Episode 305: Convergence: Toward a Human-centric Future | Deborah Westphal

Change is an unavoidable fact of life and we get to choose whether to accept or resist it.  

Organizations that can leverage technological innovations while effectively managing workplace dynamics have a competitive advantage. It is equally important to have organizational leaders who are committed to building a culture where everyone feels supported, and employees' initiative, uniqueness, and enthusiasm are appreciated. 

Join us in Episode 305, with guest Deborah Westphal, a business leader, consultant, and author as she shares her perspectives on an evolving leadership approach that views employees as individuals who deserve respect, power, and trust. Questions like: “What IS a humanist and what does human-centric leadership look like?”, “Why should organizations become more human-centric?”, “What does the ‘race to space’ mean for the rest of us?" will be answered. 

Listen in as Nikki and Deborah discuss how you can align your professional and your personal life, and the tools, tactics, and techniques that you can use to embrace new leadership roles, and how Deborah built her career through global travel and industry exploration. 

Thriving Points:

• The core of humanity is hopes, dreams, fears, and concerns that people have no matter where you live, your culture, or your experiences. 
• To be a humanist is to be an advocate for people and realize that because it's an energy that can be tapped into so many different things.
• Growth is scary, any kind of new experience is scary, but what you rely on is,  you know you’ve done this before.

Get to Know the Guest:

Deborah Westphal is a business leader in future-focused strategy, consultant, and author of the book “Convergence: Technology, Business, and the Human-Centric Future”. In Convergence, she leverages more than 30 years of experience helping the world’s most innovative business and government leaders to challenge biases, ignite ideas, and build connections. She delivers this rich insight with an empathetic and thought-provoking writing style to chart a path for readers. 

Throughout the book, personal stories and historical examples highlight convergences that span the globe, impacting everything from global supply chains to climate change, and reshaping the future of business, technology, and humanity everywhere.

Connect with Deborah:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Email

A Team Dklutr Production

Transcript

Nikki Rogers: Your business is an asset that can support a thriving life. I believe this, and I'm committed to making this a reality for every entrepreneur and business owner who listens to this podcast. The Women Thriving in Business Podcast was created with you in mind, whether you were thinking about entrepreneurship or you're a business veteran, this podcast has inspiration, information, and advice you can use to thrive in business.

Women Thriving in Business features candid, unscripted conversations with entrepreneurs, business experts, authors, and academics who will contribute to your business success. I seek out and talk with business leaders who have built, grown, and thrive in business. My name is Nikki Rogers, transformation coach, author, and the host of the Women Thriving in Business Podcast. I work with women entrepreneurs to develop the mindset, strategies, and connections necessary to thrive in business. Join me and your fellow Thrivers each week on this journey of discovery and success.

Welcome Thrivers to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Rogers, and my guest today is Deborah Westphal who is a business leader, consultant, and author of the new book, Convergence: Technology, Business, and the Human-Centric Future. I had a great time talking with Deborah today about what being a human-centric leader really means, how her travel has shaped her perspective on life, and what the current space race means for the rest of it.

Deborah is a leader in future-focused strategy. In her book, Convergence, she leverages more than 30 years of experience helping the world's most innovative business and government leaders to challenge biases, ignite ideas, and build connections. Throughout the book, personal stories and historical examples highlight convergences that span the globe, impacting everything from the global supply chains to climate change, and that it also reshaping the future of business, technology, and humanity everywhere. Deborah's career spans more than 30 years in multiple government agencies and fortune 100 companies, and virtually every continent.

Deborah's unique experiences and perspectives as an engineer, consultant, CEO, board director, and world traveler made for a fun and fascinating discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's go. 

Welcome Thrivers to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast. My guest today is Deborah Westphal who is a business leader, consultant, and author of the new book, Convergence: Technology, Business, and the Human-Centric Future. Welcome, Deborah. 

Deborah Westphal: Hi, how are you? I'm so excited to be here. 

Nikki Rogers: Great, great. I'm so happy to have you. So to start us off, just perusing your website and some of your writings, you describe yourself as a humanist and a human-centric leader. So can you tell us what that means to you and why you've chosen that as your identity? 

