This is a transcript of the podcast Michaela Ahlberg talks about building trust and ethics in compliance programs, in which Michaela speaks to GRIP’s US Content Manager, Julie DiMauro, and Senior Reporter, Hameed Shuja, about her work on managing and upgrading corporate compliance programs and her thoughts on seeing compliance through an ethics-based lens.
[INTRO]
Julie DiMauro: Greetings everyone. I’m Julie DiMauro, the US Content Manager, speaking to you from New York City. Welcome to our Global Relay Intelligence and Practice, or GRIP, podcast.
You can find articles, thought leadership insights, and our podcasts on our website at grip.globalrelay.com, and we welcome your input at any time.
I’m going to have our esteemed guest today, Michaela Ahlberg, introduce herself, giving you all an overview of her career experience and current work. Take it away, please, Michaela.
Michaela Ahlberg: Hi. Thank you, Julie, for inviting me. Thank you, Hameed. It’s really my pleasure to be here today. My name is Michaela Ahlberg, and I’m a Swedish lawyer. I have worked in big international businesses for more than 40 years. Can you believe it? And during the past 20 of these years, I have focused on ethics and compliance.
Julie DiMauro: Michaela, I want to delve into your experience more deeply, in a general high-level way, and then we’ll get a little more granular. Can you tell us about your approach to remediating compliance programs based on your experience? What it takes, the general kind of approach that you’ve had, and maybe how it’s changed through the years.
Michaela Ahlberg: Yeah, that’s a really great question because it has changed over the years. So the first time I worked more specifically with ethics and compliance was with Nokia Siemens Networks. And that company had a big corruption crisis, which came in the merger of Nokia and Siemens Telecoms business. It was a lot of focus on compliance and bribery, corruption, compliance, and it was a lot of focus on the failures of Siemens because this came out of the Siemens scandal, if you remember back in the days.
Then time passed and I joined Telia in 2013, which was the company also in a big corruption crisis. And my task was to implement ethics and compliance. And then during the past five, six years, I have worked with a Swedish Medtech company, Getinge. When I joined them, they also had a big corruption crisis in Brazil that they really couldn’t get their arms around and they needed some help to kind of fix the problem, remediate the problem. And my experience during these 15 years is that you come in and you want to remediate, there is a crisis, full blown crisis, people are in the crisis mode and you want to start remediating and you focus on this specific conduct problem or this failure, this conduct failure.
But what they have learned is that if you do that, you kind of position the whole ethics and compliance function as part of a crisis management team that will be phased out once the crisis is over. And that’s not, we all know, that’s not at all what ethics and compliance is about. And furthermore, when you come in and you have this, say, for example, the corruption crisis or scandal in Brazil or wherever it, in Telia it was in Uzbekistan, and then everybody’s focusing on Brazil or Uzbekistan or in the country where the wrongdoing happened. But there is never just this one thing.
So what I have learned is that if you come in, in a time where you have this crisis, for example, a corruption scandal in Uzbekistan, as in the Telia case, don’t just focus on that. See that as the tip of the famous iceberg and start looking for other similar or other conduct problems that you have. Do a proper analysis of the culture in the company. Do a proper risk assessment. Do not just dive into that specific silo, which is the scandal, because you will find that it is the tip of the iceberg. And when you can explain that and show that to the board, they will have an entirely different understanding of what the work that you’re doing and what ethics and compliance is all about.
That is my kind of most important learning, having come in, in several different companies in a full remediation mode, that don’t just focus on what is right there in front of your eyes. Make sure you kind of find other wrongdoings or other crises in the company that people are not aware of yet.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. It could be a symptom of a larger problem.
Michaela Ahlberg: It’s always a symptom of a larger problem.
Julie DiMauro: There are many, many issues that you’ll probably have to address. In thinking about that, you need to bring the board along in your executive leadership, but also just every line manager. How do you get that buy-in?
Michaela Ahlberg: You don’t get that buy-in overnight. You have to have patience. Another thing that I think that I have landed in now, after all these years, is that we focus too much on the executive team. We focus too much on management. And I think also in this context, it is important to understand and remember that leadership and management is not the same thing. People forget that. They see themselves as leaders just because they are appointed managers. But people choose to follow a leader. They are not forced to follow a leader.
