This is Master's in Business with very Rid Holds on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, another extra special guest, Robin Grew, President of man Group one hundred and forty five billion dollar publicly traded hedge funds in the UK
and soon to be Man Groups CEO. This is a fascinating conversation about business growth and leadership and management, how to run a team, how to recruit and retain the best people, and how to use technology as a tool to give you an edge not just in investing, but in the ability to offer clients various solutions improving your efficiency,
effectiveness and productivity as a company. I found this to just be a fascinating masterclass in running a giant financial organization, and I think you will also so with no further ado, my conversation with Man Groups incoming CEO, Robin Grew.
Thank you for having me, Barry.
I've been looking forward to this for a while and when we first booked you you were like a junior analyst. Then suddenly in the ensuing weeks you can get tagged to be CEO. That has to be a little bit of a surreal experience.
It is nothing short of surreal. This is obviously new news for this particular podcast, and it is you hear the words that people say, you know, it's an honor and it's a privilege, and it sounds a little trite, and then you find yourself in one of these rare positions where somebody is asking you to take on the CEO and I have to tell you I'm mean it very authentically. It's an honor and it's a privilege, and it is slightly surreal and.
For a little context, maybe for some of the audience in America who may not be that familiar with Man Group. This isn't like a startup. This traces its roots back to eighteenth century sugar trading. Right, how old is Man Group.
Well, it's two hundred and forty years old. Put it that way, seventeen eighty three, and you're right. It traces its way back to sugar trading and at one point being the monopolistic supplier of rum to the Royal Navy, which and in those days that was important because everybody had a ration in the Royal Navy and everybody wanted to use it. And it's the journey, isn't it. It's
the journey of organizations to continue to be relevant. So two hundred and forty years ago, it's a conversation I have with people, which is, if we didn't keep changing, we'd still be making barrels on the side of the River Thames and trading sugar and hoping that the Royal Navy still needed a lot of rum. So that's not
where we are today. But the routes are deep and now we you know, we're just a shive one hundred and forty five billion dollars of assets under management across the entire credit curve, trading through US and quant through discretionary and private markets, reaching investors all over the world.
So we're going to spend a little more time delving deep into man groups practice. Let's start with your background, sure, which doesn't quite go back two hundred and seventy four.
Thank you very much, Sam.
You went to law school. Were the plans to become a solicitor or a barrister? That that's not the thought process of someone who wants to go into find it.
You're spot on. I actually qualified as a barrister, which is the fun words I went to the bar. People use that all the time to describe me, and you're right I had thought I was going to be an advocate, quite frankly, a barrister, you know, the one with the wigs and the gowns that you see on TV. My roots were very or reasonably humble. My dad was a public GP, you know, in the National Health Service in England, and my mum was a public school teacher, and quite frankly,
I know what financial services was. It was this thing that existed somewhere else. And so when I went to law school and went to the bar, I had every thought that I was just going to be a barrister and be another vocational professional in my family.
When did it enter your mind that hey, this finance stuff looks kind of interesting.
It entered my mind when very early on I found myself in a position where I was looking at a brief that had come to me, and it was yet another sort of sketchy criminal defense, a piece where I had to go and interview a client who had been arrested because he had been out on bail and escaped bail. And I went to a very old magistrates court in
London at Bow Street. It's very close to Covent Garden and very old cells and the doors of these cells were built for men, and you, Barry, you have the you have the benefit of seeing how short I am or talk five five foot nothing, And so I couldn't
see through the little window. I just couldn't reach it, right, I just it wasn't apul So the guards and it had to actually stay sort of open the door and they had to stand either side of me, and they were worried about me because my client was so out of his head on whatever it was he had taken that they were actually worried for my safety. And I went home that night and I went, do you know what, I might not want to do this forever. This might not be this might not be a good idea. And
I thought, I know what I'll do. I will go into commerce. That's what I thought. I will go into commerce, or go into business, and then I will go back and I will be a commercial barrister where they don't have to get lists into cells and see whether and be worried about the safety they have to deal with people like me. Now, So that's what the plan was. And so it was a plan to get into this space, get experienced from being an insider in business, and go back.
And I got hooked. I just never went back.
What was the first job in commerce?
In commerce. So there was an advertisement in the newspaper. That's a thing, that's how what I am. There was an advertisement in a newspaper for Fidelity, and I thought, well, that sounds interesting. They wanted they wanted to have new kind of graduates, postgraduate type people to come and do a round robin. And that's also expression that that gets used with me a lot. And so I applied and I sent in a letter and I said, yes, it sounds terribly interesting. Can you give me a shot at this?
And I got invited to this interview thing. And it was a thing because I turned up and there are one hundred and fifty people in a room. It was a Cata caul and totally new to me, and I had no idea that this is what happened. So I just chatted to everybody I met.
I'm just chatting online while you're waiting to go for the interview.
Yeah, and you're just you don't know when you're being interviewed and when you're not being interviewed. Quite frankly, it was one of the come and meet these people, and it was I had a great time. I'm a chatty kind of individual, and off I went round the room, chatted for a couple of hours and then left and drove home. And I was rung the next day and they said, we really, really would would you like to come and join us? And I said, yes, for sure,
let's do that then, and I bounced around. Yes. I did some legal staff and reg staff, but I you know, I went in on the weekends when we did the stock certificate count and counted share certificates. That it was that long ago. I did early tech kind of pieces. I manned client call phones, I did everything, and it was a bit of a blast. It was this kind of thing of being in the center of for delicious brokerage arm at that point, not its asset management, it's brokerage piece.