Deborah Westphal: Yes, so that's a great question. The word or the term humanist is probably, there's probably a lot of different definitions of that. But for me, it’s the more you know people and tap into people, especially for me through my travels, the more you see that we're all more alike than what we're different. The core of humanity is hopes and dreams and fears and concerns that people have no matter where you live or your culture or your experiences. And so to me, that's what it means to be a humanist, to be an advocate for people and realize that because it's an energy that can be tapped into for so many different things.

Nikki Rogers: I love that idea of energy and the fact that we're more alike than we are different. So one of the things that I also read about you is that you alluded to this, that you travel a lot, a great bit and that you learn and collect insights from your travels. But one of the statements that really struck me on your website is that you have cracked the magic equation, and you have been able to align both your work and your life. So can you talk to us a bit about how you have been able to make that happen, to make your professional life and your personal life actually converge? 

Deborah Westphal: Yes, so I think that comes with experience. I think that comes with age and probably a lot of mistakes too from the past. 

Any of us that go into business and become leaders of organizations, there's this model of what we think that we're supposed to be. I think over time, when you really start to self-reflect and to really understand your place, you have a different model of yourself. And for me, that came from a lot of traveling, a lot of reflecting, and a lot of communication and discussion with other leaders on that same journey. 

That alignment is for me, is very much around this human-centric future. It wasn't the case, I'm young in my career. It was all about the organization and the structure and the processes and the things that the organization did, and that was given a priority versus the people inside and outside the organization. And so, it's my journey and I will say that I feel like a much better leader now, and I'm much happier now with that perspective. 

Nikki Rogers: I think that's great, and you give a good argument for getting to that place of alignment sooner rather than later. I think we're conditioned and we're taught, we're educated to make the business be about business and personal life be about personal life. I think, definitely with the generations I see coming up now, that those two much more merged together. 

Deborah Westphal: Yes, I really do think that, and your core values. I think your core values are really important, and I do think the younger generation may pick companies or organizations that fit those values and their values more, which is really important. I think for a company to understand what their values are, and their values aren't the things that a lot of companies put on the wall. They put things like profitability and integrity and innovation. Those to me are core values because if you don't have integrity, then you probably shouldn't be in business.

But it's really that understanding of what is the purpose of this organization? What are the big thought and the big reason for this organization? And I think it comes to the human aspect. What are you doing for humanity or your little corner of humanity? And when those things are aligned, I think there is joy and happiness, or at least a higher probability of having joy and happiness in that professional life and how that aligns with your personal life. 

Nikki Rogers: Yes, definitely. Definitely. Can you talk to us a bit about what has been your journey? So I know you started out as a civilian employee within the DOD and then became a CEO, and now you're a member of a number of boards as well as an author. So can you share with us what that journey has looked like?

Deborah Westphal: Yes, it's really interesting because I never really reflected on that journey until just recently. I love asking that question of other people like, how did you get here? What was that journey, and it's never really a straight line. I grew up in a small family. My father was a master wireman, we traveled to jobs. My mother supported him. She was a stay-at-home mother. It was me and my sister, and what they taught us though, especially, my father was to be independent, to have discipline and work, and to really stop and think.

Because we were a small family, we did a lot of things together and that meant working together too. They, at one point they built houses and I helped. I know how to roof and plum and all those things. So that influenced me to go into engineering, and I got an Electrical Engineering degree. When I came out of the university, I got a job with the Air Force as a civilian working in advanced concepts and advanced technology, and it was incredible. Even though it was on weapon systems and maybe non-traditional things that women don't necessarily go into, it was absolutely fascinating. So I did that for about 13 years and then it was connected with these amazing people that we’re starting a startup called Toffler Associates.

It was a strategy consulting firm focused on the future created by Alvin Toffler, who was a very famous author that wrote Future Shock many years ago. I decided to make the jump and go into consulting. It was amazing and all the different clients who I worked with the problems from space and healthcare and food and agriculture, it really allows you to connect dots and maybe see things that if you only stayed in one industry, that you may not recognize. So that's where I'm at now, and the last couple of years I've been writing. I wrote the book, I've been talking about the book and then on the side, helping leaders become human-centric and helping drive human-centric organizations. 

Nikki Rogers: Great. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's what I love about consulting as well. You get to see so many different organizations, so many different industries. There are new challenges all the time, and then there's also that goodness and experience that you can bring from one client to the next, to help them move forward a little bit faster.

