Gaining insights from this pandemic to prepare for the future of work

Gaining insights from this pandemic to prepare for the future of work with Naveen Bhateja, CHRO of Medidata Solutions

Maintaining a connected and engaged culture in this time of COVID-19 pandemic

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with my new friend, Naveen Bhateja. Naveen is the Senior HR strategist, business advisor, hands-on leader with expertise across all aspects of HR for global diverse multinationals, as well as high growth companies. Naveen is the Chief People Officer at Medidata Solutions, a technology and software company that is leading the digital transformation of life sciences.

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Diverse Global Experience

Naveen, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy. I’m glad to be here.

It’s great to have you. You and I have already been chatting quite a bit. One interesting thing that I’ve already learned about you is that you've lived in eight different cities or countries including India, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, a couple of others and London as well. All the coolest cities in the world. What's been your favorite?

I would say we’re home in New York for now, but I would also add on that each of these cities taught me something different, not just culturally. I still have relationships in many of these cities where I either grew up or spend time during my life journey. I still cherish those relationships. They're all special to me but if I have to pick one, it would be New York only because I live here, it's been home forever and I love the city and the energy that exuberate.

It is a wonderful city. When you do move around that, you and I were talking about this that there are pros and cons of staying in one place and developing deeper relationships moving around and meeting a lot more people. I tend to be more drawn towards that type of lifestyle. I've said one of my goals is to have friends in every city around the world. It seems like you have started to do that by dropping into all these different cities and building relationships everywhere.

I've definitely been fortunate that I have friends in all these cities. In fact, my Master’s in Business Administration was at UK University where we had people from about 40 different countries around the world. In addition to this, I also have friends in some lesser-known places where you usually would not have a lot of people like Iceland or any of the smaller countries like Brunei.

[bctt tweet="A tribe and culture are important for companies and for employees." via="no"]

Where is this diverse global experience been helpful or beneficial to you in your career so far? Can give an example of where it's helped you a lot?

I've done HR for many years, a variety of different roles within HR, business partnership, training and development, compensation, talent acquisition and organizational development. I would say in each of these roles, in any of the companies that I’ve previously worked with whether it be in GE, JP Morgan Chase, Amazon or Juniper Networks, these are all global multinational companies with a presence in multiple countries around the world, 40, 50 countries or even more. The fact that I've had this experience and exposure, more from a diversity perspective and cultural perspective internationally has always served me well. Most of my roles have been global.

It brings another set of lens that you leverage when you're sitting and having discussions with your business leaders and HR team. When you're launching programs or projects internationally, you bring in that additional finesse to the entire implementation, which you could have missed if you didn't have any of these experiences. One that comes to my mind, I remember we were launching a 360 globally from the US and the executive that I was working very closely with, found it hard to understand the recommendation that I had for him. It was to do a special call with the Japan team before we launched the 360 to set the context, give them a little bit more of the lay of the land, why we were doing what we were doing, and not send them an email asking them for feedback on their superiors.

Culturally, if you look at Japan for instance, they’re not being a hierarchical society. There is a respect for chair and you never stand out. It’s opposite to American values. You can have a backbone, you can disagree, and yet commit to something. Bringing that additional lens helped them get the intended outcomes that he was hoping for which could have derailed the entire 360 that he was hoping to do on leadership for the development if we had not had that goal. That's an example that comes to my mind when I think about how some of these experiences as I was growing up that helped me shape who I am and how I’ve leveraged these in my roles.

You touched on a couple of interesting things there. One, I always like to say the hallmark of a great leader is starting with curiosity, asking questions to find out how things are going to work before pushing a new program on a different country or office or whatever it may be. I'm fascinated by cultural differences especially Japanese culture. As you talked about a hierarchical age is also a much bigger deal there as it is in the US. You reminded me, many years ago I was in Tokyo facilitating a leadership program for a software client. The client came to me halfway through the program and said, “Andy, you are knowledgeable. You know so much but you are young.” I was 30 or 32 years old at that time or something like, which was young to be put in front of the room over there and no gray hair. A different culture than what we have in the US.