And then this is late eighties or early nineties.
And then I was exactly and then I was called into I was called in ninety one, so in that nineties period, and then I was called by and by a headhunter, by a recruiter who said, listen, there's this. I spent a couple of years at Fidelity. By this time, there's a role at this thing called life or Liffy, right, And they really need somebody who understands a criminal law. And they need it because when they conduct interviews, uh, it's undertaken under this Police and Criminal eavendon Xact thing.
In other words, it's done in a way that whatever is said in that interview could be brought as evidence in a court. And I said, well, I know, I know, I know that bit of it. I've done. I've done that bit. And so I turned up to Life.
What was the commerce of Liffy.
So it's an exchange, it's an open outcry exchange. In fact, at that time the biggest open outcry exchange in Europe and we had it was a time when Life was biggest in the bund contract.
So I have to ask why the concern about future criminal evidence? That seems sort of at odds.
I know, right. So what happens is when you work in an open outcry environment, there are training practices that get investigated. And those training practices are quite they're fun, they're interesting, and they're complex because it's all about hand signals.
Right, and everybody's word is their bond or their gesture.
Right, And so you're looking at at that point very forward thinking videotaped evidence. You've got pit observers, and you are trying to piece if there are malpractices or going on. You need to piece that all together. And so at that point you are you are building a case. You are running a market investigations team which is looking at ensuring proper conduct. From a regulatory perspective, you are the regulator. You are managing the efficacy of those markets and across
futures and options. And so I went to an interview and they said how much do you know about futures and options? And I said, not a lot. In fact, I said, And there's a chat who I'm still in touch with who repeats this at regular interviews. To my embarrassment, he says, you said, you know a postage stamp and you know really large writing. That's how much I know. But I'm a super quick learner, right and for good and for bad and for my benefit, they hired me.
How long did you stay with Liffy Life?
A couple of years? Just over again. And then I got another call. I know, this seems to be a process. So I got a call, and this one was ultimately from a recruiter who was working for Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, a bond.
House, another one that's a few hundred years old.
And another one that was a few hundred years old, again set set up by you know brothers and all the rest of it. So and that was another conversation where they were looking for somebody, quite frankly, who had some sort of futures options style of experience, because they wanted somebody to go and sit on a fixed income floor.
Right. I wanted to say, the criminal background turned out not to hurt you.
No, thanks for that. We'll talk about that later, you know. So the sense of again another opportunity just sort of thrown in my way. And as I joined Lehman Brothers, it was the first time that Russia had had a little bit of a crisis. Andy eight correct, correct spot on. And I was thrown at a Okay, we now need to know what have we got in Russia, what's our exposure,
what our legal contracts? How does this work? And I was one of many, many people, but talk about landing and the rubber hitting the road, And at that point Lehman share price had its first sort of crumbs moment, and that was fascinating to just be in the inner working baptisms of fire I sort of enjoy I shouldn't probably.
Was a phrase that popped into my head as soon as you it is right.
It was a baptism of fire, and it was something which was phenomenal to actually be part of. But for the fact that you're living it, does that make sense? It's as an academic exercise marvelous. When you're in the middle of it, you're kind of so caught in it. And I ended up on working on the fixed income floors until.
You're working in London, not in New York.
Correct, working in London, and again the first time i'd worked on the cell side, and that's where I sort of feel I had my biggest growth and my growing up was in that Lehman Brothers phase. But in part
because I again benefited from being in the mix. When we were the second bank that was raided by the Japanese regulators after they'd gone into credit Suee and the Japanese regulators were having a tough time with cross collatoralization and issues about whether there were balance sheet accounting issues.
Is this how you ended up living in Tokyo? It is how long were you there?
For so well. For the year of that first year of the investigation, I flew back and forth to London. This is becoming a theme with me flying back to Force London and then after that another two and a half years where we actually lived in Japan. Fabulous.
Tokyo was supposed to be an amazing city.
It's extraordinary and brilliant, And the things you learn when you live overseas, I'm not sure I can never really put a value on those experiences, being responsible for a region in which you are very much alien, in that space where you have to learn cultural cues in the ways that you've never had to understand them before, where you're navigating different countries and different relationships between those countries, which are also tricky. Leman had its headquarters for Asia
Pack unusually in Tokyo. Most others had a kind of a Hong Kong piece or a Singapore piece and then ex Japan piece of it. That wasn't how Liman did it. So being responsible for Asia Pak was from a Tokyo base was brilliant.
Quite fascinating. So you were very successful at Leman. You kind of worked your way up the ranks there. What else did you focus on outside of putting out fires in Japan.
Well, after running and building up that sort of that team, I hired my successor, by the way, fabulous thing to do. I suggest everybody does that, actually, I mean genuinely. We can talk about it later, but that ability to hire tremendously strong quality people around you is I think being a an enormous opportunity and provides you with opportunity, one with opportunity to move on and do more. So I got a call. I got a call from the US who said, hey, how'd your fancy coming to the US,
And that again was to work at Lehman's headquarters. Fabulous opportunity. So if we went from Japan to New York, that was a cultural change.
Yeah, say to say the very least, Lehman was very much a hyper aggressive, macho culture. Dick Fold's nickname was the Gorilla. What was it like working in that sort of, you know, very much bro culture.
