A new blueprint for cost-out leadership
Cost out is no longer just about reducing spend. In this session, Niklas and Rikke explore how leaders can turn cost out into a long term discipline that strengthens organisations, builds financial literacy and creates stronger ownership across teams. Viewers will gain practical perspectives on leading change with both speed and decency.
Why cost out needs a new blueprint
Cost out is moving from a crisis response to a strategic leadership discipline. In a world shaped by uncertainty, AI disruption and changing business demands, organisations need a more sustainable way to manage cost while strengthening long term competitiveness and growth.
The leadership opportunity in cost out
Leadership is often underrepresented in cost out programmes. Niklas and Rikke explain how leaders can create ownership, strengthen financial literacy and avoid the toxic side effects that emerge when employees feel excluded or disconnected from change.
Creating sustainable transformation
A successful cost out effort is not only about cutting expenses. It is also about building healthier operating models, stronger collaboration and lasting behavioural change. The session shares practical examples of how organisations can design cost out with greater transparency, agency and impact.
A new blueprint for cost-out leadership
Cost out is no longer just about reducing spend. In this session, Niklas and Rikke explore how leaders can turn cost out into a long term discipline that strengthens organisations, builds financial literacy and creates stronger ownership across teams. Viewers will gain practical perspectives on leading change with both speed and decency.
Why cost out needs a new blueprint
Cost out is moving from a crisis response to a strategic leadership discipline. In a world shaped by uncertainty, AI disruption and changing business demands, organisations need a more sustainable way to manage cost while strengthening long term competitiveness and growth.
The leadership opportunity in cost out
Leadership is often underrepresented in cost out programmes. Niklas and Rikke explain how leaders can create ownership, strengthen financial literacy and avoid the toxic side effects that emerge when employees feel excluded or disconnected from change.
Creating sustainable transformation
A successful cost out effort is not only about cutting expenses. It is also about building healthier operating models, stronger collaboration and lasting behavioural change. The session shares practical examples of how organisations can design cost out with greater transparency, agency and impact.
View transcript
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our On Point called A New Blueprint for Cost Out Leadership. We're super excited not only to have you invited for this morning session, but also to be able to start up a conversation about how might leadership need to look like in order to get the sustainability of the Cost Out programs that we have in our organizations. I'm not alone. I have you, Niklas, with me today. Yes. Will you say a little bit about who you are? I will. I was going to say good to see you all, but I can't actually see you, but I'm glad you're here. I'm Niklas. I have been a consultant for most of my adult life, so the past 20 years with Implement. And for the past many years, I've been heading up the strategy and M&A team. So I work with strategy in all sorts and shapes. And I typically say I spend 50% of my time in private equity. And who are you? Yes, I am Rikke. I'm your colleague. I'm also a partner in Implement. And I've been here also for 20 years. I'm heading up the leadership practice and also work a lot with implementing strategy and getting the most out of our transformations when the responsibility mainly lies on the shoulders of all the good leaders we have in our organizations. And so it's not by coincidence that it's the two of us that you are looking at right now, because the agenda that we've put together is also something that we've been looking very much forward to, because the idea about the cost out as a concept is, I think, on many people's agenda right now and probably also on your agenda since you are dialing in. So the cost out has for many years been a big part of the way that we do organizations. It's always a good idea to be conscious about the cost. And then we must also say that throughout the last year, we in Implement have been, you know, putting our heads together, thinking out. So these cost out programs that we are designing, could they be done in a different way? And we have the luxury and also the privilege of being a quite broad organization. So, you know, ranging from everything to how does the operating model need to look like when we are in a cost out kind of, you know, phase or in the new cost out, how the new operating model, how will that need to look like? You know, the design of the cost out program, how should that be done? And also, you know, to gain the real benefit or the sustainability, which is the agenda for today, also the leadership opportunity that that also carries with it. Because I think that and I'm not maybe rushing myself here, but I'm thinking that leaders need to play a different role in the cost out programs because the challenge that organizations face will need to be carried in a new way by leaders. And that's what we're calling the leadership opportunity. So basically, that was a long fly in on the agenda. But basically what we want to say is that we want to share with you our thinking about cost out and also how leaders need to seize this opportunity in a new way. Yes. And that will end at 945. Yes, it will. And before we get going, as you said, we take it for granted that since you are dialing in, you are either in the middle of a cost out process, you're maybe beginning one or you've just concluded one. And so we take that for granted that that's why you're here. But