Learning and earning: The bold moves that change careers

| Podcast

Corporate attrition persists, but one way to win employees back is to develop their knowledge, attributes, experiences—in short, their human capital. But how? How can companies determine what’s best for employees? How much value can greater internal mobility among workers create? McKinsey partners Anu Madgavkar and Bill Schaninger, coauthors of the recent report Human capital at work: The value of experience, join McKinsey Global Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly on this episode of The McKinsey Podcast to answer these and other questions.

First up, though, McKinsey partner Josh Katz shares a quick update with McKinsey executive editor Roberta Fusaro on the status of global food inflation and its effects on business.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

Roberta Fusaro: Josh, a few months ago, we talked about how the war in Ukraine was increasing the risk of a global food crisis. What’s the latest? Has that come to pass?

Josh Katz: We are still in the midst of a food crisis that will have multiyear implications. We need to be aware of that. That being said, from where we were a few months ago to where we are today, some of the indicators have gotten better. Specifically, this has shown up in grain prices, which signals how dire the situation potentially is and how short we might be.

Back in February, there was a point when wheat prices were up about 60 percent. Now they’ve come down to about 20 percent, up from where they were in February. Corn prices were up about 30 percent at one point. And now they’re up about 20 percent. That’s not to say we’re out of the woods by any means, but it is a more positive outlook on where food prices have landed and therefore on how many people will be able to afford their food.

I’m still quite concerned about where we’ll be in the next several months, especially for countries that are reliant on food aid or for countries where many millions of people are going to face a financial crisis caused by the rise in food prices. That is absolutely still ahead of us. It is absolutely still ahead of us that farming is going to be challenged in parts of the world for the next several years, particularly as input prices are likely to remain high.

Let’s also remember that the inflation issue certainly predated the war in Ukraine. I just looked at the US food inflation numbers the other day: we were up in Q3 and Q4 of last year quite significantly in the food and beverage categories. That inflation did accelerate through the crisis, but we were already at levels that we hadn’t seen in about a decade in those quarters.

Roberta Fusaro: What do we know about how the trend is unfolding globally?

Josh Katz: Unfortunately, in the countries that are already feeling food crises, the war in Ukraine exacerbates them. It’s an affordability issue. In poorer countries, more of the wallet and the income that folks earn goes into food. So when food prices go up significantly, it’s an even bigger squeeze on them than it would be otherwise.

That’s not to say that this won’t be challenging for many across the globe, but I think that on a sheer numbers basis, and the extremes of the pain that is being felt, this will unfortunately fall disproportionately on countries where a significant amount of the population is already struggling.

In Ukraine, there are estimates that point to something like eight million acres of arable land has been lost through the conflict and potentially more because of shells that remain in fields. This means we’ll have a shortage of what comes from Ukraine in the next few years.

Roberta Fusaro: How can leaders respond, or how are they already responding to these shocks?

Josh Katz: In the very short term, we need to make sure that the harvested grain can get to market. That means finding creative ways to make sure that the grain that’s in Ukraine can get out. We’re seeing remarkable progress on that despite the ports being quite restricted. I think some of the reasons why the crop prices have come down have been due to the creativity of people for getting the grain out of the country.

Another strategy to help in the short term has involved several countries: about 20 so far have imposed some form of trade or export restrictions, which takes some flexibility out of the system. In the short term, those restrictions add challenges to moving grain around the world as we need to, so we’ll see if some of those come off to help the system more broadly.

As we look past this season, what we are going to have to figure out is how to make up for what’s missing from a more average production in Ukraine. We should recognize that the agriculture system is quite impressive in that, almost every year, there’s some form of a shock to that system. It’s a drought in one place. It’s another challenge to production in a different place. The system itself has historically become better at managing the fact that there are parts of the world that have challenges, and, frankly, trade has been a big part of that.

There are some concrete measures that we can look at in the medium term and questions we should ask ourselves: Are we incentivizing the planting of the right crops and food stuff crops? How are we actually using our conservation programs? How are we thinking about biofuels as part of the agricultural system?

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Roberta Fusaro: In the long term, what kind of resiliencies are we looking at?

Josh Katz: We have an opportunity to look for productivity in an even broader set of crops. If we think about adding resilience to the system or just adding supply, having better varieties and better technologies across a broad set of crops, including wheat, would make a significant difference here.

Roberta Fusaro: How hard is it to get people to move away from this small set of crops or the parameters that they’re working under now?