And I'm slightly worried I'm going to disappoint you with this answer, but it was fabulous. I had the best time, and I never encountered that sense of being overwhelmed by a masculine, overtly bullying kind of culture. In fact, some of the early work that I did on diversity and inclusion was that Lehman in New York and was sponsored by people like Joe Gregory, who was just a real champion of that that content. So maybe maybe I'm maybe I'm thick skinned or something, but the truth of the
matter is I loved it. I enjoyed it, and I think Lehman was I owe a lot to my experiences of that organization.
As much as Lehman spectacularly crashed and burned in the financial crisis, everybody I know who worked there really liked it. It was a pure meritocracy. Absolutely, They didn't care if you made money, it didn't matter, right, And yeah, it was a little sharp elbowed. It was a tough place to work, but people who came through that said it was the best experience professionally of their.
Lives, absolutely right. And you know, they had a phrase which I still use. You know, when you get at that point in investment banking, you ended up with those loose sights with various things that you're supposed to a mousematch with the little banking things whatever. And they had one phrase, and I still use it, which is be smart, be dumb. And it's kind of a piece you're smart,
be dumb, be smart, be dumb. And what that really translated into was, if you don't understand something that's going on, if you're in a meeting, you don't get it. If you're outside of a meeting, don't get it, say something. Actually ask the question, because you'd be surprised how many people can't answer the can't answer the question, by the way, but also it's it's okay not to know everything. It's the only way you learn. And I still use that.
I might have it quite I don't have it on a loose sight anymore, but I absolutely believe that to be the case. If you don't get it, ask a question. I'm not supposed to know everything in the room, that's not the point, but I would like to understand what's going on.
Huh. Really really intriguing. So let's talk a little bit about the history. For those listening who might not be familiar with a MAN group, what is its focus and specialties? Who are its clients?
So Man is a as you said, one hundred and near one hundred and forty five billion dollar hedge fund. It's there too, and long only it's not just a hedge fund. It's not just doing longshore. It's doing long only. It's got private markets, it's through the credit curve. It has core business engines which are driven via style. So we have large quant businesses CTA and equity compt businesses. We have a discretionary business what some of you might
have already been familiar with in GLG. We have a private markets business just focused really on real estate and that the single family real estate ownership piece and community housing. And then we have something called solutions, and the solutions piece is the piece where we work with, in effect, our institutional clients. We're an institutional client business, but those
institutional clients are pension funds, they're endowments. They are looking after the pensions and the savings of real individuals, the individuals that my mum and dad right, the doctors, the teachers, the metal workers in Holland, wherever they may be. And we partner with those institutions to return value. And that's our only goal. When we come in in the morning, we think about who the real underlying clients are here and how we partner and ensure that we're returning alpha.
We're an active manager, and that solutions piece is how we create bespoke solutions. So we'll take elements or particular strategies from each part of our discretionary strategy and match it with a quant strategy and return it to clients because we understand and we work with them on their portfolio, their exposure, what they need to achieve, their risk management, to create something that is bespoke for them.
That's very interesting because the typical fund is this is our strategy, take it or leave it right, that's pretty much it. You sort of have a one foot in the financial planning asset management side and another side in actual fund management. What are the advantages of marrying those two together?
I think the reality for me is that more and more institutional clients need something in a separate managed account. They want something that's bespoke to them and the portfolio
risk or construction that they need answers to. These are long strategic relationships where we are investing time and effort in partnership within these institutions to understand what their portfolio construction needs to look like, what they want to achieve, and then we are part of helping them understand that and helping them deliver a solution that we can provide to them to address certain issues. So maybe it's the combination of strategies. Maybe it's a combination of strategies with
additional transparency or additional liquidity. Maybe it's leverage. Maybe it's a tail protection. Maybe it's an overlay hetch. Maybe it's any number of these things. The capability that man has to do that is what we have spent time and energy and money on and technology on. Let's be clear, we talk about tech, and I'm sure we'll cover it later.
We talk about how we deploy tech, and we think about tech within that quant space, but we deploy technology throughout the organization to give us scale and capability that we use to service our clients.
So let's stay with that before we get to the tech side of it. All the entities you referred to, various foundations and institutions and pensions, many of them have a future liability, meaning they have an obligation to pay out a certain amount of money to a certain class of beneficiaries at some point in the future. So when you're just gribing bespoke strategies, I'm assuming you're targeting those future liabilities for each of those entities.
It can be that it can be anything that they want. In reality, we are much more about understanding client needs. And remember they have, as you know, vast portfolios trillions of dollars that they're putting to work. We're part of that, and doing absent understanding what they're trying to achieve is less efficient potentially for them. So let me give you
an example of what I mean by this. I was speaking to a couple of clients in the last couple of days and they were talking to me and they said, listen, what we really would like to do is sit down with you, and that there are two or three areas. And I was like, terrific, What do you want to talk about? And they said, well, first of all, we'd like to understand data and how you manage data and how you manage your technology in that. I said great.
And then they said, and then the second thing is, we'd really like your help in understanding our portfolio construction and whether what we think it's doing is what it's doing, or whether we've got correlation where we didn't think we'd have correlation, or how we're positioned. And we said, sure, we've got tools that can help you do that. And then the third thing they said, I really want to talk to you about how you're achieving diversity and equity and inclusion.
