An interview with Wilf Blackburn

We talk to Wilf Blackburn who describes himself as a serial CEO and is also the author of the recently published "Optimal Leadership Reflections of a Serial CEO".

Wilf's career as a CEO has primarily involved delivering large-scale and high-impact organisation-wide transformations alongside significant and sustained business growth. He has a lifelong love of learning and this passion also acted as a catalyst for his book as he felt that it was important to share the what he has learned over the years from a practitioner perspective

Interviewer: Today I'm joined by Wilf Blackburn who describes himself as a serial CEO and is also the author of recently published Optimal Leadership Reflections of a Serial CEO. Wilf has held multiple diverse regional and country CEO roles in the life and health insurance sector throughout Asia and Africa. During this time he lived and worked across a range of countries while also serving on company boards in Cambodia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria and Taiwan.

Wilf's work has primarily involved delivering large-scale and high-impact organisation-wide transformations alongside significant and sustained business growth. He has a lifelong love of learning and is also a perennial business school student having been awarded postgraduate qualifications from INSEAD, Bath University, Oxford University and City University London. Wilf, welcome.

Wilf Blackburn: Thanks Nicola, great pleasure to be talking with you today.

Interviewer: So Wilf, you learned about the principles of a team-based empowering culture as a young business student in the 1990s and you've now had the opportunity to put them into practise. When you look back at that younger aspiring self, have there been any major lessons in business that weren't in the curriculum?

Wilf Blackburn: Oh that's a great question, thanks Nicola. My instinctive answer is no. Most of what I've been practising, perhaps all of what I've been practising, has been preached by others for many, many years.

In fact, largely throughout my career I've been taking other people's practises that had been studied often by practitioners, academics and written about. And one of the things I picked up from somewhere is there's nothing as practical as a good theory. There have been lots of theoretical books written, lots of practical books written.

All I can say I've been doing is practising what other people have preached. But I'm absolutely convinced that team-based approaches work in business just as they do in other aspects of life, such as sport, and get the best results.

Interviewer: And in your book Optimal Leadership, you describe the experience of being a CEO as somewhat messy, even feeling out of control at times. Can you share what you mean by this?

Wilf Blackburn: There's so much uncertainty in life, in business, and I think particularly I would say it's the role of the CEO, which is a generalist. There are so many different aspects of a business to consider. We're dealing with people and there's so much uncertainty with people.

And particularly if we're in unstable, uncertain environments, which many of us are, if we're bringing about change, there's so much coming at us from all directions. And so when I say it's messy, it's complicated. There are no straightforward answers to any of the questions.

There are multiple perspectives and often there's no right and wrong. That's what I mean by messy. There's no clear A to Z direction that brings us to the right answer.

I mean, I grew up as a mathematician where it was completely the other way around. We could learn a formula, follow it, and we get to the right answer. And then in business as a CEO, I found it's quite the reverse.

I think what I've been learning is that the more we play, the more practise that we get, the more we're able to deal with uncertain situations and the messiness that comes with that. And in fact, the more I love it.

Interviewer: This being the case, how do you ensure that you stay focused on strategy in these situations?

Wilf Blackburn: I think what's really important is to understand what is our key mission? What's the agenda? What are the most important stakeholders in a business?

What are we really here to achieve? And it is easy to get distracted by some of the people issues, but then very important, we need to remind ourselves why does the organisation exist? What gives it the right to be here?

And then ensure our objectives are all aligned with that and that our people are aligned with it. That's very much the role of the CEO to keep everybody on track. And I think in that regard, performance management, key theme within the book, it's a key aspect of my leadership.

Very important that all of our objectives right the way through the organisation are aligned with our purpose, with our strategy.

Interviewer: The role of the CEO to keep everyone on track. And you also write about the balance between being innovative and being able to deliver in optimal leadership. It sounds obvious, but that's not necessarily the case.

So what advice do you have to help managers and business leaders ensure that they're able to keep innovation streams open?

Wilf Blackburn: I think it's a great question, Nicola, because it does on the face of it appear counterintuitive delivery versus innovation. Firstly, innovation for its own sake makes no sense. Innovation has to be somehow related to the objectives, to the strategies.

