BOSS delves into the career paths of the senior executives at Australia’s 20 biggest companies to discover where they started – and the critical skills and experience they gained.
Already a subscriber?Mark Hall, head of acquisitions and integration at freight software provider WiseTech, was working for PwC in London during the global financial crisis.
The McKinsey alumni includes former CEO of Star Entertainment Group, Matt Bekier, former CEO of Coca-Cola Amatil Alison Watkins, the former ASX CEO, Elmer Funke Kupper, SEEK CEO Ian Narev while outgoing Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka came from Bain & Company. The former Bank of Queensland CEO George Frazis and former Australia Post CEO Ahmed Fahour were from Boston Consulting Group .
The BCG numbers are enhanced by the fact that five alumni of the strategy firm sit on the Woolworths executive leadership team, including chief executive Brad Banducci. Ackland is a BCG alumni and found himself working in India for about 18 months in the late 1990s. He was part of a team advising a petrochemical plant in southern India, a sector he was unfamiliar with despite holding an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. Like Hall, Ackland was able to rely on his fundamental skills.“We turned up with the approach that they would describe their problem to you, and you can start to step through from a first-principles point of view,” he says.
“ the familiarity and comfort with working in an agile way, although we never called it that,” Danziger says.“It’s about coming together as a group of talented people and figuring out how to team together to solve a problem. If you look at the way we work increasingly across businesses today, it’s bringing multidisciplinary teams from different places together to solve a problem and leverage each other’s strengths.
“You realise that you’re only as strong as the weakest link in your team, so you’ve got to help others in your team, get them up to where they need to be so that we can all get that pass mark.“It might sound silly, but the fact is that it was 30 plus years ago but I still remember it,” Corbally tells BOSS.“Unless you want to work as someone who’s self-employed, you have no choice other than to work in a team environment.
Corbally says that after every job he did at PwC he had to write a performance assessment on the individuals who worked on the same project.“You have to write it down and then you have to take the person through it. You couldn’t just write it and walk away,” he says. “So you have that permission to be bold, and look for ways to make big steps in thinking about the latest innovations that might drive that, or pushing hard decisions that organisations haven’t been able to make yet.
On the other hand, colleagues can be more appreciative of your ideas because they are no longer paying tens of thousands of dollars for them, argues Hall.
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