we want to kick us off with one question related to the cost out process you're either in the middle of or beginning or wherever you are. And that's this one. So what is your biggest leadership challenge in cost out? If you look at what you're in sort of in the middle of right now, we're going to give you a couple of minutes to answer that question in the chat. We're going to put on a little bit of music in a second. And we want we want you to do that also because then we'll have the chance to address some of that as we move through the 45 minutes we have together. Before we put on the music, if you were to if you were to answer the question. Yeah, I think that when we talk about leadership challenge, I think and we'll talk much more about this during today. But I think one of the key challenges that we see is that the lack of agency for the leaders that a lot of the leaders in the organization, they feel this, I don't know, paralysis or they feel this inability to act. So, so, so, you know, empowering the leadership chain, I think is for many organizations. What I also hear from my clients saying that we need more agency, we need more empowerment, we need more ownership around these things. So I think that's for sure one of the challenges I see. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. And on that, we'll give you a couple of minutes to reflect. We'll follow here along in the chat and hopefully be able to address some of what you write throughout the session. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we're back. Thanks for the comments and do keep them coming throughout. We're reading them on the screen in front of us. And we also have Matthias, one of our colleagues sitting here next to us to let us know if there's something we should bring up. But this hopefully got us started. We will now move into a session. So obviously the focus for this session is on leading cost out. That's what you signed up for. We're going to give you a little bit of an introduction or I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction to the context and how we think about cost out in general. That has evolved a little bit, as you also alluded to, since we first started doing this many years ago. But it also goes to show that why we think that the leadership perspective is actually underrepresented in most cost out processes. So I'll take you through a couple of slides, five slides or so, ten minutes to set the scene and then we'll dive deeper into the leadership perspective after that. Okay, and I'll kick us off here. I know you may not be able to tell, but I'm old enough to have been a consultant during the financial crisis in 2008, nine ish, 20 years ago. Obviously cost out was a big topic. Back then I was fortunate enough to spend some of my time doing cost out transformations for some companies. Some made it, some didn't. I must be honest to say some actually defaulted during the financial crisis. On the back of that we wrote a book. You see it here on the left. I took a picture of my own edition back home in my shelf. It's called From A to B, Leading Strategic Transformations. And in that we defined five archetypical transformations that companies go through, one of them being a turnaround, obviously very linked to the financial crisis. And we did some of this back then. But as I also alluded to before, our thinking has evolved quite a bit since then. So fast forward to today. We are obviously not in a financial crisis mode just now. However, when we look at the business environment, we do see that there is something similar to what we experienced 20 years ago. I was just listening to a podcast the other day with some of the top CEOs in Danish business life. And they basically said that for as long as they have been CEOs, uncertainty had more or less been permanent. So we're talking supply chain disruption starting especially with COVID. Obviously geopolitical instability starting, I guess, with the war in Ukraine and Trump one and Trump two and all of that that affects everyday business life. And we don't know what's coming next. So that's one thing. The other thing that we have today that we did not have during the financial crisis is obviously AI disruption. And I think there are two elements of AI that play in here. One is AI can be disruptive. So you can actually, there's a risk your business model at its core is getting disrupted. And on the other hand, AI holds a promise of efficiency gains and a lot of potential. And those two together with the great uncertainty has put cost out on top of the agenda for many companies. So we have worked with the cost out agenda as Regge alluded to for a while, especially during the past couple of years. We've done that for large companies, small companies, many different shapes and sizes. I'm just going to anchor us in three different types of cost out processes that we have been part of recently. And these are all more or less live cases. I think either they're still ongoing or we just ended our engagement. And it goes to show that cost out can be many different things. It's not just about the turnaround situation. So the first example, this is a company in the consumer tech space. This company was actually not in a crisis mode. They were looking into a situation where the market was changing, consumer demands. Consumer demands are changing. They hadn't been looking at cost for a while. And they saw the AI thing coming and they wanted to get ahead of the curve and ahead of competition and take a long, hard look at their cost base in order to free up capital to fund their strategic journey. So this was sort of a proactive situation. Second case is in, we call it here, engineering slash manufacturing. It's a capex heavy industry. They were a little bit further on the crisis curve here. They've been experiencing growth in white collar workers especially, also relative to blue collar for a