I think I learned it through making errors of, you know, somebody saying to me, sometimes
you've got to be told by people, Kim, you weren't very nice to me then.
In those first five or ten years of my career, I could have done a lot of things a lot better.
So this obsession now with networking and making sure you connect with everybody but
make sure there's a reason you're connected.
Oh, can we all just be a bit normal?
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 Kim McKay, the chief executive of the Australian Museum.
Hi, Kim, how are you?
Thank you very much for coming in.
I'm great, Sally.
Great to be here.
Now, Kim, as I said, you're the CEO of the Australian Museum here in Sydney, which is
the oldest natural history museum in Australia and the fifth oldest natural history museum
You have about 400 staff.
And last year, you had 1.5 million visitors.
And I'm reliably informed that 508,000 of them went to see the Ramses and the Gold of
the Pharaohs exhibition, which was the biggest collection of Ramses II objects and gold to
ever travel the world.
Did you learn something from the way ancient Egyptians lived their lives?
In fact, it's something I learned from the age of five, because we left Australia and
moved to London when I was five years old for my dad's job.
So I grew up surrounded by some of the great museums of the world.
But on the way to England in those days, the Suez Canal was still open.
So I visited ancient Egypt.
I was convinced that I used to be an Egyptian princess.
And in fact, when I got to school in England at age six, I did something that friends laugh
about now because they say it's so archetypal.
I gathered all the children together and made them my slaves.
And we built a sarcophagus made out of cardboard and painted it.
And we built a mummy inside it wrapped in bandages.
And this was my husband who I decided had died.
I still remember the teachers looking at me going, who is this child?
Well, here you are.
We haven't got very long, just 50 minutes.
The time starts right now.
Kim, my first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
What happens in the morning?
I get up at 530 most mornings and I actually spend the next half an hour between 530 and
six thinking what's ahead of me in the day while lying in bed.
So do you think about the sort of difficult meetings or conversations you might have to
have that day or the problems you've got to solve that day?
Everything because I'm very good at switching off.
So the night before, I don't think about it at all.
So once I'm awake that morning, I'm thinking about the day and all the positive things,
the challenging things that I have to face.
So I just have that quiet time.
And then at six, I'm on, I get up, I'm listening to the radio.
I love the morning news and I start getting ready for the day.
Now some mornings that means going to the gym in my building and some mornings it means
going to the physiotherapist because I had a horrible accident in the last two years
with my knee and so I've had it rebuilt a couple of times.
And then I usually have about an hour before I go to work because I live within walking
distance of the Australian Museum, which is really wonderful.
So I then start doing some work and I'm sending text messages and annoying people that way
or reading something online that I need to be prepared for.
And I'm at work by usually between 8.30 and 9.
And breakfast or no breakfast?
Oh, I have breakfast.
I like breakfast.
I have berries and yogurt.
My next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that somehow changed
the trajectory of what you're doing.
It might have been a project that you're working on that sort of led you off in a different direction.
I just finished 10 years working on Clean Up Australia and Clean Up the World.
I was the co-founder and deputy chair and I had started consulting to the Discovery
Channel in Australia who just launched here and was asked to be involved in a really big
filming project, an adventure sports race called Eco Challenge with the quite legendary
Mark Burnett who went on to found Survivor.
And the president of Discovery Channel back in those days came out and he was I guess
impressed by the work I'd done and he said, Kim, why don't you come and move to Washington
and run a new division we're creating called Themed Entertainment where we'll do the Eco
Challenge and some other things as well.
And I knew the next Eco Challenge was going to be in Morocco based out of Marrakesh and
the one after probably in Patagonia.
So I knew there was some great adventures ahead and I guess I was in the latter part
of my 30s and I threw caution to the wind and went, yes, I'm moving to Washington.
I'm going to change up my life.
And what did you learn from that whole experience?
What were the main takeaways?
If opportunities like that present themselves, take them.
And did you learn a lot about just new subjects?
Was it a new industry you learned about?
How did that sort of change the trajectory?
It was a new industry.
So I was like a grand project manager.
My background, of course, was in marketing and communications to start with.
I knew I could do so much broader than that.
I didn't want to be a specialist.
I wanted to be this grand generalist.
And I thought this will give me the platform to do that.
And I'd always been attracted by non-fiction television and this was going to put me right
in the middle of that in a very big way and meeting an extraordinary array of people,
of course, you know, the experiences that money can't ever buy.
And getting out of my comfort zone.
I mean, you get pretty comfortable as your knowledge increases in a certain way.
So it was great to shake it up, you know, to put myself in new cities, new challenges,
different people, learning a new industry.
It was an amazing time.
My next question is, what was the best piece of career advice you've ever received?
I've received a lot because I need a lot of advice from time to time, you know.
So the career advice I think that has meant most to me is don't take no for an answer
if you really want to do something.
Find ways around those things and don't sort of be put in a box by people in that way.
So can you give me an example of a time you were told no and you didn't accept it?
Well that goes way back actually.
When we first did the first clean up the harbour day in 1989, we wrote to the New South Wales
to say we'd had this idea with Ian Kiernan about organising a community clean up.