Josh Katz: People have been looking at technologies that apply broadly across crops more easily or other soil amendments, which almost inherently helps add potential to other crops.

It is happening naturally, and the nature of the technologies that are on the horizon just need to be commercialized to help with that. I’m optimistic about where we are going.

It will also take farmer education and farmer incentives, because farmers are the best in the world at managing their land and their balance sheet. So asking them to do something differently is a very high bar. If you’re essentially betting your income every year on how you farm and what you farm, you would certainly want to be very convinced that what you’re being asked to do differently is going to work. And I think part of the challenge is that these are slow-moving changes, and there are good reasons as to why they can be slow moving.

Roberta Fusaro: So will the farming industry need to pull in nontraditional sources of talent?

Josh Katz: In the developing world, it’s unclear how folks will view the opportunity on the farm versus in urban areas. On the one hand, on the farm is becoming increasingly exciting as technology and opportunity expands because of connectivity.

On the other hand, we’re still at a point in most of the developing world where urbanization is a primary driver of where people choose to live and where they choose to work. So we’ll have that tension to sort through.

Roberta Fusaro: Thinking about the next potential crisis, how can stakeholders be better prepared?

Josh Katz: There are a number of inherent challenges in the agricultural system to creating resiliency. While I think we’ve addressed many of them, the system will continue to evolve.

First of all, a number of our key inputs, as we’ve learned in this crisis, are concentrated in a few places around the world. In this case, it’s a potash question more than anything else. We have to recognize that and know how we can manage it.

We have also moved toward relatively concentrated production of certain grain. In the case of the war in Ukraine, the scramble has been around sunflower and wheat.

The other is, as you get further down the value chain and as we get into processing, there are elements that are relatively concentrated. People probably don’t consider the baby food crisis part of an agricultural element, but I think it’s a decent analogy here. We had one plant go down, which caused an entire crisis across the United States. So there are vulnerabilities associated with the concentration at certain steps of the value chain.

And then the other thing, which we haven’t talked about, is the twin climate and nature crises. We are going to see more frequent droughts in many parts of the world. We’re going to face risks from biodiversity or water shortages. I’m not sure we’ve fully recognized how severe those are. That means that the overall system has to be more resilient because we’re going to face different types of crises with more frequency.

Roberta Fusaro: You’ve listed a number of challenges. What can key stakeholders do next? What do leaders need to do next?

Josh Katz: First, I’m optimistic about the innovation that’s coming to this space and has been for the last several years. We’ve moved from a relatively small set of incredible innovators to a relatively broad set of incredible innovators that bring ideas from a whole host of industries to agriculture, which has been very exciting. I think the net result of that is we’ll become less reliant on a particular region or a particular type of input or a particular crop, or even a particular protein source.

We have so much innovation occurring that as it improves productivity, improves diversity, and allows us to grow food in different ways, it will help us quite a bit. A more resilient system should also have a longer-term view of our soil and our water and our land that we’re utilizing to produce the grain.

Part of that resilience is going to be investing in ensuring we have healthy soil, sufficient water, and sufficient biodiversity such that we are not trying to correct immediate problems, but we’ve built up an agricultural balance sheet of the planet that works well for us for the next several generations.

Defining and accumulating human capital

Lucia Rahilly: Bill, your research grapples with human capital, which, as a term, can risk feeling a bit mechanical and dehumanizing. What is at the heart of human capital?

Bill Schaninger: Human capital encompasses a person’s knowledge, skills, attributes, experiences, and health. Typically, health is not included in the definition of human capital. However, we added it to ours because we were looking at it across multiple countries and a broad range of people. We thought it was important to ask, “Are you healthy enough to deliver on your knowledge, skills, attributes, and experiences?”

Lucia Rahilly: Anu, human capital must be a tremendous source of value, not just for organizations and for economies, but for individuals. What did the research reveal about how we as individuals accumulate human capital throughout our working lives?

Anu Madgavkar: Human capital is essentially the potential of human beings to be productive. We found that this process of accumulation happens throughout life, and starts in early childhood. People accumulate a large amount of human capital abilities through education, but then through work experience, people learn to do new things, so they continue to accumulate human capital: they acquire new skills and find new ways to deploy those skills.

Almost half of a worker’s lifetime earnings are attributable to the skills that they acquire through work experience. Therefore, human capital is intimately connected with the whole experience of being in the workforce and working with other people.

