President & COO Asia/Australia Pacific/Southern Africa, Parsons Brinckerhoff
BE (UNSW), MBA (UTS), FAICD
Guy Templeton addressed graduates from the UTS Business School in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Thursday 3 May 2012, 5.30pm.
About the speaker
Our speaker today is Mr Guy Templeton.
Guy has been the President and Chief Operating Officer Asia Australia-Pacific and Southern Africa, at Parsons Brinckerhoff, since January 2012.
Parsons Brinckerhoff is a global consulting, engineering, and program and construction management organisation. Guy overseas approximately five thousand employees who work on hundreds of transportation, power, mining, water, wastewater and community development projects.
Prior to joining Parsons Brinckerhoff, Guy operated his own consultancy. Recently he was an advisor to Worley Parsons Limited, a thirty-five thousand-person provider of services to the energy, resources and complex process industries; leading simplification of the company's operations.
From 2005 to 2009 Guy served as Chief Executive of Minter Ellison Legal Group, the largest law firm in the Asia Pacific.
Prior to joining Minter Ellison, Guy worked with PA Consulting Group for fourteen years, where he was one of ten global managing partners. He was based in Hong Kong for eight of those years.
Guy is a member of the Advisory Council of the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales. He is the Chairman of Ravenswood School for Girls and an Adjunct Professor at UTS Business School. He is a past member of the Business Council of Australia and director of for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Guy has a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Business Administration from UTS. In 2011 he received the UTS Alumni Award for Excellence for his success as an inspirational business leader in a wide variety of industries.
It gives me great pleasure to invite Mr Guy Templeton to deliver the occasional address.
Speech
Pro-Chancellor, Thank you.
On Saturday morning I was out at my son's sports match and a lady, Justine Hemmings, a friend of mine came up to me very excitedly, she said ' I hoped that I was going to bump in to you, I wanted to tell you about something that happened a few days ago'. She had been at an event at my son's school, the day after the opening of a major new building. She said that as they sat there there was a video of the opening and it showed all of the people that were coming along in their finery and she said 'during the speeches, the camera panned across the audience, and it stopped, and it focused on you and it zoomed in on you and there was your face for everybody to see, and you were fast asleep'.
So, the first tip I will give you is be very careful this evening, there are a lot of cameras and if you nod off you may very well be caught and written up in the magazines. It also helps me to share my embarrassment, and it is part of the cure I think to get that out in the open. But also it made me very grateful to be asked to come along this evening so thank you very much and congratulations to all of you this evening.
I graduated with my MBA 20 years ago, which is a little bit shocking when you do the math, and I think it is fair to say that the things I am comfortable doing now as an executive, I wasn't comfortable doing when I graduated 20 years ago. And thought of it I would like to speak for a few minutes about of what some of these things were;what were some of those lessons.
The first thing I will tell you about is when I was running a small division of TNT, the transportation company. I came in as an engineer and I joined because I got my own profit and loss account and I also had a large capital budget and as an engineer I thought it would be fantastic fun, installing a range of technology and equipment. At the end of my first year I was reflecting on what I had learned and the highlights, and the name that popped into my mind was Dot. And the reason Dot's name popped in to my mind was that our largest project was the upgrading of a bunch of telecommunication's facilities in the TNT towers in Redfern, not far from here, which have since been renamed, and some of the neighboring buildings.
I put Dot in charge of the project; some of the technical people in my team came to see me. I received this delegation, and they said 'Guy, you are making a terrible mistake, Dot can't possibly do that project, it is our most complex project, and she is not technically qualified, it will be a failure and we really would ask you to reconsider'. So I thought about it, and I backed Dot in that role, and she was exceptional. She didn't know the technology, but she knew how to work with our suppliers, she knew how to work with our technical experts, she knew how to deal with our customers and ensure that we were delivering something they wanted. At the end of that project, Dot walked about this much taller. She was a lady in probably her early fifties and she, I saw her take a step up in her career, and I really thought at that point, the thing I get a kick out of is actually developing and leading people and the technology is just something along the way. I found the same as I came in to Minter Ellison, a large law firm of 300 partners. Unusually they recruited from outside so I came in as the Managing Partner and Chief Executive - 300 partners, I am not a lawyer, absolutely terrified. What do you do? You come in from the outside to lead this group, and lawyers, as you can imagine(some of you, your first degree may be law so forgive me for saying this) they can be a little bit tricky.
