I'm a firm believer that to really understand a business takes years, not months. As an investment analyst you think you understand a business from the outside, but the reality is that, once you are inside, you can go on learning for five or ten years.
I think the most important CEO task is defining the course that the business will take over the next five or so years. You have to have the ability to see what the business environment might be like a long way out, not just over the coming months. You need to be able to both set a broad direction, and also to take particular decisions along the way that make that broad direction unfold correctly.
You can't overestimate the need to plan and prepare. In most of the mistakes I've made, there has been this common theme of inadequate planning beforehand. You really can't over-prepare in business!
I was always acting primarily with shareholder interests in mind. It's also true I've always had a fairly moralistic attitude to business, and would not do anything that I considered improper. As a consequence, I have occasionally pursued issues during my career that other people might have avoided.
Without deep personal transformation, collective transformation is not possible.
I think Virgin Blue is still a very promising and exciting business. Now, I know that's not a view that's widely held in the market but I think the market is simply throwing it into the too-hard basket at the present time because of the oil price events. But we think it is still a very exciting business.
You would have to say of John Howard's government that he has tended to go after things with a fair degree of determination, and I would have thought.. I don't see any reason why that should suddenly disappear now that he has control of both houses.
I'd always had a childhood ambition to go into the investment capital business, and spent twenty-odd years in it. But the thought of spending the second half of my career in the same business was boring, so I looked around for other opportunities .