while. They had moved into being a very siloed organization. A lot of processes that were not coordinated. And they also had a little bit of a challenge with leadership and cost consciousness, if you will. So they had to act a little bit more swiftly than the consumer tech example. And the third example I brought here is, this is a turnaround situation. So this is a company in the FMCG space that has been performing poorly for many years. They are looking into markets consolidating throughout Europe. Price pressure, political pressure as well. They have an aspiration to become cost leaders because that's how you win in this kind of industry. But they're so far off that mark that they have to act now. They're also the product of a lot of acquisitions. So transparency and share processes and data, et cetera, is more or less non-existent. So for them, and they're in the middle of this now, they have to act now. So this is to the turnaround situation. So again, the point here is to show cost out can be many different things. One thing, however, that is typically something to pay attention to for all cost out processes is this. We've given it a cute consulting name. We call it the creep back curse because it sounds good. But the point is fairly evident. If you're not doing this right, you will experience that cost creeps back over three to four or five years. If you don't address sort of the root causes or you cut into something that you shouldn't have cut into or you erode the culture during the cost out. So it becomes difficult to maintain a positive momentum as a company. So this is something we always want to address. And that's what sparked our interest in saying, can we actually design cost out processes differently than what we did during the financial crisis, or at least when I first started doing this. And to do so, we've asked ourselves three questions. We've said, so what if cost out was not a one off, but a repeatable discipline, something we could do over and over again, something that was in our bone, in our processes that would enable us to create a lasting advantage. What if cost out was that and not the big splash? Secondly, what if cost out, we thought about cost out as something that is not sort of a crisis mode only, but it's something we do proactively to fund where we are going to say, okay, we want to become this kind of company, we want to make this strategic move, we need funding for that move. So we need to look at our costs continuously. What if we thought about it like that also energetically? And the last thing we ask ourselves is what if cost out was not just a CFO, CEO driven top down process that it typically is, not always, but that's what we have experienced. What if it was led by all leaders, Rege alluded to accountability and agency and we'll get back to that. What if we thought about it like that and designed the processes to cater to that? Those are the three questions we ask ourselves when we design cost out these days. And then we have, and this is going to be my last slide in the introduction, we've defined five, I'd say, guiding principles that we try to live by. And I'll share those with you and they'll lead into also why we think leadership is super important and to think deeply about how we design these processes. And I'll take them one by one. So first one is we believe that cost out has to be anchored in something long term. I talked about it just before. We need something. We need to put a stick in the ground out there and say, this is the company we want to become. We need to connect to a theory of winning or a position we want to take. And we want to do that for two reasons. One is that we don't want to cut into some of the core that should take us to that new future. We also want to do it energetically because actually having a purpose with doing cost out is just a different feeling than if you're only just trying to survive and be defensive. And it's going to create a different kind of momentum. So that's the first thing. Secondly, we want we will typically advise that you search quite a bit for the root causes. So cost when cost sort of skyrockets or grows beyond what is what is good for you. There's typically an underlying reason and you can cut costs. But if you don't address the underlying reason, then you you will see that creep back occurs very soon. What's on this slide are three examples from the turnaround case that I mentioned before. And we had a session with with management there and arrived at a conclusion that three things we needed to address also for the longer term. One being we called it a lack of respect for cash, also for cost in general, but it's specifically for cash. So nobody in the company was actually paying a lot of attention to networking capital. And if that's if you're a large company, you need to do that. Right. But so that needed to become something that we that we had focus on beyond the cost out process. Secondly, the company that I referred to is is is fairly complex. So it was the eight business units and acquisitions and all that. They had a super complicated operating model. And if they didn't address that, they would not be able to control costs on a longer term. So we needed to figure out how do we simplify our setup. And the third thing here is they were sort of they had what they called a digital deficit. Right. So they didn't have transparency. They didn't have data. They didn't have systems that talk to each other in a meaningful way. And if they don't have that transparency, you're going to see costs grow back. So how do we address the root cause is a question that we are designing into the processes. The third thing is and that speaks to what I just said is we have we have concluded that we need to make transparency, not just a means to cost cutting, but an end in itself. That means that you have to create some transparency that reaches beyond the process you are in