This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast, I have yet another extra special guest, Linda Gibson, CEO of Pigium Quantitative Solutions. She has a really fascinating background, very clectic, a combination of math and law. She has run a number of firms and a number of divisions at large firms and traced a career arc that's just very unusual compared to the typical person in finance, eventually leading her to a point where she's managing quants running about one hundred billion dollars
in assets. Really a fascinating background, and it just goes to show you how broad and flexible the world of finance is. That there are so many different ways you can find yourself in a senior management position in this industry. If you had to guess someone would run through this path, you would never assume, well, you're going to come out of law school and eventually you're going to be general counsel. How does that lead to running a group of quants?
But that was Linda's Korea path. There are a few people in the world who are more knowledgeable about the management of asset managers and what it's like to actually run a global organization and interact with lots of aspects of the business of finance, whether that's acquisitions or compliance or dealing with all the legalities of multi jurisdictional regulations. She really has been the person who's lived this and
walk the walk. And I found this conversation to be quite fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Linda Gibson, CEO of Pigum Quantitative Solutions. So let's get into your background, which is really kind of interesting. You get a BS in mathematics and a jd from Boston University. Math and law. Yep, not the usual combination, not at.
All, Barry. It is something Math has always come easy to me since a child. So I was a math major pretty much because it was an easy a for me.
Math is truth, It's absolutely it is.
I loved the fact that my grades weren't subject to the subjectivity of my professors, and that there was always a right and wrong answer and the one that's.
Until you get to applied mathematics, where it all goes off.
The rails, which, if you notice, that is where I stopped. I didn't get an advanced degree in math.
But you do get the JD. And you said you weren't a math nerd. You were not looking for a job in finance. What happened?
I was not. I was waitressing one summer, my final summer after my senior year, and a friend called and said, I just interviewed with a financial services company. I'm not interested in the job, but you might want to reach out. And I literally reached out. It was Mass Financial Services. I reached out, I got the interview, and I got the job, and I started the next week. Didn't really think about going into financial services. I thought it was
going to be, honestly a math teacher. I was thinking about teaching in boarding school.
Wait, so you go to MFS MFI and was this between college and law school or after you graduated law school?
It was between college and law school. So first job out of college.
And you discover, hey, this finance stuff is kind of interesting. What then led you to go to law school instead of business school?
I worked with a bunch of lawyers, So I worked at the third party administrator distribution arm of mutual fund family at Mass Financial. So it's called the Banking Services group when banks couldn't offer and distribute mutual funds. So we had clients like Chase and City Bank and JP Morgan and all of those, And so I worked with a bunch of lawyers and our company was going through transition at the time, and I thought I always wanted
I knew I wanted to get an advanced degree. My father is still a practicing lawyer at eighty five, and my grandfather was a lawyer.
So you come from a long family of attorneys.
I do. But my father advised me not to go into law. He always wanted to be a stockbroker, even though he's in trusts in estates, yes, So he was never really interested in pushing me to go into the law. And even though he worked for his father's law practice with the name on the door, literally, that was not an option for me.
That's so amusing because I immediately imagined getting pushed back from the family. Hey, everybody here is a lawyer, our name is on the door. You're turning your back on the family business. No, such, Nope.
They were at a point where they anti nepitism or nepotism was an issue, and they said, nope, you will not be coming to work for this firm, so don't even think about it.
Huh.
So I was literally sitting on the roof deck one night, and I was balancing law business school, which one made more sense for me, and didn't really know that much about either. But I was very logical by nature, and I was working with a bunch of lawyers at the time. And I also loved the fact that, well, it took one more a year to get through school, three years versus two. But when you come out you are something, You're a lawyer, you have something, and so off I went to law school.
I thought you were going to say indebted, but it really had too It really doesn't matter when you come out of business school. You're an MBA wouldn't come out of law school assuming you passed the bar, you're JD and your license to practice. How soon after law school did you realize I don't want to practice law?
Pretty soon?
I went in year third year law school.
It was pretty much the third year of law school. I was in a immersive mock trial program where you spend the whole year and you work for the DA's office in the prosecutor's office. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. LA law was what it.
Was all about, exactly.
It was so cool, and so I thought, that's what I want to do. I got into it. I wanted every single one of my cases to settle. I did not like law, especially trial work, at all. And I was walking on the street and I ran into somebody I had worked with at this banking services group of MFS which had spun off and become Signature Financial Group, and the woman said to me, you might want to come back and work for us. Have you thought about it? And I said absolutely, I'm in what do I need
to do? And I started working for them part time during my third year of law school, and then worked for them ten years after.