One of the most surprising findings was that human capital is closely related to change, dynamism, and mobility, moving to new roles, performing new tasks, and learning new skills.

Almost half of a worker’s lifetime earnings are attributable to the skills that they acquire through work experience.

Anu Madgavkar

Changing roles isn’t anything new

Lucia Rahilly: Right now we are in the throes of a very tight labor market, very high churn, as we know from McKinsey’s Great Attrition/Great Attraction research, as well as BLS [US Bureau of Labor Statistics] data and other stats. Did we learn anything new or surprising in this research about why folks are changing jobs?

Anu Madgavkar: We found that change is a feature of the labor market that precedes the Great Resignation. The Great Resignation highlights this process. But when we looked at the work histories of roughly four million workers across multiple countries, we found that, on average, people change their roles every two to four years.

Of those role moves, 80 percent are between organizations, meaning that people leave their current organization and move to somewhere else. And that’s because in the process of change, people find that they can perform new roles and learn new skills.

Our research around the Great Attrition/Great Attraction suggests that career development is an important, but less-well-understood, motivation for why people are quitting even now. They do want to advance.

Bill Schaninger: Companies can create new opportunities and new roles just by asking, “OK, what adjacent skills does the person have?”

The essence of this question is that some company is going to take advantage of the existing skills the person has, knowing the skills can be grown over time through experience. Why wouldn’t the organization that currently has them as an employee be looking to grow their skills?

This ties in with the Great Attrition/Great Attraction because there’s a real opportunity for organizations to say, “We want to be an academy company. We want you to continue acquiring and growing new skills.”

Bold moves lead to upward mobility

Lucia Rahilly: So gaining work experience is instrumental to growing our human capital, and mobility is vital to gaining work experience. What do we know about the folks who are changing jobs in the ways that most positively affect their human capital?

Anu Madgavkar: We found that roughly a third of workers in most of the countries we looked at had very successful, upwardly mobile career trajectories—one, two, or three income brackets higher.

Those who were upwardly mobile had pursued mobility, but with stretch roles and stretch skills, meaning they moved into jobs and roles that were adjacent, but still represented maybe up to 40 percent nonoverlapping new and different skills that they hadn’t deployed or exercised in their previous role.

We call that “boldness of moves.” And it’s the boldness of role moves that’s a really important part of the story of possibility. It’s important to enable more workers to break out of what they might have thought was their destiny simply because of the level of education that they had. It doesn’t have to be the case. You can defy the odds if you yourself, as well as your employer, encourage you to make those bold moves.

The cohorts who leave that for later or don’t make any bold moves at all have a very different path and trajectory. You can think about how the experiences of individuals vary based on their openness to doing this early on in their career versus later, and then more frequently versus not at all.

Bill Schaninger: But the willingness of people to try that is a personality component here, which is “openness to experience.” There are people who shrink away from what we call “bold moves” because they’ll recognize what they’ve done previously and what’s coming in front of them. And it might just appear a little risky to take on the new tasks and challenges.

Anu Madgavkar: There are personal choices, personal qualities, and risk-taking abilities that influence this. We also found that organization context matters. Some organizations are just better at unlocking these possibilities for workers.

We studied this in a way that actually measured how companies invest in training, how much they invest in training, and how much they focus on internal role mobility to open up opportunities for their workers within their own companies. Then we looked at how good they are in building overall organizational health and a positive culture.

We found through these work histories that people who’d had the exposure to high-performing organizations early on in their career were actually more likely to be able to be upwardly mobile and to take advantage of those opportunities in the future. So the onus is equally on individuals, but equally on employers to create the conditions that help and enable the whole process of learning through work experience.

Lucia Rahilly: Could you give us an example of the difference that experience and bold moves might make for folks who begin their career at roughly the same starting point?

Anu Madgavkar: Take the story of two people who joined architecture firms, for example. Both individuals come in with a certain set of trainings and credentials based on their education, but one person joins a firm where work processes are quite traditional: they do good work, but you don’t really have an opportunity to learn, for example, how to use new digital tools in the process of architecture. Whereas the other person moves into a more tech-savvy firm where some of those new tools and techniques are put to work. And that person learns those skills.

The second person may also have opportunities to get involved in client development and learn the front end of what it means to be successful: [that person can learn] how you actually sell your services to clients potentially by accompanying a senior partner and going with them on a client call.