I've heard that as well over the years, particularly during the early part of my career where they would say, “You're so young and you know that.” They would be surprised when you would even address someone by their name and then add some at the end of it, which is the sign of respect. They will be surprised that I knew about that or how did I demonstrate respect for them and their culture. One of the ones that stand out to me in a big way is, as part of the American culture, a lot of people are self-motivated. That's part of the DNA. When I look at Japanese culture in general, and we're generalizing a little bit, I'm not saying everybody's like that, it is a little bit of a group mentality. You look to your superior for approval before making big decisions but there are similarities as well. The way I always say, cultures have similarities and differences both the cultures work extremely long hours and take a little vacation during the year, that's a similarity but when the Japanese culture and the US culture, for example.

Company Culture During COVID-19

The similarities and many differences. I’m fascinated by culture. We're talking about country cultures but company culture is a hot topic on this show as well. I'm curious to know what your perspective is. You've been leading people operations at Medidata for a couple of years, and the company has been growing 20% year over year. You've got public, been acquired, these are all big changes for a company and its people. How do you manage culture through so many big changes like that? What are some key things that you do to make sure that people stay connected and engaged?

Future Of Work: Having a diverse cultural perspective brings additional finesse to your project implementations that you could have missed otherwise.

I would say, for audiences who don't know much about Medidata as you introduced us, we are leading the digital transformation for life sciences if I can start with that. Truly, in simple words, if I have to describe it, we provide fast cloud-based technology solutions for pharmaceutical companies, and clinical research organizations that are working on drug discovery and development. We provide them the technology for clinical trials and a lot more. In fact, we’ve built-up an entire practice or platform for clinical development, commercial, and real-world data as well on how can this be leveraged. We can bring drugs faster to market and support the life of millions of patients who are waiting for these treatments to come out to the market faster.

Getting to the question that you were asking. Medidata has seen much success over the past years. One of the things that they have always preserved, yet evolved at the same time, has been its culture. The mission of Medidata and culture has been the secret sauce I can call it. We starting from employee recognition if I talk about that which is a very vital part of our culture. Showing appreciation. We believe increases engagement and motivation. There are multiple programs. Medidata has the managers and employees including peer-to-peer recognition, so that's crucial. The second thing I would call out is the real-time performance providing meaningful, continuous feedback which is focused on how we are doing of recognizing accomplishments, strengths, and development opportunities as well as serve in nurturing and maintaining that culture of Medidata well.

The third I would call out is diversity and belonging. It's an important piece of the equation and Medidata has been committed to it. I've worked with organizations. I’ve been exposed to other organizations over the years, and sometimes it can be purely a strategy. I've realized that Medidata is action-oriented as well. They have a business resource group of employees whether it's Women of Color or Medidata Out where we are celebrating Pride or Veterans at Medidata. We also have a business resource group called Remotians, given roughly 20% of our people work remotely. There is the business resource group where we celebrate differences not focusing on the unconscious bias training and policies. There is an executive oversight and they data-driven assessments.

For example, we have our quarterly diversity and belonging executive summary dashboards where we track diversity promotion, the trends within hiding we are making in each function. Do we have a diverse slate of candidates? We constantly engage with more thought leaders externally like McKinsey and Edelman to make sure that we are on track. The talent management itself is infused with diversity and commitment to impacting our communities, whether it's supporting organizations like All Star Code or Black Girls Code, New York Urban League or New York Academy of Science, which are on top of my mind. There has been a lot of focus on building and nurturing that culture. There is a comprehensive wellness program driven by the CSR team where we focused on health week and charitable rounds. I would say these are probably the specific areas that we've been able to focus on in creating, nurturing, and maintaining that culture of Medidata.

Many great components and a lot of a great foundation, a lot of stuff that's already been put in place. Has there been any major shifts that you've had to maintain that culture under COVID with everybody going remote?

It almost seems like this is a long time back. We had to make adjustments, and three things that stand out to me on how we have responded to this challenge, empathy, empowerment, and communication. Nearly 20%-plus of meditations work remotely exclusively. This was a pre-COVID. Almost all staff is working remotely when COVID hits. I'm also responsible for our workplace solutions and global security. One of the things that we had done before the pandemic hit to that extent was we had reviewed our business continuity plan. We had started involving the cross-functional team of internal communication lead, legal, information security, IT department, and others to ensure that we are keeping our staff informed as the events and news was unfolding externally. That was a little bit of an approach and a shift.