now and enables you to manage the company also going forward. The fourth thing I want to mention, and this is something I think at least a lot of companies forget or don't see is that the best way of minimizing cost is actually to grow your top line. So that means that if you sell more, then the margins will grow and the cost base will be sort of smaller relative to your revenue. So there's a scale advantage to that. So if we can design into the cost out process something that drives a revenue boost, whether it's wind rooms or it's sales acceleration, many different shapes and forms, but it will do you good both on the numbers, but also energetically in the company and put that stick in the ground. So that's the thing that I refer to that. Okay, we are going somewhere and we're actually a successful company. We're not just trying to survive. And the last thing I want to mention here, and that's a lead into to you in a second is when you design cost out processes, you want to be quite deliberate on shaping the conversation you need to have as we put it here. So how do you bring leaders together around a conversation that is positive and does what it should do for you? And we have made three anchor points specifically. One is you want to design a conversation that is cross-cutting rather than siloed. You want to design a conversation that is long term. I spoke to that already rather than just short term. And you want to design a conversation that is filled with curiosity rather than just being defensive. So the BU head saying, I took care of my part. Now you do your stuff. We don't want to end up there because we're in this together. It's actually an opportunity and Reggie, you'll get back to that for creating a new conversation in the company. That's the end of my slideshow here. But the point here being all of these things were not something we did during the financial crisis. At least not. I did not think of this as something, you know, sort of holistic design of cost out back in 2008 and 2009. I think we've matured somewhat on that. Yeah. Yeah. Let's hope. Let's hope. At least we are standing here today trying to argue that that needs to be the case. Because just like you said, we do have an opportunity to do things differently. You know, a lot of the cost out programs are rolling in, you know, not only facilitated by AI, but also to this cost consciousness of this. You know, like it also says in the chat, we need to have a much more higher financial literacy understanding. You know, how do we make money? Do we actually understand, you know, the business models of our organization? So and we need our leaders to do that. So that carries with it an opportunity that I will try to address a little bit now. Because I think that for one of the reasons that leadership is not on your slides, Nicholas, I think is that, you know, we have a lot of stereotypes built in the organizations that leadership is not on your slides. We have a lot of stereotypes built in the organizations that leadership is, you know, down prioritized or dismissed as the soft stuff. Right. The CEO and the CFO in particular own the vocabulary in many organizations. And I think that that is why also that these stereotypes about, yeah, that the leaders, you know, we just delegate it or we just tell them what to do because it is assumed that the leaders, that they know that it is known in the organization how we do the cost out, how we actually do the cost out. How we actually implement or execute the to do's of the cost out program. Right. But I think that what we're seeing is that this assumption or this stereotypical approach to cost is creating a lot of what we call toxic side effects in our cost out program programs. Right. So that got us thinking that maybe leadership is under prioritized, maybe not by intent, but maybe just by kind of, you know, bad habit. But but but maybe if we take the leadership approach and put it in the foreground or make it the highest context of our cost out programs, then could we avoid the creep back curve? So, you know, designing our cost programs in a new way, in a different way, might give us the opportunity to, you know, put all all people on board to help us get through this cost out because a cost out program is a very, very big thing for an organization. Just, you know, the mere the mere idea of putting it on the agenda can actually create not only, you know, disturbance, you know, I don't know. I want to say shock or trauma, but those words are also extremely big. But it does something to the organization when we put cost out on the agenda, because it always comes with a promise of something has to change. I might lose a colleague that I hold dear. I might lose status that I also hold dear because something is being cut away. All right. Maybe because I think you're onto something. I think there's so so the way we think about cost out, it doesn't have to be sort of huge designed processes that sort of encapsulate the whole organization can also be smaller processes. But what it does to the organization nevertheless is that the energy and and the thinking is sort of resets and get back to that. It is an energetic impact of cost out. We're in cost out mode. It feels even though it's not necessarily the big program, right? It can be something. No. And I guess you could actually also argue like you also said on the other slide that, you know, that cost out shouldn't be kind of, you know, a pill to take or fix to do. But it should be kind of, you know, a part of the way that you operate your organization on a daily basis. Right. In your bones. In your bones. Yeah. Yeah. So. And then I think, you know, we will. We also remember this this idea about, you know, the unfreeze. So maybe there's also something about in the chat about, you know, the culture of of maintaining the culture also throughout this this cost out, because I think that, you know, it does