ISSUE 55

DOMAIN / SECTOR (TO CAPTURE CURRENT SECTORAL TRENDS / DEVELOPMENTS / CHALLENGES)

3. How do you see organizations balancing home-grown talent development with lateral hiring at the leadership level?

Every market is different, and every journey is different. In a very fast-growing market, if 100 companies come up and 10 of them become unicorns, they are able to grow faster because they can attract better talent quickly. That includes talent across the board, from developers and programmers to business professionals.

It also depends on the stage of the business. If you’re an established, large business such as S&P, Thomson Reuters or Moody’s, which are also in the business of data and analytics, you will naturally have a strong pipeline of homegrown talent. So, it depends on where you are in your journey and the skill sets you have developed as a business.

Given where our country is in terms of growth, a significant percentage of talent will continue to be brought in from outside as businesses grow and expand. At the same time, as a corporate, you typically want people to grow within the firm because that helps retain talent.

The biggest challenge today is that people are thinking fairly short term. They want to spend a couple of years in a role and then move on. So how do you retain them? You retain them by showing them opportunities for growth and progression. If you’re not promoting homegrown talent, that message doesn’t come across. You need to demonstrate that people who grow within the organisation can also progress and do well.

4. What capabilities would do you think that organizations should prioritize when building their next generation of leaders?

It’s really about the ability to think laterally, get things done, think through solutions and work effectively with people.

Soft skills are very important, particularly the ability to work with people who may be very different from you. You need to be able to take risks, make decisions and move on. You won’t get every decision right; some will definitely be wrong, and some may not be 100% right. You have to adapt as you go, and I think those qualities are very important.

I would say a basic level of intelligence and technical skills are necessary. But given the amount of information available today, you don’t need to know everything. As a CEO, you don’t need to have all the answers. What is equally important is the ability to hire and retain good people and to remain humble.

5. Have there been any recent initiatives within the industry to upskill talent at the leadership level?

I think all of us are very focused on building strong teams. Ultimately, any good manager wants to leave a better team behind. In fast-growing businesses, however, you sometimes have to churn your team. You may start with someone who you think is right for the role, but two years later, as the firm grows and you are able to attract better talent, you may need to move that person on in a very civilised manner.

There is a constant struggle to get the best person into the job and ensure that you have good people working for you. As the business evolves, you need to recognise when things need to change and adapt accordingly.

It is a constant process of training, making difficult decisions, and motivating people through both financial rewards and a positive working environment. I think it’s about constantly adapting yourself to the environment.

6. Do you see innovation as a constant leadership imperative or a strategy that needs to respond to specific market situations?

We’ve all heard the saying, “Change is the only constant.” That is, unfortunately, life for all of us. I went into engineering but never did a day’s work in engineering. I’ve had to adapt many times throughout my career. The good old days of someone joining a company after an MBA at 24 and staying until 60 are very rare now. You’re constantly adapting – whether you’re changing your stream, industry, business line or role. I think personal adaptation and innovation at a broader level have become constant requirements.

With costs of delivery, pricing power and market access becoming easier to replicate, unless you innovate significantly, you cannot stay ahead. If the market is demanding superior margins and you want to maintain pricing power, you need to continuously work on the cost of delivery. Innovation has to happen across the board – on the product side, delivery side, operations and technology.

Ultimately, you’re trying to build a business that generates superior margins and sufficient cash flow to reinvest and grow further. Innovation is going to become increasingly important because the ability to copy has also become much faster. I may come to market first, but my competitors can quickly replicate what I’ve done, adapt it and bring it to market themselves. So, I need to keep innovating all the time.

7. How should leaders balance the need to innovate with the need to protect and scale what is already working?

You’re hoping to create a constant flywheel where your existing businesses generate strong cash flow, which allows you to put more money into innovation. You don’t want to keep going back to shareholders or the market for additional capital because that can dilute existing shareholders.