What is essential, however, is in my view to have an innovative, creative element of the DNA within the culture of the organisation so that we can think differently, so that we can create new solutions. Over-innovating can lead to too much tweaking. I grew up with the Tom Peters philosophy of, if this is the way we've always done it, then it's probably wrong to refine it a little because the world's moving so much more quickly now.

And say, if this is the way we've been doing things for more than three years, there's probably a better way of doing it. So good that we continue to look at everything we've been doing for more than three years and say, if it's material, if the impact is going to be significant of doing things differently, let's do things differently. One way to do that, I've found, is try to avoid people being in role for more than three years, because that's usually when we bring our creative ideas, our new approaches, and then we get used to things, we embed them after two or three years.

And usually the best ideas come from having new people looking at a process, looking at a responsibility, looking at an accountability, rather than asking the people who've been doing things for a while, is there a better way of doing things? So it tends to flow more naturally with new role holders coming into roles, because most people want to have an impact. Most people don't want to just come in and turn the handle and do things the way they've always been done.

So it will naturally happen if there's some rotation in the system, particularly at the senior levels, I find.

Interviewer: Yes, and as a CEO at The Cutting Edge, how did you get around potential objections from board members who are perhaps less willing to transform from the status quo to a culture that does embrace empowered teams and strong communication?

Wilf Blackburn: What I've found with boards is they tend to be not always convinced about the methods, but always convinced if the results are what they like to see. So I think giving the results to the board that they want always works. Trying to convince them of methods, approaches, empowerment, not empowerment, in advance, tends not to work.

So show them the results and then wait until they say, how did you do that? And then they'll ask you to do some more. What I have found in times of transformation is people complain if they're not winners.

They'll reach out and sometimes they'll reach out to boards and sometimes they'll reach out to those boards are accountable to, such as regulators, and say, look, we don't like the way things are going. We're not convinced. So I think it's important aligning up front the extent of the transformation with a board that they may be looking for, may not be looking for.

And maybe that's the pace, maybe that's the scale. But then be ready to talk the board through what you're doing and why. I remember having one conversation with a chairman who got quite nervous about six months into a transformation that seemed to be getting more complaints than he was used to and it was growing.

And I remember saying, yeah, I think we're in about a month's time. You'll reach the peak of the normal distribution of complaints that you're likely to get based on what I've experienced before. And sure enough, that happens.

So helping board numbers to stay with you on the journey is really important.

Interviewer: You describe yourself as being a perpetual student. What motivates you to keep learning and stay inquisitive?

Wilf Blackburn: Partly, it's a short attention span, learning new things, doing things that I haven't done before. Partly, it's recognising that there's so much I don't know and so much I can continue to learn from other people. And being in a learning environment, I found, does give the opportunity to pause.

It gives a legitimate opportunity to pause, to stop, to reflect, to step back from the situation, to engage with other people, maybe from other sectors, other generations, other walks of life. I think there are many, many ways in which we can learn and often by taking on new experiences. But I think the motivation comes from the fear of boredom, of going through the motion, doing things I've done before and recognising that if that happens, I'm not going to be at my sharpest anywhere.

I find I'm more effective when I'm being stretched and challenged. And an important aspect of that is having the opportunity to learn something new. That might be working with people from a different culture and learning how to get things done in a different part of the world where value systems are different.

It might be doing something with new customer segments. It might involve marketing in a different way. There are many, many ways in which we can do new things.

I've stayed within one sector and I think probably one of the greatest ways in which people can learn new things is switching sectors. I've been a great believer in bringing people in from other sectors. That's one area where I've not yet practised what I've been preaching.

Interviewer: Is it important for CEOs to continue their self-development? Do you think it should be formally encouraged even? And if so, why?

Wilf Blackburn: I think it's important to keep developing because firstly, we can get stale if we're not developing. And I do believe in the mantra that to a certain extent, if we're not learning, we're not moving forwards, we're probably moving backwards. Secondly, careers can be long now.

And what we learned 30 years ago, probably much of it doesn't make sense anymore. Or if something really still makes sense, we'll keep hold of it. But there's a lot of new technologies.