present an unfreeze moment, because when we introduce the cost out, just like you're saying, Niklas, there's something about, you know, something goes into unfreeze. It makes it possible for us to move things around. And like it says on the slide, it reshapes meaning. It reshapes power. It reshapes relationships and routines. And it actually can change the, you know, the entire way our organization works, especially if we also, you know, change the bits and the bytes of the operating model. Right. So consequently, we have an opportunity to reignite not only leadership, but also redefine how we need to think about the cost consciousness. And this is also where we want to, you know, introduce the idea about the financial literacy, because there's something about how can we have leaders be much more financial literate? How can we have them understand how we make money, how we kind of, you know, spend our money? That's also a point about that in the chat. But there's also something about, you know, the value creation of our organization. Do I actually understand that? Not only not not alone in the C-suite, but on all the leadership levels, because that talking about conversations is also a huge conversation that we need to be able to have much more. It's not bad to talk about money, top line, bottom line, whatever it is, exactly expected that this is a big part of how we do leadership in our organization. So as a leader, you always have the prerogative to put costs on your agenda, whether it be in your project or in your team or in your unit or in your department or in your function or wherever you are in an organization. Yeah. No, no, no. No, no, no. OK. OK. So so we have an opportunity. We have an unfreeze moment. Let's make the most of that. So like I said before, we saw a few like we call toxic side effects of not putting, you know, leaders ahead of our cost program. And some of them, you already mentioned them in the chat. But I think that one key important thing is one key important thing to remember is that cost out is not just a numbers game. Cost out is not just a numbers game. And I think that is super important to remember because, you know, the name alone cost out talks to the numbers and that actually kind of, you know, it it minimizes the space that we have to act within as leaders, because we actually have a lot of power and we have a lot of, you know, agency to act in the cost out. Because if we only see the cost out as a temporary diet, like, you know, the stupid New Year's resolution, I have to weigh you have to lose five pounds. We only talk about numbers and we only talk about, you know, where to slim, where to cut. We actually risk losing the potential of the sustainable benefit that the cost out presents. And we are not able to make it into a sustainable leadership discipline. And I think that that is super important because this idea about the leadership practice that we can actually induce now that we have the opportunity. Also, because, you know, when we get a call from our clients, Nicholas, they call us up and they say, you know, we want more commercial mindset. We want more ownership. We want more kind of, you know, understanding of the value creation in our organizations. And the cost out is just such a nice lever to introduce that conversation. So don't make it about a numbers game. Also make it about a leadership practice. So that's the first toxic side effect. The conversation gets skewered in the wrong direction. Then there's something about this, the broken promise, which I actually really, really like this idea about the broken promise, because I think that when you also said it, Nicholas, the minute that we put cost out on the agenda, what happens is that we start up thinking that it's an either or game. Right. It's either you or me. You know, it's either there's also something in the chat about this. You know, it's either nothing on or all. It's either speed or decency. It's either or because it becomes so kind of, you know, scarcity carried this idea about the cost down. So the problem is that, you know, it invites into these games of territory or my new role or, you know, it changes everything. It changes the power, the dynamics, the routines and the priorities. And this game about, you know, who looks the best, who is the most mature leader, who is the best leader, who's the most executive leader, who can say cost out the most times in the meeting. Right. Because that carries with it a promise that I am the right one to kind of, you know, to take along. Right. I think also it makes me think of typically organizations have leadership principles. Yes. And when you then say cost out. Yes. It seems like all that that that that that is pushed aside because now this is a critical agenda. And then we may be a little bit more hardcore and we'll we'll leave those values by the by the wayside. The fluffy stuff. Yeah. Now we have to focus on the money. Right. So. So there's something there that also speaks to when you have that broken promise that can be the feeling that, OK, now that was apparently not important anymore. No. Or was it just a game we were playing? Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, these leadership practices, they're often often called something like, you know, collaboration or customer mindset or something like that. Right. And then that stops to be, you know, the truth. Yeah. It gets on standby or it's not important anymore. So you in the worst case, you actually risk, you know, lying to your employees. Yes. While this cost out is going on. Right. So, you know, I was promised collaboration, but right now I'm being left out. You promised me customer mindset. But right now we're only, you know, looking inside. Right. So there's something about breaking the promises that actually also, you know, I don't know, challenges the organizational identity because I actually signed up to this organization because I believed in what you promised me. Right. So, you know, and I know also maybe that's also a point that I want to make here, Niklas, that that we will be breaking promises. Yeah. And then maybe that's also kind of, you know, it's also fair, but but do it wisely. Right. And the way that you break the promise, do it intelligent. Yeah. And you can say, I think we have some slide. I don't think we've brought it, but it says something like speed and decency are not opposites. Yeah. Right. So you have to act swiftly if you're in a turnaround situation. Yeah. But, you know, you don't don't you still want to be living your values. Yeah. Yeah. And then I also said just the last point I want to make on this one is that I think that when we do kind of enter this cost out, what happens is that and I alluded to it a little before, but I think that a lot of us, I think that a lot of us leaders, you know, it could be the first time that we in a cost out program. And like I said before, that it's kind of a distributed truth that it is known that I as a leader know how to execute this cost out. Right. But I think that if I don't know that what what what my default will be, I will go back to kind of, you know, doing what I know very well, because that is my mastery, my functional expertise. So I start, you know, being much more an engineer. I start being much more a commercial wizard. I start being much more because that's kind of, you know, my functional expertise. And that's actually, you know, the exact opposite of what we want in a cost out because we want all leaders kind of to stay close to the program and understand how to lead this. So this idea about not having your leaders be masters of cost out. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a very bad idea just to put it like it is. Anyways, I'll move on. This this is what the one that I raised in the beginning of this session, the high risk for low agency. Right. Because this toxic side effect is something that I think I've seen in any cost program that I've been a part of. Right. Because the design of the cost out will typically take place in the C-suite and maybe also with the transformation office or consultant company alongside. Right. So the atmosphere or the vibe of the cost out is that this is something that is confidential. We can't say anything about it. This transparency that you invited for before is, you know, we are everything is being hidden. You know, the meetings are after 5 p.m. We see a lot of people looking like us in a consultant outfit with jackets and asking, you know, all these questions, trying to close down, closed off offices or. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you don't invite your leaders to be a part of that. The big problem is that you paralyze the bigger part of your organization. You will actually put all your leaders on the bench while this cost out program goes on, and you will actually kind of, you know, make them an audience or passengers of this cost out programs. cost-out programs. You will actually, the invitation that you extend to them is sit and wait. So the many waiting for the few. And I think that that is a huge kind of, you know, toxic side effect because you actually want your leaders to be high on agency because that will actually create the low risk. So there's something kind of, you know, counterintuitive in the way that we design cost-out programs today is that we think, shh, keep it a secret. We can communicate. Keep it confidential. Don't say anything because we fear that the wrong people will leave or that we risk kind of, you know, saying too much or that. But I think that sometimes this idea about the secret, it's an illusion. And I know, I know that there might be a market risk if you are kind of, you know, communicating, you know, to the market about A, B or C. But honestly, there's also something that you can really communicate about. So, you know, don't make it an illusion. Don't make it a distributed truth that we can't communicate because that's how it's been. I think that maybe that's the main point, to me at least. I think obviously if you are a publicly traded company and all of this, you can't go around telling secrets and you can't, you have to live up to some sort of some certain governance. So some of it will be secret. Yes. But not at all. But not all of it. And there has to be. It's not like people don't know what's going on. No. I mean, they know. So having a super stringent and clear sort of communication strategy for this and who do we involve, when do we involve them to also make leaders feel like they are part of this decision? They may not be part of every discussion. No. And maybe they'll be involved further down the line, all of this. But we're not doing this on our own in a sort of a C-suite closed forum. No. So there's something about understanding that if you actually put your leaders on the bench, you actually risk creating this kind of, you know, feeling of being, you know, victimized or being something that is something that is happening to them by someone else. And that dynamic that you create about who has the agency in your organization actually creates, I don't know, worst case skepticism or even cynicism. And you do not want cynicism in your operating system. Trust me. So, you know, for whenever you have an opportunity to involve your leaders, take that opportunity. Okay. So the fourth toxic side effect. We have, well, we have six minutes or, yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's the second founding potential. And I'll just breeze through this one, because I think that like one of the quotas that I really, really like from Jeremy Utley is that your imagination is the biggest limitation. So if you don't have the opportunity to imagine what we can do with our organization, now that we have this unfreeze moment, you're wasting a huge opportunity. So you need to