TTF Blog: 16 November 2020

Jason Hsu is CIO of a global investment management group and spoke at a Symposium we ran last week. He explained that he has been creating a ‘wealth experiment’ in London around purposeful leadership. Why?

“Let me share a story with you”, he said, “I once hired a senior executive who was mentoring one of our younger folks.” He watched the pair discussing ‘the fact that bankers are paid … half a million to start, probably well over a million if you do well. And teachers and engineers and others are paid fractions of that.’

The senior executive then surprised Hsu when he then told the mentee his interpretation of that fact: “‘we need more bankers, they create more value for society’.”

“That was insanely alarming to me. I thought to myself – ‘at what point did we lose the ability to have some common sense and look at the prices that the market reveals and say “that’s just wrong”? When did we lose sight, between price and value?’ Value is what we create, price is what we extract.”

If you are paid a ‘princely sum’ for doing ‘almost nothing’, Hsu added, why would you not consider the possibility that “the market isn’t working, there’s a bubble.”

Sleeping giants & courageous investors

Hsu reflects: “For a lot of people leadership is about the power, the control to get things done, and I think for a group of us here it’s about a lot more.

“The people at the very top set the tone for an organisation.  Why is that important? These days whenever we see a major blow-up, inevitably you find the leader at the very top – different situations, different problems. Almost always they repeat the same – ‘I didn’t know.’

… “You can’t wake up someone who’s pretending to sleep … If you don’t want to know, no mounting knowledge at your disposal can change the ‘not wanting to know’. … How do we get people to want to know?”

“So we have to start with the ‘why’. Why does our industry exist, what do we do? Can we start with people who care”.

“A lot of people today are involved in E.S.G. investing. The way I think about E.S.G. investing is that we need courageous investors. Because without courageous investors backing courageous executives, you can’t answer the question ‘are we willing to grow slower’?”

You can see a full video interview between Transparency Task Force’s Andy Agathangelou, the Centre For Inspired Leadership’s Deborah Henderson, and Jason Hsu here.