We wanted to make sure that from an infrastructure standpoint, we were in good shape when the pandemic was reaching its worst. We also wanted to focus on recognizing that it is a huge emotional impact on people, not just on productivity but emotionally because these were individuals, including myself, who were worried about themselves and their families. They were worried about a lot of emotional stress that they were going through in the background and very uncertain environments. One of the things we landed up doing was created the Remotians page, which I was sharing with you the business resource group. They made themselves available even after office hours to provide their expertise and support to other colleagues who were navigating working from home for the first. It seems a small step but a step which went a long way in helping each other and bringing that spirit of camaraderie.

[bctt tweet="It is a must to engage employees and stakeholders in co-creating the change plan with you right from the start." via="no"]

We launched a manager survey into COVID when they had all gone remote to get a pulse on how teams are managing the situation. Particularly did managers have the tools and resources to be able to manage and support their teams to this situation so that we also give us a little bit of an insight. One of the things we found out, our younger managers were struggling and no surprises there. At least, we could get to them soon enough in-time with help rather than them and the team members continuing to struggle. We continue to monitor and communicate with our staff internally as things were unfolding. The other couple of areas, I will call out from the adjustments that we made. Engagement activities are a critical part of our cultures.

Cinco de Mayo or virtual happy hours, we didn't stop. We transformed and shifted it more virtually. We invited the Mariachi band that was playing when everybody was having cocktails at home on video. We broadened our Gym Reimbursement Policy to include wellness app reimbursement as part of the policy. We introduced the cost of a home equipment reimbursement for that. We also had to restructure some of our processes like virtual interviewing, how do we go about onboarding the staff, or how do we go about creating the new hire orientation. Lastly, as I was sharing with you, corporate social response instability is such an important piece of our culture.

We created a new volunteer policy to allow employees who are certified and registered while interiors in the healthcare system to take two weeks of paid time off to provide emergency assistance to the community that they live in. The donation that we made, we had secured some mask as a precautionary measure. Once we went on virtually, we made sure that we donate that to the local hospitals like Lincoln Hospital in Bronx and a couple of hospitals in San Francisco and London where we wanted to provide them with the supplies that we had and we weren't using. These are some of the things I would say we had to adjust in response to COVID.

Empathy, Empowerment, And Communication

You've put many great things in place ahead of time and then made many adjustments to keep people engaged and keep the culture going. I love the use of surveys. You also mentioned the importance of empathy, empowerment, and communication. I've studied this idea of leading through crisis quite a bit and run some programs on it. In fact, I'm running a couple and empathy, empowerment, communication, there are critical factors in that. We've got to have empathy for what people are going through, empower them to make some changes, and we cannot communicate enough. We can't over-communicate because without communication, then people start to make assumptions or they worry or they don't know what's going on.

It's an important element, empathy, particularly, you talk about that. There's a lot of change that's going on externally. Change is happening anywhere pre-COVID. The amount of stress because of the changes that are happening externally, whether it's the civil unrest or the pandemic and the pace of change from a business itself is a lot. A lot of people are going through the grieving cycle. I call it a hidden grieving cycle. Sometimes you don't recognize it yourself or you don't know what people might be going through in their personal life. It becomes crucial for you to practice that empathy to check-in with people and ask how are they doing more of a surface question.

Trust me, the number of conversations I’ve had with my own team where I’ve done check-ins with almost everybody. In fact, we brought the entire team together once a week, about 100 people globally where we all come together, we have fun for that time, 30 minutes or an hour where we talk about our bucket list. We talk about how we are feeling so that they also understand that it's okay to feel that way and we don't have all the answers or what we are struggling with most. Purely an open discussion and a platform have served me well. The amount of feedback I’ve gotten from the team that they feel a lot more connected with each other, even as compared to pre-COVID versus in this pandemic is phenomenal. All we have done is leverage those empathy, empowerment, and communication philosophies, created the cohesiveness within HR, and also within the business teams as well.

The Future Of Work

Those things are also important. You mentioned that things are changing a lot around the pandemic, the civil unrest, but even before and without those things, society and the business world is changing. The rate of change is faster than it has ever been before. I know that you have been studying this idea of preparing for the future of work, creating a progressive organization to embrace the future of work as things are changing. Because there is no playbook for a pandemic or anything else that we may be going into but if you follow some of the experts like Josh Bersin, who has been on this show and talked about learning in the flow of work and things that are going on. You can see things are changing and different things are coming. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that you've studied that you've implemented in your organization to prepare for this idea of the future of work.

