to break out of that paradigm. So maybe we should start there.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I mean I think that is the number one sort of big point, and maybe just to pull up for a second, when I said CustomerFirst and disruption, when I think about disruption, my strong view is disruption, often we think in tech in particular that it's about the tech, but I think disruption is frankly never about it.
It's eventually maybe about tech, but tech should be thought of more as a tailwind. It's always about this collision of mega trends that shapes something big, right? And it's a shift in the socioeconomic or political environment, sometimes pushed by regulatory change, right? And clearly, aging population and a whole range of things that you just hit are part of that, right? It's a shift in sort of how people behave and adopt. So, it's usually behavioral shifts.
And that I think is a big deal when it comes to the digitization of the world, because now media, our kids and well, and younger, are growing up in just this media first world, right? And so how they adopt and adapt is different than maybe how I do or maybe how you do, but that's important.
And then, the technologies, and so if you look at those intersections, I think what you'll see in many cases is that there are new demands that are basically unfulfilled, just like you were talking about. And what you have to kind of do is shift your focus out of the product category, the supply side. And instead of being inside that, say: "Wait a minute, is there an emerging opportunity in home comfort and convenience?"
And I mark that because I think some of these really interesting stories about Ring LLC and all this sort of really interesting invention, the shift in what might be happening around auto and mobility, there's a bunch of really interesting ripples and wrinkles there.
Another one that you and I have spent a fair amount of our time in getting to life insurance is really financial wellness, as opposed to banking, or insurance, or asset management. Those are the product side of it, but as a human being, I want to understand those in kind of in a holistic way, right? "Am I saving enough? Do I have a rainy day fund?"
There's all these very big issues on the minds, especially of the American worker, but not just in the US. And I think if you sort of then say, "Let's flip it to that," and stare at that, as you would say and see, what are the sort of demands there, the needs, the problems, as we like to say, the “Jobs-To-Be-Done” that aren't being done?
And this is a really important point, where there's genuine energy for progress. It can't just be an interesting opportunity, there has to be some motivation behind it, right?
And I think if you look at that, then you're going to see some opportunities, like we have been seeing around financial wellness advisory, things that could be digitally mediated, that might pull through classic life insurance product, but it's presented to the person in a way that they are pulling it into their lives, right? It's not being pushed to them. They're kind of saying, "Ah, yes, I like this now."
Mick: The energy for progress point is a great one, Rick. How do you go about finding that? Because as you know, the landscape is kind of littered with good ideas that when somebody had a good idea internally, there wasn't energy for progress around it. It didn't land, it didn't go anywhere. How do you filter through for that in the first place?
Rick: Well, you know, I was just talking to one of our colleagues in the UK who was working on a project recently in insurance. And there was, I think, about a year's worth of work that a tiger team had been doing to chase sort of, asset management, I'll just call it, in an interesting and novel way, and break into the market.
And what they found was they were focused, I call it, “majoring in minors,” they were focusing on things that to the human being weren't as important. And so the answer I think really is doing deep research in talking to people, and it's kind of both qualitative and quantitative.
You can combine the qualitative interviewing, and you listen to the stories, the day in the life of people, and you will hear passion and energy. It's easy, actually, you will spot this.
We took one of our mutual clients through this and they were just stunned at what got surfaced in the context of these interviews. And then, you can lean in with some quantitative research, surveys and other things, and say, "Wait a minute, let's validate whether we're onto a thing."And I think then from there, it isn't swinging for the fences once you've done that.
I think it's still, stage it to the next, take one more step, which is some level of day in the life scenario or conceptual prototype and pressure testing that. And we like to say, "Test your way to right." Right? So yes, do that. Absolutely, do the research, but then test your way and be humble.
It's this combination of humility but also leaning in, a little bit of confidence and humility, because you don't want to project what you think the people want. You have to let that kind of get surfaced. But that discipline, I think of that test and learn your way to right is kind of an unnatural, I think, act, often.
And so, I think the answer to your question is I think it's a critically important thing. I think, I don't want to say you know it when you hear it, but you can hear the passion and energy, and then you can do more focused research to quantify that or to qualify that further.
Mick: I think one of the harder parts about it, I think is to escape thinking about what you have and to think about what somebody needs that you might have permission to serve.
Rick: Oh, boy. Yeah, that's a great one.
Mick: And that, I think we've seen it time and again in financial wellness, and in your kind of home comfort and convenience one is very interesting.
