Don't let somebody else manage your career, you're the CEO of your own career.
Just like you would think about your business strategy, you've got to think about your own
sort of personal brand.
Over time, instead of getting a consult from your GP, you might actually be using the AI.
Now there is questions around the ethics of that.
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
And along the way, we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Alistair Symington, the CEO of Blackmores.
Hi Alistair, lovely to see you today.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Thanks for having me.
Now Alistair, you're the CEO of Blackmores, which manufactures an extensive range of vitamin,
mineral and herbal supplements.
Those products are sold in 13 markets.
And indeed, I think you sell more than 900 products.
You have more than 1200 employees and an annual turnover of more than $650 million.
That sounds like a day's work.
I think it starts early, I would say, every day.
You know, one of the things that is really fun about working for a company like Blackmores
is you really get to match your personal values and what is interesting for you in terms of,
you know, living well and healthy with the business as well.
And so starting with a nice healthy morning, I think is always the best way to start your
Yes, hopefully we will get to that very, very soon.
Thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the BOSS.
As the title suggests, we only have 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
Now, as you just alluded to, actually, my first question is all about your morning routine,
how you start your day.
So tell me what happens, what time do you get up?
Well, I mean, it does.
As I mentioned, it starts early.
So for me, getting out of bed at four thirty five o'clock in the morning, either with some
exercise that might be heading down to the freshwater beach, which is my local beach
for a swim, taking the dog for a walk or maybe something a bit more energetic, which I like
to do some high intensity training three days a week, which might mean getting the
heart rate up and really getting a quick workout in the morning.
So it really sets me up for the day.
So do you have gadgets like fancy phones to monitor your heart rate and your recovery
time and that sort of thing?
Yeah, look, I spend all my day looking at data.
So I think when it comes to personal diagnostics, I'm actually wearing an oora ring right now.
I don't know if you've heard of one of those, but it's a device that I got introduced to,
which does measure sleep and measures heart rate throughout the day.
It can actually monitor stress levels throughout the day.
So just on that, do you get sort of really stressed if your data is not good, if you
don't get enough sleep or enough REM sleep or if your recovery time is not fast enough?
Does it worry you?
Yeah, look, you can get a bit carried away with those things.
But I think, you know, what's been interesting for me doing continuous monitoring is just
to understand throughout the week or the day, you know, where you might be under a little
bit more pressure and then start to think about some of the mechanisms you might want
to put into place to help manage some of that stress.
Because stress in of itself helps to build capacity.
But if you're encountering stress for long periods of time, it can actually be quite
detrimental to your health as well.
So are you a coffee and breakfast kind of guy?
I have my own little Italian coffee machine.
So I like good coffee.
I don't like a lot of coffee, but I like very, very good coffee.
So I've got a local guy who I get my beans from.
And there's a bit of a process in the morning, which I enjoy, which is making my own espresso
And then does that come with breakfast or not with breakfast?
I normally would have, you know, a piece of toast with avocado or some fresh fruit or
something like that, something small.
I'm not into having a big breakfast in the morning.
Yeah, that is quite light, actually.
OK, let's move on to my next question, which is what is the best piece of career advice
you've ever been given?
So I think the best piece of career advice I've ever been given is don't let somebody
else manage your career.
You're the CEO of your own career.
And so just like you would think about your business strategy, you've got to think about
your own sort of personal brand and what you are looking for in life generally.
And so having a clear strategy around how you manage yourself both in business and
outside is really important.
So how old would you have been when you started being consciously the CEO of your own
I think it would have been I was fortunate enough to work at Procter & Gamble and I got
introduced to a concept called corporate athlete.
And so the concept here is you manage energy, not time.
And so I would have been in my early thirties, I would say this concept of managing
energy, not time means if you can manage your physical, emotional, spiritual and
mental energy, then it means you can build capacity.
You can really become fully engaged at the times that matter most.
And so for me, that was a real concept that resonated.
And I mean, it required work in order to sort of develop some of the tools around
that, but that was sort of the start of understanding about how strategy is
important in terms of managing yourself.
And what are some of the key tools that you employ to do that?
At least once a year, probably two or three times a year, actually, you sort of
take a look at those four energy zones, you actually rate yourself in terms of
whether you're how you're going.
So I think for many of us, the easier one would be physical.
So most people are saying, well, I want to do more exercise or maybe I want to
lose a bit of weight or whatever that might be.
