Manage the process, not the scoreboard
In the shadows of the Rugby World Cup kick-off, one of Australia’s most celebrated former players, Nick Farr-Jones, explained to Michael Davis how lessons learned in shaping a top-level sports career can translate into managing a career in banking and finance.
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Nick Farr-Jones
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Nick Fa rr-Jones was the first Australian to lift the William Webb-Ellis Cup, the trophy awarded to rugby union’s world champions every four years, after captaining the Wallabies to glory in 1991.
In what was an amateur game, Farr-Jones represented his country for ten years, earning 63 caps and captaining the team for 36 test matches, all while building a successful offfield career as a lawyer.
Since his retirement from rugby 18 years ago, he has continued to apply the same principles of hard work, consistency and team building to reach the top in fields arguably as challenging and uncompromising as international rugby.
At a recent book launch for SAS analytics expert Evan Stubbs (see page 9), Farr-Jones spoke fondly of the amateur days, and the joys of touring in a bygone era. He also recounted his move into banking, living in Paris for four years in the 1990s while working for Société Générale and shared his philosophy on building an effective team.
When AB+F spoke to him afterwards, Farr-Jones was also keen make the point that he was not a rugby player turned banker, but rather a lawyer who then became a banker. His 14-year investment banking career with ‘Soc Gen’, which commenced in the mid-nineties, just happened to coincide with the end of his rugby career. The transition, he said, at times involved a lot of “blood, sweat and tears”.
In a further transition, he is now a director at Taurus Funds Management, specialising in the resources sector.
The amateur days
“It’s interesting that [when it comes to rugby] we all [tend to] think of the modern professional game,” he said. “I always find it amazing that people forget about the old amateur days that I played through. The game only went professional in 1996.”
Farr-Jones refers to himself as being among the “last of the lucky ones” – a reference to the end of the amateur era of rugby when people from all trades and professions got together to play the game they loved, for the honour of turning out for their clubs, state and country.
“Rugby was just an attachment to my life – a fantastic attachment – but I was a lawyer. It gave me a passport to the world, but I’ve always considered myself to have a full time job,” he said.
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Nick Farr-Jones talks to David Campese in 1991.
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“[When it got] to six o’clock in the evening, you took off your suit, put on your jersey and you loved running into someone.”
As an amateur, Farr-Jones likened rugby touring to holidays. International tours were in fact his breaks from his job at the mid-sized law firm of Garland Seaborn and Abbott in Sydney.
“It was wonderful way of life,” he said. “That first major tour I went on with the Wallabies, we went away for ten weeks. In the old days of playing amateur rugby, you only played seven or eight tests a year unlike in the modern game where you play 13 of 14 tests.”
Touring, said Farr-Jones, was an opportunity to explore new cultures and interact with the local people. It was an experience vastly different from that of the modern-day professional on international duty.
“That (1984) was arguably my greatest tour, as a young kid getting [to see] the world and experiencing the culture of countries. When the Wallabies go away these days, they only go to the major cities; London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, maybe get across to Dublin and Paris. They play a test match, the dog barks and the caravan moves on.”
Banking career
While many Wallabies spend their lives working towards the dream of pulling on the gold jersey, a young Nick Farr-Jones never expected to play at an elite level. Small as a teenager, he wasn’t selected to represent his school, Newington College, at first XV level, but through hard work and persistence, he found himself making his Wallaby debut at 21. It was a journey he drew upon in making the switch from a legal to a banking career.
“Transitioning from law to banking was a bit like transitioning from being a second XV player at school to being a Wallaby. It took a lot of hard work.”
When Farr-Jones received an offer to move to Paris with a French investment bank, he jumped at the opportunity. Set on moving to Europe with his young family, he revealed he had entertained offers to continue playing rugby overseas semi-professionally, but he had lost some of his passion for the game. A career in finance provided him with an ideal opportunity to not only take a break from rugby but also to absorb a different culture.
“My umbilical cord to rugby was somewhat cut [when] I joined Société Générale,” Farr-Jones said.
“I spent four years in the derivative team on the commodities side which took me down to Africa, particularly South Africa which was the biggest gold producer at the time. I also set up a physical gold desk in Paris in 1997.”
Involved in risk-management, Farr-Jones was also instrumental in developing a mining-specific project finance team in London. During his time in South Africa, he established a relationship with Rand Refinery, the world’s largest gold refiner. The operation supplied India, at the time the biggest consumer of gold, with about 20 per cent of its gold.
Building a winning team
Moving to a new country and in to a new career was challenging, but Farr-Jones said he was helped by a strong team built on trust and accountability. New to investment banking, he relied on others to provide cover for his deficiencies in technical and quantitative finance, as he established his own niche.
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Lifting the trophy after their victory in the World Cup final against England in Twickenham.
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“I had to almost recreate myself. I didn’t have any economics or commerce training. It was a bit of blood, sweat and tears when I first went to Paris [with SocGén] and it certainly didn’t come naturally.
“I realised that if I could do something well and I surrounded myself with good people who did the things I couldn’t do, who understood technical risks, geology, metallurgy, engineering, people who loved crunching numbers, doing the financial modelling, people who loved writing up the credit papers, I knew I could succeed,” said Farr-Jones.
“I knew I would be part of a team that could do our job [well]. If we all did our job, the scoreboard would look after itself.”
This was a reference to the mantra Farr-Jones and the Wallabies observed religiously the early nineties: “Get the process right and let the scoreboard will look after itself.” It was one that has served him well in business life.
After an inexplicable collapse in the second of a two test series in France in 1989, Farr-Jones and the Wallaby leadership group concluded that their inability to perform consistently could be attributed to a ‘scoreboard focus’ – that is, looking for the end result rather than the details and execution.
Changing the culture of the team from one that was score board focused to a team that was process-driven did not happen overnight, Farr-Jones noted.
“It probably took us six to nine months. But the last 25 tests I played in the early nineties, we probably won 90 per cent of the games.”
“And I put it down to understanding what your role is. Of course it goes beyond the 80 minutes. It [also] goes into everything you do in preparation.”
This belief in was echoed during a 2005 meeting with the legendary mountaineer, the late Sir Edmund Hillary. Farr-Jones recalled the exchange to illustrate the value of preparation, when he asked, “51 years ago, was there ever a time when you looked up at the mountain (Everest) and thought, ‘I’m not going to make it?’”
Hillary replied, “Nick, I never, ever looked up at the mountain, because had I looked up the mountain and seen the enormity of the challenge that confronted me, I figured I wouldn’t get there.
“But what I knew I could do because of my training, my commitment, my passion and the team I had assembled around me, I knew I could keep throwing my left foot after my right.”
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- Your Career
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- Author:
- Michael Davis, mdavis@financialpublications.com.au
- Article Posted:
- September 15, 2011
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