So totally different things, which means that anybody can be a leader. Also people who are not managers. Another fundamental shift in the way I work is that I focus more on the people out in the organization and a little bit less on the executive team and the managers. I spend more time out there because I want to create an awareness and a kind of a pull from people who are really out on the ground.
Julie DiMauro: And build that trust and communication with them.
Michaela Ahlberg: Yes.
Julie DiMauro: Now, did you find that over time that trust was actually built such that you heard from them and you even heard admissions from them when they did not do things so perfectly. A “this could have been done better,” type of thing – after some people made some shortcuts along the way. Did that happen over time, such that you got better inside information?
Michaela Ahlberg: Yes, you get much better information, but it’s not only, of course, you, one person, it’s also your team. So you have to position your team members and choose team members who are out there. So who really have a capacity to be out there with the people on the ground and have interest. So when I see myself as a, as you know, as an ethics and compliance professional, I view my task as somebody who enables, inspires and challenges people to make the best possible decisions. So I am not the one who is going to make the decisions.
I am not the moral police. What I can do, I can give people information about the law, about ethical expectations, about stakeholders that are affected by your decision, that type of information. And I can also, you know, challenge you a bit in the way that you want to be as an employee or a leader in the company. I can inspire you maybe a little bit to be the best version of yourself.
Hameed Shuja: Michaela, you said it was important to go in and understand the company culture, but companies operate within certain markets. Did you feel that it was important to understand the broader market culture as well? Shall we call it national market cultures? For instance, if you go into a certain country and you see signs and symptoms within companies, do you sometimes think they might exist in the broader, larger market culture as well? And how important it is for you to then understand and digest a lot more than just focusing on that one company that you might be dealing with?
Michaela Ahlberg: Of course, I can give you Telia as an example, because Telia is a Swedish Nordic telecom business and they had this pressure to expand, to grow. And to grow, they needed to get outside of the Nordics. So they went to Eurasia and they established themselves in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Nepal, Georgia, Moldova. Countries which are very, very different in terms of governance structure than the Nordics. And they didn’t do a proper risk assessment, not on the broader country or part of the world assessment or how the businesses are running these particular markets. They didn’t really understand the culture externally, but they also did not understand the culture that was built internally in their own company in these different countries.
So a lot of decisions that were taken high level were taken without the proper information. So again, my task is to enable people to make good decisions. If they don’t have the right information, it’s very difficult to make a good decision. That’s just the first basic level. And understanding where you are doing business is one of these things.
Julie DiMauro: Now, you do need to deal with the executive leadership and the board and you need to get the proper resources from them and set reasonable expectations for how long all of this will take and other things that you might need along the way that you couldn’t have anticipated. How do you bring them along specifically, given their roles as gatekeepers and having a fiduciary duty to keep making profit as a business?
Michaela Ahlberg: Yeah, I’m going to tie back to your first question here. So say you come into a company that has, like Getinge, they have a big corruption scandal in Brazil. So the board and the executive management, they focused a lot on their problems in Brazil, how difficult it is to do business in Brazil, how corrupt that country is, how the governance structure is totally bananas. And that was kind of the focus. But I joined this company late in my career. So I knew if we have this type of a problem in Brazil, we have similar problems in a lot of other places. And to make the board aware of this was my first task. I didn’t sit around and wait for whistleblowing to happen.
I started to look and dig where I knew I would find things. You know, you can start looking at do we have agents? Do we work through distributors and agents? I can take a look there. I can start to look at the level of warehouse at the end of the year and see what is happening and moving. So I can look in a couple of places where I know I will find things. So that is what we did. And I was not alone. And in that way, we brought up to the attention of the board and the executive management that this is not a Brazil problem.
This is a problem more general in how we do business in this company. And they were fatigued almost. They were like, is this never going to stop? No, it’s not. It’s going to continue and continue and continue until we change our business practices. We change the culture with how we work. We make these necessary changes. That is a way to kind of wake them up a little bit out of their slumber. They don’t like it. Nobody likes to hear bad news over and over again. But it is absolutely necessary because that is how you can bring their attention that this is a much bigger problem. The core problem here is not Brazil. The core problem is our culture and how we do business.