There's a lot of new ways of looking at things, of doing things. And so to me, it's essential to stay relevant, to stay useful, to remain effective. We need to be continuing to learn.

I had a fear in my late 20s when I had some managers who were about the age I am now that I'd become one of those people that didn't seem to have learned anything new in 20, 25 years and stopped learning early in the career. And so I decided I'd carry on continuing to learn. And I'm so glad that I didn't stop learning 30 years ago.

And in 30 years time, I imagine I'll be saying the same thing.

Interviewer: You've always placed a very strong emphasis on communication. Can you unpack for senior leaders what you believe are the most important communication tools and why?

Wilf Blackburn: Picking up on what I was learning, and I grew up with one of the frameworks being John Cotter's eight step approach to leading change. And I did remember in there, one of the steps was when you're leading, and generally we're managing change, whether it's big or small, if we're leading, we're not just there, we're presumably changing or improving something. One of his steps was, however much communication you think you should be doing, you need to multiply it by 10.

I stuck with that. And so often through life, I found that things have gone better than they otherwise would if we communicated now. So how do we do it?

Well, I think generally in person is best. Particularly I found as a CEO, working with a team as a team is very important. Trying to stay in the room together, ideally in a virtual room, communicating interactively, not top down, but with each other.

And this has probably influenced a little bit by being in East Asia, which is a highly collective, collaborative kind of environment. So spending plenty of time together until we've reached alignment. I'll give a specific example of communicating and in practise.

So setting the annual objectives, say targets for members of a leadership team is a very hands on communicative exercise where we would spend time together, maybe as a team of seven or eight people reporting to me, we would set everybody's objectives for the year, their individual objectives, we'd set them together as a team. So for example, the CFO's objectives would not be set just in a one-to-one way, in a dialogue between the two of us. No, we'd all be involved.

We'd all have a view on what the objectives for the CFO should be. Ultimately, I might have to make a decision, but we keep going until we were all clear what the CFO was supposed to be doing. And then we'd move on to the marketing head or the HR head or whatever.

And in such a way, we're all communicating with each other until we have absolute alignment. And it seems like a time intensive process, but execution throughout the rest of the year is so much faster because we've all shared a communication process where we know exactly what the CFO is responsible for. At the end of the year, the evaluation will happen in precisely the same way that we'll do it collectively.

I'll just give one more, for example, if something goes wrong, I'm thinking about the CEO. If there's a crisis, if there's a disaster, if something happens that impacts customers, then CEO needs to be out there with customers, giving the communication on behalf of the organisation to whichever stakeholders are materially affected, explaining what's happening. I think the most important thing is that you've got to step up and be accountable and be clear and be consistent and use words that people will understand.

And as implied by the earlier part of this answer, it's a two-way process. At least half of our time communicating should be hearing other people and their perspectives.

Interviewer: Currently, you have a board role with the India-based insurance company Livewell, and you're seeking your next executive role. The time and investment, the commitment to do this, there aren't that many books written by CEOs.

Wilf Blackburn: Yeah, I love your question, because I've not encountered too many practising CEOs who've taken the time to put a book out. There's something about the personal brand versus the employer's brand. I think it's quite a difficult thing to do to put out a book on leadership while you're working in an organisation.

Maybe there's a misalignment of interest between those of the person writing about leadership and the CEO. So, it's something that I think can only happen when there's sufficient time between roles and when there's sufficient interest in doing this between roles to get started, to see it through. And so, I was, I guess, in some ways fortunate, but also motivated enough to really spend the time on this.

And I guess I was also quite lucky, Nicola, that because I was never particularly strong in any functional area, I had to become a CEO relatively early on in my career, which meant I had time to have a fair amount of practise and roles and therefore plenty to reflect on. So, it suited me really well to spend this time reflecting as well as a desire to put something out there that's coming from the perspective of the practitioner rather than the observer of the practitioner.

Interviewer: Wilf, thanks so much.

Wilf Blackburn: It's been an absolute pleasure. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Nicola.

Interviewer: Optimal Leadership Reflections of a Serial CEO by Wilf Blackburn with author Philip Whiteley is published by Breakthrough Books and available from Amazon. It can also be ordered by established bookstores and directly from the publisher's website at BreakthroughBookCollective.com