Therein that role I was expressing some frustration one day to a lady, Katharine McLennan, who Professor Green I know knows, and I said to her, I can't get this group of partners to move from here to there, and she said 'Oh Guy, you are approaching this completely the wrong way' and I said 'Oh, how so?, what do you mean? I am running this firm, that is what I want to happen' and she goes 'Ah no you won't change them, your job as a leader is to get the best out of people.' It was an incredibly good piece of advice to look at what is the unique strength that each person has and how do you get an advantage from that, how do you get them into their sweet spot. So the first thing that I wanted to share with you is , in my experience it really is all about people, the way you deal with them, the way you lead them and the way you motivate them. And no matter how technical your background, you will only be successful if you can convince other people of your technical argument. Those skills are hugely important and very much worth developing.
The second question that then comes up is; how do you get opportunities? When I graduated I was ambitious, I wanted to go on and really be stretched and challenged. I was working in a consulting firm and I was 28 years old and I got a phone call from one of the partners that had just moved up to Hong Kong. He said 'Oh, I have been having a conversation with the chairman of the Kowloon Canton Railway, they are a railway from Hong Kong up into China, and they want to look at opportunities in telecommunications, deregulation of the market , they have rights of way, maybe they can lay optical fibers, maybe they can make a dollar from it, there are some other issues that they want to look at, can you get up here on Monday and do some work for them?'
And I thought; how on earth am I going to do that? I was an engineer, I understood technology, I knew nothing really about these other areas (well I knew a bit , I think I was about a year into my MBA, so hence, perfectly qualified for any business problem). So, I went up there, and it was a terrific experience, because Paul Lewis, the partner, trusted me to at least have a go at this. There was a safety net; if I fell off he was going to catch me. But I felt incredibly challenged by that project, because I just didn't know quite how to go about it. I found the same in joining Minter Ellison. I went through all these discussions with Heidrick & Struggles, the search firm, and went through a long process. Towards the endI had dinner with the chairman of the firm and he said 'Look, we are really keen on you as a candidate, you are our preferred candidate', and he actually put some confidence in me, Peter Bartlett, for whom I am eternally grateful, for trusting me to get in and perform that role.
What I encourage you to do is look out for people who can coach and mentor you, but first and foremost, get yourself into situations which are going to challenge you. Unless you are thinking 'Why did I take that on, how am I going to do this?' and you feel out of your comfort zone, your rate of learning is going to be only a fraction. It is only when you are truly stretched, you're pushed and you are uncertain, and you have got that 'How do I move forward?' feel, that you really get the learning in your career. So if you are given an opportunity, for heaven's sake, take it, do not back off, do not chicken out, and you will really get a great reward for that.
It's great to talk about all this practical experience but here you are, having studied all those years to earn a degree or another degree, so what about academic learning? I found one of the magnificent things about UTS was the ability to apply your learning very quickly, and I do not know about you, but I kind of forget things after a while. If you learn something in a lecture theatre and a year later the opportunity comes up to apply it, do you still remember it? I will remember part of it but I am certainly not going to remember all of it.
When I was working at TNT, I had to put up an investment case, and it had to be signed off by the Chief Financial Officer for TNT, who at that stage was David Mortimer, now the chairman of the Australian Post and who had been the Chairman of Leighton. I had just learned about discounted cash-flow analysis, so I went back to the office, and I got out a spreadsheet which was quite novel, 20 years ago or so. I did discounted cash flow analysis and I put up my expenditure request, it came back and David Mortimer was very complimentary and said 'If only all of our investment cases used discountedcash flow we would be a better company'.
It was such a boost to me. You go to lectures, you arrive at 6, you go at 9, you are half asleep by then you have had 17 cokes, 4 mars bars to keep yourself awake. You have all done it. And then to get that feedback was tremendously useful, so try to get yourself into situations where you can apply that knowledge. Since doing my MBA I have done quite a lot of other study, I have been to various universities around the world and done top up training in different areas where I felt there is opportunities to learn. I have done a lot of training in consulting and other things around company directorship etcetera. You are here tonight saying 'Oh, thank heavens I have finished, no more lectures, no more tutorials, no more essays, assignments, being graded '; you are probably thinking the last thing you need, is more study. You get over that, and I would encourage you to then, really, as the Pro-Chancellor said pursue 'lifelong learning'. It is terribly important, and please just see this as a step in your education and by no means the end of it.
It has been an honor to be here this evening, I really appreciate going back to my old school, congratulations to all of you, I wish you all the best.
Pro-Chancellor, Thank you.