That's interesting. When did the Harvard Advanced Management Program come along?
That came along much later. So I spent the first decade of my career as a mutual fund attorney, which was really in.
The house for not for a law firm, but for a mutual fund related company.
Right this was the Signature Financial Group. And that was a great opportunity to learn, frankly, because not only was I writing offering documents, I was reading I mean, how many people do you know that have read the forty Act and read the various Use its Directives, which is the basically the UK equivalent to the forty Act.
I saw a lot of people keep it on the nightstand in case they.
Case I tired, Yeah, put right out right. So that was just a really good foundation for me. I also sat, as I said, we were the third party distributor for all of these major companies, so I was on twelve different boards, not on them, but I was the officer, so I was taking minutes. So I was learning just a ton about the mutual fund industry and working with
these big global companies. But then this company, I'm getting off topic of the Advanced Management degree, but this company launched a new investment fund structure called Global Hub and Spoke or master Feeder you might have heard of it. And I was chosen by the CEO to go travel globally with him to not only get big firms the likes of HSBC, Julius Beher those types to adopt this fund structure, but also to get regulatory approval. So I
was traveling all around the globe. This is I was in my twenties at Chris.
It had a lot of fun on the company dime.
It was very, very fun, weird runt of the bus front of the US. Yeah. Well, we actually had a flat in London, so I was going to Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, the UK trying to get regulatory approval of this mutual
fund structure. So it was really really a great foundation for me and I did that for about ten years, and this is where I moved over to UAM at the time, which is the first multi boutique investment business, and I moved over there into their third party mutual fund business as general counsel.
So that's the real interesting question is why general counsel in house when given your background, you could have gone to any of the big firms Scadden elsewhere and made a ton of money working as an attorney working for these big fun companies.
It's ironic that you said that you said Scadden.
Because not ironic at all.
When I was thinking about going to Old Mutual, I was offered a job at Scadden that same day for the same amount of money, and I knew UAM was potentially going to be acquired, and I knew it was a riskier business, but I thought I can go work for a law firm and then eventually become a general counsel or. I can just skip the law firm step, especially working at a firm like Scadden, and go directly to the general council job, which I thought was much
more interesting to me. So even though Scadden had such a big name, I decided to go to UAM.
And it's a really challenging life work balance. At my my friends who all went to big firms like you hear stories and all they do is wine. Why don't you quit? I can't leave. I'm making so much money, but you're miserable. I'm just going to do this for another five years. I've heard every ten twenty years it keeps going. So you skip that went in house, never looked back.
Never looked back, and the firm got acquired pretty much a year later. I was told to shut down my division or my business unit, which I did, and more interestingly, given my us its background, in the fact that I had traveled globally. This was a South African based firm, so Old Mutual, but it was listed in London, so
the head office was in London. They were very interested in my global experience and my regulatory experience, so they said, hey, you want to become general counsel of the holding company. Why wouldn't you? So I then put all of my forty act work aside, and that's when I really learned the art of negotiation. They had forty four affiliates at the time. We had to convert them from revenue share to profit sharing. We had to put equity in the hands of the founders and their management teams. We were
doing M and A work. We were disposing of firms that weren't strategic, we were acquiring firms. So I ended up negotiating with so many CEOs CIOs and founders. That was really eye opening. When people have self interest and it affects their wallets, they are very interesting people. So I had to.
Pivot and very phrase interesting people. Yeah, are you New York based, London based or Nylon back and forth.
I was Boston based. We were Boston based, but we had our parent company was in London, and then the ultimate insurance company was in South Africa, so I was in London quarterly. And then we had affiliates. We had forty four affiliates and they were all over the US, but they were also in the UK and Tokyo.
At the time, so you were really on a plane a lot global. I think. I think the flight from Vancouver to Tokyo is fast than the flight from New York to South Africa. That's a bear of a flight, isn't it?
It is? But South Africa is really amazing. And it was interesting going into Cape Town and looking around. The brand Old Mutual was like Coca Cola here. It was on every building everywhere. It was really interesting. They had offices in Cape Town, and Joe Burke I preferred Cape Town of course.
But so the obvious question, given this background in law and working on mutual funds and eventually becoming general counsel, how does this prep you for the role you have today essentially hurting cats and managing a whole bunch of quants.
