George Koukis
Ceremony: 10 October 2017, 2.00pm
Speech
Before I begin my address, I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land that UTS stands.
It is indeed my honour and privilege to be here today, and I mean every word that I say. If I manage to do a couple of things well in my life, I owe a lot to UTS. My story’s not unique. There are many people who have done a lot more things than I have done, but the way I’ve gone about it and the way I was influenced by my studies, it may be of interest to you; you can apply whatever I’m going to talk about in your private life and your business life and I hope I can make a very small difference. If I did that to your career, to your life, I’d be a very, very happy man.
Attila made a very, very good introduction and covered most of the things – I will be very, very brief. I was born in Greece; I was educated in Greece in the field of accounting. I met my wife when I was 21, and even thought Greece is a very nice place to go on holidays – if you have money, that is – it’s not a good place to work or to make a living or to have dreams about building a successful business or something. So, my wife and I decided to migrate. And at that time, Canada and Australia were taking migrants. We saw a brochure of Canada; it was magnificent. Large country, as large as Australia, full of snow, polar bears. We saw the brochure for Australia – beaches and beautiful stuff, so guess what? We got on a plane, we ended up here. Our daughters were born here – we have two daughters, and it has been a phenomenal trip and I’m ever so grateful.
However, we did make some miscalculations. Neither my wife or I spoke English, and Australia was never a Greek colony, so we landed in Sydney, we have no relatives, no friends. And we ended up renting a room in Glebe, and we paid one month in advance – we were very honourable people, so we paid one month in advance, but we only had 140 Australian dollars; that’s all we had. We were told the third week, when we were left with 10 Australian dollars, that the government would pay a subsidy because we were legal migrants. We refused. Accepting money from an organisation that does not know how to make money – it only spends money – is like stealing the money from everybody else, from your brothers and sisters, so consistently my life it happened a few things, I refused totally. We refused. It’s a matter of principle. We found jobs, we’ve done everything you can imagine, from cleaning toilets or dishes, washing dishes, or waitressing or whatever, because understand we did not speak the language, so the early part was very, very difficult. We would call for a job and say, ‘How long have you been in Australia?’ He says, ‘Yeah, mate. Job is taken.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. Phone call after phone call, we managed to get jobs.
The only sad thing as I say, we did not speak English, we have not improved very much since, both my wife and I. we still make impose a lot of problems in the language itself. We ended up doing well, as Attila mentioned. We found jobs, we did some pioneering things that then – we learned technology because of that, but at the same time, because of the language problems, I enrolled in the UTS, and I identify with you right now.
There is no greater moment than having received your degree, which you richly deserve, because you worked hard. No matter what it is, you’re remunerated with a degree, because you’ve worked hard. And a lot of people have supported you, like family and friends, like lecturers. What I found very helpful and helped me in my life was I was working during the day, I would attend classes 6-9, and then I would have another job as a waiter, very close to university, so I would finish about 130 in the morning and then I would go and study, and then I will start all over again, five days a week. I spent time with the family on only the weekend. And that recognition, if you like it, is good, but what do you learn, and what is the difference between one university and another? What my experiences were that when I would go to classes, I would deal with people who’ve done it before. It’s different when you talk about theory – I can theorise as much as you like. I was telling once some things to my daughters, and they said to me, ‘What makes you an expert?’ And they were right. I was telling them what it means – that’s theory, because I cannot understand it as well.
In UTS, what I found was they, I remember once we were talking and the lecturer says, ‘Who runs the company? The board of directors, or management team?’ Of course, I said, ‘The board of directors.’ I see hierarchy over there, and then as life will have it, I end up being in business, and you find out it’s exactly the opposite. And what I have discovered since is whenever I talk to lecturers or different things that UTS does, there is an area of concentration to get the best people out and that they have practical experience. When you start a new business and you talk to someone who’s run it, you’re likely to make less mistakes. I don’t recall the physical aspects of what I did – I was young, I felt indestructible. I enjoyed my time at university, and I was learning, and I was, my style is I will still learn until I die. I will never stop.
