Step Back to Step Up

What are some of the things that you've seen that are barriers to innovation?

I think one, and I'll personalize it, I can become the biggest barrier to innovation in my own organization. I'm the CEO. So my likes, dislikes, pros, cons, my biases are probably the single biggest barrier to innovation. So if I get very firm in my views either about people or about products that we have, about the plans that we have. They can either aid the team to go forward faster or they can inhibit the team to stop. And that's happened to me more than once.

But what made you realize that about yourself? What led to that self-awareness? That, Atul, oh, I need to step back.

You know, I turned 60 this year so I can... one of the great benefits of aging is I now have the ability to look back in the rearview mirror almost 40 years, and I can see all the potholes that I fell into. Right. We can also see the mountains and the peaks that that, you know, we all climb together. So that's what I look back on as I've tried to not memorialize this. So you don't dwell on them, but to build a discipline of not repeating my mistakes.