In the middle of the last proper recession Australia had, I left a safe banking job and
did a startup technology company.
That was a huge pivot.
It's kind of like on a video game going from 4x, 16x, 32x, the game is accelerating.
You need AI on your side to operate at 32x as well.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review.
And welcome to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything
in between, and along the way we're hoping to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is David Chutehoe, the chief executive of Macquarie Technology.
Hi, David, love to see you.
Thank you for coming in for your grilling, although it's not really a grilling.
Now, David, you're the CEO of Macquarie Technology, as I said, which is a $2 billion cloud services
data center, government cybersecurity and telecoms company with offices in Sydney, Melbourne,
Canberra, Brisbane and Perth.
Now, on your website, I noticed that you say, the people who do best and stay the longest
have a burning passion to make a difference.
So you clearly aim for employees to stay for a while.
Are you really passionate about staff staying around a bit?
We are, and we're particularly passionate about our purpose that you spoke to there because
That has definitely something we've doubled down on and resonates so well.
Our whole business has been around the purpose of making a difference in markets that are
underserved and overcharged.
And we're trying to find people with that desire to make a difference, that burning
passion to punch above their weight, to do something special in their career.
Sounds fantastic.
Thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
We don't have much time, so I will start the clock right now.
So David, first of all, what time do you get up in the morning?
Do you have breakfast at the same time every day?
I get up about 6.30.
But the thing that might surprise many people is that I really enjoy dropping my children
It's the chance I have a chance to talk to them in a strange enough, it's that weird
environment where you're just looking at the front windscreen together and there's
nothing else to talk about or do except to one another.
It's a really special time.
And over the years, I've really come to treasure that.
And I've got one child left to drop to school.
And my daughter and I have some really nice time together.
And do you find she does open up when you're not looking face to face?
Yes, and particularly so with my boys.
For boys, particularly driving, looking at a front windscreen together and talking
about small things, slightly bigger things.
It's so much more natural, I think.
And what time do you get to the office?
I like to try and get in about quarter past eight.
I used to be a late stay backer.
I still am at times, but I think the most important part has been effective when you're
there than the hours you're there.
Oh, that's interesting.
So how many hours do you try and work a day so that you can be really effective?
I don't really think about hours as much quantum of hours, but more sort of how do
you create a day where you're productive?
Essentially, I think the question is how to maintain a focus and how to make sure
your priorities don't get subsumed into a sea of recurring meetings, a sea of
coordinational conversations, which really don't necessarily move the ball forward.
So how do you overcome that?
Well, I'm a huge fan of a book called Meeting Advantage, which talks about the
absolute importance of getting meetings right, the importance of having different
types of meetings rather than sort of blurring them into one.
We're big fans of starting the day with a stand-up meeting, nice short meetings.
The idea is talking about what's in the day ahead, what people's priorities are.
That we've found super important for creating a bit of unification, improving
communication, and then separating that from meetings which are based around
projects and separating that from true leadership meetings.
And I think quite often the challenge in business is leadership meetings get blurred
with management meetings, which get blurred with technical meetings, and it all gets
sort of one big omelette.
Oh, so the secret is to be very clear about exactly what that meeting is for.
Okay, my next question.
Was there a pivotal moment in your career that really shaped the trajectory of what
you did thereafter or changed you somehow?
If I go way back, of course, it was leaving the safe vault of banking and starting
Macquarie because I was one of the founders of Macquarie.
And that was a huge pivot because in the middle of the last proper recession Australia
had, I left a safe banking job and did a start-up technology company.
And also it was one of those ones where I think it was at a point in my life where I
was willing to not just recognise the opportunity but also accept that it may fail.
And without a family and other obligations, it was probably a risk I was up for.
So were you really scared at the time?
And you were prepared to fail, I imagine?
Yeah, the way I rationalised it back then was that I thought, well, I'll get my old
job back in two jobs' time.
So I'll do this for two years.
It doesn't work out.
I'll get another job back.
It won't be as good.
And then I'll probably get back into where I am now.
So I'll lose about four years of my life.
And luckily it didn't fail.
But it also unfortunately took twice as long.
And I think that's the other part that for start-ups is always challenging is you think
it's going to be two years ends up being whatever you think it's going to be.
It's twice as long.
But interesting that you calculated how many years your life would be or your work life
would be set back by before you do the start-up.
And I think for a lot of people who may not be thinking of doing it so young but later
in their career thinking, hey, maybe I should set out of my big, safe corporate land and
join a start-up and a senior role, you do need to rationalise, are you up for that downside
and calculating what it would take to recover?
Yeah, it's good advice.
Okay, David, my next question is, what is the best piece of career advice?