What I liked about UTS, and if you go on my private website you will find that we share very, very similar values, if not identical. It’s the values that drive the university the same way as values drove my life, if you like. I will not make expedient decisions. The capacity to debate, the capacity to bring an idea forward and not have somebody rapping you on the knuckles is very important, because it prepares you, as Brian said, for the real world, and the real world is full of competition, and the more you know, the more you can refer to. The likelihood is you’re going to be, you’re going to have a great probability of being successful. To me, in my early days, and because I did not speak the language very well, I truly thought that this is the place were underneath Acropolis democracy was born, and I’m very qualified to talk about democracy, of course, because I’m Greek – I invented it. When we figured out it didn’t work, we exported the rest of the world so you cannot suffer.
In 1987, here in Australia, four friends of mine and – four friends and myself, we invested in the stock exchange. I was in technology; I had no idea what a stock exchange is. Neither did my partners. And I said, ‘Why should we do that?’ And he said, ‘We’ll make more money.’ And I said, ‘We’ve got enough – we’ve got a nice house here, family was growing; we’re doing well.’ He said, ‘No, everybody’s making money. We’re going to make money.’ I said, ‘What do you know about the stock exchange?’ He says, ‘We know a broker. We’ll put some money in and the broker will match that money and then buy shares.’ We kept doing this; we started July ’87. I put all the money, all the cash that I have accumulated over 20 years, I mortgaged the house later on, we bought shares, we never sold one share. Nineteenth of October, the stock markets crashed. The following day, I had nothing. Nothing. Zero.
It’s easy to talk about now; it even sounds funny, but it isn’t. We lost everything. The only single time in my life that I targeted money, and the system penalised me. I lost everything. In a discussion with my wife, she said, ‘Now, what do we do?’ I say, ‘When we were born, we had nothing. When I met you, we had nothing. When we came to Australia, we had nothing. We’re in familiar territory. Don’t worry about it – we’ve been there before. There’s no problem.’ Honest to god, this is very true. It’s been documented.
In 1993, I have an Australian partner for many, many, many years, [name]. Him and I developed [name]. We identified a company outside Zurich to acquire it. Because I had no money, we found a venture capital, an American firm but based in Hong Kong, and they would give us the money to acquire this company. We’re ready to acquire it, but my venture capitalist had allocated four people as advisors. Four of them told me not to do it. One of them said I was crazy. But he said it in French. After I told him that I don’t speak French, so there you are.
Over the years, and to the young people, people will come and give you their opinion in subject matters that you did not ask their opinion, they don’t know much about, but they will tell you what to do. I had quite a lot of them and some of them are very close to you, ah? I’m not going to mention their names in case I become politically incorrect. My – I developed a mechanism, it’s a membrane that grows inside my ear; it comes down and I become stone deaf. I can’t hear what they’re saying. So I employed that tactic when this guy said, ‘Don’t do it.’ And I did it – I bought the company. Very fast forward, without a loan, without overdraft, without anything. A true lesson for debt that worries me right now. Zero loans, zero – we built that company in [inaudible] it is today the undisputed number one in the world. I bought it for $948,000; we took it public at $1.4 billion, and now it’s worth multiples of that. And you know, sometimes you need to do what you have inside you, not what you’ve told or what may be in a reference book or what may be outdated 40 years ago.
I graduated 40 years ago, in 1978, 79. That’s a long time; things change, then, and you have to own that problem whereby you make decisions and if the decision is good, then you are likely to be called crazy, but you're likely to make very good decisions. Now, my message to you is that how do you go for bankruptcy to prominence? How do you go from where you are to something special? Special, for me, is you can be a very good CEO, you can be a very good manager or supervisor – it doesn’t really matter [inaudible]. Now, I wasn’t after Brian’s job; I just made a mistake, because I was excited with the degree and I sat in the wrong chair. I don’t have to be in that chair to feel successful; I can be successful in everything I do in life.
So I’m going to give you a roadmap that you need to think about it and if it works with you, then apply it. You need a few things in order to be successful in life: one of them is to understand yourself. Spend your private moments and say, ‘This is what I’m good at.’ Don’t come up with more than one thing, because I’ve seen people who are good at 20 things, and in reality, they’re five per cent good and they create a lot of mess. I’d rather be good at one thing. I can’t be a good technician, a good CFO, a good development man and a good leader. You can’t.
