Stuart Lawson, CEO of HSBC Russia, believes that the ability to learn is his strongest competency and that it is important to know how to absorb "learnings" from all the environments that you are in.
1. What is your strongest competency?
I think we all are always learning and the moment you stop learning it's time to quit, because you're not going to function well. For me, I'd say that more I know, more I don't know, and the more I learn in life, the more I understand that I actually don't know about life. I've got more to learn.
2. How do you do it?
Well, you build it in every aspect of your life. I don't think with learning you should set it aside, you know: I'm going to learn from eight thirty till nine o'clock in the morning and than I'll be doing things for the rest of the day. The point about learning is that everything that you do, everything you touch, all the media that you see, all the people that you meet, all the environments that you're in and even physical environments you should be absorbing and taking from them "learnings". And these "learnings" can take all sorts of different natures. You know, there are learnings where you pick up a piece of paper, you read it: there it is, there is the fact, you've learnt it. There are other learnings that are far more complex and far more difficult to acquire and valuable, and those are the ones around people.
3. Can you give an example?
My father was a doctor, and he was practicing medicine till he was eighty-five. So, he was a practicing doctor for sixty years. By the end, he didn't need to physically examine his patients, they'd walk into the door and from the way they walked, the way they looked, he could pretty much diagnose them. Now, in my dreams I would love to be a banker of a similar type, so when a client walks through my door I don't need to see all the spread-sheets, I don't need to read about his biography, I can simply have a reaction to the individual. You know, I've been a lending officer for thirty-four years, so, I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether someone's a good risk or a bad risk, and over time you do create this smell, there is a sense of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Nine time out of ten, you can be fooled, and as I started by saying learning goes on all the time. I'd be contradicting myself if I'd say: "oh, yes, and now I get it right ten out of ten", because I'm not learning anymore. But I like to think that at this point I'm getting towards lines, but even now I still get very surprised.
4. Can you be more specific on how do you actually learn?
You do it by keeping an open mind. I think it's extremely important in business and in your personal life that you should allow no prejudices. Actually one of the greatest advantages that I had at Citibank was because I worked in eleven countries, I am completely oblivious to race, creed, color, religion. It's just simply that there is a person on the other side of the desk and we are talking, hopefully, on the language that I can understand and if not through a translator. Any prejudice should be thought of simply as a barrier to learning. And if we have established that learning as a very important thing to do, than what you have to do is break down the barriers, otherwise, you won't be open to this wonderful information that you can pick up.
5. Do you have any other example or story that you can share with us?
When I was twenty-five, I was a marketing manager for Citibank Edinbrough. I was based in Edinbrough, but I had to go out to see my clients. There was this paper company and it was very important for me to see their CFO. So, I found out his name, I called the company, and this was a cold call, I set up a lunch. He sounded quite surprised when I called him, but he seemed quite happy. So, I arrived in St. Andrews, which is an hour or so away from Edinbrough, I pick him up and I take him to a near by restaurant. He seemed not exactly the guy I was expecting to meet. Nevertheless, we ordered expensive wine; we started with smoked salmon, now we are going to have some steak. And, as I got into my pitch, he looked pretty interested, but around the main course, around the steak, he asked me why I invited him out for lunch. I said, because he was the CFO, and here, he told me that, actually, he was in charge of the paint shop. He had the same name, and when I called the switch board, they put me through to Jack Frost, and there were two Jack Frosts: one of them was the CFO, and one of them was in charge of the paint shop. And he had a very good lunch, and I had a very good lesson, which is always know who are you talking to. These days, I never walk into a room or give a speech or anything without knowing who my audience is. And you should adjust your conversation accordingly. He was very confused.
