Thomas E. Polen
Management
Yes. Thank you for the questions. So when it comes to the CFO search, continue that is well underway, and we will look forward to providing an update when that is complete. In the meanwhile, of course, Vitor is doing a great job stewarding the company and obviously doing a great job here on the call. So more to come on that. But we are running a thoughtful process focused on, you know, continuity of execution and financial discipline. And obviously, it's a really important moment in the company's evolution, and we are going to make sure we get the right person there. When it comes to upsides, guidance for the year, look, again, we are really pleased with how we started the year. As we think about the areas that we are investing behind, those areas of high growth and higher margin urinary incontinence, pharmacy automation, connected care, APM. Tissue regeneration, biologics, right? Those are the areas that we are putting our investments behind, both commercially and disproportionately from an R&D perspective. And so those are areas that could be natural areas of opportunity for us. I think, you know, as Mike Feld now also as chief revenue officer, who's been running the Life Science segment, essentially as of today. He's now full-time in that role. We see opportunity the reason we created that role, it's never existed in the history of Becton, Dickinson and Company, is we have been very good commercially. You do not get to our category-leading shares in 90% of the markets in which we compete without being good commercially. We think there's another level of performance that we can reach, just like we have always been good operationally. But we are reaching and we are executing at levels that we have never executed at before operationally. We view that same opportunity exists commercially, and when we execute that, that will deliver higher growth. We are convinced of that. And so more to come there. As Mike's now fully in that role, we will provide more exposure to our investors on the programs that he's executing. It not only has to do with sales force expansion, but we have changed compensation plans for our selling organization around the world going into this year. We are putting in new tech stacks for our sales teams to help them be more effective. We are optimizing our management systems and processes with our selling organization, and Mike's leading that, working with our teams around the world. So, again, like we have seen in operations, we believe that there are opportunities, meaningful opportunities, to help accelerate growth as well through that commercial excellence and complementing that with our innovation pipeline, the growth areas that we have been focusing on and, of course, complementary tuck-in M&A over time as well. So thanks for the question, Rick.