I was having a conversation with an executive from a kind of high-net-worth organization the other day, and actually, he brought up not the example of Ring, but the example of Ting, which is obviously kind of monitoring electricity in your house and telling you have some kind of fire hazard.
But it's also networked with other Tings in your neighborhood. But it just brought in my mind that point you made in passing about home comfort and convenience has auto and home in there, but also has a whole ecosystem of things kind of wrapped around it.
Rick: Amazing, right? Like security, like the kind of services for the elderly. I think the one you just talked about with energy consumption and all of that and usage. Yeah, no, these, it's fascinating.
Once you put yourself in the person's mindset and you say, "Well, what are the ecology, not of stuff I could supply, but of demands that people have? "And how might I use that as a way to increase my scope and relevance to that cohort or that customer?"
Mick: Yeah, and the other one, I'm not sure what the right umbrella... I mean, we use financial wellness, I think, as a proxy for kind of a whole set of needs. And as you know, that varies a lot depending on where you index it, in terms of age and wealth for example, right?
Rick: Right, right.
Mick: In that financial wellness for a 23-year-old is very different for financial wellness for somebody who started a family, is very different for financial wellness with somebody.
But I think there again, it seems to me that insurers are very well placed, particularly at the older end of things. The population, as you know, kind of wraps up a whole... Long- term care has a lot of baggage in the space, but kind of aging in place.
Rick: Right, exactly, exactly.
Mick: It's kind of at one end of it. The other end of it is, as we've discovered, trying to break into that energy for progress, talking to somebody about making a long- term financial plan, for example, when they're 25 and just concerned about the next six months is the wrong place to go.
Rick: Right, right. Well, and now you've hit on something. Well, there's a bunch of stuff in there that was really rich. But one of the things I wanted to pull out of that is, especially if you're in that earlier stage and you don't have good financial habits, we've been finding some fascinating things.
First of all, you don't really want to talk about that too much, because you could trigger some shame. So I don't want to say it too much, so, but I want to find out what others are like me, others like me might be doing. So, there's some learning in silence, in quiet, right? And then, "What I really want is some nudges because if you push me to a plan."
"I'm not going to go there, and that might be good for you, but right now, I'm just trying to figure out how ashamed should I be?" And then, it gets even more complicated if you have a spouse or a significant other, and you have very different views about finances, which people don't think about, but it's a huge issue in the path toward financial wellness, because those differing points of view also are difficult to talk about. I don't want to argue with my spouse or significant other, so maybe we just won't talk about it.
Mick: I think we're both smiling, because we're remembering jobs to be done interviews, where that came up very specifically, right?
Rick: Yeah, right. It did, it did.
Mick: Do you want to just describe? You've mentioned this test your way to right piece in passing there. Do you want to double- click on the jobs approach and also on what that test your way to right looks like?
Rick: Yeah, I think it's, to me, kind of heavily influenced by... maybe I'll call it small tech, not big tech, but the venture capital world, where seed money is to like, "Do you have a concept? Have you tested it? Do you have some validation of it?"
And I think that's where this Jobs-To-Be-Done work is very powerful, because it isn't about us doing desk research, right? It's a very active unpacking. And like in a venture world, if you go to venture capital pitch, you say, "Well, I've been thinking about this thing, and I think it's big." Nobody cares.
It has to be, "I've got this validation, I've talked to these three big lighthouse potential clients, here's what they're saying. I've actually done some testing with them, I put some sketches in front of them." And I think there's this process that goes from an idea to some validation of that.
Now, in the digital first world, there's all kinds of tools and capabilities of doing conceptual prototypes. We've had great success, I think, in doing vision videos, that's what I call them, which can sort of do a day in the life scenario, what it is today, what it could be tomorrow, making it vivid for even board members and senior most executives, because getting conviction is super important in some of these change programs for incumbents.
And so, if you don't do that and check those boxes, you're not going to move forward. And then, I think from that conceptual thing, the next stage would be more what we in the tech world would call functional, the conceptual or functional shift, because we're going from conviction to confidence building.
And now, we got to shake out some things like legacy system connections and connections to partners that are all API-able these days, right? And it's one thing to say, "Oh, we've got APIs and it's quite another to run live tests.”