That sets up the second person to then move on and take on positions of greater responsibility where both the new tools and techniques as well as the softer skills that they’ve acquired are put to work.

Assessing human capital

Lucia Rahilly: How do we measure an individual’s human capital?

Anu Madgavkar: We’ve estimated lifetime earnings for individuals based on their past work history and their current occupation, and looking at salary growth data across national statistics as well and mapping that back. But crucially, and perhaps for the first time, we’ve come up with a methodology to attribute earnings to the skills that are actually put to work in each role and each job that the person plays.

So we’re then able to bifurcate the skills into, “How much of your earnings came because of entry-level skills that you had when you entered the workforce? Versus, how much did you actually start earning because of new skills you acquired while at work?”

Bill Schaninger: It was a fascinating breakdown of the data when you just look at what was contributed by each and what was new. Sometimes people ask us, “Well, is human capital compensation?” No, compensation is the marker of what the market wants to pay for and how it’s realized over time.

Lucia Rahilly: But many people who are starting out are not going to have either the credentials or the working experience to attract job offers from those employers. Is it realistic to suggest that particular path? Or does something need to change in order for more folks to have access to those talent incubators and for this to have positive impact at scale?

Bill Schaninger: As you were asking the question I was thinking, “Wow, we’re smack in the middle of the equitable-access question there.” Companies that are run better do better on this. The more that we’re in a talent crunch, the more companies have to think differently about sourcing. The more they’re thinking differently about sourcing, they’re thinking more expansively about not just, “Oh, do you have the degree? Or what schools did you come from?”

They are looking for an opportunity to say, “This person could conceivably develop these skills. This person could conceivably do this.” “OK, we can take some bets here.” So I think it’s a wonderful opportunity in terms of the equitable-access part. Because organizations, perhaps backed into a corner but perhaps just of their own orientation, are saying, “We’re going to give a broader aperture here and make it more available.” The environment we’re in has really exacerbated this.

Anu Madgavkar: Yeah, I think there’s a real tailwind now in terms of this shift that organizations are making to view people in terms of their potential and not just typecast them into what you think they’re capable of because of what they’re currently doing. That tailwind is because of the labor market tension at the moment where quit rates are high, vacancy rates are high, and companies are desperate, as Bill said.

I think the other really interesting thing that we found was that there were a lot of midsized and smaller companies in our data set that actually were good at not limiting their perception of their employees’ capabilities. And size, therefore, is not the only predictor of how good a company will be for your career.

But it’s not transparent to employees who are looking around and thinking about their career moves as to what role your prospective employer can actually play for you. The more that companies are more transparent about how they’re doing this well and what outcomes they’re able to deliver to people, the better it is. The matching process would be better with more information.

Bill Schaninger: There is something here for organizations and individual managers to get comfortable with the idea that they’re going to support employees taking on different roles, either within an organization or outside the organization, comfort in knowing that excellent people always have excellent opportunities.

But if you’re viewed as a facilitator of that, you will have more people knocking on the front door, and then more people looking for those opportunities. It becomes a virtuous cycle like the classic idea of an academy company.

I do think the role of the organization here and individual leaders is not to covet and control talent but to acquire it and develop it and make it as brilliant and shiny as possible and know that a good number of their employees are going to leave.

That mindset, I think, is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of scarcity, when you would think the opposite would be true. They would hold on and not let anybody go. And I think that would be the mistake.

So I love the idea that we have these smaller companies in there that we look at and say, “There’s a mindset here around the brilliance of the individual and helping develop it and hone it and make them shine as bright as they possibly can and keep that going, right?”

Smaller companies can stimulate talent too

Lucia Rahilly: Bill, I think what you’re saying is that employers become talent magnets when they are also talent accelerators, right? But to Anu’s point about smaller companies, it feels like becoming an academy company requires access to a lot of resources. How does this work, Anu, in the context of start-ups or smaller brands, as you mentioned?

Anu Madgavkar: There’s all kinds of talent acceleration that’s possible. And we find that some of the most effective ways to accelerate talent is learning through coaching and apprenticeship on the job. Smaller companies that may not be able to invest in a lot of more structured learning opportunities can still deliver a lot of hands-on, on-the-job training.

And the fact that many of these might be quite flat in terms of organizational layers means that people in teams get the opportunity to work with very talented and more experienced individuals in a real-time, hands-on, personalized way.