Julie DiMauro: Which is not easy to change, right? So how do you get all of those on board from the everyday worker to the top people in the organization to change the cultural fabric of the organization? How do you get them to start that process while keeping their morale up too, because it’s going to take time?
Michaela Ahlberg: So that’s the million dollar question, really. And we have started to say that, you know, change happens one person by one person. So you have to be really patient when you work with change, especially if you work with this type of fundamental change. There’s going to be incremental changes all along the way. But fundamentally for something to shift, you need to see it’s one person by one person and at some point of time you will have a critical mass and something will shift. So it’s not about putting slogans on the walls or finding like three key words on our values. It’s really to make each person aware of the fact that their decisions matter in building a culture in this company.
So it’s not only about what the CEO decides or what the executive management decides or what your manager decides. It’s what you do. You matter, your decisions matter and make sure that they are as good as you want them to be. The boring part is to give them the information on the law. That sounds like so fundamental, but that is really important to remember that we need to understand the regulatory landscape and we need to be able to convey this and explain this to anybody who is going to make a decision. But on top of that, we also want them to be inspired to understand that, well, what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. If you take a little bit futuristic view and try to future proof your decision and in order to do that, maybe you need to understand better why there is this legislation.
Where are we going? What is going to happen in a year or two? Now, for example, when we see compliance and sustainability emerging and more and more sustainability matters become compliance matters, really. And that is a movement, a trend which you can make visible that you can inspire people maybe to be the best version of themselves when they make their decisions and to take stakeholders like the environment and human rights and other important stakeholders, employees into consideration.
Julie DiMauro: I want to ask you about just a couple of the more granular elements to the effective compliance program. Can you tell us about maybe some training that you’ve instituted, what you find to be effective training?
Michaela Ahlberg: I think the whole structure and concept of effective compliance is really important to always keep in mind and to have a structure and an organization so that you have fundamentally built a platform of all the different elements of effective compliance. So you have your risk assessment, you have your policy structures that is easily accessible and maybe you can use AI to make them even more accessible. You have your training, you have your third party programs, you have all of these different folks who have investigations and you have the speak up line and you have all of this and you work with it so that it is current and fresh and present all the time. And there you have training and education.
I find oftentimes that training is structured in a way so that it is almost insulting to the people who are going to do the training. We have to find ways to do training in a way that respects our employees’ intelligence and that is of a level that they will find interesting. And there are many different aspects to this because of course if you work in a very challenging – corruption wise – challenging market and environment, you have to do fundamental anti-bribery corruption and the money laundering training. 100%. You have to do that and you need to do it as good as you can, preferably face to face, all of this on top of all this topical training.
I think you also need to build some type of training around culture and ethics and leadership, true leadership, where you inspire people, not just force them to understand the legislative landscape but where you inspire people. Because for me, ethics is not what I think. I am not more ethical than anybody else, maybe the contrary. So I cannot take it upon myself to give ethical advice to anybody. But for me, ethics is a process.
Ethics is a process of taking in different information, taking in difficult information and addressing different stakeholder interests and then processing this and then come to a conclusion, a decision. So for me, business ethics is more of this process of being aware of how you make decisions and what will affect you when you make decisions. And that’s where I think it’s important to build some type of education or training which raises the awareness with people on why good people like you and me can make really bad choices. And that normally doesn’t happen because you don’t understand the law. It more often happens because you don’t understand yourself or human behavior. If you take that element into your training where you take a much wider grip on decision making, it will be more inspiring and more effective. And it will also have effect on the culture that you build in the company.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. You know, what you said reminds me of a discussion I had with an ex-FBI agent who said, much to your point, kind of the same remarks in terms of it’s good people doing bad things because they’re stressed, because there’s too little time for them to get their jobs done, because they think other people are getting away with it and they’re sick of not being able to as well. Things like that, it’s like human nature elements rather than them being a bad person or for some reason wanting to cheat anyone out of anything. With regard to exam cheating at firms, they found that it was, again, people who were working 100 hours a week were just having a hard time with trainings that they found insulting. I’m not giving them a free pass, by any means. They obviously should not cheat on exams, but a lot of it was the pressure that they felt in their jobs. It’s important to know why it was happening.