understand, like, just like you were saying, the conversations that we have, don't make it only about operations. Don't make it only about the numbers. Invite for new conversations that are ambitious on behalf of your organization, because you have a second founding potential here. So understand that that is also the responsibility you have as a leader to take the conversation in that direction. Because your cost out needs to be about rethinking the organization to become simpler, stronger, and of course, more competitive. That is ultimately the goal. So the last part, and we've said this a few times, so maybe I'll just breeze through it. But there's something about making your leaders lead with financial literacy, make them understand how you create value as an organization and ingrain that in your vocabulary, have them lead with agency, provide opportunities where they're actually able for them to lead, and of course, lead with speed and decency. So we did bring that one. We did bring that one, yeah. Don't think that this is an either-or. Make them understand that these are not kind of, you know, counter-opposites. This is an expectation that you're actually able as a leader to do exactly that. So don't fall into the luxury of thinking this is an either-or. Understand that the opportunity space have to be open for a long time, and speed and decency has to be a big part, a big ingredients of this. And now we're just running around because we want to make it to the specifics. Yes, we want. Yeah. And the specifics, so now we, I think we communicated a lot of how we think about this, some principles, and, you know, opened up that, and obviously the specific design. Also given the three examples that I gave previously, can look in many different ways, depending on the context, and how severe the situation is, all of that. But we wanted to just, so the design exercises for you out there to, to run and do call us if you need help. But, but we wanted to just leave you with a few examples of how we have designed the leadership angle into, into cost-out processes in, in recent, in recent years. And, and there's no sort of magic bullet here, but, but we'll give you a few examples. First example, this is from one of the cases I mentioned previously. We did, the headline here is called leadership principles. What we actually did was we, we did a, you know, a baseline of all employees and the relationship to, to leadership. We defined new leadership principles, and we actually translated those into some day-to -day guidelines that were about cost consciousness. How do we make swift decisions? How do we own the cost? How do we make bold decisions as a, as a leadership team? So, so that was one way of addressing this. And these are not, you know, they're not exclusive or something, you can combine these, but that's one way of doing it, to work it into the leadership practice in general. The second example here is, is from the turnaround case that I talked about, this speaks a little bit to what you were saying that, you know, some of this goes on in a closed forum, at first, at, in the C-suite. But this company was very focused on actually cascading those targets for cost, cost cutting to the leadership team, to the broader leadership team. So each leader was given two, two, two targets. One being, you need to become cost leader within a couple of years. And the second one, one was you need to before the summer holiday this year, to have found X number of percent in your cost base and take that out. So that was a, more of a classic cascading of targets to create some agency and accountability on the leaders and make them be the designers of how they wanted to do it. But given some targets. And also co-responsible. Co-responsible, yes. And then the next one, I think what, what the, what was the main driver here was that we wanted to have the leaders to be kind of, you know, the ones driving the transformation. So having that, you know, conversation starting up, not only with the, with the C-suite, but actually cascading, just like you said before, but starting with the one-on-one conversations with the EBP, having a conversation about the leadership practice of how should we do this? Because the leadership practice, we didn't want to break the promises like we just talked about before, right? So we had to do it the right way, the good way, the decent way, the fast way also, right? So engaging not only with the EVPs, but actually having that, having a design flow for how we wanted to engage all the leaders to create agency and mastery around this cost out exercise and train them and also in the financial literacy, which is also the last one on the mindset and training. Because understanding how I create value in my organization is a super important, it's a super important leadership skill. Maybe down, down, prioritized, or assumed that someone, that we just know that by heart. It's not the case. No, not necessarily. And the last one, there are just a few words on that. What we did there was actually initiate, in parallel with the cost out process, and leadership training. So a little bit old school, but training in financial literacy, going through the curriculum of financial management and learning, what does the P&L look like and how do we manage cost? What about the balance sheet and how these things connected? Giving a broader set of leaders that capability in order for them to be prepared for a continuous focus on cost and cash management. It's 9.45. We're out of time. The conversation, however, is not ending. No, I think let's keep the conversation. I think we have obviously people writing in the chat here, and I think we managed to address some of it, a little bit, and some of it maybe not. But don't hesitate to reach out with questions. Shoot us an email or give us a call if you have further questions. Thank you for dialing in. Thank you for dialing in. Have a lovely day.