So I know when we talked before, you mentioned that you were tapped to be the CEO of Toffler Associates, and at that time you didn't feel quite ready. So can you talk to us a bit about how you overcame those feelings of not being ready? And what were some of the tools, tactics, and techniques that you use in order to really embrace your role and embody that of a CEO?

Deborah Westphal: Yes, first of all, I think just admitting that you're not ready. I think a lot of people, you see it. Yes, I want that promotion but when I was asked, and I really wasn't asked. The previous CEO called me one night. It was late, I remember I'm in a hotel. It was probably 8:30- 9 o'clock. And he said, your time's up, it's your time. The conversation went something like, I'm not ready, yes you are and no, I'm not. If you don't take it now, it's going to be gone forever. And I said okay, I guess it's going to be gone forever then because I don't think I'm ready.

Over the course of the next couple of months, we actually had broader conversations with a couple of the other leaders. And I think, you come to some sort of, inside where you have any kind of growth is scary. Any kind of new experience is scary, but what you rely on is, you know I've done this before. I went to school and I graduated, I took my first job and I didn't mess it up. Took on that project and all right, it may not have been perfect but I learned a lot. So you come to that realization that I can do this, especially because there are so many wonderful people around you to help you be successful.

 And I had an incredible mentor. There were times as CEO that it was a privately held company but there were a couple of times that I really felt like I should hand in my resignation like this is tough stuff. My mentor would say: No, put that away. You got to this place and found a way to get out of it. So I think it's the people around you. I think you have to be willing to, one, take that jump, take that leap, and then learn from your mistakes. Allow people to help you and guide you too, and all the time, just so grateful for all the colleagues that I've worked within the past, there was always a lesson in there. Even though sometimes it was super difficult for me to accept, I'm a better person because of them. 

Nikki Rogers: So in thinking about that time, what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced, and what did you learn from these challenges? 

Deborah Westphal: One of the challenges was gone through the financial crisis of 2008. We were in 2006- 2007, we were really growing at a pretty accelerated clip. And so we had decided to invest in some things that we weren't putting off. Investments in technology, there were human capital investments that I wanted to make, some training, some education. In fact, one of the things that we did in that 2007 timeframe was to customize a leadership program in the whole firm, actually, went to Wharton and had a 3-day leadership, very customized for us on how we lead? How do we move forward? And that was everybody in the company because, maybe you're not ready to be CEO, but at some point in 10-15 years from now, maybe this training in this program can help. 

So we invested some time and invested some money that when the crash happened, we could have used. We could have used that. It didn't get tight for us until that 2009-2010 timeframe because of the decisions that we made in 2007. We also considered some different strategies around which customers we would go after and some of the markets that we would pursue, and we invested in those. And so that was tough, we ended up having to downsize. I had to make some decisions around layoffs. It was really hard because you have to make these decisions for the business, but your heart is breaking for those people and for the decisions that you know because they got to go home and they got to tell their spouse, or they got to go home and think about this. It had nothing to do with them, it just had everything to do with the business and keeping the business moving forward. So that was, some of my deepest lessons learned were during that time. It's not fun. 

Nikki Rogers: Do you recall any specific personal challenges that you faced, either being a woman in business, being a woman CEO, being in a space where you might've been, just not the typical person that would have been in that space were there any challenges related to that? 

Deborah Westphal: I think it would be challenging for anybody in that. I think sometimes for me being a woman leader, I tend to have a lot of emotions, just like anybody else. And I learned young in the business world to tamp those down rather than bring them out.

If I really look back on what messages I could give my younger self, don't do that. Because if you're hiding those emotions or if you're trying to communicate in such a way that it probably is more expected than how it naturally becomes, you're really not being authentic. You're not bringing all yourself to the table, and so I think I've learned that too, is it is okay to share that you don't have all the answers or that you've made a mistake or that it's scary also. Maybe it's the generation I came from but I was very in my career, and I felt like I really did make a mistake and I felt like I needed to tell the team like, Boy that wasn't the right decision.

