Hello everyone, I'm Andy Surwer.

I'm here with Robert Ford, CEO of Abbott Laboratories.

Robert, great to see you.

Nice to be here.

So we want to talk about leadership, and I want to start off with the heavy stuff.

You become CEO of Abbott in March of 2020, just as the COVID epidemic

is sweeping across the globe. Tell us what leadership skills you brought to bear to address this.

Well, I mean, it's, it's, first of all, I think, yeah, I get asked this question quite a bit sometimes, right?

And I'd say it's good to take over a company that's in good, strong shape the way Abbott was.

So that makes, I think that makes a difference.

The other thing is that I think there was, it was pretty level set.

I don't think there was, like, if you're a new CEO or a CEO that's been there for 10, 15 years,

I mean, everybody was level set in the same playing field.

Nobody could go back.

Oh, remember what happened 20 years ago when we had this, right?

So everybody was kind of trying to do the same thing.

I think that for me, one of the things that I wanted to do was to

kind of re-engage the employees and quite frankly, a lot of our customers, too, in the sense that

sometimes we take for granted what we do as healthcare companies and people that work in healthcare. And I just, that was one of the things that I want, I took advantage

is to really re-engage the employees to say, hey, this is what Abbott is built for, right?

I mean, we were the company that developed the first HIV tests, we were, you know, had huge

efforts in producing penicillin in World War II. So this is another

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