Michaela Ahlberg: 100%. And what we want to do is that we want to simplify, just as we want to, in the example I said with Getinge, we want to focus on Brazil and how Brazil is such a corrupt country instead of focusing on ourselves and our own culture and core problems. The same thing is that we want to kind of believe that the problem is solved if we find the bad guy who did the bad thing. If I find a fall guy and we kick him or her out and everything is fine. And actually nothing is fine because we haven’t addressed again the core problem here and all the people that made this possible.
So all the good people that made this possible. I am not giving people a free pass either, Julie. I agree with you. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, but that doesn’t really solve the core problem as ethics and compliance professionals or as the board or the executive management who want to have a culture where people make good decisions, good people making good decisions.
And to do that, you cannot just say make good decisions. You need to understand how humankind works, how we work. If you have a bonus program or a stock option program, that will, I mean, the whole purpose of this is to influence how we work or how we achieve things and what we do. We’ll also put pressure on people that will maybe blind them in certain situations because of the pressure of the bonus program. So you need to be aware of what happens when you make these types of decisions.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. Understand the environment and the pressures within which they’re working.
Hameed Shuja: Just on the point of understanding human behavior, Michaela, it’s very interesting. How frustrating or how exhausting it is from your experience to sometimes perhaps deal with the corporate egos or executive egos because they’re a real thing in the real world. Some companies, some cultures, may not be very open, may not be very accepting. How important it is for you to be likable first and then people can listen to you and act on your advice. So you almost have to be kind of a psychologist as well, not just an ethics and compliance officer.
Michaela Ahlberg: Funny you should say that because I think that there are several layers in this question or comment that I agree with. Because, you know, first we have the compliance professionals. How can you be a good ethics and compliance professional saying uncomfortable things, all the time pointing at uncomfortable facts, all the time being the person who is kind of the stone in the shoe and still be respected and liked because we all want to be liked?
That is also one of our most fundamental human aspects that we have. So how do you balance that? How do you live in that friction without becoming bitter, angry, misunderstood? That’s one aspect of this friction. Another aspect of this friction is exactly what you’re pointing at. Is it possible in this culture, in this organization to have different opinions? Is it possible to disagree with your boss? Is it possible to speak up about something which is really uncomfortable? Is it, I mean, really? And the answer to that is normally no.
And that’s why I think it’s so important with this type of training and awareness where you raise people’s awareness around you, yourself, at all levels, have biases, have ethical blind spots, frame the problem in a way that feels comfortable because the solution will be easier to find in that way. You are succumbing to group pressure. You are a human person and this is what can happen to you. And I have found if you have the chance to implement that type of educational program, however you structure it, you will find that the people who are the most interested, the people who find this the most interesting and inspiring, again, are the people out in the organization. And they will create a little bit of momentum.
And then this will kind of create the pull instead of the push from the top down. Because if you go into a board and you talk about human behavior and group pressure, they will sit there and say: “Now, we are so well educated, so we don’t have biases and we don’t succumb to group pressure and we don’t have any ethical blind spots.” Because they feel that they have risked them so high. If you insist and you continue, and after a while they will become more comfortable having these discussions, I use quite a lot of different cases of famous misconduct. Theranos, Wells Fargo, Boeing, and I create these cases and we can analyze them, not from the point of which laws have been broken. Because sometimes no laws have been broken.
But really, what went wrong? Why didn’t people speak up? Why didn’t people listen? Why didn’t they frame the problem in a different way? To have these conversations around this, to make people aware. And I find that when you do that, people are really interested. Most people find this fascinating. And even a topic that has become so controversial, like diversity, inclusion, equity, and bias, if you put that topic in the perspective of you need to have different opinions at the table. You need to have different angles. You need to have people with different backgrounds at the table to have a more broader possibility to make good decisions. I mean, then it’s also doing the right thing, but that’s really a good reason. And bias, it’s really because I want you to be more aware of biases so that you can make better decisions and not fall into the trap of your own biases that we have.
Julie DiMauro: Based on your experience specifically, can you tell us if you had any one thing or it could be one or two things that you’ve spotted as concerning patterns or undervalued problem areas within compliance programs, what would those one or two things be?
Michaela Ahlberg: So I have one pet thing right now. I’m going to say that I don’t like anymore to speak about speak up. I try to avoid talking about speaking up. I think the whole concept of speaking up has failed. Anybody who has spoken up, really spoken up to be a whistleblower or similar will testify how difficult that has been. And we cannot pretend that it is not that way. So I feel uncomfortable walking around telling everybody, speak up, speak up, speak up, we are listening, we are listening, we are listening – because we are not listening. So therefore I think it’s more important to talk about listening and listening up.