Again, the learning the negotiation skills really helped a lot in dealing with managing investment professionals as well as managing quants. As you know, quants have extremely high IQs. I mean our firm pgum quant we have twenty nine PhDs. Our CIO is literally an x rocket scientists to use to work at NASA, and then we have an advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK as a CIO,
so these are very very smart people. Managing them you definitely have to adapt your style a bit, so you have to learn how to deal with smart people as well as introverts. We have a lot of introverts at are firm. They sometimes have trouble talking to clients. Sometimes they have trouble talking to me, so I need to adjust my management style. But what I learned really early in my career is that it's not about IQ, it's about well, it is about IQ. We need very smart people,
but EQ is equally important. So what I have to do for them is I have to lead them, direct them, manage them and then sort of push them, but then just leave them alone. I want to make sure I've give them the resources that they need, but also give them the direction that they need. And having this legal background, what was really great about it is when you're a lawyer,
you're at every important meeting. You're in all the board meetings, midting everything, You're in the board meetings, you're in the compensation meetings, you're in the internal audit meetings. So you really learned everything about a business, everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. So that really helped me understand what it was like or what it would be like to manage a company. And then I had this strange seven year stint of heading global distribution, which is
that was very interesting. I didn't want that job at all. The CEO of our firm came to me and said, I don't really need a chief operating officer, but what I do need is a global head of distribution. Can you build a centralized global sales team? And oh, by the way, your compensation is going to be tied to assets raised, which is the first time that ever happened in my life.
Right, interesting perspective change, eating what you kill.
Yes, I had never sold anything either, So again, what I had to do there was be comfortable with hiring really smart people. So I analyzed the landscape, figured out where there was demand for our products, made sure we had the right products to sell, made sure that the regulatory and the expense hurdles were too high to go in. And then I had to build a lean team of very smart salespeople that could sell our products in these
various jurisdictions. But also, when you think you're managing people so far away from you, the distance is so vast that you have to trust them. We had people in Dubai. I need to make sure those people are doing what they say they're doing and that I can trust them, and never mind also people in China, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Sometimes we had language barriers, so again I had to make sure that I hired the best people that I could really trust to do what they needed to do,
and then again let them go. I also needed to learn fast that when somebody is not right or not a good cultural fit, that you need to make a change very very quickly.
Yeah, not to say the very least. So let's talk a little bit about your work with Pigium. They are one of the world's top twenty asset managers well over a trillion dollars. What was it like settling in to such a giant firm coming from more reasonable both size firms in the early part of your career.
Well, I came from a more reasonably sized firm. It was a very very easy transition for me because I spent seventeen years at an insurance owned multi boutique at the head office in various executive positions, So it was a surprisingly easy transition for me.
Close of the insurance background, or because of.
Just the multi boutique background. So I wasn't on the insurance side. So I was at the asset management arm of the Old Mutual insurance enterprise, and I worked at the head office. I was after I was general counsel, I was chief operating officer and head of affiliate management. So I oversaw nineteen different investment boutiques that frankly spanned the gamut of offerings. We had timber, we had real estate, we had global fixed income, quant equity, fundamental equity, managed futures,
everything you name it had it. And Old Mutual was ODDO, South Africa, London, New York, Boston.
Boston, Okay. So you're used to working cross timelines and.
Regions, absolutely, and having worked in that environment for so long made moving over to pGEM and pGEM Quant Solutions a pretty easy transition for me. I was really excited about it. I had been watching PGIM, I had been watching their reputation and their brand grow exponentially under David Hunt's leadership, and then I had also known a lot
about pGEM. Quant at the time was called QMA, and we had a firm at Old Mutual two firms Acadian and Analytic, who are both quant firms, and I sat on both of their boards for years, and as head of affiliate management, you're responsible for their p and ls, so you're in their shorts with respect to their strategy, their product development, any liftouts they would do, making sure they had appropriate distribution resources and funding, made sure their
succession plans were set and were executed seamlessly. So I spent a lot of time with quantitative firms and I really really liked it. Coming from a math science background, I very much liked the systematic nature of a quant firm, but I also liked it pagem quant. We like to call it the fusion of art and science, so you have the fundamental insights plus the systematic And while I am a math science person, I am very very artsy
and creative. I love a good craft. My daughter got married two weeks ago and I spent my winter learning how to day coupage oyster shells with maps of the cape and gold gilding along the edges. So I spent I don't know how many weekends doing two hundred of these over the winter last year. So that is a little snapshot into my life. But to take it back. So I very much like sort of the art and
science of quant investing. So it was a natural fit for me to come to PGM, but also to come to pagemqu and it's been it was remarkably easy to transition to the firm and more interesting to me. When I became COO, I expected, frankly, organ rejection because I didn't come from the investment management side of the business, and often you think that investment professionals want CEOs who
are investment professionals. And I was shocked and delighted frankly when I was appointed a Chief operating officer of PGAM. Kwant that the investment group embraced it. They loved the fact that I would support them and lean into them and really let them do what they do and not micromanage them.