I take a lot of my advice interesting, not so much from other CEOs, although that's valuable
too, but actually from reading.
I just love reading biographies and I get insights out of reading books and I guess
walking other people's shoes before me.
So who's given you what great advice?
Well, I'm currently reading a book on Cleopatra and a very different perspective on Cleopatra.
But the challenge of again adapting to an extraordinarily powerful neighbour in Rome
and how she steered Egypt through that.
That story of how you adapt as a country, as a business, I think is very interesting.
And it's one that resonates with me particularly because in our business, we're in technology
and it moves so quickly and adaption is frankly the key to success.
So was Cleopatra really good at that?
Was that a strength of hers, adaptation?
Yes, extraordinary adaptation.
Because Egypt was not what it was by that time and not only had it moved from an Egyptian-based
leadership to a Greek leadership, but the power of Rome was just growing and growing
despite the size and wealth of Egypt.
And although I haven't quite finished the book, so even though I know how it ends, the
way she adapted under pressure when Rome moved in and there was almost a bear hug going on
Egypt and she navigated Egypt through that without the calamities that would come later.
So have you over the years had to adapt to your business a lot?
The one thing about tech is because roosters can become featherdusters so quickly and there's
new technology emerging all the time, you have to make choices about which ones to embrace.
You can't pick every one and you can make mistakes because that happens in business
all the time, but you've got to recognise those mistakes and pick something else.
So what's the biggest change you've had to make?
So in the world of cyber security and the world of cloud, there's no question that
right now, AI is transforming our industry.
A lot of people think, oh, AI is chat GPT, which of course it is.
Oh, AI is Copilot, which of course it is.
The reality is there are a few hundred other AI companies in primarily the US that are
doing extraordinary things whose capabilities are actually more capable than the two I mentioned.
And the question is, how will that play out for all our businesses?
Our data centre business is very clear.
It's redesigned a data centre that we're about to start construction on to be AI ready,
which means it has been redesigned to cope with the very extra power requirements
and the extra hot GPU chipsets that AI uses.
It would have been convenient not to redesign the data centre,
but that was the example where we had to go.
We have an opportunity.
We must adapt now if that means some delay.
Now stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break.
When we come back, we're going to open the chatterbox.
David, welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
Now, this is our section called the chatterbox.
The chatterbox is right here in front of you.
It's this lovely shiny brown box inside, which are about 15, 20 questions all wrapped up on
little bits of paper.
I'd like you to choose some one by one and I will ask you to answer the question.
So please have a fish.
So it's like a Chinese fortune cookie, except it's a question, not an answer.
Who is a person outside of the business world whom you really admire and why?
It ties to my love of biographies.
I'm reading right now a book called Founders Forge, which is about the two amazing people
who back in World War II, before and after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, transformed the
American industry to support the war effort.
And as part of our business is in the world of cyber security and we do a lot of research
in the world of cyber security and we provide cyber security for about 40% of government
I've often been wondering about what happens when war is looming and then of course when
war breaks out that harnesses industry and speeds up decision making because you think
it surely must have to accelerate and it did.
And this Norwegian immigrant to America called Bill Knudsen completely rebuilt the US defense
industry out of something that was almost nonexistent in the 1930s into one that actually
helped win the war.
And I just thought that is extraordinary transformation.
But the way he did it as a corporate executive turned US public servant was amazing.
So what was his secret to transforming it?
He harnessed US industry.
So in World War I, the US government had decided to take over US industry.
They literally took over the railroads in the United States and tried to run the trains.
As you can imagine, the US military had no idea how to run trains.
They made a complete mess of it.
They also took over some businesses and thought they could run shipyards and made a mess of
They tried to contract at government pace and most of their contracts were finalized
just as the war was finishing.
So when Bill Knudsen came along as a Norwegian immigrant, his totally different approach
was we're never going to get there.
And he harnessed US industry by providing incentives for US industry.
Financial incentives?
Financial incentives that simplified contracting.
So rather than saying we need to go through a long run tender process or take months and
months and months, he reset the incentives to be cost plus a set margin.
He provided incentives for retooling people from corporate-based products to defense
And much to the upset of US defense, he kept the US military out of the whole process.
And so their job was to specify what they needed.
Their job was not to change the designs once they were in place, but to let US industry
get on and mass produce.
Extraordinary story.
But it harnesses the energy of private sector for the benefit of the government rather than
trying to hope that government might be able to run private sector even in an emergency.
David, here's another fish in the chatter box.
This is perfect for you.
What do you think of AI and what does it mean for your business?
I think I must have written that one out myself, which I did not.
