# Common Denominators Among Successful Company Leaderships?



## StockyGuy (2 April 2022)

Say I was to choose the ASX universe of stocks.  Say I was to exclude the big caps.

Any of the experienced types here notice any common features, that are checkable, among say the top 3-5 leadership positions in an  ASX company, bearing in mind any common denominators might be very different for say a mining company versus a fin tech startup?

Examples of what one might look for:
- very high qualifications; all important people having PhDs, MBAs etc.
- a lower level of qualifications, going with a more practical mindset
- elite private school types
- more normal family backgrounds
- all or mostly men
- all or mostly women
- mostly young people
- mostly older people
- fatter people
- healthy people
- mostly native-born Australians
- a lot of overseas born people, giving insights to other markets and mindsets
- woke people
- not so woke people
- multiple brash alpha types
- more high in conscientiousness types
- evident religiosity

I'm not debating the moral rights and wrongs of these attributes.  I also appreciate that for most non-big cap companies it's VERY hard to answer such questions as public information can be quite limited.  Simply wondering if any have observed any of them to be a safer bet over the long term.  Leaving out other factors (and luck always plays a part in any human endeavour), where would my investment likely do better over 10-20 years?  Obviously we are excluding the superstars - if you have one Gates, or Musk, or Buffett in charge the attributes of the rest don't matter so much.  But normally the team DOES matter.  There's probably some special combination of types that works best I'd say.  (Which is not to say diversity simply for its own sake is best for the shareholder.)

At a simpler level, what do you like to see in the leadership, for the purpose of your enrichment, not whether you personally think them standup guys/gals overall?  Does it depend on the industry sector?


----------



## frugal.rock (2 April 2022)

Are you looking for free data ? 🤨

About Neal Cross (ASX; PIL)
Mr Neal Cross is a globally recognised corporate, social and start-up entrepreneur with a long track record across blue-chip technology, finance, and data companies. 
He is currently co-founder andchairman of PictureWealth, one of the world’s fastest growing wealth fintech companies, and serves on the advisory board of Razer Fintech.

Prior to this, Mr Cross was the Chief Innovation Officer at DBS Bank where he drove their
transformation into a global innovation powerhouse culminating in achieving the world’s best Digital
Bank 2016 and 2018 and world's best bank three times across 2018 and 2019. 
He has advised hundreds of major brands in Asia and is a trusted adviser to several leading CEO’s, government agencies and start-ups.

Privately, he has been awarded the world’s most disruptive CIO/CTO globally from judges Sir Richard
Branson and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and is a regular winner of best innovation lab and
innovation leader awards.

I note, no mention of qualifications, but are pieces of paper important?
Maybe/maybe not.?
If the glove is a good fit, wear it.

Many years ago I had the idea of trying to ascertain what made a selection of number 1 hits, hits. 
EG, was it the drums, the tune, the lyrics etc etc ?
What was catchy about them?
Never got there. The realisation was that every song had their own unique catchy thing going on. Could be the same for Directors?


----------



## frugal.rock (2 April 2022)

Have been considering this idea a bit more.
Some further thoughts are;
^the idea has merit, but in reality is probably highly time and data intensive, with limited data on directors actually available
^to achieve assessable data, one would probably need to assess all the easily accessed company fundamental and financial data fields in conjunction with director attributes
^in effect, one would need a huge kickarse dataset with some kick arse algos to sort the chaff from the wheat
^the final result? probably iffy results. Human teams are involved. Corruption, greed, sabotage, manipulation etc etc could all distort outcomes and are unmeasurable parameters
^it could be done, at great cost, time, effort etc, perhaps individual appointments checking on proposed investee companies might be the easiest continued norm. 
I wish there was a "duds and avoid" list of directors...


----------



## StockyGuy (4 April 2022)

frugal.rock said:


> Have been considering this idea a bit more.
> Some further thoughts are;
> ^the idea has merit, but in reality is probably highly time and data intensive, with limited data on directors actually available
> ^to achieve assessable data, one would probably need to assess all the easily accessed company fundamental and financial data fields in conjunction with director attributes
> ...




Definitely, fair points.  The key issue, is like you indicate, the data just isn't easy to aggregate.  You could try spending hours wading through LinkedIn, FB and other social media and get a lotta stuff.  But it'd fry your brain.

Call me a superficial, judgmental creature or whatever, and this a slight redirection, but perhaps it is not a bad idea idea to simply type in the stock name followed by a term like directors/managers/leadership to a search engine's Images search. Clear recent, unfiltered, photographic images of the main leaders can be worthwhile (pretty irrelevant for short term traders, though).  Not my main motivation for an investment, just a final vetting to make myself feel okay about submitting my cash to their tender mercies for the upcoming years.  Do they look trustworthy, intelligent, somewhat hip to the zeitgeist, healthy (or at least not about to drop off the perch) etc?


----------



## frugal.rock (4 April 2022)

StockyGuy said:


> Clear recent, unfiltered, photographic images of the main leaders can be worthwhile



Profiling... dark arts without a huge dataset and automation.


StockyGuy said:


> Not my main motivation for an investment, just a final vetting



Again, the idea has merit, however, how a group of people with certain attributes react in certain situations, is quite a "dark arts" scenario.

Below, social and racial profiling based on your conditional pre set biases. Other people may have a different perspective.
Law enforcement has been going this direction for a while, but it's data intensive. 
Is anyone that interested in Directors, unless they dramatically outperform or underperform.


StockyGuy said:


> Do they look trustworthy, intelligent, somewhat hip to the zeitgeist, healthy (or at least not about to drop off the perch) etc?


----------