There is this new research that has been done in a university in the south of Sweden, which says that a manager spends more than 80% of his or her time speaking. Very little time listening. I think we need to kind of turn the page here and work more with how to listen. And listening is not about my door is always open or I don’t understand why people don’t have the courage to come to me. I am a nice person. It really is about soliciting advice, soliciting people’s voices and stepping out of your own comfort zone as a manager and leader and be with people so that you can listen better.
Because despite the whole thing of legal protection and all of that, it is still horrible to be a whistleblower. Everybody who just wants to raise their voice to have a different opinion knows how the heart starts pumping and how uncomfortable it is and how the pulse goes up and you start a little bit of a sweat almost because you are just going to disagree with your manager or with what everybody says around the table. So I think it’s really, really, really, really important for ethics and compliance professionals and for leadership and managers to find ways of listening better to their organization, to people.
Hameed Shuja: Your role, Michaela, requires you to work with the people across the company from top management to junior staff. And that also exposes you to internal company tensions sometimes. How did you, in your experience, how did you first handle tensions? And also, how do you keep morale high because you might be having to deal with a Department of Justice investigation or a SEC investigation, but the day-to-day business doesn’t stop because there is an investigation going on. Companies still have to produce, they still have to generate revenue. How do you keep people happy and motivated so that the business, the work carries on? And how do you handle tensions, because they do exist?
Michaela Ahlberg: There are many different types of tension when we talk about rolling out an effective ethics and compliance program. There is tension within the compliance team because they are exposed to a lot of friction daily. So that’s that tension. But then there is also the tension out when you meet the business and you kind of feel that maybe what you are trying to do is colliding with business interests and priorities of the business. So I think that my best advice on how to deal with tension and friction is to calm down and to see things more long term and to understand, to really understand that you are just one person and your team may be 15 people.
The whole organization is maybe 12,000 or 20,000. And to really understand that proportion and give yourself a little bit of a grace in how you can do this and what you can accomplish and how quickly you can accomplish things. And then calm down and breathe.
And that’s why I really was not very happy with this invention of the Department of Justice that the ethics and compliance officer should co-sign that the company is compliant. I think that puts unnecessary additional pressure on people. But also, you know, to address friction with empathy, to understand where the other person is coming from, to try to understand where the other person is coming from. I’m saying this as if this is something I’m very good at, but I find it very hard. But I try to practice both empathy and compassion and a little bit of humor. Everything doesn’t have to be so serious all the time. So a little bit of humor as well to make it possible.
Hameed Shuja: I couldn’t agree more, but more specifically on your career, Michaela. I mean, we all go into new careers or jobs with certain experiences or skillset. What were the things that helped you from your previous background before you went into compliance and ethics? What did you take with you, which then proved to be very useful?
Michaela Ahlberg: So, for me, I worked as a general counsel or regional general counsel for more than 20 years before I moved over to ethics and compliance 100%. So I came from being what I call a business lawyer, supporting the business with legal advice and contracts and all the normal things, litigations and patents and all sorts of things, different industries. I feel that what I came with was a rather solid understanding of business on how you do business. And I had also worked in Middle East Africa, in the US, in Europe, many different places.
So I also brought in with me some knowledge about cultural differences and similarities, because I think sometimes we kind of over exaggerate the differences when maybe there are more similarities than differences between us. So I think that that has been really helpful for me. And it gave me self confidence when I sit with my ethics and compliance colleagues and we are a little bit discouraged because things are going too slow or we’re not getting the money. We feel as if, well, this is what we wanted to accomplish this year, but maybe it will be next year instead. And then we can laugh a little bit and I can say we continue because we are right. We are always right. I feel the confidence. I brought a certain level of confidence.
Hameed Shuja: And why ethics specifically, Michaela, why did you decide to focus more on ethics to the extent that you went on to develop a consultancy around the practice?