Future Of Work: Accelerated digital transformation is what will gain momentum and will become a key part of the HR agenda worldwide.

The future of work particularly is an important topic and pandemic as I was sharing with you has multiple HR implications is how I see it. When I think about some of the trends that will emerge over the next 12 to 18 months or have already started emerging some of them as a result of this pandemic, it's put on a little bit of an accelerated mode. The percentage of remote staff, let's start with that and the gig workers, as they call them, will increase whether companies go completely 100%, 50%, or 40%. The percentages might differ but the hybrid organizational model is here to stay. I was reading this research by Gartner that said 48% of employees will work remotely after the pandemic, compared to 25% or 30% pre-pandemic.

It would go a lot more and companies have also started to realize a lot of them that nothing has fallen through the track. The fact that they couldn't take the plunge before moving 100% virtual or remote was always that fear of loss of productivity or impact to the customers or something negative. A lot of those companies are realizing that it's not happened. The second thing which I would call out is the entire employee life cycle. Whether you talk about employee experience, productivity standard, you look at the well-being of an employee particularly mental well-being will also have to be reviewed as a potential implication of the HR strategies that you creating to support both virtual and onsite employees. You'll have to make sure you're addressing both and not just one.

The other area which will emerge significantly and we are also trying to make sure that we are working toward is the digital tools for learning, communication, and collaboration. Accelerated digital transformation is what will gain momentum and will become a key part of the HR agenda worldwide. Whether your digital and virtual learning programs which were any day on the rise pre-COVID and now I'm seeing that there's an increased sense of adoption. I was reading an article on LinkedIn where it said LinkedIn Learning has increased 3x during the COVID time. That tells you that there is an increased sense of that adoption that's coming up. The other thing I should call out as part of the trends which I foresee is, how do you go about creating a culture of inclusiveness that will also become important?

How do you engage these remote employees in a team culture? A tribe is important, culture is important for companies, and for employees. How do you go about doing that? I'm also responsible for our real estate as a lead to global security. From that lens, the real estate strategy and the costs that are associated with real estate will also go a significant shift with less demand for the office space. Given a larger percentage of the workforce might work remotely potentially. What does that mean for real estate strategies for companies? Overall, I would say talent branding, talent selection, how do you go about engaging managers and developing them from a leadership perspective on how to be more resilient?

How do you focus on the emotional well-being of an employee and create that shift in the organizational culture that some of the teams that I see will have to work on? I always love talking about business stuff from a business standpoint. The future of work or change is a potential one. Companies will have to focus on resetting, rebuilding the business models in a post-pandemic world, and incorporate some of the lessons that they've learned during this time. It has to do with the supply chain, whether it's to do with any potential destruction that they faced, and how they go about future-proofing their operating models will be a key area as well.

One thing I’ve studied around the future of work is this idea of moving more towards a gig economy where people are doing more project-based work versus sitting in one role for their entire career. Are you seeing that happening as well?

Employers will definitely expand the gig project-based workforce because there is that flexibility that everybody is requiring, not just flexibility, a lot of them land up wanting different things which an employer might not be able to provide whether it's autonomy, being able to do different roles or get different experiences and exposure. There's the side of it from a company's perspective, it can result in cost-saving, they're not full-time headcount and it's an on-demand workforce that you're engaging. You're addressing whether absence internally, someone's ill and you're filling in for that, or somebody has made a lifestyle change and you're doing that. From an employee perspective, it goes well.

[bctt tweet="Leaders put the needs of their people and talents before their own." via="no"]

People want more autonomy, more flexibility, independence, freedom, particularly the tech industry. I can generalize it for every industry, particularly for tech. The workforce in tech tends to be the younger generation, Millennials and Gen Z. This is important to them. A lot of them are focused on doing the best work but it doesn't have to be five years. It could be five months and that's okay because that's the experience because a lot of them don't know what they're looking for. There are almost in search of a quest of what that might be that might stick well with them and they're ready to try. They're open to trying different things until they figure out what sticks better.

One of the things you mentioned in there in our discussion about the future of work was accelerating digital transformation. Your company is involved in digital transformation. You're involved and intimately familiar with the concept. It's something we hear about all the time. Almost every company seems to be in some various form of digital transformation. I hear all these companies saying, “We're not in this business anymore. We're not a car company, we're a technology company,” that happens to make cars. Everybody's moving and trying to embrace technology more. They talk a lot about technology but we can't forget that people still make technology in business work. How do we manage a digital transformation successfully from the people’s side of things? It's a huge undertaking but what are a couple of keys to that that you see companies doing well?