The mentor I had at that time says, oh no, you never do that. You never say that you didn't know or that you made a mistake because that's a sign of weakness. Maybe that's the generation I came from, but I held onto that for many years. Is that you don't really bring that part to the conversation, and now I view that that's not necessarily helpful because back to the definition of humanism, we all have fears. We all worry. We all make mistakes, and I think that's really important for leaders to share. I do think there are times when that's harder for women to share because it may be viewed as a weakness. But I don't know. What about you? Do you find that these things are hard to share? Or how do you think about this? 

I think before I would have been much more compartmentalized, so work is work, home is home, and never let them see you sweat. I've just come to realize, I'm a full-pledged human being with feelings and thoughts, and ideas. I've been told I don't have much of a poker face, so you're probably going to know what I'm thinking before it even comes out. But I think it comes with, like you said, experience and time and just growing as a leader, but especially since starting my own business, I would say transparent, very authentic, you're going to get all of me. That's what you're asking for, that's what you're inviting in and you're going to get all of it. So that's where I am right now. 

That's awesome. That's awesome. I remember the first time, because sometimes when they get really angry, I will cry. I'll tear up, it's just an emotional response. The first time I did that, it was like, I was very embarrassed. Later on, in my career, I've seen men cry the same way. And so we've got to come as people, not as what we think is the expectation. And I think what you said about being compartmentalized is, it's a really great description of that.

Nikki Rogers: So we've talked about some of the challenges, what have been some of your greatest accomplishments in business? 

Deborah Westphal: There's always looking back with some of the organizations and some of the strategies or some of the things that they try, that's always really fun. That's always super exciting to say, I was there, we were there. We did this and it helped them along their way. That's really amazing especially given we were a very future-focused organization. It was about the future. It wasn't just about today. And so seeing some of the things that have come to fruition are super exciting, but I think the biggest is a compliment or saying that I'm proud of is, people, pop back into your life and they tell you: Hey, you really helped me. You may not have realized it, but do you remember this? I had, but this was a couple of years ago. I was actually in Tanzania getting ready the next morning, we were leaving on our hike to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, and I got a text from a gentleman that was in the Air Force and he was letting me know that he was pending on Colonel, he had just been promoted to Colonel. And he had worked for me as Second Lieutenant, a brand new Second Lieutenant and he said: I wanted to reach out because I remember that time, and I remember that responsibility that you gave me, the belief that you had in me, and I'm doing this because of you and people like you that have been there throughout my life. That's just incredible. That is those things, especially as you're late in your career, you're retiring, it's that impact that you made on people. I just find that super fulfilling, and that carries me for a couple of weeks after. It's just like, oh, that's just awesome. 

Nikki Rogers: That's great. That's a wonderful story. And in another time I want to hear about Kilimanjaro because that is on my bucket list. 

Deborah Westphal: Oh, you gotta go. You gotta go. It's so awesome. 

Nikki Rogers: I definitely want to hear about this. So let's talk about your book, what led you to write Convergence? 

You know it's the years of experience for sure, it's the years of experience in consulting and helping organizations and just seeing their struggles or their objectives. As you stand back, you look at what they're trying to do. There are a couple of things that I bucketed down into three buckets. There is this purpose of business and why does this exist? And most of the organizations that we would go into, you would ask, what is the purpose? Most of them would say, to maximize shareholder profit, or to grow or to double in revenue or take it to the billion-dollar level.

There's this purpose of business, which is really shifting, and I really do think it's shifting from the outside. I think society is asking them business to really rethink the purpose of business. The other is just this fascination and almost reliance on technology. We're going through this massive shift in technology, and we've done this for the last couple of decades, if you would, even we're in the information age. Technology is going to save us and it's fascinating, but really it's not. I think the third bucket is the hard problems that we're faced with within humanity and all the opportunities that there is to solve these problems if we choose to focus on them instead of ignoring them. And so the book is about these three forces that are converging or in some cases, diverging that actually need to be rebalanced. For business leaders and organization leaders to consider, to be aware of that, and to take a future-focused view of what they're doing so that they can be profitable as well as responsible to stakeholders and to humanity.

So what do you think the burning platform, if you will, for businesses or business leaders to really focus on humans in the midst of this technological revolution, in the midst of this information is, and I feel like there's a lot of information, not a lot of knowledge? What is the compelling argument for entrepreneurs, business leaders to really focus on the human side of things? 

