Hello, WGates Foundation. I went into medicine because I wanted to have an impact on patients' lives. First, I learned that you had to be a good scientist to be a good doctor, so I became a scientist, and then I was recruited to join the board of a pharmaceutical company. Uh, I wasn't quite sure why that would be interesting, but I found it to be very interesting. And when they asked me to join the company later, the idea of making a medicine that could have an impact on millions of people's lives was very exciting to me. The groups that I led consisted of 15,000 people, so there was definitely some management involved. The distance between a leader and 15,000 people is much greater than the distance between a leader and five people that he sees every day. One of the things that you, you realize is that when you talk to people every day, um, you can have personal relationships and people can understand who you are and what you're thinking, and there's a level of trust that develops. When you step back from that to running a group of 15,000 people, it's much harder to do that. In order to be able to have an impact on those people, you have to somehow make a personal connection with it. And you can't make a personal connection with people unless you are prepared to reveal aspects of you that are very private and are very personal. So there's a sense of intimacy that's created. Now, I'm Japanese. Generally we're pretty reserved people, and sol had to learn how to, uh, express emotion in public in order to be able to reach people and communicate with him, even though the distance between a leader and 15,000 people is much greater than the distance between a leader and five people that he sees every day. Mm-hmm. . But I do think if you can talk about, uh, challenges or decisions that are being made in the context of personal challenges that you've had or personal decisions that you've made, it first of all brings the decision to life. And secondly, it tells the listener something about the, the personal challenges that the leader went through in making those decisions and, and therefore can reflect upon the challenges that he or she will face in making those same decisions. I had to sort of learn that along the way. I, I remember once when I was being filmed, this was at the time, very difficult time of a merger between two companies. I was being filmed, um, and I saw the film and I thought, now that looks like a very cold guy, and I don't, I don't recognize that person. And so I thought, well, why? And it's because I was being so impersonal and so cut and dry. That's when I began to start thinking about how to talk about events in my life that influenced what I did. We had a person that was in charge of our communications team who was very, very helpful. She helped to bring out that personal side of me in interviews and in communication. Again, I'm gmreflect at a time of a merger, and there were two teams of people, one from one company and one from another company. And we were brought together as an executive team for our research and development, and we had a strategy for going forward. And about a year after the merger, we took the executive team on a retreat. And, uh, I took these anonymous voting machines on the retreat. Um, and we asked some hard questions, you know, is our strategy going to allow us to succeed as a company? Uh, strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree. There were 12 people on the management committee. Um, there was one strongly agree answer, that was my answer. There were two agree answers. There were six disagree and three strongly disagree. So nine out of the 12 members of the, uh, executive team for research and development did not believe we're heading down the right route. Now, of course, this is a difficult situation, and it's when I reflected and thought, what, what, what reading matters here? What reading matters? And I thought one of the things that that's really important is to understand what we're there for. And we were there for making people's lives better. And so I changed the message. Every year there would be a, a group of objectives for the whole of r and d, and there'd be like 20 of them. I said, no, this year we're just gonna have one that's gonna be focused on the patient. And I said, look, you know, my mother was very sick when she was sick. I didn't care about how much money I made or what my position was or what my house looked like or what my car was. I was only interested in finding out if there was a medicine that I could give her that would make her better. And I felt a deep sense of urgency to do that. And when I say focus on the patient, it's like saying, focus on your mother's illness. Why does it matter how we're structured as an organization? Why does it matter what your span of control is? What matters is we're, we're vested with the responsibility of finding solutions for people who are sick, who are I suffering. And in that light, can we forget about all the things that don't matter and focus on the patient? And it was unbelievable because within about six months, things started to happen. First of all, we had some of our early successes. Nothing breeds happiness and success more, more than success. And secondly, there was a transformation in, in the, the group of people, 15,000 that focus on the patient became a mantra. Everybody began to understand it. There were fewer complaints, fewer concerns. And we started actually working from the same sheet of music, I think, and that transformed the group and it became a very successful group. So here's this circumstance in which recognizing a problem, admitting that there was a problem, and saying how do we overcome it? Reflecting on a personal crisis and, and, and exploring howl dealt with it, I think helped to transform a group of people being human beings. We all share common experiences and if we can tap into that well of common experience, then I think we can find connections that will allow us to work