In some ways I was lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do for a living since I was 9 years old.
In Grade 5, my primary school teacher introduced the concept of investing in shares to our class. Looking back, I’m sure he was an investor, if not a gambler, himself. One day he brought a newspaper into the classroom and opened it on the page where all of the current share prices are listed. He explained that you could buy a ‘share’ and be a part owner of some of the largest companies in Australia, for an amount of money as little as a few cents. He went on to say how the price of these shares changed each day, along with the success (or otherwise) of the company. If you made good investment decisions, your shares would rise in value, and your fifty cent shares might suddenly be worth seventy cents, or more!
I was hooked.
That evening I explained my discovery to my parents, and they told me that my great grandfather owned shares in a few companies. From that day on, I followed those companies’ performance in the newspaper, and I read everything I could find about personal finance. In those days, Amazon.com wasn’t a thing, so I had to import books on investing from overseas in order to learn about personal finance and investment strategies. For the next decade I would regularly travel to the city to visit the stock exchange and buy specialist investment books. At secondary school, I was able to organise work experience with one of the largest stockbrokers in the industry and continued reading and learning about investing and personal finance. In the middle of a sharemarket boom, they were very exciting times.
Having to wait a decade before I could be a part of the personal finance industry, I decided to look for work before studying at university.
Thankfully, my first job was with a truly amazing company, being the one that was considered the leading company in the local investment banking industry.
I would be forever grateful to have worked at this organisation as my first full-time job for many reasons. Primarily, it is because the contrast between organisations I would later work for would be so stark. Those differences included areas such as an organisational culture which supported true innovation, a strong work ethic, the value of relationships, risk taking, high performing teams and so on. Most companies these days proclaim that they excel in all of these aspects, though few genuinely do. Had I began working for almost any of their competitors, I would never have realised just what is possible in a high performing organisation.
Realising their people were their greatest asset, they went to great lengths to hire the best and brightest people. For many, this involved a gruelling process constituting multiple interviews, psychological assessments, and behavioural based interview techniques. Once hired they took great care in developing their people.
While I didn’t work in the larger head office, there were a few hundred employees in my office, and even the lowest ranked employee of the firm would feel comfortable in approaching the CEO and having a chat. Surprisingly, there was little to no politics within the company despite the majority of the employees having exceptionally high IQs and being paid very high salaries and bonuses. If you had a good idea, it would be listened to and actioned, regardless of your job title. Everyone’s contribution to the firm was genuinely valued because management knew that the best ideas could come from anywhere.
By contrast, in many organisations I would later work with, the leaders thought that they need to be the source of all ideas and that they understand all aspects of the business better than the people actually working day-to-day in those functions.
Later, this organisation would acquire the second company I would work with, one that had industry leading performance in their asset management business. That company hired similarly bright people; however, their organisational culture was one of high competitiveness and politics. Reading about that acquisition many years later, it was suggested that one of the biggest challenges they experienced in integrating that company into their business was the politics and competition that existed within culture of the asset management business.
In summary, the company found the brightest people they could, put them in groups with others of a similar intellect, and had supported them with a very unique organisational culture. I would describe that as being one where ideas were freely exchanged and controlled risk taking was encouraged. Apart from the corporate side of the business, which legally needed to be sectioned off to ensure client confidentiality, the office was open-plan in order to facilitate the development of relationships and the free exchange of ideas across business units.
Unlike with most companies, if you made a ‘mistake’ because you took a controlled risk, you weren’t penalised should it not pay off. It takes enormous leadership maturity to hold this stance. Most companies penalise those who make mistakes, even if they were good ideas given the available information at the time. As such most companies create a culture of fear, protection, blaming, and one where people don’t or are afraid to take risks. These organisations can never lead an industry. Paradoxically, by trying to do the impossible (avoiding risk) their organisations are higher risk, and therefore are always at risk of failure, because they are followers rather than leaders. As followers, they miss many of the excellent opportunities available.
The company I worked with also had a culture of excellence. You brought your A-game to work every day, and were expected to perform at a very high level. In return, you were paid very well, with profit shares and bonuses being a big part of remuneration. The firm supported employees well in many other ways including professional development and a fully stocked fridge of drinks and snacks.
Their approach to business paid off, spectacularly so.
At the time I was there, the bank had made increasing profits every year, never having made a loss, and its return on equity was several hundred percent greater than those of its competitors.
Their success made them the envy of the entire industry.
With a supportive corporate culture, it was also highly innovative. They were the originators of many investment products and structures that would later become commonplace in the financial services industry, earning them billions of dollars in profits.
It was also my first real experience of working with people that were genuinely able to ‘think outside the box’. I got to see how many opportunities are hidden in a company’s ‘invisible’ assets like knowledge, systems, processes, reputation, and so on. For every company in an industry, for example, a business function might operate as a cost centre. By challenging the assumptions that most hold as true and reorganising that function, it can be possible to run that same function at an enormous profit, simply because no other company has seen that opportunity.
Experiencing that, was an eye-opener for me.
That principle has affected almost everything I’ve done since.
At university, for example, I knew most students would submit essentially the same answers to an assignment. Their answers would be focused on everything in the notes the lecturer gave to us about the topic, or the consensus opinion of two or three of the most noted textbook authors in the field. I knew that if I wanted to do well relative to my classmates, I just needed to find something extra or different from the consensus.
There are very good reasons why most people think the same way about most aspects of life such as organisations. I will discuss that elsewhere on this website, in particular, where I talk about paradigms. That being said, as I was later to learn, different, doesn’t always mean true, better, or even useful.
If you’re reading this website its likely you have an interest in either leadership or individual and organisational change. There are hundreds of theories and models of leadership, and whilst it is true that the same assumptions underlie nearly all of those models, when you look around, there is a clear absence of great leadership despite all of those different theories. Just ‘thinking differently’, doesn’t guarantee any kind of success.
Overall, this was the most valuable lesson I took away from my first working experience.
If all I had ever known was working with average companies, I never would have had any idea as to what was possible. I would simply consider average as being normal, and all there was to business and life. What I began to see, was that we live in a bubble in all aspects of our life. We have been conditioned to believe that is all there is because that’s all we’ve experienced or seen as being real. It’s the bubble that keeps things safe, stable and predictable.
The next few experiences in my career and personal life would change this for me, forever.
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