Michaela Ahlberg: I think this is the most fascinating topic and interesting topic because for me, ethics is, again, it’s really not what I think is ethical. I am not somebody you should go to, to have ethical advice. My role here, which I really enjoy, is to try to enable, inspire and challenge people to make the best decisions that they can make, to try to build a better organization, a better culture, a better world, if you wish, by supporting people making as good choices as they can make.
And for me, that’s ethics, to understand, yes, the legal requirements, but also understand how to future-proof your decisions, what are the ethical expectations, what are your values. How do you want to be perceived? Who do you want to be? And that’s why I like to really make sure that people understand that managers and leaders are not the same thing. So if I work with this program in the company, I work with everybody from the top to the bottom, from the bottom to the top, because everybody has a capacity to be a leader.
Hameed Shuja: And just one last brief question on ethics from me before I hand it over to Julie again. Can you teach ethics, Michaela? Or can you teach some parts of ethics and other things around ethics? They have to come with the person, kind of built in. And how do you balance ethics with fear when it comes to compliance? Is it important to be compliant because it’s ethical, the right thing to do? Or do you have to be compliant because you could be punished or prosecuted or you could be fined or lose your job? Do you have to strike a balance and if yes, how do you strike that balance between ethics and fear?
Michaela Ahlberg: I don’t think that the fear-driven programs are … it’s not really my cup of tea. Fear is a very blunt weapon. So I try to stay away from that. But then, of course, people can become afraid if they understand what legal consequences there can be. If you don’t understand how you do business and do it within the laws, within the frame of the laws, there can be personal accountability for you as well. So, of course, that is a bit scary, but that is what it is. But I think that compliance, it’s not an instrument of fear. You should work more towards inspiring people to make good decisions. And you ask, can you teach ethics? And I will say yes. If you agree with me that ethics is not the end point, it is the process.
I teach the process of making a good decision to be aware of the law, to be aware of yourself, to understand human nature, to be aware of ethical expectations. And to that you can teach, that you can work with, that you can have a program in the company around. I have to say I’m really surprised that very few curriculums cover this. I think we waste many years when we come out from the university and we think that if you only have all the knowledge, if you only have all the factual knowledge about the laws, about how to do business, about the technical, you know, if you only know this, you will be successful and everything will work. But that’s not how it is.
Hameed Shuja: What could businesses do differently today to build that culture of, a culture where doing the right thing is appreciated and has value?
Michaela Ahlberg: So I think that they should have more programs, ambitious programs available for everybody in the company that address the topic of ethical decision making and how to make ethical decisions. Not to go around and tell people to be ethical, this is the values you need to have and this is what you need. It’s more that, how do you make a good decision? How do you do that? So I think that and that also addresses another topic that interestingly enough, the regulator is interested in. And that is the culture, because compliance in itself doesn’t build culture, but this type of an effort builds culture.
Julie DiMauro: As a final question, I’m thinking of junior compliance officers, and I want to ask you what advice you would have for someone maybe in, you know, with one to five years of experience, what type of skill sets should they be developing? How has compliance changed and how can they really build a résumé to move up the ladder, if you would?
Michaela Ahlberg: Fundamentally, they should feel extremely comfortable in what needs to be done in all the aspects of building an effective compliance platform with all the different aspects of third party programs. And all of these are kind of complex things, all of them, but they have to be there. They need to feel 100% comfortable there. And then I think that what they should see is that is this merger that is happening between sustainability and ethics and compliance. I think that this is one of the most interesting things that is happening to the profession right now, that we see this merger. We see it because the way we have worked with sustainability before has not been very successful.
So we are not progressing as we should. And there is a lot of expectations that companies will solve our big existential problems because it doesn’t seem as if the politicians are going to do that. There is a lot of expectations. So from that part, we are also seeing the merger. But then we are also seeing a new regulatory landscape. And the political environment today is very shaky, but irrelevant of that, I think we will see more regulations on sustainability topics like we see in the EU today on third parties and human rights. And that is a very interesting journey that we are walking on right now as ethics and compliance professionals.
Julie DiMauro: Michaela, I can’t thank you enough. Thank you for sharing these incredibly useful insights with all of us and being on our GRIP podcast program. I’m Julie DiMauro here with Hameed Shuja from Global Relay Intelligence and Practice. And as ever, we also want to thank our listeners for tuning in today. Please explore our articles and other podcasts at grip.globalrelay.com. And we will see you back here for another podcast session soon.