The ideal mix is to have businesses generating positive cash flow that allows you to
continue investing in innovation. You have to balance those priorities. You will have some businesses that are not performing, and you have to be willing to let those go. At the same time, you need to ensure there is sufficient cash flow to invest in people, products and technology across the board. I think it’s a very delicate balance, but you have to get it right.

8. As an organization’s leader, how do you prepare your teams to navigate nonlinear situations / decisions?

I think after COVID, everybody is familiar with how to deal with non-linear situations. Before COVID, people perhaps had a more linear life, but after going through so much uncertainty, everyone has had to adapt. Constant adaptation and innovation have become the norm. I don’t think there is a truly linear situation anymore, anywhere in the world.

As human beings, we have become more accustomed to dealing with non-linear situations, and that naturally shows up in the workplace as well. Nothing can be taken for granted. You may have a situation today, and tomorrow the world could be falling apart. You have to adapt, and those who can adapt are the ones who will survive.

That said, it can be somewhat unfair because larger companies are often better equipped to adapt. They have capital, technology, people and infrastructure, as well as the ability to invest in building infrastructure that can respond to change.

It’s a little unfair, but I think everybody has to learn to live a non-linear life going forward.

9. What are the 3 most pivotal moments in your career that you learned from and/or that got you where you are today?

I think one of the most pivotal experiences was certainly COVID. All of us who ran businesses during that period had to navigate a completely different environment. Personally, I started my last role as CEO of Dun & Bradstreet during COVID. It was a US business with a new private equity owner, and the entire interview process was conducted virtually.

In senior roles, chemistry is particularly important. Virtually, you may feel that there is chemistry, but when you meet in person, it may be different. The entire process of being hired, onboarded and running a business virtually was new. For the first three months, I never met anyone in person; I only saw them on a screen. I did not meet my boss in person until 24 months after I joined. That experience demonstrated the level of trust the firm placed in me and their belief that I was a custodian of the shareholders’ interests. Managing a team, hiring and letting people go, and running a business virtually required a very different approach. So, from a professional perspective, COVID was certainly one of the defining experiences.

Another defining experience has been working across multiple industries and geographies. I’ve worked in the US, the UK, the Middle East, Asia, including Hong Kong, and India. That experience gives you the confidence that you can get things done. It may not always be comfortable, but you learn to adapt. Working across different markets, geographies, personalities, workforces and crisis situations builds character.

The third has been experiencing different crises and periods of significant change. COVID was one such crisis, but before that there was the Global Financial Crisis in 2009, which had a major impact globally, particularly in the financial services sector where I was working at the time. Many of us have also experienced acquisitions, which can significantly disrupt an organisation.

Overall, the key learning has been about managing yourself and your teams through different kinds of events – whether it is a financial crisis, COVID, an acquisition, or a career or personal move. These experiences have taught me how to adapt and navigate uncertainty.

10. What message would you like to share with young professionals?

I’ve got two kids who both just finished university, and I can see how tough it is for them. It’s a very challenging world for young professionals, given all the turmoil in the wider economy – wars, AI, the future of jobs, and the shift towards remote working. It’s quite a complex environment compared to when I started working. My daughter and son often tell me, “Dad, you guys had it too easy.”

The whole piece around immigration has also changed. In my time, I finished IIT and ended up in the US. There was no question you would get a job and somebody would sponsor you. But that’s not a given now. You may be really smart, and you may even have an employer, but you may not get the necessary working papers, for example. I think it’s a very challenging environment.

For young professionals, I would say they need to think through their choices more carefully and be open to starting somewhere and building from there. A lot of young professionals also have very fixed notions about what they want to do. I’ve had people in our firm come for interviews and say, “If you’re not going to allow me to work from home, I don’t want this job.” That kind of mindset does not work as well and can limit opportunities. I think flexibility, openness, and being very clear about your skills and interests will help you figure out what may work better for you.