And so, when we've done this work, we always want to do those tests against what we think could be nice ways of assembling a solution quickly, but also, the whole thing could fall apart, right? So you have to do this more, I would say fuller, kind of pilot-ready offering, right? And so that's testing every two weeks, getting research, putting things in front of people, testing the back end, testing the front end, testing.
This is the most important part, I think, the people and the operational processes that need to be in place they need to sit underneath it. You've seen this graphic that we are using of the iceberg, where there's nice little piece at the top that you can see, and then there's all that stuff under the water that has to be connected before you move forward into piloting and scaling a thing, right?
Mick: Yeah, I like our four simultaneous equations.
Rick: Exactly right, exactly right, yeah.
Mick: You know, it might be a good time... I'm conscious that when we talk about this, a lot of the time we kind of focus on the end consumer as an individual, but just as important as the end consumer as a corporate.
Rick: Oh, my goodness, 100%. In fact, I feel sometimes we not intentionally, but we do over-index on thinking a customer's consumer. I think the better way to think about it is look at the end of the demand chain and who is there?
It's a worker in a workflow, is as powerful, because what you're going to find when you do this research in a more business-to-business (B2B) context, there are all kinds of pain, there's all kinds of friction, there's all kinds of complexity. There's much more pressure put on employees.
There's this theory of automation with AI, which I'm a huge believer. I've seen 30 years of boom and bust in tech. But there's still a lot of expectation about productivity gains. So you don't have to work too terribly hard to see the jobs-to-be-done Yeah, in a corporate context, exactly.
Mick: I mean, one of the nice things that we can talk openly about is the Sentrisk product development process for MMC.
Rick: Yes.
Mick: Do you want to kind of describe that?
Rick: Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the ones I'm just absolutely fascinated by. So it was first I think anchored in some insight we had about disruption in a place that you might not think about it initially, but climate science, and sort of saying, "Wait a minute, there's now, in this world of particularly all this technology about geospatial technology and geospatial data, there's some phenomenal ability to train that really lovely, amazing James Webb kind of technology on the surface of the planet.” And then, what do you see? Well, you start to see the world very, very differently.
Mick: So, it's use of satellite imagery.
Rick: Satellite imagery. Yeah, exactly. And so you can see climate change actually unfolding, or whether you believe that or not, you can certainly see patterns in the world. And you can also see things that have to do with supply chain risks, right?
And what was really brilliant about this is that, well, if you're trying to insure or understand the sort of business resilience risk associated with an auto manufacturer, well, you got to understand all the supply chain things that are often opaque. And what we found in the building of this Sentrisk offering is making that visible to decision makers, showing it in a visual way that they can engage with it. And then, underneath it, bringing data science.
And this is what was really kind of interesting to us. A lot of the data sets do exist in the world, but they're disconnected. And since people aren't starting with the problem in the business context.
Mick: Supply chain resiliency.
Rick: And supply chain resilience in this case, they're not starting with looking at that problem. They're not seeing the relevance of the right data, to answering the risk for one auto manufacturer versus another. One might be in Europe and one might be more concentrated in South America or whatever. And so we found that the assembly of these data sets, but focused on, laser targeted at that business supply chain supply chain resilience challenge, created this amazing offering.
Mick: For a corporate customer, Marsh in this case.
Rick: Exactly, in this case for Marsh. Yes, exactly. And so in this case, it was the building of this offering, which sometimes we refer to as venture building or business building. For our parent, right? For MMC and for Marsh.
It's augmented and amplified the capabilities of Marsh. It's not a replacement or an automation of it. It's actually empowering an ability to be much more leaning forward and informed by data and insight for the Marsh teams.
Mick: Yeah, and again, where there was an energy for progress on the part of the corporate client, particularly in the current environment, where there's lots of de-globalization, and I need to think very carefully about my supply, so in lots of cases, I am fragmenting supply chains that were global supply chains into regional supply chains.
Rick: That's right. And by the way, some of this was being done, but in Excel spreadsheets. But not thought of in this more global way and not thought of in a regional way, with regional distinctions, and certainly not visualized with data and analytics.
And what's interesting about that is that kind of offer, it does exist, as you and I have found in other kinds, like Verisk Analytics, a bunch of companies that have been doing similar things over a period of time. And this may be taking us a little bit away from where you want to go, but I think it's an important point. It has actually differentiated some of these other companies, because what they are thought of is a software and technology company, with that kind of multiple versus services model.
So the spotting of this new thing, looking at the Jobs-To-Be-Done, attacking those Jobs-To-Be-Done, doing the work differently and in a way that's differentiated, it has the potential effect, I'm not going to say a sure effect, but the potential advantage of bringing in some of that software, and tech, and data valuation, and interest, and excitement that investors have.
Mick: Yeah. Well, look, I know we're going to segue in a minute to the kind of more macro view of this thing, but I mean, maybe to put a bow on this piece of it just before we do it, I think what we're saying is that, informed by the collision of mega trends, there is a robust and tested structure for finding places where there is that energy for progress.
There's a methodology that's there in terms of testing your way to write, engaging heavily with consumers, stage gating the investment in what you need to do, applying a venture capital (VC) approach to how to do it. And I guess the provocation I maybe throw out there for the two of us to bounce around on for a minute, but before we move on to how to do this at scale, is that why do you think it is that we don't see more of it happening day to day in a sector that is challenged for growth?
Rick: Well, you know, it is a provocation. I mean, I think some of this is the proclivity that all of us have, that we were all taught to love the assets and products that we have, and to really think about product out adjacencies, and bundling.
We say customer first as opposed to customer-centric, because I think it's a distinction with a real difference. It's starting around that ecology, to see that it's a financial wellness proposition, or in the case of Marsh, it's a supply chain resilience problem. And then, being a little bit humble about that and testing your way into it, right I think that's also another muscle that often doesn't exist or has gone a little bit soft over time.
I mean, I found this in the tech sector, you could sort of say, "Well, wait a minute, Cisco, SAP, HP, these are brilliant, innovation-driven companies," and they are. But at scale, you start to kind of go toward the larger things and build yourself around that. You're not doing as much of the test-and-learn, you're not doing so much of that early-stage investment.
And what you find, it's kind of curious, is that the venture capital model that birthed these kinds of companies, and I'm talking about tech right now, seemed to kind of exit stage left. And I found this to be true in tech. You have to kind of bring that back and inoculate companies with it.
If that's true in tech, I think that's also going to be true with insurers and others, and banks and others, because I think it's the building of that muscle to organically move in a new direction. And I think the organic piece is very important, versus mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is great, but there's also the risk of organ rejection. So you might do it and it might work, but it's not going to be a habit that can be replicated again and again.
And I think that's what we need to be able to do. If we're going to grow our way to the future, there's a big part of this that's grit and resilience and sticking with it, and repeating that is part of it, as opposed to, "I did one thing and I'm done." I think it's, "I'm now able to do this repeatedly, as a new muscle."
Mick: Yeah. Let me test something with you, and you and I have had this conversation a couple of times as well, is that I also have a view that you can't delegate it down the organization, that you've got to have passion for changing the investor story, changing the trajectory, finding those spaces, and it's got to be there right at the top, right? Because what I see happening repeatedly is, "Oh, yeah, we have an effort going on around that. It's been dealt with over here, right?”
Rick: Right.
Mick: And to the point you made, if I am or have been a successful organization, I have the machine set up in a certain way, right?
Rick: Right.
Mick: And my observation on a lot of this stuff is that it involves reshaping the machine, because you meet organizational resistance all over the place to new ways, because invariably, it's not going to fit in one of the columns that you currently have.
Rick: Right.
Mick: And as soon as you delegate it down, it just meets so much friction that it can't get through, that the odds of it succeeding diminish very quickly.
Rick: That's right. Well, and also, customers have this habit, that tricky thing of not necessarily caring about the silos, particularly if you talk about something like financial wellness across who owns it in an enterprise? And so that's another challenge.
But I think, to your point, I completely agree with you, I think though this is a problem that we've obviously been... It's been with us for decades. I think what's really important is to understand that if it took decades to build these great companies, it's probably going to take a while to build the growth muscle.
And it probably needs to be concentrated in a place and be thought of as distinct from the mothership or as distinct from the performance, business- as-usual kind of. And to not say that "Oh, it's not BAU," it's wrong. But to say, "No, actually, we do need to put metrics on the back of what we're going to incubate. We need to think about the talent model inside of that and the leaders of that.
And they need to be doing their jobs, just like the people who are running our big businesses are doing their jobs. And those may not be the same people, and that might not be the same process, and that's okay. And I think that's one of the harder challenges is to say, "I'm going to look at my business as a portfolio of big performance things that we're doing, stuff that I might be ratcheting back from because it's not going to take me to the future, but I need to get it efficient to fund the future.”