So CIO and CEO are very very different skill sets. CIO, you're essentially dealing with a probabilistic process trying to make assessments about an unknown outcome in the future. CEOs have to manage people, they have to manage budgets. It's much more blocking and tackling and less probabilistic than the investment side. So the fact that you're now CEO of this group of quants but don't have a background as a CIO, that I don't think that at all would work to your disadvantage.
Yeah, and I saw it in real life when being part of a multi boutique and being on the boards of nineteen investment managers. I saw the difference between the CEOs that had been investment professionals or CIOs and the ones that were heads of distribution or were in operations. It is interesting, though the majority are either in distribution or CIOs, they don't tend to be lawyers. So but regardless, I do think that CIOs tend, if I'm going to stereotype, they tend to do better managing money.
Than people I know. That's absolutely I don't think that that's over generalizing at all. What's kind of interesting is I thought the ease going from Old Mutual to pGEM, given both of their insurance backgrounds, might have been that, but you're suggesting it was less had to do with that and more had to do with just running a broad assortment of different groups, departments, division strategies, et cetera.
Yeah, both pGEM and All Mutual are similar with respect to their investment management businesses tend to be pretty separate and distinct from their insurance businesses. So they report in and they have quarterly business reviews and all of that stuff, and they dovetail nicely, but they really are run separately.
So you were general counsel and how to manage a large group of attorneys, and now you're managing a large group of quants. Any similarities or differences that are noteworthy between hurting each herd of cats over there?
There are similarities in that they both tend to be meticulars, so they're both type A. They're both very very smart, and they tend to get into the weeds and the details. So you have to constantly take them up. So at our firm, putting portfolio managers in front of prospects and clients, we constantly have to train them, give them presentation training. We need to often bring in CPMs to help translate their knowledge into Layman's terms. It cpmbing being client portfolio managers.
So these are the people that explain what we do in Layman's terms.
To prospects client facing.
Yes, and many of our as I said before, many of our investment professionals or introverts. They do not want to be in front of clients or prospects. Lawyers can be the same, and you often have to get lawyers to think like business people. You do the same thing with investment professionals. They don't have to think like business professional as much as lawyers do, but they still need to adjust their thinking a little bit. And I often need to change my leadership style. And I learned early on.
I took a personality profiling test. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's called Insights Discovery, and they put you into a color bracket and I'm red, which means I tend to like people to be be bright, be brief, and be gone. That's how I like people to interact with me. But there are a lot of people that want a lot of data. They want a lot of information. You need to spend time with them. You need to ask them how their kids are. Some
are extroverts, they don't care about the topic. They just want to have fun, you know. Others care more about socializing. There's a lot of different ways people like to take in information. So when you're managing lawyers and you're managing quants, there is something similar there. Managing distribution people is a whole different ball of wax, though that was fascinating when I managed distribution group.
Salespeople respond to financial incentives.
They do. They also can be very needy and they can require a lot of your time. And they also want to be praised a bit, huh, which is interesting although everybody, I think everyone likes praise.
I guess. But if you're on a variable com system, depending on how successfully you raise assets, it's there in black and white on the sales log you've raised X. Hey, do I really need to tell you this is fantastic? You did a great job this quarter.
You do. Actually, what I did learn is you do and the more you do it, the better they perform. Now, I think again, that works everywhere. What do they say you have to say something positive X number of times the sandwich?
Yeah, you're gonna say something negative. You've got to put something positive on either side.
Either side of it.
Criticism sandwich I find not amusing. So let's drill down a little bit to the various quant strategies that pGEM utilizes. Is a different asset classes, different geographies, different strategies. What is the full spectrum of offerings pGEM has for their Quant group.
Short answer is all of the above. So pagem Quant is divided into three platforms. We have our quant Equity platform, which manages risk control equity portfolios that were quants, so they're model and factor driven. They cover core value, opportunistic equity, and indexing. Then we have a multi asset platform. The multi asset platform manages things like offerings that give you inflation hedging against inflation, so we use publicly traded real
assets and commodities. We do defensive equity strategies. We also do asset allocation and overlays. And then we have a third platform which pGEM Quant acquired right before I joined, which was another interest of mine was integrating a new firm into the fold, and this is Pgemwouldwanti. It's our London based liquid alternatives firm. It offers global macro trend following.