The interesting part for us is we've just had a book written about us called Customer
Magic with a US author who's written a lot of famous customer experience books.
And he posed the question to me just towards the end of that process.
He said, David, how do you think AI is going to change customer experience?
This is your purpose.
This is obviously a big part of the book he was just finishing with us, honestly.
And I said, I think it's going to make customer experience even more important.
And the reason for that is that AI will deal a lot of the interactions that we would
associate with customer experience today.
Resetting passwords, gathering information, just renewing insurance policies.
AI will really help all of that.
I think it will help enormously.
But when you do need to talk to your telecom company, or in our case, your cloud company
or your insurance company for someone else, when you do need to talk to them,
and it may only in the future be once or twice a year, that interaction will be so important.
It will shape that person's view of your business.
So you want to make sure it's a spectacular interaction.
So I think customer experience in those moments of truth will be even more important than
they are today when you might interact with that same customer a handful of times.
If one of them isn't perfect, as long as the other four are good, it kind of averages out
and the last one resets it.
But in the future, with so much AI-generated interaction, that when they need to speak to
you, that moment of truth will determine their whole perception of your business.
So from where you sit, in the next 12 months, if I came back and we did this podcast
time next year, how different do you think the whole AI and our use of AI will look?
Cyber is really interesting because right now hackers are using cyber.
So to we on the defense, where the defense team have to use AI as well,
basically speeds the game up.
The power of AI is that the person driving an attack will, for the most part in the future,
not be an individual, but will in fact be an AI program doing what a hacker would have done before.
Oh, so bots will be breaking through our defense systems, not individuals?
I mean, there's some extent that's already happening, but it will just go much further.
And the adaption of those attacks will not rely on a programmer offshore somewhere,
but will actually be AI adapting the attacks for your defenses.
So it's kind of like on a video game going from 4x, 16x, 32x, the game is accelerating
both on the attack and the defense.
And when it speeds up like that, you need to have AI to counter it.
Imagine a video game, which is accelerating and someone is playing against you and they're
just incredibly fast.
Your reflexes can't go any faster.
You've got hand-eye coordination to do.
You need AI on your side to operate at 32x as well.
That's a really scary outlook for cybercrime globally.
And it means that the defense team has to operate at the same speed as the offense team.
It also means that one of the big issues of cybercrime, which is holding people to account
for law enforcement will also be more challenging.
So David, you have passed the Chatterbox challenge.
I now have one last question.
And that is, if you had 12 months off unencumbered, you could do anything you liked,
go anywhere you like.
What would you do?
This might surprise you.
I had this opportunity mid-career to have a sabbatical and I chose to study overseas.
In business, which my friends and family thought was hilarious, but I actually really enjoyed
spending three months doing case studies and thinking about what makes successful leaders.
And I actually, the case study teaching method was well taught is very powerful.
So where did you go?
I did a into Harvard and did the advanced management program with another 170 CEOs
from around the world.
So if we gave you 12 months off, would you go and study something like that?
Or study something else?
Right now I would do another three month business sabbatical like that, which for many people
would be like, that's not a sabbatical, David.
That's kind of like work, but actually I find it really stimulating.
So was there one thing that you really took from the Harvard course that you did last time?
I thought there was one particularly powerful example, which I took away,
which was called the Stockdale Paradox.
And it was based on a US admiral who was shot down in Vietnam and was spent five years in
a Vietnamese prison camp.
And he did a study of the other prisoners when he was there and his observation, which
became the paradox was the people who believed that they were going to be out by Christmas
or set some deadline for when the war would end and they'd be freed did not make it.
Setting artificial deadlines did not create the resilience people needed to get through
the terrible experience.
But it was the people who had an absolute belief that the war would end.
They would be released, but they set no arbitrary date.
We're the ones who survived that horrible experience.
It calls it a paradox because to have that level of faith, yet not knowing how it would
be achieved or when it would be achieved does seem like a paradox.
And I think the point being it's so true in business that quite often you don't have
clarity about how it will end or when it will end.
You always face challenges which you have to rise to, but having that complete belief
that your purpose and your resilience will prevail.
You need patience, but you don't create artificial deadlines as to when that will occur.
That's really good advice.
And that is our time up.
David, I really love the way you have drawn a link between yourself and Cleopatra.
And Cleopatra's need to adapt and your need indeed to adapt your own business.
I have loved less, I must say, the idea that AI is going to accelerate cybercrime because
cybercriminals will be using AI to automate and speed up their cyber attacks.
And I really do hope that in your year off you will find another great course to study.
So thank you so much, David, for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, and produced and edited by Lapfan.
Video and audio assistance and our music theme is by Alex Gao
and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.