Knowledge@Australian School of Business: In Australia, do we give enough support to leaders who show true grit?
Alex Malley: What we need to see is leadership in politics and leadership in business and community. There’s no doubt that Australia at the moment is locked in incremental leadership. If you were to test the Australian electorate and ask them what the vision for the country is, you would get a lot of different answers, including if you spoke to the politicians.
So we need to start from the political level. Australia needs to build its vision. It needs to agree on some core principles, and we need to see that long-term spirit of leadership that we don’t see at the moment in Australia.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: In part, might that be why we’re seeing a real problem with productivity in Australia?
Alex Malley: There’s no doubt that there’s a level of uncertainty that businesses are dealing with, particularly those like ours that have an international footprint. Some markets are asking questions about the certainty of policy in Australia and that’s affecting people’s investment capabilities. It’s putting pressure on our costs and our businesses, and so productivity is challenged. Plus [many of] the markets we deal with have much lower labour costs, so that also adds some tensions.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: Is there a real difference in leadership qualities in these different countries? The fact that they’re willing to look at things, and maybe in this country we’re not prepared to play with it?
Alex Malley: Australia post-World War II had a fire in its belly that’s hard to replicate today. Why? Because we were starting from the ground up. To a great extent, the emerging economies have that fire in the belly now and we have a bureaucracy in our belly. It’s a very tough scenario that we face. We have to find young people with the ambitions similar to the ones we had post-war, and allow them to drive the economy and the country forward.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: In one of your interviews with Wizard Home Loans founder Mark Bouris, you noticed in him the willingness to challenge the oligopoly. Perhaps that’s a leadership quality we need to encourage?
Alex Malley: As a leader you’ve got to contest and challenge norms anyway. And I think Mark’s journey in dealing with a nimble model against a larger set of models in banking was a really fantastic way to go. Virgin does the same thing; it goes into sectors that are fat, and it has a trimmer version.
Australia’s future is in that entrepreneurial nimble flair. We see it in retail. Those young people now setting up retail operations online are buying and selling the large department stores, because they can’t move with the same pace.
So that challenging of the oligopoly – challenging large business with entrepreneurial innovation – is really a great future for our country.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: People have suggested that Australia has been missing the boat when it comes to the internet revolution. Australia was almost 10 or 15 years behind what was happening in the US and Europe. Now our internet retailing is really taking off. Is this another example of Australia not really grasping what’s important?
Alex Malley: It is an issue of leadership that’s steeped in history. There are many great leaders out there who grew up generationally at a different time and with a different set of events, and they struggle to understand what this all means. And that’s a real test of leadership, when you’re actually facing parameters that you’re not familiar with, and it’s how you manage that.
Organisationally, [CPA Australia has] a very active online social media model, and we populate that with people who understand it. We give them guidance and we take advice, and we say “no” when we need to. But we’re not afraid to move into that new environment. There’s a lot of fear in leadership on those sorts of fronts at the moment.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: What should a leader do when they are confronted with something totally new, such as how to deal with social media?
Alex Malley: The first thing is to hire people who are smarter than you in that area. All too often, leaders tend to hire people who aren’t smarter than them, and that gives them a sense of comfort. That’s wrong. You need to hire people who are experts in their field, who are going to be consistent with your culture, but are going to take you to uncomfortable, but relevant, places.
Our organisation set up the online facility of TheNakedCEO.com. And that was a huge challenge for a conservative organisation that’s 125 years old, to have a site that’s called The Naked CEO. It was a real challenge for our culture. But it’s been a fantastic outcome and it’s allowed us to look at the future in a very different way.
Knowledge@Australian School of Business: Certainly, when people are looking at CPA Australia, and its tradition, they might now be questioning why it’s so heavily involved in leadership.
Alex Malley: We’ve always been in leadership. We actually are the second-oldest profession in the world, I should note. But with that comes great experience. In many ways, accountants in organisations in every sector are leaders. But the image of the accountant over the years has been left unattended. We’re trying to bring the brand, if you like, into contemporary times. Accountants are strategic business leaders and we’re making that emblematic by using real people who actually have those qualifications and make strategic decisions.