Realized that comes up.
And so I was like, Okay, we can talk to you about that too. The point is it's not just about delivering a fund. Here's a product, let me flog it to you. It's about a much deeper relationship for us, and it's about delivering all of the firm, not just part of the firm. And that is important to us because I think we do a better job. And by the way, I'll put this in there as well, we believe in making our you know, our clients smarter and better because they make us smarter and better in return.
There's a there's an interesting piece. I was on a podcast listening to Frandly bol it's actually the other day, and she was talking about the massive loss we had in the eighties with the aid crisis of artists. But she made this really great point, which is it wasn't just the artist we lost it. We lost the audience. We lost the discerning audience in that process too. And it resonated with a bit me about how we think
about man. We want our clients to be smarter and better and equipped with what we can give them because they hold us as we hold ourselves accountable. They're the better audience that makes the better performance.
Really really quite interesting. So we'll circle back to diversity inclusion ESG a little later. Let's stay with technology for a minute. How is man deploying new technologies? What are you using in your quant work, your trading and how does this infiltrate the entire organization?
Well, it's a cinema and let me say, you know, we view technology and the adoption of AI technology as a fundamental part of innovation, and it's useful across our entire organization in the investment process but also through trading and execution. It's used at every single juncture. We're constantly looking to align the latest technology and latest techniques with our underlying investment philosophies, not the other way around. Does that make sense? So it's one are the tools that
make us better at delivering what we do. New technologies are on a replacement for me, they're rather a compliment to what we are trying to achieve, and we're never going to be reliant on one technology. This space is moving so quickly. It's about adopting the new, finding its application, seeing whether we can gain alpha from it, whether it makes a smarter whether it allows us to commodifize something which reduces costs, whatever it may be, and making that happen.
I think AI can do much more, for example, than just automate. It's innovative, it can increase productivity. We use it as part of our processing of data, of large data, of looking at our models, at looking portfolio construction. We have used it for example for ESG prediction metrics. Let's look about whether where we see weather cycles, we look at it. And we use it in neuro linguistic programming to look to make sense of sentiment in and your
reporting for example. So so many different applications by nature. As you know, Barry, we are an open source space. We love it. Our developers love it. I mean, I wish I was as smart as a developer, but our developers love open source. It makes them better. When you look at GitHub, which is one of these mechanisms which I'm sure most people know. I think we're number two
on GitHub. But it's this sense of open source technology where we use it as much as we can within the organization, but we're always interested in what else is out there, so we're not frightened by tech development. We want to use it, but we don't depart from philosophically where we start and what we need it for.
Yeah, there's been a little bit of a backlash against things like various AI and chat bots and etc. To me, it's always been a tool. All this technology is a tool that makes people more productive, more effective, more efficient. I've never thought, hey, chat GBT is going to put all of us out of business. It's something that can be used to the betterment of our work product, and it sounds like that's integral to Man's philosophy.
Kind of agree. Chat GPT is clearly the greatest disruptor we've had in the last year. It's been It's been given some really quite momentous bylines as well, but it's certainly a massive disruptor from my perspective. If you think about it negatively, you're missing the mark, right.
It's it's sure it hallucinates occasionally.
But but but well, I was going to say something, who doesn't, No, that's not true. It's it's but it's also not going to be the first or the last piece of AI technology. This isn't a well we've got chat GPT and now therefore with data that's not going to happen. And this this sort of semi hysterical fear of it, I think is all wrong. There is there are undoubtedly going to be benefits for us being able to use technology to capture large data sources. Look at
what we've done. And you know, I'm talking to a man at Bloomberg, so you will know this. But we talked about open architecture a minute ago, and look at what we've done with this Arctic dB. So this is a piece of technology. We've developed a man group which in effect is a super charge database. You know, it's able to process large chunks of data which we're all trying to deal with in a much more fashion and effective way. We actually open sourced it back in twenty fifteen.
It's first version. But in one of those moments where you've got to be carefully or not drinking your own cool aid of a bit and we talk about tech all the time, we went to Bloomberg and we said, listen, we've got this cool piece of kit. Would you like to take a look at it? And we came to Bloomberg because if there's one place that has a phenomenal tech space and a qatrillion developers and all the rest
of it, it's Bloomberg. So we came here and we were testing ourselves back to that audience thing, show me how whether we can be better at this, and show me whether we've kidded ourselves. Is this really? Is this really the thing? And after months and months, it now in the hands of Bloomberg and it's been endorsed us that as a program that is in the mix and is part of the Bloomberg offering in that space. So we checked our audience. We worked out with a wind
drink in the kool aid. But it shows you the sort of the way that we think about tech and how we think about it as something that makes us all better. But I will be super clear, it's only part of what we have. We have a million models, we have our own technology, we have our own philosophical investment ideas within each of our engines, and we use tech to make us better at that.
Huh. That sounds quite fascinating. Let's discuss the major divisions that at Man Group. I want to try and wrap my arms around. First, what is man AHL.
Okay, so think of we have two let me do it in a slightly different way. We have two cont engines. One is Numerican, one is AHL CTA Macro big trading hubin.
When I hear CTA, I think kamal is that.