That’s an unparalleled learning experience. So I would argue in fact that for larger organizations, part of the magic they have to create is: How do you marry the structured learning with that feeling of working in a really flat, small team where you learn dynamically by working closely with very talented and more experienced individuals?

Don’t box in your employees

Lucia Rahilly: Suppose I’m a leader and I’m operating in this super tight labor market. What are some concrete steps that I can take to become a talent magnet and better increase the value of the human capital in my organization?

Bill Schaninger: One of the important things for them to do is have a good handle on the skills that their current employees possess, what their potential might really be, and actually invest in it. Sometimes I think we pigeonhole people.

The first way is being a little more expansive in your thinking about what that person’s potential and capacity actually are. The second thing is thinking about who you can attract up front, and who you would hire might also need a similar push on expansiveness.

Again, Lucia, we were talking about equitable access. In professional services and consulting, we used to think you had to have an MBA. Less than half of the people for us have MBAs now. And one of the things we did was hire clever people and did our own mini-MBA program to give them a basic jumping-off point.

We’ll trust that things like apprenticeship, mentorship, and training on the job will enhance their skills. Not everyone’s going to make it. But a lot will. And some are going to really thrive. There’s a way that you make it part of everyone’s daily life that they see people changing jobs internally on a regularly rapid basis.

You shouldn’t have someone in a role for ten, 12, 15 years. That’s counter to what we’re talking about. Dynamism in talent matters quite a bit, so people can see that you’re committed to it, especially in times of scarcity.

The thing that we keep talking over is mentorship, apprenticeship, and coaching. Who are we relying on? We’re relying on people leaders. We’re relying on middle managers. We’re relying on people who have the opportunity to really shape this person’s career.

So the quality of those people providing the apprenticeship, the coaching, and the mentorship matters massively—organizations thinking about who they put in those roles, not in controlling activity but in growing the next generation of employees, in growing the next generation of leaders. I think what we’re talking about here is a much more expansive view of what individuals are capable of.

Dynamism in talent matters quite a bit, so people can see that you’re committed to it, especially in times of scarcity.

Bill Schaninger

In India, experience is more valuable than education

Lucia Rahilly: What did the research show about geographic variation? Did the value of experience differ by country?

Anu Madgavkar: The value of experience did differ by country. We studied four countries in depth, three more-advanced economies: the US, the UK, and Germany, where the value of experience was between 40 percent and 45 percent of lifetime earnings, so roughly half.

We also studied a developing economy, India, where the value of experience was almost 60 percent. It was higher than in the other countries. And we believe that’s because the value of experience is greater for workers who have lower levels of educational attainment, because most of what they learn then is on the job. And their prospects depend on what they learn on the job. That structural difference between these two kinds of countries does explain a lot of that variation in the value of experience.

Leaders must discover their staff’s unrevealed talents

Lucia Rahilly: It can be difficult for companies just to create an inventory of current skills. How can leaders illuminate otherwise latent potential among their staff?

Bill Schaninger: One of the obvious ones is just remember all the way back at the beginning, how did we measure it? Knowledge, skills, attributes, experiences. Sometimes the best thing you can do is really challenge how many of those are actually necessary.

You don’t want to anchor in bias and say, “Oh, they have to come from an Ivy League school. They have to come from engineering, right, in which case you’ll get a significantly disproportionate number of white men with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] degrees, right?”

It’s important to ask, “What really matters?” We can hire people with all sorts of degrees—for example, someone with a master of fine arts. But if a potential hire is clever, passionate, and a participant, leadership has the opportunity to see them as a good fit. People who are hiring must think more broadly about what they actually need for an open position, particularly when it comes to knowledge, instead of defining a person’s value based on their degree alone.

It’s a barrier to entry for people to get in. You know, architects, accountants, doctors, all those jobs where you have to have both a degree and a license had made it historically difficult to get into those. What we’re suggesting is: even in the absence of that, a lot of employers can find and go beyond the usual suspects, to find real potential.

Anu Madgavkar: Most leaders don’t have a granular idea of the skills their workers possess. And there isn’t much visibility into what else people might do outside of their day job, the kinds of initiatives or task forces or contributions that they’re making outside even their formal role.

But we see some encouraging examples where, on top of understanding what skills workers may be capable of, companies are offering career counseling advice or support to employees to help leaders say, “OK, here’s what you do today. But this is perhaps what you could think about doing going forward.” So being very proactive about that is the other muscle that some companies are starting to build.