Deborah Westphal: So I think it depends on your business, but I also think that there are some systematic problems that they all need to consider and prioritize. It's interesting to me right now, you can't pick up any magazine or news channel, newsfeed without this focus on the workforce. People aren't coming back to work, people don't want to do things that aren't meaningful, and how do we get people back to work and how do we incentivize them?

So a burning platform for me is to recognize that people are absolutely critical to your business. And those people exist outside your business, and they're more than just your customers, but they also are inside your business or your organization and schemes to try to entice them to come back or to work for you. I don't think of long-term solutions, because I think people are waking up to the fact that their time is valuable. They want to do meaningful things. They want to be accepted as total people, not as a job description or a limited position. There's more to add. So I think that is a burning platform. I think technology is great. Technology can add to the effectiveness and to the growth of an organization, but without the idea of how are you going to balance this with people, and how are you going to actually build teams of technology and people that where we bring the best to the front?

I don't think the technology strategies that are about replacing without thinking about this human-technology team is a long-term strategy either. A burning platform that's very close to my heart is the environment, and what are we doing to the environment and how are we keeping it viable for the future? That includes all the things from climate or water or pollution or any of those things. I think we have to be good stewards, and not take the planet for granted. So I think those are, to me, some big themes that are written about in the book.

Nikki Rogers: Yes, thank you for sharing that. One of the, very early on in the book, you bring up this idea of being very careful about using the term stakeholders. So can you talk a bit about who you define as a stakeholder for a business and how businesses may need to be shifting their mental map or mental mindset about who a stakeholder is? 

Deborah Westphal: I think I actually wrote that it's become a worthless term. It's been misused and it's been overused. Some people think your stakeholders are the customers, only your customers, and they view that as those people that are going to buy things from your business. I think it's part of my engineering and my background, I was certified as a professional program manager. I got my PMP certificate and it's interesting because doing a stakeholder analysis is one of the first things that you should do before you launch a project or about the portfolio of your work. There's a lot of headwork in understanding your stakeholders, and those stakeholders are anybody that could influence the success of your business or your project if you would, and that includes your employees. A lot of companies don't think about the employees as stakeholders. A lot of companies, I think, view them as a cost that's where they show up on the balance sheet but your employees are stakeholders.

Your customers, your suppliers, the people that are out there larger in humanity are beyond just the community in which you operate in. And what do I mean by that? If you're manufacturing something that uses materials from across the world, you should understand what that practice is. So are those people being treated correctly or rightfully and is it environmentally? Are you doing your best to do this in an environmentally safe way to get those materials? Just because they're not right in front of you or within the bounds of your organization, doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility.

When I say stakeholders, I do open it up beyond just community, employees and suppliers, and your customers to larger humanity so that it captures these bigger ideas of your impact, and especially your long-term impact of the decisions that you make.

Nikki Rogers: I think that's great. I think what you're calling and or saying that businesses need to do is have a broader examination of their impact from sourcing their supplies or the supply chain. So it's really making them think about it, and be intentional and not just bury their heads in the sand and say that I'm getting it from this direct supplier. They're good so I don't have to worry about it. But you're actually inviting them to actually examine the whole process, the supply chain being just in one area.

Deborah Westphal: Right, and supply chain is upfront but there's also a consideration of when your product is no longer used, how are people going to dispose of it? We've all read fast fashion and how that is just an incredible negative if you would on our planet or plastic. How do we get rid of the electronics that we use when we no longer use them? It's not just about the climate, it's also about the people. How are we training people or how are we teeing them up for their next journey, which may not be in our organization? The hire and fire or hire and lay off the idea of: We need 6,000 people and then, four months later, we lay off 5,000. That's not very responsible. That's not growing us as a society, or it also impacts our workforce market in the future. And so I do think that there's a lot on a leader's plate or leadership team's plate to keep the organization moving forward and keep it healthy.

I really think that some of these things we're coming to a point that we've got to open that aperture up and start looking at some of these other things for the long-term sustainability of our organizations, and technology can help us with that. Technology can help us understand that supply chain or the backend at the disposal of whatever it is that we're making or our impact.

Nikki Rogers: Thinking about the entire life cycle. 

Deborah Westphal: Exactly. 