Was where it was originally coming from. But it's much more than that. And then equities rus Premia long only piece in Numeric which is also quant GELG. Third engine discretionary human beings people like you and me. And by the way, the way I started at the firm was through Georg. That was an acquisition, which is something that we know is part and parcel of how Man has grown over the years. So Georg discretionary portfolio management. Then you have what is FRM MSL. So that's that solutions
piece we talked about earlier. Although FRM was and you've spoken to Luke before, so the fund funds business, which was also an acquisition, but that's rolled in solution as well. And we have still got a fund of funds business where people might have thought in the past that that was a dying part, not so much. People need some help when it comes to selection. Also of managers. That are out there, and that's still something that we are
part and part love. And then the fifth piece is that private market space where we have that real estate piece that we talked about earlier, and we within each of those engines, we also have credit offerings as part of that.
Huh really quite fascinating. So let's talk a little bit about your approach to leadership. You've managed to distinguish yourself in a very competitive field. Tell us how.
Here's the answer. Everyone, It's not true, I tell you in perhaps this is a way of thinking about it. What I have done, perhaps is the better way of saying who I and how I distinguish myself. What I've done is taken every single opportunity that has come my way.
And I so no master plan. This just you just stumbled blindly from one gig to the next.
I mean, that's the perfect way of summing it up. The way of summing it up is this. If you'd have asked me twenty five years ago, do you think you'll be the CEO of an investment management company? I laughed, right, I would have done. I didn't have a grand master plan. What I did have was a somewhat insatiable desire to learn and have some fun doing so that. I loved being a fixer. I loved being put on planes or
being sent into areas to solve things. I have innately hired people around me and built teams of highly credible quality people who I have empowered and who I have loved to partner in achieving whatever it was that we needed to achieve, better, faster, smarter than before. And that empowerment piece is huge. The ability to not have to be the fact in a different way, if I am the smartest person.
In the room, you've done something wrong.
I worry. I mean, that's not okay. So on that basis leadership style, hire brilliant people, Put great minds around you, Put people around you who are willing to disagree with you, or better still, stop you careering off a cliff if you're heading in the wrong direction way. I can't tell you how many times that that is just as important of the sort of the rugby tackle to your knees bit, if you've suddenly got yourself into a frame of this is where we're going. And I have enormously benefited from
that style of management, which is inclusive. It's about delegation, and it's about empowering people to sometimes be really horrible.
So let's stick with the delegation and the empowerment because those are key themes. You don't sound like you're a micro manager. You sound like you tell people this is what we want you to do, tell us what you need to get it done, and now go do it.
That's our job as great leaders. And I mean that sounded arrogant. I don't mean that I'm just anyone any leaders. I think any great leader, any capable leader. Maybe that's a better way of framing you, any capable leader. That's one of the hallmarks. It feels to me high great people empower them if they can't deliver. If you've got the wrong person, change the person, don't micromanage, don't find the fix in making it. You do the job or somebody else. Swap swap, that's right, And so that has
always been away. I also find that really smart people want that they want to be given the keys. They want to run these things. And the smartest people know when they don't know. The most frightening person is the person who doesn't know. They don't know. The best person who works for you is the one who goes, yet don't know the answer this, leave it with me, or we've got to find the best solution here, not the perfect solution here. You've got to be able to move dynamically.
You have to be able to think, You have to be able to find solutions and be execution driven. If you're working with me.
So you clearly have great insights and leadership skills. But you've said you're a surprise that you got named CEO of this large financial firm. Why the surprise?
I was well, And by the way, I'm.
Calling you out for a little false humility here, defend yourself.
Defend excellent. Here, I go on, goes the barrass again. Parised, we can count Let me say I think there are tremendously strong people. We have a great bench of senior management at Man Group. It is a bit of a privilege and it sounds a bit trite, just happens to be true that we have a phenomenal bench of high quality people. I don't want to assume, and didn't want to assume that I'd be named the CEO. I am thrilled.
Let me tell you that I am going to be the CEO from the first of September, but that there are so many capable individuals that it doesn't do you any harm to step back and recognize the skills and the qualities of those people who you have worked with and who you want to work with going forward. So that that has been something that I think has held me in good stead actually to have perspective and to
keep my feet very firmly grounded. I think what perhaps surprised me in reality, and yet it shouldn't have done, was the press coverage that the announcement garnered.
Meaning I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've read everything you've written. You would genuinely surprised people focused on you as a woman taking the CEO. I mean, this is still a pretty especially in finance. Look, there isn't gender parody in business generally, and finance lags business, and hedge funds lag finance. So why so surprised?
Well, that's the point. I think this is where I call myself out and say, why, you know, you kind of go, yeah, well, obviously, when you put it like that, I think perhaps I was so focused on the job. I was so focused on this being something that I looked at internally rather than I perhaps focused on the external ramification or impact of it, and it's humbling when that happens. And it's been heartening and in some ways
overwhelming and brilliant all at the same time. And of course you get one gets a thousand emails and a thousand messages and all of those things, and some of the most touching are those from people who are really just saying, do you know, thanks, thank you, Robin, but thank you man for breaking that, for giving us somebody who is underrepresented. And it means that we all think we now you've got you're one more people, one more person.
Sorry too. That's broken through that barrier, whatever that barrier may look like. And that was that was touching. I have to say.
It's also when you're on the inside, you see the changes that others won't see manifest for years or decades, so you're aware that things might be a little better than they appear from the outside. So maybe there's a little surprise there. I have to mention at this point that by the time you become CEO on September first, the chairman replacing John Cryon will be Anne Wade. You'll be not only led by women, the firm will be
led by two women. There's nothing like that in the hedge fund universe at all.