Lucia Rahilly: On the point of staying committed in times of scarcity, it’s tough for managers. Hiring is risky. It’s imprecise. So managers must be loath to introduce even greater mobility into the mix. If that’s right, what should companies be thinking about in terms of changing incentives? How should companies help managers navigate that?

Bill Schaninger: Companies have to stay the course. As soon as you start thinking about you, “How am I going to hit my numbers? How is my unit going to hit its numbers?” As soon as you start optimizing for you, you’re no longer optimizing for the enterprise of other people. And it will show.

I used to work at a residential psychiatric-treatment center, and I really liked the idea that my assistant, after nine months, was going to be pulled to run the next unit. I had peers who asked me, “Why do you keep looking for your people to be promoted?” I said, “Well, I view that as saying that (a) I’m better, and (b) people want to come to my unit.” You could say it was altruistic. Or it could be just that I wanted to be known as the person who grew supervisors.

I do think this is as much a mindset for leaders as anything else—I want to be the finishing school, or I want to be the person who grows and unlocks new opportunities. We have to embed that, the idea that talent is going to come in, and talent is going to go out. And, ideally, when they go they’re a whole lot better and they have more opportunities.

Lucia Rahilly: Nevertheless, if your best employees are routinely leaving, development and learning become not just more vital but much more capacity intensive for managers. How does this increased focus on development change the manager’s portfolio? And what needs to happen there to enable it?

Bill Schaninger: You could argue they should do their job. If you were to think about where their time should be spent, is it best spent on feeding the machine, on bureaucracy, on administrivia, or on presiding? Or should it be understanding the talent they have and providing real apprenticeship, mentorship, and coaching? I would argue this just forces the hand of the leaders into focusing their time on what really matters.

Lucia Rahilly: We spoke on one of the episodes of the McKinsey Talks Talent podcast about talent marketplace platforms. Would an internal talent marketplace be helpful here?

Bill Schaninger: I’d say an unequivocal yes. At the core of the marketplace, Lucia, is this idea of match. How much do you match the new skills and what can be expected? And then filling in the gap is what you get from the experience of doing the role and/or coming from your colleagues and the leader.

Anu Madgavkar: I think it’s a really big part of addressing the information asymmetry. It can help workers discover new things that they want to do. But it can also, of course, help the company figure out where to source internally without having to look outside.

Fresh, on-the-job experience leads to advancement

Lucia Rahilly: Before we close, let’s shift perspectives back from the employer to the individual. Any final messages for individuals who are looking to realize their potential for learning, for earnings, for human capital generally?

Anu Madgavkar: Particularly for those who are in the early stages of their career, viewing work experience as a way to learn new things, even if that means a short-term or a temporary perceived trade-off in terms of your salary or what feels more like a lateral move rather than an upward move.

But if it’s a bold move, chances are that it will set you up for higher momentum going forward. And the going-forward part of the story is huge. Half of all your earnings, two-thirds of all your wealth as an individual through your lifetime, will come from tapping into human capital that you possess, that you have control over for the rest of your life. Have that forward-looking mindset and explore those bold moves.

Bill Schaninger: We would not have guessed that the data on experience would be as profound as it is. In some of our earliest conversations, there was this wonderful moment. We were wrestling with, “The die doesn’t have to be cast when you’re 22 or when you’re 18. And that doesn’t have to be: This is it. That you’re tapped out. You’re going to be this thing. And you’re never going to have any other opportunities.”

There was a wonderful realization that there’s still a role here for human ingenuity, human motivation, the desire to reach.

If you’re willing to bet on you and be thoughtful about the conditions for success and where you’re going to go, wow, what an outsize impact that will have on the rest of your life. And it’s not that your earnings are the rest of your life. But it’s the experiences, the people you meet, the network you grow. Boy, does that have an impact. And so there, I loved the idea that the kids who came from a poor family and couldn’t go to school right away, or the kids who maybe were a little longer on the maturation curve, before they got it together would still get there. It may take a little while for people to get going. I think that’s wonderful. And it doesn’t have to be just a small set who have it nailed and then they’re anointed from day one.

Lucia Rahilly: Fantastic. Let’s close there. Bill and Anu, thanks so much for joining us today.

Bill Schaninger: Thank you. This was great fun.

Anu Madgavkar: It was great to be here. Thanks, Lucia.

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