So you need, in your private moments, to look at yourself very, very critically and say, ’That’s what I’m good at.’ Then, believe that and concentrate on that. Build all your dreams and aspirations around your strengths, not your weaknesses. You have time to fix that later on.
Define success. Please define for your own good and for the good of society, define what success is and don’t include there the word money. Just write down four sentences or five things that, if you achieve them and I come back and we review that five years later, I will say, ‘You’re successful.’ And I guarantee you, you will make more money than if you run a spreadsheet and interpret that in money. I believed in values. None of them had any money, and I made obscene money as a result, because I defined what success is in a software company.
There are a lot of companies out there, and for every success there are about a million failures. So to succeed, you need to define what success is, but not in terms of money. The business people will know that ROI is you live with ROI – return on investment. And I don’t have a problem with that; I don’t believe in running companies at a loss, by the way. It is contrary to providing any value to society. But ROI for me was a return on integrity, not return on investment. The moment I feel good about the decisions I make, then I know that I’m going to receive the reward in multiples. So define success, understand who you are.
The third thing is long-term mentality. I had a 20-year plan with Temenos, not a three-year plan, not a one-year plan. If you look at all the world issues today, I can relate them to you right now – in the interests of time I cannot do it; I’ve been given only a few minutes. If you take all your [inaudible] problems, overpopulation, literacy, everything, everything, what is the one thing that we could remove or improve today that will affect all these areas? And there is only one: short-term mentality. Our society suffers from short-term mentality. Short-term mentality makes people greedy. When you’re greedy, you create problems for yourself and for others. For instance, if you said to me, ‘I want to be a millionaire,’ I’ll make you a billionaire in 50 years’ time, but if you said, ‘I want to be a millionaire tonight’ you can only do that by doing something criminal, and I will never do something criminal.
So define long term, in long term. When you think long term, there are no issues you cannot sort out. And when I had, in my life when I have four solutions to problem, I always take the hardest one, because it’s the most rewarding and the most effective for society, not short-term things. Look at what can anybody achieve in four years – look at politicians and business people. I’ve seen companies if they invested it would have been superb, but people do not invest because they wanted to protect their bonus, their stock option plan, and those companies suffered later on.
Once you’ve decided all these things, let’s say you decide to start a new company, decide to do only good things. Society encourages sometimes to do horrible things, like for instance, not producing good products. Brian mentioned the things that I live by, and that’s a good functional product, absolute quality and total client orientation, service that I [inaudible] and I’m used to top service, not playing games with those words. Decide the same thing.
One of the problem of our society, we’re not sustainable anymore. We have reached a point, we’ve poisoned our waterways, we’ve poisoned the air we breathe that’s not good for you to create a business plan and say, ‘I’m going to cut all the trees in Malaysia’, for instance, simply because I’m going to be a billionaire. They’ve done it in Brazil and in other countries. So please do good things, and whatever you do, think of Mother Earth. Mother Earth is going to get even with us.
Final thing, as far as I’m concerned, remove all negative emotions from your existence, especially fear or guilt. You cannot lead your life, you cannot do things, if you fear. Whatever you, whatever the negative emotion you harbour inside you, understand that will consume you. Fear and all of these negativities are not physical things. If there is a knock on the door, you don’t see a dagger when you open the door, do you? They only exist because you allow them to come into your brain. I know there are a lot of superstitious people talking about number 13 or number 4; how can a number be good or bad? How can a black cat decide what I do in life? These are excuses when we fail; when we fail to learn from that.
Complaining. If you complain, you’ll never solve a single problem. Whatever your concern is, you need to become accountable for what you do, and the people who are going to succeed in life and do good things for their own country and world at large, they never complain. It rains, get an umbrella. Don’t complain about your father, your mother, your neighbour, when you don’t achieve something. In life, there are only two options: one is you’re going to do something good, and then you can repeat it, or you can learn from it. There is no other option. If you ever wanted to find a culprit simply because you feel like complaining, please go to the nearest mirror, because you are the problem. Go to the nearest mirror and you’ll find the culprit.