Nikki Rogers: For their products and goods. So this next question, I think you're actually uniquely qualified to answer, so turning towards current events, and we're hearing a lot about this current space race amongst a couple of billionaires. So thinking about this human-centered approach, the technology future-facing like, what does all this mean to the rest of us? Like how does that impact the rest of humanity when you have a few people in a competition? What does that mean for the rest of us?

Deborah Westphal: Yes, it's interesting. First of all, it was just really exciting, but the whole area of space infrastructure for the rest of us, it could give us different economics. There are other industries that can open up, space mining could open up. There's a lot of different materials on different planets or asteroids that we could use for advancements or new products or such. The whole space infrastructure that we have in place right now is very much around communications and remote earth imaging. There's a ton of information that we can gather about planet earth in what we're doing and people and the impacts of people because it comes from space. I think the big space race with the billionaires and such, I think that's fascinating, but to me, what has been shown is that we can get to space at a much more affordable cost.

We couldn't have done that. They couldn't have done that. They didn't have the money nor the technology 20 years ago to get to space at this price point. Now that price point's going to come down. That's important not because people are going to just take rights in space, although that will be the foreseeable near-term future, but that whole space exploration and possibly very different economies of space. When we think about going to even deeper outer space it opens up a lot of possibilities. There are other things that we can do too. We can manufacture pharmaceuticals in space. Quicker and cheaper than here on earth. I think there are some really interesting possibilities for the rest of us by these incredible scientists and engineers trying to open up space as a place if you would, for us to access and do things.

Nikki Rogers: Great. Thank you for that perspective. That brings the news home. What does it mean? What does it mean from a business perspective, from a humanity perspective? You talked about the economies and some of the things that can happen in space that can actually advance humanity a bit further. 

Deborah Westphal: Yes, and it's a great, great example is something that the Toffler Associates, the company that I used to lead. This was probably back in the early 2000s. We helped NASA Ames ensure that they got a test on the shuttle because they had to do this thing with Congress. Anyway, the test was to test the vaccination for salmonella. It was critical that only if they did it up in space, they could do it much quicker, much cheaper. And they got a ride because you had to get a ride, there's a prioritization, but they got a ride. And that led to a couple of years later, a vaccination against salmonella. And because thousands of people get sick every year because of this, if you can start to vaccinate where there's no refrigeration or necessarily cleanliness can save lives. And so that is a very specific example to highlight that.

Nikki Rogers: Thank you. Well Deborah, before we wrap up, I want to ask you two questions that I ask all of my guests. So the first one is what are two songs that are on your power playlist and why? 

Deborah Westphal: That's really funny because I'm a runner. And so I have a power playlist that is very fast and furious music, but I like the two that I think I would pick is, there's a song called On Top of the World by Imagine Dragons. And it's just a really happy song. It talks about living for the moment and not waiting for tomorrow. And then there's a song called Happy, which we've all heard. And I think it's by Pharell Williams, which is just an incredibly joyous song too that just gets me going.

Nikki Rogers: Great, and the last question is what is one book that has influenced you in business? 

Deborah Westphal: It's Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. She talks about the power of vulnerability and being authentic. She's written many books, but Daring Greatly is one that I would recommend. It is focused towards business leaders, parents, just people trying to be better people and live a more authentic life, and how to really overcome some of the narratives that we tell ourselves that aren't really helpful. So I would definitely recommend that one. 

Nikki Rogers: Well, great. I'll add that to my list. If people want to get in contact with you, learn more about you or your book, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Deborah Westphal: You can go to my website its deborahwestphal.com, and there's a little bit about me. I have continued Convergence conversations by some amazing people that I post. And then there's also access to the book, but you can also get me through LinkedIn or Twitter, or Instagram. And if you're compelled, I would love the people to just continue the conversation, I love that. 

Nikki Rogers: Great, we'll add all that information to the show notes. So, Deborah, it has been great chatting with you today and I look forward to reading more, learning more, and just keeping abreast of what you're doing. 

Deborah Westphal: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I think what you're doing here is just amazing. I've listened to your podcast and you've got some amazing guests, so I feel very honored to be one of them.

Nikki Rogers: Great. Thank you so much, Deborah. 

Deborah Westphal: Yes, thank you.