It also has inflation hedging products as well as macrotail risk products, so we kind of cover and we go up and down the market spectrum from microcap all the way up to large cap and then we go across geography, so we'll do US, International, EMX, China, you name it. We offer most of it in quant form. The one thing we don't offer is privates. Our sister company does that.
What's the name of the sister Hume.
We have well Page in private capital. We have pGEM real Estate. We actually have six sisters. We have pGEM Fixed Income, Jennison PGE and Portfolio Advisory and pGEM Investments. Those all wrapped together make up that one point two trillion dollars.
That is PGIM really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about multi asset opportunities. Starting with you have a year like last year twenty twenty two. Stocks are down, bonds are down, all these asset classes are under pressure. How does that affect all the various strategies that you guys are running.
Well, Clearly the markets affect our strategies. But that's one of the reasons that we feel strongly that quants excel in volatile times, mostly because they have a long term approach. They're data driven, they're disciplined, they're diversified. So we have three hundred plus stocks in our portfolios. We look at hundreds of pieces of data on ten thousand companies every day,
so we're very, very diversified. But the other thing about being a quant which is nice is it removes the emotional bias from picking socks, so you don't get caught up in what's going on in the market and freaking out in essence and making bad decisions. You have your models to ground you. Sure there's fundamental insights on top, and there are people here back to that fusion of art and science, but we have the models as our bedrock.
So, given what twenty twenty two is like and obviously very challenging, what's it like when the calendar flips really was last October twenty twenty two, where market's bottomed and took off. How does that change in market regime effects how you're going about your business or is it still the same thing, just whether market's going up and down, you're still applying the same strategies.
We're applying the same strategies. But having said that, and again we offer so many different strategies, but what we do have and people have been very very interested in them, are sort of that in the inflation hedging strategies that we offer the custom mandates. We're all about solving our clients' needs not only today but tomorrow. So how do we work with those clients to figure out what they're trying to solve for some downside protection, so we've been recently
putting together portfolios that have downside protection. They might limit the upside a little bit. We can adjust that depending on our client's preference and needs and wants. The macro tail risk products, the inflation hedging products, all of these different things that are helping clients right now move away from the sixty to forty portfolio is just not working for clients right now. And sure they want to put
money into privates. Privates are big right now, and pGEM is leaning into our privates and our alts, meaning pGEM at our head office. But at the same time, people need liquid investments, and so what we provide for them is liquid solutions to help them navigate through these turbulent times.
Huh really interesting. So the bulk of what you're doing is liquid. You don't need a gate to get out. These are all stocks, bonds, other assets that are readily tradable any given day.
Yep. All liquid, including publicly traded real assets and commodities. Clearly liquidity is a little tougher with sort of the microcap and the small all. So what we do what our models do there is they assess the trading costs of getting in and out of companies, because we want to make sure, of course that you don't pay more in trading costs to get out than your alpha, so
we have to pay attention to that. We also have people that use us for overlay strategies and they often have to get out on a dime, so we need to make sure that everything is very, very liquid.
That's really interesting. How bespoke are the portfolios and the solutions that you come up with for clients. Are they really customized for individual institutions or how do you think about that approach?
They're extremely customizable across all of our platforms. So even I'll give you an example, our quant equity platform, we have an ESG solutions offering. We had a very very large E andF endowment and foundation come to us and say we need to get we need to solve for our ESG needs, and we want to do that. We want to track a certain index, but we want to
take energy out of the portfolio. So what we've been able to do is we've been able to help investors solve for their ESG needs wherever they are in their journey, and I get that it's different for different people. But that's what's really unique about our offerings is that we're able to sit there and talk to you and say, Berry, what's important to you? Do you care about water usage? Do you care about women on boards? You care about energy? Do you care about carbon footprint? How much do you
want it to impact your returns? Or maybe you don't want it to impact your returns at all? So how do we work with you to create a portfolio that does what you wish? So that's been really interesting and we've gotten a lot of traction there.
Huh, really super intriguing. So you mentioned some people are looking for inflation hedging. I would imagine that would have been really useful last year. Are you still getting demand for that? Given how far ce is fallen from the peak? When was that June twenty twenty two something like that? Is there still a demand for inflation hatching?