Act with integrity and fairness and you have nothing to worry whatsoever. When you feel like this, when you feel – you organise yourself like I’m talking about, then I promise you your business plan will be something different, because what is the next step you’re going to do is you’re going to allow yourself to dream. If you look at the inventor of the zeppelin, Ferdinand von Graf, on his tombstone it says, ‘Dream, believe in your dream, then watch it happening.’ I don’t have time to explain to you how true that is, but when you dream, when you allow yourself to dream, you create a world in your brain that is perfect – there is social justice, there is plenty of jobs, there’s no unemployment, no crime. You feel so good that you actually positively influence all others. You create within yourself a capacity to be resourceful, tenacious, you solve problems you never thought was possible, simply because you feel good.
You never quit. The quitting is not in my vocabulary – definitely not in my English vocabulary, because you believe in that dream, because you create exceptional wealth that you can share with anybody. When you allow yourself to do that, our society today does not allow us to dream. If you look at the news and you put a business plan together, if I force you to watch the news of every channel in the world and you put a business plan together, it’ll be totally different – it’ll be very conservative and it’ll be, ‘Okay, if lose the money, it’ll be somebody else’s but not mine.’ Yeah? If you spend a day with me and we put a business plan together it’ll be how to conquer the world, because nobody can tell me what I can do and cannot do.
If you look at throughout history, change did not come from political groups, religious groups, clubs, associations – only came from individuals, and that innovation, that integrity, that greatness that the university teaches is within each one of you. Each one of you can become this, if you only believed in yourself and you let yourself dream. We have complex problems in this society. The university acknowledges – I talked to the department of creative innovation. They’re preparing you for this, but unless you feel good about yourself and you think you can do the impossible, you will not.
Finally, when you are successful, no matter how good you are, money and power corrupts people, sadly enough. So stay incorruptible, believe in yourself, and do good things for yourself and society. Thank you very much.
About the speaker
Mr George Koukis was born in Chalkis, Greece, and migrated to Australia in 1971. From 1971-1980, George held management positions with Qantas. During this period he developed various pioneering systems, the most notable ones were: The Profit Centre System which allowed profit determination by type of aircraft and sectors; and a statistical model to calculate risk for insurance premium reasons. While at Qantas, George studied at the NSW Institute of Technology (which became UTS in 1988) and successfully completed a Diploma of Technology in Commerce in 1979.
From 1980 to 1986, George was the Managing Director of the Pacific operations of Management Science America (MSA) based in Sydney. MSA was the leader of computer software business solutions. Between 1986 and 1993, George developed the CTW Ltd business plan which was financed by IAVM, a Hong Kong based Venture Capital firm.
In 1993, he co-founded the Temenos Group by acquiring Globus, a company in Switzerland that owned banking software. Today, Temenos is considered to be the best company for core banking systems and fintech worldwide. It is a global enterprise with more than 50 offices worldwide, more than 5,000 staff, and is listed on the Zurich Stock Exchange. Through Temenos, George has transformed the industry. He retired from the Chairman position of Temenos on the 1st of July 2011 but remains a member of the Board of Directors.
George is a staunch proponent of ethical leadership. In all his business interests it has been a core focus. The transformative approach of Temenos is due to this focus and George has been an inspirational demonstrator of ethical leadership. More recently, George founded an international program “Future Leaders for the World” which teaches ethical leadership skills. The program is held in a different international location each year and has been established to guide students to self-study and inner exploration “to discover who they are and what they were uniquely born for”.
George has made outstanding contributions to a plethora of fields, including entrepreneurship, software development, fintech and other innovative industries and has provided philanthropic support for medical research, education, music and the arts.
George is currently Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Classical Opera, a non-profit organisation based in the United Kingdom and is a board member in seven private companies acting mainly in IT and Green Technologies. The ‘George Koukis Paediatric Rheumatology Clinic’ at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital has been named after him. George is a member of the Australian Society of Accountants and Australian Computer Society.
George has been a regular and valued supporter of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), contributing to the Luminaries Scholarship Fund, and giving his time and expertise at university events. He is a Fellow of King’s College London and an Honorary Adjunct Professor in the UTS Business School.