You're sort of gauging yourself on your physical output.
And then the others are a little bit more tricky.
So emotional energy would be writing yourself against the relationships that
you have at work and those, you know, you have outside of work.
Mental would be, how are you creating opportunities for yourself to think more
broadly? So rather than staying on narrow topics, you sort of widening the, you
know, your sort of intellectual endeavors as you think about mental capacity.
And then the last one, spiritual, which I think can mean different things for
different people.
And so for me, it was really being very clear on your value system and then going
back against that value system and assessing whether the decisions you make
in your life are actually aligned to your values.
So, you know, it's, it's fairly rudimentary, I would say, in terms of
putting it together, but it does give you a guide and what you do is you rate
yourself from one to five and you just say, you know, am I at the top end or am
I sort of, have I got some opportunities and work to do in certain areas and try
and, try and strike the balance.
My last question in this first segment is about a pivotal moment in your career.
Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career, which really changed the
trajectory of your work life or really changed the way you lead and the way you
do business in some way?
A life ambition of mine was to live and work overseas.
And I was working for Procter and Gamble.
I was fortunate enough to start that in Singapore, but I really wanted to, I
guess, push myself a little bit more.
And the opportunity came up to move to, to Shanghai to live and work in China
and take my family to China.
From Singapore to Shanghai.
And so I took that challenge on.
And I think for me, it taught me so much about my own leadership.
It really tested me in an environment, not only where business was challenging,
but also communication generally with my team.
I had eight direct reports.
I had some, you know, spoken English, but then I had 150 other
employees who spoke no English.
You know, that really pushed me to think about how I
could show up in a different way.
So what did you learn most from that experience?
So I think underlying learning from that was you tend to focus on
where your strengths might lie.
Here, you have to think about different ways of using those strengths to maybe
engage with employees in a different way.
So language was important, but then spending time demonstrating to them that
you're interested in their part of the business.
So for example, we had 30 distributors in 32 provinces in China.
So I traveled a lot and spent a lot of time visible to that team.
Oh, so because you couldn't communicate so much verbally, you did it by showing
up and being with them and just spending time with them.
We put a lot of pressure back on, I guess, myself, having to do that amount of
travel, but it was, I felt like being visible to my team was, was really
important at that time.
It's a good lesson though, isn't it?
Just the different ways of communicating.
If you can't do it verbally, do it physically.
Alistair on that note, we're going to take a short break.
When we come back, we're going to open this extremely dangerous chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm Sally Patton and I'm here with Alistair Symington, the
chief executive of Blackmores.
Now Alistair, this section is called the chatterbox.
So in front of you, as previously advertised, is a very dangerous
chatterbox, which is otherwise known as just a brown, shiny box, cardboard box
inside, which are about 20 questions all folded up on pieces of paper.
I would like to ask you to choose one of the questions and I have all of them,
of course, ask you to answer it.
So have a forage around and pick a question.
What's the hardest thing about leadership?
Oh, the hardest thing about leadership.
It's important that as a leader, do you do show consistency in terms of the way
that you show up in front of your team, the way you communicate to your team.
So certainly I think the most effective leaders are the ones that are able to
clearly articulate where the company might be heading or clearly articulate a
vision and then follow through with consistency around delivery against
that type of vision.
And so being consistent against that and really lining up, you know, your team
to ensure that they're all moving in the same direction is one of the toughest
things about leadership, because if you think about the world that we live in
today, it's volatile, it's uncertain.
Things are changing all the time.
So you not only need to be consistent, but you also at the same time, need to
create a little bit of flexibility without appearing that you are actually
changing the tune.
So when you talk about consistency, do you think very carefully about making
sure that you show up in the same manner every day and that whatever else is going
on, say in your home life or with your new owners, you park that to one side and
you put a consistent message out to your employees?
Yeah, I think that builds a certain level of confidence with your employees.
I think trying to create an environment whereby the employees are not impacted
too much by maybe things that are outside of their control.
So really creating a sense of safety, I would say, in an environment where they
can go about their work without having some of the pressure that maybe as a CEO,
you're taking either from the board or from the external environment, from
shareholders, whatever that might be.
In saying that though, we're not robots.
So, you know, you still need to do that with authenticity and in a way that your
employees and those around you really get a sense for who you are.
So that's really the delicate balance as a CEO that you're trying to strike every
Yeah, it's difficult balance, isn't it?
Okay, next question.
This is slightly more quirky.
If you cook, what is your favourite thing to cook?
Well, my wife was listening to this.
She'd be saying he never cooks, but I do like to get friends over and, you know,
try a few things, different things on the barbecue.
So I would say my favourite thing to cook on the barbie is fish because it's, it's
a bit of a challenge when you're cooking over high heat to make sure that you can
deliver the perfect piece of seafood.
So seafood on the barbecue is always good.
And then I think for me, then it goes with a really nice salad.
Again, more in the theme around being healthy here.
One of my favourite recipe books actually is a book around the best salads in the
So just thinking about whether it's from the Mediterranean or Sardinia or different
ways of pickling fruit and veggies.
So thinking about those things as well as inspiration.
I might invite myself to one of your barbecues.
I like to think of myself as a salad queen.
Well, maybe we should have a salad off Sally.
Oh, this is interesting.
What do you think of chat GPT and what do you think it means for your business?
Oh, that's a great question.
I've spent a lot of time discussing this back at Blackmoor's actually.
One of the things that we find in, in what we do is there's so much information in
this area that trying to curate it for the individual, cause not everybody's the
How do you personalise, I guess, the natural health journey and how do you engage
with consumers around the options they have either through vitamins and supplements
or natural health generally.
So chat GPT and AI generally, I think is an opportunity to personalise the health
So taking not only the information that we would have and be able to provide, but
as the consumer engages with AI and chat GPT, it's learning as it goes.
So, you know, every time you go back, it's a personalised browser for information
that you are looking at on a daily basis.
So do you mean for me as one of your presumably millions of customers that you
could personalise products that I might need or that would be beneficial to me?
So if you're making queries into chat GPT or using artificial intelligence, what
would end up happening over time is you would be curating your own personal
So whether it's certain, you know, health conditions that you may be facing, or
you might be struggling to overcome, or maybe you just are thinking about, I
don't know, there's an ambition in terms of what you want to do in terms of your
own health outcomes.
The AI will over time be able to curate that solution for you.
Oh, so I'll be using the AI to help me rather than Blackmores using
the AI to target me.
So the entry point could be through Blackmores.
So we would create, let's call it a personalised naturopath that has all the
same information as, as any other practitioner.
And over time, instead of getting a consult from your GP, you might
actually be using the AI.
Now there is questions around the ethics of that, that we are all grappling with
because at the end of the day, you know, you want to make sure that any of the
recommendations you're getting are covered off by a practitioner, but most
of the journey could be, and the problem solving could be done by, by an AI.
I look forward to it.
Alistair, that is the end of our very dangerous section called the chatterbox.
I now have one last question, which we ask all our guests.
And that is, if we gave you a year off, unencumbered, you could do anything
you liked and you can come back to your job, what would you do?
I think that what I would do is I would actually take my family and I would go
to a remote location and spend time in a community, giving back to the community.
So, you know, if I think about it in the Pacific islands, for example, you know,
there's challenges that exist in terms of global warming and climate risk.
And to have an opportunity to spend time in the community, helping them maybe
deal with some of those issues and then giving something that was, is more
meaningful back to more underprivileged communities in relation to learning
around how to manage, I talked about climate, but there could be a
raft of different topics.
So, but for me, I spent two or three years as a child in the Pacific living
in Fiji and, you know, I look at the challenges that they have now.
And I think sort of in our broader community in, in Oceania, there's
an opportunity to spend time.
And I'd like to take my children on that journey with me so that they can go
through life with a little bit more understanding and acceptance about those
communities that might be dealing with issues that, you know, when you're
living sort of a more privileged life, they may not necessarily be that exposed to.
And did you like growing up in Fiji?
I think some of my fondest memories, and we had the opportunity to go back last
year as my parents 50th wedding anniversary.
And so we all went back as a family and the hospitality and just the sheer
joy that comes with engaging with the Fijians, I think was something
that was really memorable.
And that is our 15 minutes up.
Alistair, thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with you.
It has been really terrific hearing about how you think you're going to use AI in
the future, about how you manage energy rather than time, your stories of living
in Shanghai and how you had to change the way you communicated with your staff
and about being the CEO of your own career.
I am going to start being the CEO of my own career.
So thank you for that.
Thank you, Sally.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced and edited by Lapfan.
Our theme is by Alex Gow and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.