There still is? It may not be as in demand as it's been, but if you think about where we are, the macro environment is so uncertain. People still don't know whether we're going to have a recession. People don't know people are assuming there's going to be a recession in Europe, so people just don't know. So I think they're really trying to pardon the use of the word hedge, but hedge their bets and make sure that they have downside protection. And people get a bit scared in this type of
environment and they want to diversify their portfolio. So we just what we want to do is we want to partner with our clients. And they might have any number of needs. They might have, you know, risk parameters, they might have liquidity needs, they might want to track a benchmark, they might want to just absolute return, they might want real return. Whatever they need, we will solve for.
So about half of your clients Bullpark are large institutions. You mentioned endowments and foundations, and given the background of pGEM with insurance, I think about future liabilities. Is there a lot of matching? Hey, in twenty thirty five, we have this sort of expected demand on our capital. How important is future liability matching to custom solutions?
It's not. We don't do as much of that at pGEM quant So we do manage money for the prudential general account, but it tends to be in equities, and we do manage some money for them through our pagem would WANTI. But as you know, insurance companies have various constraints and that they need to solve for these things, and they have much smaller buckets of risk assets. So should insurance companies invest in equities? We very much want to be a part of that, and we do manage
equities on behalf of our parent company. But lucky for us is we don't We don't have to think about paying claims. We just have to think about managing the money in the best way that we can.
What about since people are talking about hedging, how do you think about risk management? Are you looking at a series of small wins or is there sometimes hey, we're going to take a big bet because we have a lot of conviction here.
So risk management is very much embedded in our process. So it's not an afterthought. It is something that we pay attention to. And clearly, you have to take risk if you're going to get gained. So but what our models try to do is take that the risks, the risks that are going to benefit us, and then manage the risks that are not. We tend to take a lot of singles and be consistent, but It depends on
what our clients are looking for. So I say that with respect to our equity book, but then we have also we take much you know, larger bets with our Pigeono with war platform as well as if you're thinking about maybe a small cap investment versus a large cap investment. So it really goes up and down the gamut depending on what our clients are looking for, what their risk tolerances are. We try to solve for their risk needs. And again quants can do that pretty effectively because of their process.
So how big a differentiator is pgeum quantitative solutions to pgeum. Again, given the insurance background, I don't know of a lot of other large insurers whose financial arms are leaning this heavily into the quant side.
I think it's a big differentiator for pgeum one. I just pGEM has one of, as you mentioned, one of the broadest asset management offerings out there, and I feel like quant is a very important component to the offering, especially how if you think about how technology is advancing and it's becoming more and more a part of our lives. AI is evolving, and we've been doing that for a long long time, So I think it's just natural to have a quant manager as part of your stable of offerings.
But yes, I do believe that it's a differentiator for pechim.
Really really intriguing. So there's a couple of quotes of yours that I have to ask about because they're kind of fascinating. Quote. Softer skills are more valuable than ever. They are what clients want. So first I have to ask, what do you mean by softer skills? Tell us about that.
I often refer to softer skills when I'm talking about women in management. Actually, when you think about the ability to connect with people, to really listen to understand what their wants and needs are, that many people don't do that, and I feel like I feel as though softer skills, especially in this tech enabled environment, so in a hybrid environment, when you're streaming and dealing with people by zoom and teams and you're not seeing people in the hallway, these
softer skills really really differentiate you. And one of the things that I've been doing as CEO during CODE or what I did during COVID and I've continued to do now, is you lack that ability to run into people in the kitchen and to connect with them and really build a relationship, because I do believe that building relationships is important to building trust. Building trust is essential to building working relationships with your business partners. And so what I
started doing was I started doing a video series. If you think carpool karaoke. I would drive my dog to the dog park in the mornings, and it was about a forty minute drive, and I would do a lot of reflecting and thinking about strategy, people, whatever I was doing at work, and instead of thinking about it, I thought I'm going to do some little video segments too minutes. Didn't really think about what I was going to say, just got on the and talked to the employees of
our company. And I did that regularly, so they would know what I'm up to, what I'm thinking about. They knew a little about me personally, but they also knew what I was thinking about, what the management team was thinking about, and what we were up to. And that's an example of a softer skill that it's that ability to connect with people and to think about how you can connect with people in different ways to build their trust and get to know you better.
You mentioned the various hybrid work options that, especially what took place during the pandemic. Are you guys still operating on a hybrid basis and what does that do for you?
We are, we're working in a hybrid three days in the office, two days work from home, and I believe that it's the best of both worlds because we have those three days to collaborate, to continue to get to know each other, to brains dorm and then we have two days that we can do heads down work, meaning the work from home days. And I also feel that we get a lot of credit for doing that with our employees, our employment. Our employees are happier in this environment.