It's phenomenal and and is a superstar. I'm very, very lucky to also work with a board. We're very lucky to work with a board at Man that is brilliant and engaged and highly qualified, and that with Anne has been again the master of transition, the master of how we think about succession at Man has been very deep in the way that the board has thought about the succession of the chair has also been a very very in depth assessment and analysis by happenstance. We are in
this position with Anne and myself. I've got to tell you it's going to be brilliant. But it's not because we're women. It's because we're the best people to take these roles.
So let's talk about the best people. The firm is one forty four point seven billion in assets. Let's round it up to one forty five. As much as my compliance people hate when I do that, how do you guys plan on growing the assets? Do you have any targets in mind? Do you want to get to two hundred billion? Is it a trillion dollar firm? A decade from now, what are you thinking about?
And it's a great question, it's also an early question. Let's be clear. So I'm going to phaps not give you the satisfactory answer you want. Nevertheless, you'd expect me to do exactly what I'm just about to do. The firm is brilliant. I mean, it has a cracking core business and my number one job, apart from anything, is not to break that because that is value and it's
real and it will continue to grow. We will continue to see the value of technology, and we have thirty five years, forty years of quant and data and tech behind us, and we will continue to invest in that space. We will continue to look for opportunities in an M and A format. We've made it very clear to the market. Can't guess what they're going to be. Couldn't tell you if I did know, But I can't guess what that's going to be. What I will tell you is it
will be additive. It will be additive for our clients. Ultimately, this is about having deeper and better client offerings. It's that piece about the solutions that we talked about earlier. How do I ensure that I've got each of the components that can provide made a better offering for our institutional clients, and we'll grow that us massively important to US deep capital market. You'll absolutely see us putting effort and time into building our presence here too.
Looking forward to that, tell us a little bit about your background in environmental, social and governance based investing.
It certainly has become a little bit controversial here, but yes, let me talk. Let me talk about our background. In the early two thousands we had our first sort of involvement in creating and thinking about climate and signing up to various supplies of information when it came to climate data. But really, let's be clear, it's ESG as a concept
has really hotted up. If I'm allowed to use that force with ESG in the last pun intended, maybe a tiny pun intended in the last five years or so, where you've seen the massive change in the European regulatory environment, where you have these Article eight and Article nine funds, which are responsible investing funds. You know they have to have a certain percentage of responsible investing investments within them.
That can differ between Article nine and Artical eight. Where we've moved away from exclusion this where things are becoming more complex and where data points are becoming more interesting to drive investment decisions. We have certainly seen an uptick of investment interest in ORI in Europe. You know, there's almost a point where you can't have a conversation with somebody in Europe with a client without there being an RI piece.
To it, meaning responsible investing in.
My apologies and so ESGRI interchangeable in this space. But a comment I would say more generally is since when didn't we take into account governance and risk in investment decision making? That's the bit that I find quite in interesting here. So when I answer your question, I answered it in the format of what you're really asking me, which is the ESG kind of concept. But actually, when you extract governance and you say do we look at good governance of issuers? Who doesn't?
It's a risk screen.
If anything, it's a risk screen. And so the way that we think about ESG at Man is not as an evangelical point where I soapbox you into saying what is right and wrong. That's not what we're here to do.
We're here as as product providers, solution providers to our clients and So if a client comes to us and says, I want to have a portfolio which has which reduces its carbon impact, if I want to look at biodiversity, if I want to invest in and this has not happened, by the way, but you know it only boards which I only want to invest in publicly listed companies where fifty percent of the boards are made up of diverse candidates doesn't happen. But these criters, that's where we are
placed now. The difference that Man has is that what is happening is there is a chunk of data out there that is wholly inconsistent, highly complex, multiply sourced, and downright contradictory. And what we can do with that is apply that thirty five forty years of data science, quant and tech capability. I can throw five hundred people at that if I want to. We don't need to understand what the signals are in that space. But it isn't that everything we do at Man Group is now has
to be ESG. It's what a clients want, and we certainly have clients who will only want something that is responsibly invested in some format, and we have a lot of clients who don't.
So when you say that data is contradictory, there's been some studies that have shown that ESG doesn't generate any form of alpha rautperformance very often tied to how well oil companies are doing, because if you pull those out, it's a major component. And there's others that say, we mentioned the risk component. Hey, if you have a lot of companies with bad governance, they have a disconcerting tendency
to blow up and crash. How do you reconcile these different data points or is it all in the framing and the definition of what ESG is or what diversity and inclusions?
Great question, Barry. I think what you are pulling out there is the complexity of the question alone the answer. So fundamentally, yes, it has something to do with strategy. If you were in a growth strategy last year that had DSG, didn't matter, didn't matter if right, So some of this is also about extracting the ESG factor, not just understand and understanding it as against the strategy that
DSG was attached to. Absolutely, you're finding if you're in a you're a hydroelectric company and where your hydroelectric base is now suffering from drought every year. If you are a wind company and wind patterns for the last few years have been off considerably. These are climate change, but they take into account effectively the effectiveness of your business. Now, so how do you how do you extract the various points of that to make it a decent a decent thesis.
And the argument is, what is it you want to achieve as a client, what are you after? And are you willing and some points of this, And this is the discussion out there that happens with some clients. Is is it all about P and L, is it about alpha capture? Or is there a willingness here to actually say, actually, I'm more interested in I want P and L, I want alpha capture, and I actually want social impact or
I want climate impact or I want decarbonization. The other piece of this is there are absolute strategies which are about transition, and transition is about recognizing the journey between where we are today in carbon and greenhouse gas versus
where a company might be going. So you will have and we have had clients who so I'm interested in I still want to look at oil and gas and fossil fuels, but I'm interested in the transition I'm interested in who is really putting money to work to transition from those fossil fossil fuels into renewables, for example. So a complex question which then begets unfortunately a complex answer.
Let's talk a little bit about diversity and inclusion. How do you think about that as a manager, and then how do you think about that as an investor?
We turn a mirror on ourselves, Let's be clear. You know that's important. We continue to put every effort into seeking and having different in our organization, I mean real difference as well. I think this piece about I'm not really interested in the person who is different on the outside but actually went through all the same educational processes in the same training. I think we need difference in.
The right the way. That's it's funny you mentioned that, But there was just a study recently, and I don't remember if it was the Times or Wall Street Journal of Bloomberg that had the story. The vast majority of economists working in finance went to the same six grad schools. So what does it matter how they look. It's the same widget coming out of the same factory.
And we've got to get comfortable as well. Let's be clear we have to be comfortable with discomfort if you want real diversity.
Again, comfortable with discomfort.
Comfortable with discomfort. When you're in a room and you can connect over your whatever it may be, It doesn't really matter what your connection is, your school or your experience in life, where you your football teams. By that, I meant soccer, soccer anyways, that thing. That's what we do as human beings. As human beings, we try to connect with each other. That is how we smooth the conversations,
how we move things forward. Actually, when you have real difference in the room, it feels a little kind of uncomfortable, It feels a little bit jarring from time. Well, what do you mean you don't understand that, you don't get that, or that wasn't as easy a conversation. We gravitate as human beings towards easier conversations where we find commonality. And what we're asking of our organizations is to make it a little bit more friction full, not friction less in
that space. But I am a thousand percent and I shouldn't say that. I know it's a bad phrase. I'm one hundred percent right.
I thank you so much for that. By the way, because my question has always why why not?
Two thousand, one hundred percent sure that we need and there is a war for the best talent. And if we think if the premise that only the best people come from certain demographics, your tribe, your tribe, right is, when you say it out loud, a nonsense. So how we get people into our organizations that feel, look and have difference, and how we ensure that we give them
the space to be that different in our organizations. That's the criticality to it, that bit of yeah, yeah, it's okay, we'll have you, and then please can you be like us? You've got to know how to create an organization which actually gives people the space to be different, because that's what you're getting them for. It's a bit like an
acquisition where you understand the commercial reality of it. You buy something because of its commercial differentiation, and then you bring it in and you're trying to sqush it into something that degrades that commercial benefit. It's the same with people. You've got to bring people in, you've got to let them fly, and you've got to be comfortable, perhaps being a little bit more uncomfortable than you work before.
All the academic studies say, if you want to avoid group think, if you want better decisions, the more diverse the group, the more likely you are to reach a better decision. So even that discomfort, there's some academic research that supports it right.
Absolutely, Over and over again, you see the academic research. And yet I think there's an arrogance that we've had in our industry a little bit, which has been that great people will come to us. And then we suddenly woke up a little while ago, especially as tech became so incredibly important to all of us, that there were other options for these very smart people that they didn't have to come and work at hedge funds, or maybe they weren't interested in finance. What how could that possible?
How could that be? Barry? You and I, it's shocking, right, I'll let you.
An a secret. I'm a recovering attorney myself, so I get it right.
So that attorney's anonymous, we need to go to anyway that aside. So we suddenly found ourselves believing that actually we are great, therefore great people will come, and actually not so much that those new generations have many more choices on how to deploy that expertise, and actually they look at us and they say, why would I come and work for an organization where you don't look like me, you don't feel like me, you don't understand me, and you'll make me do stuff I don't want to do.
And by the way, I've watched billions, and I mean, this is the difficulty with podcasts. I just made a funny face, but the point being, we have to do
and we've had to do a much better job. I think in joining up the dots for that brilliant talent that's coming through about what we do and why we're valuable, and why it matters that we do what we do, and why they are important part of ensuring financial security for millions of people who have worked very, very hard their whole lives and deserve a high qual return on their pension.
So I've always imagined the competition for the best talent is between financial companies. What you're really saying is finance as an entity collectively has to compete against other.
Absolutely field institution every day of the week, every day of the week. And maybe it's startups, maybe it's that piece, or maybe it's Testa, or maybe it's Facebook or maybe it's Google, or maybe it's any number of these other spaces that are tech enabled, and where they're doing this, their pr their PR is better, has been smarter than ours.
And that piece where we used where people you know, skateboard in the office bit, you know, And I think we've had to be a little bit smarter and a little less scathing and a little bit more humble to ensure that we really are the employer or the industry or version of that choice for the best and the brightest. And that includes people who are different and they look at financial services and they don't see difference.
Huh. So let me dredge up a quote of yours that I thought was quite fascinating. You told somebody recently, and I believe it was after you were named incoming CEO. Quote. I've never been in the majority, whether because I was a woman and or someone who proudly identifies as part of the LGBTQ community, and that can create challenges and means that prejudice has been a reality for me at
different points in my career. How does that affect how you run a company, how you engage in recruitment, and how you think about diversity and inclusion.