And then, very thoughtfully and with discipline, funding those bets or I should say pursuing them, with a real discipline. And Mick, you know, I've seen this, we've been in situations where we've also gone to companies, "We've got a large amount of money that has been earmarked for innovation.”
And what you find is that, in many cases, you need to start by starting small and focused, with the right inter-discipline teaming. That right there takes some confidence building and some acculturation. And then, once you do a couple, then you can do four and then you can do 10.
But it's scaling that way. And so I think creating the confidence and conviction in a place that you can get to this future and then systematically scaling it also I think is somewhat challenging, right?
Mick: To give that thing space and support.
Rick: To give it space and support. And I think this is another thing you and I have been around, which is not hiving it off to, and I'm making this up, a West Coast lab. I mean, I love the West Coast, lived there for many years, but keeping it close to the mothership.
So it's somewhat decoupled, but yet it's tightly connected in terms of transparency and governance. It's accountable for pursuing what we like to see. The third horizon, it's accountable for de-risking the future. It's accountable for de- risking disruption for the enterprise, right?
Mick: Well, look, I might zoom out again, Rick, in terms of closing us out on this kind of first discussion that we're having on the approach in the space.
But I mean, what we started with, as you remember, was we're serving an industry particularly in insurance and asset management, where the good news is there are lots and lots of examples of spaces that the industry could do more in, in terms of consumers, whether it's an individual consumer or corporate consumer, whether it's on the financial wellness space in life or the kind of emerging risk space in P&C, massive opportunities in terms of application of data and analytics. And yet, there seems to be somewhat of a struggle for how to unlock that.
And what we described, I think, is an approach potentially to craft an investor narrative, but one that is stretching you in a way where you're comfortable you can deliver a methodology for systematically uncovering where the energy for progress was, a methodology then if you apply it for making sure that management attention units are being spent in the right way internally, and a way of systematically then managing a set of innovation around capabilities and kind of new areas that, done right, can align the organization and drive progress, so that you're not left having committed one thing to the external market and then find yourself unable to unable to deliver.
So, look, I mean, maybe I'll close by saying this is one of the reasons I think we're working so closely as we look at the space, and I think there's lots of exciting stuff to do. And I mean, the final comment I'll make, and maybe you have a comment, is that the other thing I think is important is that, and we see executives doing this, the industry, in a way, needs to reach outside the industry for best practices, because the question we get very often is, "Which of my peers is doing this very well?" And the reality is it's a little bit hard to find, right?
Where it's much easier to look at the Microsoft case or others and say, "Look, you need to look over there rather than within the confines"
Rick: Well, and I think that customers have been taught by some of those companies, whether it's Microsoft or Apple, to expect certain kinds of convenience, and friction-free engagement, and fun. And so you don't really get to not do that anymore. You kind of have to meet that where it is. There are two things that I will add to what you said, Mick, two messages I like to give on this.
One, if you do flip the script a bit and you think about this as a demand-side problem, I'll go to mobility, because it's a little bit outside of it, and you think there's a mobility marketplace that is taking shape very, very rapidly, and that is driverless cars, and it's electric vehicles, and scooters, and bikes, and then it's also the charging stations for all of that.
And if you looked at mobility broadly, you would see a huge growth opportunity, and witness Tesla. Well, I mean, I know they're not growing as fast... But still, that way of framing it makes a massive market opportunity much more apparent. If you stick in the auto category, though, that might not look so good. You might be under assault, so I think this point you made about flipping the…
Mick: The definition of the space.
Rick: Definition of the space really matters. And if you frame it that way, it could be out-sized growth potential for “Why is it just Tesla?” I don't think it should be just those. And then, I think the other piece that is important to what you say that I like to underscore is what we've talked about is a management discipline, like other management disciplines that have come before.
It can be learned, it can be practiced, it is knowable, right? And so I think it's really important, because the point you made of, "Well, we're also people doing this, and a lot's tech, it's not us," the point is it's a new way of managing in a very complex world. And it can be learned, it can be adopted.
Mick: It can be the path forward.
Rick: It can be the path forward, yeah.
Mick: Yeah, well, Rick, a pleasure as always. Thank you, thank you very much.
Rick: Yeah, a lot of fun.
Mick: Look forward to continuing the conversation.
Rick: Me too, Mick. Thank you.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