It's what they want, it's what they're getting used to. And I was just listening to actually Bloomberg this morning where they were talking about how the trains are getting busier and workplaces are going are changing their hybrid schedules. So I'll be interested to see what happens in the next year or so with respect to hybrid, but I think right now it's a pretty good balance.
Does it help with employee retention and even new hires?
It does. We've actually had certain people that wanted full work from home, which we don't do so it is something that I believe companies need to do, they need to pay attention to that. I think our offices are in Newark, newt so hybrid is pretty appealing and I do think it's a differentiator, or maybe it's not even a differentiator. It might just be table stakes.
Right Amongst the big banks, a lot of them have been gone back to JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman, Sachs, mongst On. A lot of these have gone back to five days in the office, and there's been some pushback, not so much from the young twenty somethings who really need to be immersed, but the slightly older generation late twenties, early thirties, who really know how to work remote right.
I believe it's important for the younger generation because you want that mentoring. You want to be able to again run into people in the halls, get to know them, get to understand what they do, and I do think that's important. I think flexibility is also important to many Many have either young kids at home, or they have ailing parents, or they have hobbies, or they just have wellness goals. So getting that balance right can be tricky. But this is again why I think the three days
is a good balance. It's a nice way to solve for our employees' needs but also get the work done and build a culture. Building a culture. We haven't talked much about that, but one of the first things that I did when I took over as CEO was work with the employees to reset our values and then not only reset them, but then drive them home and live
by them and make changes based on them. And I think that building that culture it's very, very difficult to do if you're in a fully worked from home environment.
You know that makes that makes a lot of sense. Last quote of yours. You've talked a lot about leadership and diversity, especially when it comes to women in finance. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts about the best strategies for leading an industry that's spent so many decades as a male dominated bastion.
Again, it's lean into those softer skills. I think it's a trifecta of opportunity right now for women. So you have companies and boards that are trying to increase their diversity stats, so they're more open to women in senior leadership positions. The hybrid work environment makes it easier for women that are balancing multiple, multiple different chores and responsibilities, and then you have the benefit of women having these softer skills that work in this new tech, tech enabled environment.
So I think it's a great opportunity for women going forward. I think the issue really is the pipeline. And one of the things that I'm passionate about, and we're doing a lot with at pGEM quant is we're going out and doing community work. We're reaching out into the newer community, and we're working with kids as young as elementary school kids,
so we're getting them interested in asset management. We're doing things like shark Tank and job fares and things like that that are kind of mock job fares, and it's just been really rewarding for us because we have to start at such a young age. So these women and other diverse populations will continue to have an interest in asset management.
You're playing a long game. You're planning seeds ten fifteen years in advance. Because none of this is going to pay off for a long time.
We need to be patient as we invest for the long term. We need to be patient, but not complacent.
Not complacent. So let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests starting with Hey, what kept you entertained during the lockdown? What are you streaming these days?
Gosh meaning streaming on television?
Sure, television, podcast doesn't matter what whatever audio video is entertaining you.
So like documentaries, So what I was looking or watching this weekend was fantastic Fungi, which I highly recommend. This is all about the medicinal and healing properties of mushrooms. If one has ailing parents or is having health issues, I highly encourage you to tune in. But it is
also a beautifully beautifully filmed documentary. I also live on the Cape, so I had to you know, the shark population is booming, so I had to watch After the Bite, which is all about the shark population on Cape Cod. But other than that, as far as sort of more mainstream, I did like Ted Lasso very much. It was entertaining. You always got a good tidbit of knowledge, Like being an authentic leader, you know, lean into your insecurities. I never turned that off about picking up some little tidbit
of information. As far as podcasts, I get most of my new use by email feeds, so I tend to do that more as a hobby so I do. I'm very interested right now in longevity and health. So I listened to something called the Cabral Concept by doctor Stephen Cabral, which talks about all sorts of things. One of the things I was looking into was an infrared sana and a cold plunge. So my husband and I just recently purchased both of those things.
I have a buddy who is crazy into the cold plunge and whatever that breathing technique is that you need to do, and I committed to doing a cold plunge next summer, so we'll see how that goes. I'm in the ocean every Memorial Day weekend. Wow, that's my cold plunge because that's like, you know, sixty degrees, but what these guys are talking about is high thirties, low forties, really really cool.