6. What can you say about different cultures in business?
I think that this business of cultural staff is extremely important and you have to be very culturally attuned. Let me take an example: HSBC, different points of view. I don't know if you've seen our advertising, but it's brilliant, it's wonderful: two images, love hate - hate love, or pain: there is a picture of girl's on high heels and there is a picture of chili, and underneath one it says pleasure and underneath the other it says pain. So, either, the high heels is pleasure or it's pain, either the chili is pleasure or it's pain. It's a very clever idea. And the idea is to say that the world is constructed of people with different points of view and as we are the world's local bank and because we are in eighty-three countries, we have to have the same different points of view. When we started reviewing the images for what we would use, I said, please, make sure that we're trying to incorporate the concept that is very Russian. I don't want us to be a Russian bank, we are an international bank, but we are a Russian bank as well and we operate here in Moscow. It is critical for us to be culturally sensitive to the environment that we are in. One of the things that I say that if you look carefully at the word HSBC and if you are Russian, you can see it says NSVS. That's what it says in Russian. If we go and stick this outside on the streets of Irkutsk or in Yekaterinburg or even here in Moscow, we have to convince people that NSVS bank, actually, is HSBC. And than, we have to convince them what is HSBC, and we have to convince them, especially in these times, that we are the world strongest bank and that we've been around for many years. So, we should take nothing for grunted, and even this little trick of mine of saying we are NSVS bank, and when we go to London and I meet my senior managers, I say that it is great to work for NSVS bank, and now what we have to do is to make HSBC. It is my way of saying to them that the culture here in Russia is different, even the letters are different, so you have to bare this in mind when we bring our brand to this market place.
7. Can you think of a situation which helped you to learn something new?
Well, let me tell you one story which I learned from a guy for whom I was working as an assistant. He was responsible for Citibank's shipping business. He taught me the following story. He said, Greek ship owners will never tell you the size of their fleets. They always keep it as a huge secret; there are no published accounts or anything like that. And yet, as a bank we needed to build up a picture of the market place to find out how big the sipping fleet was, whether it was in fifty thousand tone vessels or twenty-five thousand tones or ten thousand tone. He said that the way to do it was to use the vanity of these ship owners, because they are very proud people. They feel very strongly about their family and their success. And this conversation would go along the following lines: Tom would go in and he'd say, "So, Dimitry, how many boats do you have?" - "I never say how many boats I have!" - "Ok, so, but I understand that Andre has thirty boats" - "Nothing, I have forty boats!"; now he knows how many boats. And than he says, "Well, yeah, but Andre's boats are forty thousand tones, and I heard he has twenty-five of them" - "Nothing, I have thirty boats that are forty thousand tones!"; and than he's got the portfolio. So, if he'd asked the direct question, he'd never get the answer, if he plays of the person's weakness, and everybody has weakness, but in a way that they feel good, by the way he said, that when Dimitry walked out of meeting he felt better than when he walked in, because he'd been able to talk about his great success, and meanwhile, me and Tom built a picture of his portfolio.
8. What was the lesson that you have learned from this situation?
Sometimes you shouldn't ask a direct questions. You should ask the question that allows people to feel good about themselves, and, certainly, whenever I meet with management I try to make sure, that I found out enough about them that I at least think I know hwho they are. It's always good to be briefed. You should always be prepared. When you lend money to a customer, there is really only one thing that counts: who you are lending the money to. Not, what the numbers are; not, how big their plants are. If you lend money to a bad guy who has good plants, you are going to end up with a problem. If you lend money to a good guy who is struggling, he will find the way, he'll try to find a way of solving your problems. So, it's always important when you meet someone to have done some homework, so that you have knowledge of them before they walk in, and to use this basis to have these questions that allow them to feel good about whatever it is that you need them to talk about.
9. Is there anything else that you have learned from your experience?
I'm afraid, that my experience has also led me to ask every question twice. That means that when you are in a situation where something is very important, the first answer isn't necessarily the right answer. You know, if you ask the first question and than you ask it again but from a slightly different vector, you sometimes get a different answer, and sometimes it's the second answer that is the important one. That combined with this really annoying phrase, which is "inspect, don't expect". It means that you should have engine oil under your finger nails. I say to my managers, that unless you've been out into the regions of Russia, unless you've been to the plants, unless you've got engine oil under your finger nails - obviously, I don't mean it literally -, unless you have put your hands inside the guts of a business, by which I mean see the operations, you won't make a proper decision. I used to be an assistant for agribusiness in Europe for Citibank. And, my friends in Ireland insisted that I went to see the plants. Well, at the plant there were killing lines, the slotter houses, and so, as a twenty-nine year old, I'd be wondering around, looking like Prince Charles with my hands behind my back, with the Wellingtons on covered in blood, because they would insist, they'd take me right to the front of the killing line, where they killed all these animals. And than, immediately afterwards, we will go to have a steak. It was a good lesson: knowing what the client does, because if you meet the client in a board room, it's different from being at the front of the slotter line. So, that's "inspect and don't expect", because you need sometimes to actually touch things.
Prepared by Katia Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on November 28, 2008