You bring in such an important point. I was giving an interview and I was talking about almost what you're talking about. I call it, it's all about people. People talk about digital transformation. They can use whatever words they want. At the end of the day, it's all about people. Anytime you're on a journey from a digital transformation’s perspective even if I talk about HR and how important this is going to become even more important in the near future, it is a massive cultural shift for the organization as a whole when you're on that journey. It will also affect different employees differently. For instance, individual contributors versus people managers. One of the things I’ve learned over the years, if you engage employees in co-creating the change plan with you and also engage the stakeholders right from the start, it's not negotiable again, it's a must.

That becomes the secret sauce for making sure that your digital transformation or any of those changes that you're bringing about are giving you the desired results at the end of the day. The only other thing which I would call out is communication. I cannot emphasize communication. Effective communication plans particularly when you're on a digital transformation that is unique, customized, and well-drafted is also crucial in driving that digital transformation. Those are the two things I would call out as key takeaways. Engage employees in co-creating, let them be part of the journey with you, and then communicate the hell out of communication.

You got to be involved and you got to communicate as what we said with COVID and leading through crisis. If you're not communicating, people are making up their own stories so you've got to communicate as much as possible. The other thing you mentioned in there under the topic of the future of work was leveraging digital tools for learning communication and collaboration. This is important. A lot of companies have embraced this in various forums and some companies have been doing it or talking about it for years. Now it's been accelerated where everybody is saying, “We got to dive into digital and virtual learning.” What have been some of the keys that you've seen to making digital learning successful? You mentioned LinkedIn Learning has doubled or tripled their users so a lot of companies are diving into this. What have you done at Medidata or what have you seen be successful in the world of digital learning?

Digital learning as I was sharing with you, any organization that I think about whether they're looking to re-skill at a business unit level, or they're doing an aspirational transformation at the enterprise level. Learning is such an important piece of that equation. They have to leverage the variety of learning channels, methods, and learning management systems to make that happen. If that's what the reality is, the landscape is changing and adapting fairly quickly to virtual learning. Virtual learning and digital learning, I'm seeing an increased sense of adoption for sure. Another report I was reading with Gartner and which fascinates me is how people are experimenting with immersive technologies. There's virtual reality and augmented reality. There are a lot of behavior apps that are coming up where you can look at different business scenarios and skills starting from running a meeting, managing a project, to coaching and how these apps allow you the real-time assessment of these on the job activities and real-time feedback on how would you performing a specific situation is also going to gain a lot of traction.

The other thing which I would call out from a learning perspective is more and more learning experience platforms are becoming more personalized is how I see it. It is what can an employed get out of it versus one size that fits all. That's a trend that I'm seeing emerging as well. Many practitioners are also leveraging Artificial Intelligence for helping learners find information on relevant topics using machine learning, deep learning, and all that. Some are even talking about advanced AI trainers delivering training to users. There is definitely excitement from all these trends that are emerging whether it's eLearning, virtual, augmented reality, or AI, as I talked about. Medidata, particularly, we are well-positioned to follow that acceleration from a digital learning environment.

Future Of Work: There is great potential for the future of work. Companies will have to focus on resetting, rebuilding the business models in a post-pandemic world, and incorporating some of the lessons that they've learned during this time.

Each meditation has access to LinkedIn Learning which is one of our key learning vendors as I was sharing with you. The last step is looking at our status report. We had a 100% activation rate, which means all employees have logged into the LinkedIn Learning, which has about 20,000 videos. They've logged in, they care about their own development and they are leveraging the tool that's available for them. We do a lot of on-demand learning, webinars, on-demand courses, eBooks whether it's under remote working, compassionate leadership, or resilience. It's part of our DNA on how we think about learning given that we are also a geographically distributed workforce. We have to continue on this journey. We know we’re close to what I would say the world is headed but we are constantly making progress. We are experimenting with certain tools and apps to see whether it makes sense or not, we are doing certain pilots, and let's see where that takes us.

Proudest Moments, Biggest Failure, Career Success

Naveen, what's been your biggest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career so far?