I think it's given me insight. I think when you live it, when it's your lived experience, you know it and you feel it. I think also, I am now in a position and have been I guess for the last few years of being proof positive that people who are different can can be in senior positions and can now run companies. I think that the prejudice for me just kind of made me more punchy and made me
more determined to succeed. So I think it makes me better at understanding what it feels like when you don't belong, when you're on the outside of conversation, when the culture of an organization genuinely isn't inclusive, and that it's not about ticking boxes. It's about investing in your culture and your organization in a way that's very, very authentic. I'm lucky in many ways. I never struggled with the I shouldn't be this, This isn't you know, this isn't what
society wants. I'm never going to succeed. I kind of don't know what happened, but that bypassed me luckily, and so I've always been the way I really am today, and that has been extraordinarily good for me in large part, but it's not been without issue. I just think that I've overcome those issues, which makes them something I'm alive for other people in my organization, and beyond that, those struggles are still real.
Hum really really quite fascinating. Let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with what have you been entertaining yourself with? What are you listening to or watching or streaming?
So? What guilty? Guilty? What I'm watching? I have? I love ted Lasso?
What's not to love?
It's like, it's a delightful show. It's a brilliant show, and I think that it seems too. It's the feel good thing we kind of all need at the moment. It feels to me as well, So Ted Lasso.
I don't even think that's a guilty guilty. The writing is so sharp. People like that are embarrassed, like, oh, I like ted Lasso, Why shouldn't you like that?
I find myself quoting ted Lasso, perhaps not Ted Lasso himself, but there are definitely points where I may be channeling some of the other characters. Definitely podcasts. I well, obviously it would be wrong Barry for me not to say you but stop stop. But I do find some of the Bloomberg series very useful. I find some of the
Gold and Stuff very useful. But I also find when I dip into you know, talk Easy, or I'll dip into Dak Shepherd from time to time, because it's really interesting hearing some of that sort of outside arts culture, or finding yourself with somebody different, asking people like us different questions really intriguing.
Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.
Goodness. This isn't an Oscar's exception speech, but I've been super lucky through every part from my university day through. Here's something I'll admit to. There is not one company that I've worked for or regulator that I've worked for where I'm not still in touch with my old bosses. And that is because they took the time to work out who I was and then they put me to work.
And I will forever be grateful for that willingness to step back, not tick a box, but invest in me as an individual and then work out what I was good at and then make it better. And so there's not one person through any part, you know, But I would say one of the most transformational mentors or allies or sponsors or whatever is Luke. I have had enormous benefit from having his confidence, and he has pushed me like no one else.
Huh. Really really quite intriguing. I very much enjoyed my conversation with him. Also fascinating person. He's really fascinating.
He's everything and more.
Let's talk about some of your favorite books and what you're reading lately.
So living in Japan it gives you a bit of an insight of many things. So any Japanese author Murakami, minute Murakami puts anything out, I read it, and then I read it again.
I'm assuming you're reading the translated version of English, not in the original.
Do you know, I wish I was that smart. I tell you something, actually, bar it's a really good point. The translators of these books, aren't they gifted? I mean, because it's not just a word. It's not like put it into Google and see what you get. It's everything, And that is fine. That is just an extraordinary capability.
So anything in that sort of Murakami space, what's open on my bedside table right now is that I can't tell you how many times I've read it, but is Orlando, and really there is something extraordinary about that transformational through time, through gender, through experience. There's something that's really quite fascinating. I'm not saying it's an easy book to read. I'm just saying it just happens to be the one I reopened a month ago. I'm still going through.
Interesting and now we're down to our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who was thinking about a career in finance?
Do it? Would? I mean, I think if don't expect it to be what you think it is, experience it without any form of prejudice in some ways or without any form of expectation. I would also say go for it in a take the opportunities what finance does, which is I had not anticipated. But it's why I'm still in it is it's fast, it's intellectually demanding, it has reached beyond its real estate footprint. It has impact, it
is topical, it covers geopolitical risk. There isn't a part of the world on society it doesn't impact, and if you embrace it on that basis, the opportunities are actually endless. So be yourself, go for it. Don't think too much about ladders and what your next title is or whatever of that stuff is. Just immerse yourself in it and take every opportunity that's given to you.
Really interesting advice, and our final question, what do you know about the world of investing and finance and hedge funds for that matter, that you wish you knew twenty five thirty years ago when you were first starting out.
I don't think I wish i'd known anything. I think that my slightly wide eyed, slightly intrigued, slightly uneducated start point in finance was almost a gift because my expectations weren't there because I didn't need to know, as I just was hungry to learn, because I didn't really think about corporate structure and where my next job was, and
it was freeing. And I look back on my career and I look back on the experiences, and I look back on the people, some of whom now still work for me, and I'm not sure i'd changed that, and so I'm okay with where I was.
Quite fascinating. Robin, thank you for being so generous with your time. This has been absolutely intriguing. We have been speaking with Robin Grew. She is the incoming chief executive officer at Man Group. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the other five hundred or so we've done over the past eight years. You can find those at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure and sign up
for our daily reads at reholts dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts, follow all of the fine family of Bloomberg Podcasts at Podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Bob Bragg is my audio engineer. Attika of Albron is our project manager. Paris Wald is our producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.