Yeah, ours is forty nine degrees and it's cold. It takes about a minute and thirty seconds to numb up. So that's an interesting podcast. Asked for me, I do tune into this other podcast. It's called Your CEO Mentor. It's by the author of no book Leadership, and this individual's name's Martin Moore, and I totally skipped your conversation, your question about the AMP program, which is an advanced
management program. It's an elite executive education program. But he was a buddy of mine at the a MP and he wrote a book on leadership. He was the CEO of a company and he wrote a book called No Book Leadership, and I of course read it out of courtesy because I don't normally get a lot, frankly out of leadership books. It's very intuitive to me. But I got quite a few nuggets of information from this book.
And he's just very entertaining and so I tuned into his podcasts frequently and I get little tidbits like it's about respect not popularity, it's about excellence not perfection, different things like that. It's just interesting and he's Australian, so he's really interesting to listen to.
So you mentioned mentors, that's my next question. Who are your mentors who helped guide your career.
I have one mentor. She was the lawyer that hired me for that job out of college. Her name is Molly Muggler and she worked with me my entire career, her entire career. She's now retired, so she hired me. I then became general counsel, I moved to old mutual, I brought her with me. And what was amazing about her is she believed in me before I did. She had such confidence and vision for me and my future, and she kept referring to herself as my sticky asset
that she'd stay with me, but wasn't. What was inspiring about her is she's so intelligent, and she's such an accomplished lawyer. But at the same time she was militant about balancing her personal life and her professional life. She prioritized watercolor, painting and tennis equally with her job as a general counsel of a big firm. So to this day, I am still connected with her, and I'm still constantly inspired by her.
That's interesting. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites. What are you reading right now?
My nightstand is a bit eclectic right now. So I have again another book on longevity called out Living, which has again to do with health and longevity. I have the rain Barrel Effect, which is again about what you put into your body and how it affects again your health and longevity. But the real chakra on there is I believe it's called the Modern Textbook of Astrology. During COVID, I started thinking a lot about astrological charts and I found them fascinating and they are tied a lot to
math and science, and they're very, very technical. And I had my chart read and I said, you know, i'd be interested in learning how to read charts. That doesn't see that hard? He said, oh, trust me, it's hard. He gave me the name of three books. He said, start reading and then get back to me. I might have to postpone that to retire because it is quite technical. It's very math forward, but it's uh, it's still interesting for fun. Recently, I've read The Lincoln Highway. I really liked.
I loved. I think it's called beneath a Scarlets guy. What I like to do? Back when I was a lawyer, everybody would say, oh, have you read the most recent, you know, fiction book on law, you know Tom Clancy kind of stuff. And I just don't want to read things that I'm living. So I don't want to read books on investing. I don't want to read books on the law. I want to read books that transport me to another place in time where I can just learn
about memoirs of a Geisha. Was you know interesting things like that. Just get out of my own head and think about something different. We do enough as a lawyer. Think about how much you have to read when you When I read, I want to for fun or for gaining knowledge of something different.
Huh? Really interesting. Down to our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either investment, finance management or law.
As we've been going through this podcast, I've realized the benefit that my legal profession has had on my management abilities. I never quite tied those two things together so much. The broad knowledge that you get from being a business lawyer is quite extreme. So depending on what that person's interest in interests are, I would say network, network, Network, It's all about talking to people and understanding what they do and understanding what's out there and really building relationships.
That's really what it's about. That's what it's about in business, that's what it's about in dealing with clients, building relationships. It's just what it is about life. But it's very hard to make that decision. Again, I fell into my career and I'm pretty fortunate that I've had a lot
of opportunities come my way. But I'm not somebody who says you need a goal and you need to follow it, because I think if you have blinders on for that one goal, that you're going to miss all of these other opportunities that can lead you in a direction that might be much more fruitful for you.
Huh. Interesting. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew twenty five years or so ago when you were first getting started.
Gosh, that one's more tricky for me. I feel like
I was pretty informed back then. But if I can flip it on its head a little bit, maybe I'll answer it as to what advice would I give to those twenty somethings out there now, And I would say, understand the benefits of compounding, make sure you invest early, make sure you're diverse, and make sure you invest in your four to one K plan, because as much as it feels as though you can't afford that extra hundred dollars or ten dollars or one thousand dollars, it's just
so important to start investing early.
Yeah, not to say the very least that decade twenties to thirties makes a huge difference over forty years.
Hey Tiz for sure.
Linda, thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Linda Gibson, CEO of Pigium Quantitative Solutions. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the previous five hundred or so we've done over the past nine years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Sign up for my daily reading list at
ridults dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rid Holt's follow all of the Bloomberg Family of podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did not thank the correct team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Attika Valbron is my project manager. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Riddolts. You've been listening to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio.