Blog: “I have a PhD in Grovelling”: In Conversation with George Feiger

Could you give a brief outline of your background?

“I began as a finance academic, and in fact, I was a professor of finance at the Stanford Business School. I then joined McKinsey as a management consultant. I spent 15 years at McKinsey and became one of the senior partners. I worked about half of that time in the United States, and half of that time in the UK, and I worked a lot on major restructuring of big companies, [like] mergers and acquisitions.

After that, at the request of one of my clients, I went into the investment banking business, and I was the Global Head of Investment Banking for Warburg [Pincus], which was, at that time, the crown jewel of British investment banking. It was purchased by the Swiss Bank Corporation, which was my client. After doing that for some time, I went into the (Swiss) private banking business, and we merged Swiss Bank and UBS. I became the Global Head of Onshore Private Banking for UBS. I built and ran all the private banking of UBS outside Switzerland.

After that, I spent a couple of years in the venture business, and in fact, we took a venture fund public on the AIM in London. Then I went back to the US and started a financial advisory business and ran it for 10 years before I came back to the UK to take this job as the Executive Dean of Aston Business School.”

Which experiences have been personal highlights for you?

“Some of the most interesting challenges, which are very relevant, in fact, to this conference, occur whenever you restructure companies or merge companies: all of the issues revolve around people, not [finances]. People have to unify around a direction; they have to take some actions that are rather difficult. This is one of the most challenging and demanding things you can do as a leader and I think I was involved in a lot of that as a management consultant.

The essence of the investment banking business is that it’s built entirely on people. These people, the more effective they are, the more mobile they are, so they can walk out the door to a competitor, and take their client relationships with them. So, I would say that one of the most demanding tasks I had was convincing people to stay and I spent [about] a year [after a big merger] talking to individuals, talking to groups, and trying to get them to hang on. In the intervals between those, I was grovelling in front of the clients to prevent them from going. I have a PhD in grovelling…I can grovel with the best of them.”

What do you feel are the key differences between experiencing the corporate world from an academic perspective versus a commercial perspective?

“The fundamental challenge for academics who study business-related activity, as opposed to physics or chemistry or biology, is that you really need to connect with the business community. Because the world of statistics is only able to be understood when you know what reality actually looks like. So, one of the things that I have done here [while] running this business school is build to, on a very substantial scale, the interactions with businesses. We do this in all sorts of ways. One of the things [is] staff is working with Small and Medium Enterprises, because the Midlands [where Aston is based] is the last manufacturing centre in the UK; it’s surrounded by these businesses…we’ve probably worked with nearly 1000 SMEs. The government programme ‘Build Back Better’ that former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced, that was designed by Aston, and [we were] the only university that Sunak visited.

Our academics are working on policy, they’re appearing in Parliament, they’re making statements about practical things that can be done, and it’s building that bridge between the academic world and what I would call ‘commercial reality’. If you don’t do that, you’re left behind. The most compelling macro-economic analyses are not done by academics, they’re done by people who work in hedge funds…we’re talking about high quality academic work, we’re talking about papers that are 20, 30, 40 pages long, full of analysis and statistics. And the difference is they bet money on it. So, it’s not just an exercise to publish a paper, you’ve got stakes to it…it’s building that bridge between intellectual theories and analytic abilities, into reality.”

What’s something that is front of your mind or on your desk?

“In terms of what I would call investments in new directions, we’re rapidly building capability in cybersecurity. We’re working with the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences [on the] technology, but part of it is human behaviour.

Most [hacks] are not because of some code cracker, it’s because you open an attachment to your email. There is what I would call a social science dimension to it, which is human behaviour, organisational [behaviour], and management of people, and there’s a technological dimension to it, [encryption and so on]. We’re pulling these things together and doing a lot of work on that, so that would be something that’s quite in the forefront of things that we’re investing in.”

What’s the core message you want attendees to come away from their three days at our Conference with?

“The most important skill you can acquire in management is seeing things from somebody else’s perspective.

You [already] know what you want, so that’s a useless observation. All negotiation, if done well, involves looking at [the question] from somebody else’s perspective…the only way to figure [it] out is to think of things the way they do.

The broader point is to think of things from multiple perspectives. The good thing about events like [the Conference] is different people are going to say different things. All of these things will be a surprise, even if they don’t all agree with each other. It’s developing the mental flexibility to say, ‘Yeah, I never thought of it that way’, or, ‘I should try and do this differently’. And I think that’s true, not just at this event, but of any occasion in which you bring together people of different perspectives. It’s the ultimate argument for diversity.

Especially if you come up [through] your organisation in a function, like an HR function, for example, then you tend to see things from one angle, but the reality is far more complex. And the most important thing is to break out of that place from which you started and learn to see things differently. So, to me, that’s the big message on all these things.”