How about if I say what excites me, gives me a lot of satisfaction, and I’m proud of the fact that that happens. Anytime you are able to make a business impact and you're able to make an impact on your people, that excites me. My mantra and vision have always been business relevance and people reach. The way I decode this is almost what the word says, anything that you'll end up doing, is it helping the business make more money? Is it helping the business save costs? Is it helping the business grow in a different geography, launch a new product, or help your customers in a different way? That excites me and I always feel those moments or proudest moments for me when I look at an idea from conceptualization to commercialization, that's exciting.

Similarly, on the people's side of the equation, anything that you’ll end up doing. Is it helping people become better, helping them with anything that they're struggling with or dealing with? Help them become more productive, inspired them, give them safety and security, and help their well-being from an overall perspective, it's exciting for me. If I have to choose an example, I would say one of the companies in my previous life, the CEO asked me once if I wanted to run a piece of business for him given my understanding of the business which I thought was testimony to the fact that I am able to create the balance within the business as well as people. I'm not sure how traditionally some would view the HR practitioners as more policies and processes, and not so much the business-oriented approach.

You seem to be business-oriented as their subject type. We didn't get a chance to go into too much, but I'm glad you brought that up. The importance of thinking about business impacts, because you become a much more valuable HR leader, much more valuable to the organization when you are always thinking about that business impact, keeping that in mind and connecting, learning HR policies to the business. I'm sure that's a reason why you're in the position that you're in. On the flip side, Naveen, what's been one of your bigger mistakes or failures in your career? What did you learn from it?

On a lighter note, I would say leaving Amazon. When it was at a peak and the stock was going to skyrocket. I learned that I need to suck up the rainy weather. I used to live in Seattle a bit longer, and I should have waited for the stock to go up even more. On a more serious note, I would say one of the lessons I would be called out early on that I learned wasn't effective delegation. When I started my career, I became people who manage a failure early on. At first, I tried to do a lot by myself rather than effectively delegated to my team, but of course, I have a very supportive manager who was able to provide me feedback, develop me, and learned over the years. How do you trust the team? How do you bring them along and how do you delegate effectively?

Learning those lessons early on. Is there a book or a TED Talk that has been a big impact on you or you often recommend?

It almost seems like, Andy, you were following me. I was reading this book called Hit Refresh. It is a book written by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. It's about his journey, which I was very curious about given how well Microsoft has done business-wise and their stock even in play sentiment wise. He talks about how he's gone about changing the culture of Microsoft. The book talks about from know it all to learn it all. The new culture that he and his leadership team has created is more about learning, collaboration, and listening.

[bctt tweet="Take time to learn your business in addition to the people's side of the equation." via="no"]

One of the things that stuck to me, he talks about is helping his teams put the needs of his people and talents before their own. It's a great book on how do you go about transforming the organizational culture. There was another good learning out of the book. How do you collaborate with your competitors? They go about working closely with Apple on creating a joint success, which I thought was phenomenal because usually, people see them as competitors and they might not be seeing eye-to-eye but how can you win so much more together which I will be saying. I thought that was key learning as well from the book.

I'll have to check that out. The turnaround that Satya Nadella has made at Microsoft and people are going to be studying that for decades. It's been such a phenomenal interesting run they've had. The last question for you, Naveen, for anybody in HR or talent development who is especially looking for ways to grow in their careers, accelerate their career success, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

I would say the most important one which I’ve tried to follow myself and encourage my team to do it as well, is take time to learn your business in addition to the people's side of the equation. I would go back to what I’m saying on how does the business makes money? How does it lose money? What's the USP for your business? How are the external changes impacting your talent, which ultimately can impact your business is crucial? I would even encourage and go a step further and say, “Take a role in business. Do an assignment. Do a project where you're responsible for a business outcome.” I've had the opportunity early on where I led a little bit of an operations team or worked in quality and that provided me a completely different mindset than purely only looking at people equation. You're bringing more credibility to your recommendations and the value that you create for the company.

Digging into the business is valuable. I hope people will take that advice and dig into the business more. Naveen, I have enjoyed digging into all of your experience, wisdom, point of view. I appreciate you taking the time to come and sharing that with us.

Thank you for having me, Andy. I enjoyed it as well.

Take care.

• Medidata Solutions
• Josh Bersin – Previous episode
• Hit Refresh