And the department wrote the response for the minister that came back to us about six
weeks later because, you know, it takes six weeks to write a letter and they said, thanks
very much for your idea but our department looks after the cleaning of Sydney Harbour
And what did you do then?
Turned around on my IBM golf ball typewriter in those days and, you know, wrote a plan
for how we'd clean up the harbour using volunteers.
And did they come back straight away?
After we got it going and announced it, they wanted to be part of it, of course.
I always look at a no as one step closer to a yes.
So I see it as part of the pattern with things.
Sometimes you need a no to really inspire you to go that step further.
So don't take no as that answer.
So does being told no actually energise you?
I don't see it as a negative.
I see it as a challenge to get over it and to find the yes.
On that note, Kim, stay right where you are.
We are going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to open our famous
and most beautiful chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Kim McKay, the chief executive of the Australian Museum.
Now Kim, this is our section called the chatterbox.
In front of you is this beautiful brown shiny cardboard box, inside which are about 15 questions.
Have a fish around, pick out a question and we'll get going.
What are some of the top no-nos when applying for a job, either in your experience or when
you have been interviewing people?
It's going to be the people I interview for jobs now.
Firstly, be yourself, be authentic.
Practice before you come to a job interview.
Practice what exactly?
Practice the sorts of answers you might give.
Think about what I would want to ask you in a job interview about your skills, about how
you might react to certain situations, about good experiences.
I always ask people, you know, tell me about a time when you've really made a difference
in an organization.
These sorts of questions are not hard to predict when you go for an interview.
So I always say to people prepare.
You wouldn't go on stage as an actor and not have practiced your play or your script.
You wouldn't go and give a speech somewhere and not have practiced.
A job interview is a project.
If you really want that job, you've got to make sure that you put your best self forward
So look at it as a serious enterprise and undertaking and prepare well.
And what happens if people get nervous in interviews?
Sometimes people aren't just naturally very good at marketing themselves.
Do you mark them down for that?
But I do expect people to practice and then you practice more.
And guess what happens?
You feel more comfortable saying that you learn to control your nerves in that situation
because you feel confident in your information.
If you are nervous, that is a normal condition.
Nerves can be good, can actually lift your performance at the time.
But if you've practiced, you know you've got the answers.
You have that inner confidence and you'll perform well.
And do you have a curly question you like to ask?
I don't like to put people under pressure like that.
I like to just have a good conversation with them.
I might ask them, if this situation happened, how would you deal with it?
And they have to think on their feet.
But then again, I'm interviewing somebody who should be pretty skilled in that area
and should be able to respond as well.
So my job in a job interview is not to trip someone up.
My job and the other interviewers, I hope, we're looking for someone with the right attitude.
I love that. OK, have a forage in the box.
What was your first job?
Working in the 30 Flavours Ice Cream Parlor on Manly Corso,
making milkshakes and serving ice creams to very handsome young surfers.
I worked eight hours on a Saturday and eight hours on a Sunday.
And I recall on Saturday my take home pay was ten dollars and on Sunday it was twelve dollars.
But I was the richest 15 year old I knew.
Do you think you learned something from doing that at that age?
Yes, absolutely. You go to work on time.
You go to work looking clean and tidy and you deal with customers, some of the which are difficult,
some which were gorgeous. A lovely old couple in their 80s used to come in or 90s maybe every weekend
and buy a single vanilla ice cream each and walk away with it.
And then one day the man came in on his own.
And, you know, it was so lovely to connect with him.
And I really did learn.
And of course, I learned about money and how to budget it and spend it and to save it.
And what's your first professional job?
I was a junior consultant, but I was working for a wonderful woman who was 10 years older than me.
And she taught me a lot of things about work in that first job and about being professional.
And she's still one of my closest friends to this day.
Have you developed a lot of friends through your working life?
I certainly have. And not just my colleagues at work, but also people who are my clients or other people.
I've dealt with other stakeholders, if you like, on projects.
I always say once you've met me, you never get rid of me.
But it's lovely to work with people who are your friends.
Sometimes you might not always see eye to eye, but that's normal in life.
If you respect each other, and I think that's key to this, is I respect the people I work with all the time
and learn from them and hopefully they do the same in reverse.
And, you know, I've learned that.
I mean, I think I was a pretty lousy boss when I was younger.
But as you go through your working life, you do learn more.
And I love working with friends.
Why were you a lousy boss in the early days, do you think?
I was probably too keen to just drive things forward and get ahead and often not think about people's feelings along the way.
You know, I could be pretty myopic in my view and focused on progress.
And of course, sometimes other people aren't on the same train as you're on.
I had to learn to maybe think about the others around me in a different way.
And how did you learn that?
Oh, I think I learned it through making errors.
You know, somebody saying to me, sometimes you've got to be told by people and saying, you know, Kim, you weren't very nice to me then.
You know, in those first five or 10 years of my career, I could have done a lot of things a lot better in terms of relationships with people.
I had good relationships with people, but some few key people I think back and I think I wish I thought of them in a different way.
So you had to really learn how to take people along with you.
Take people on the journey with you.
And that's everything that we do now.
If you don't have people coming with you, you're not going to achieve anything.
OK. Have a forage. Let's go.
What is the most common piece of advice that you think is BS?
Let's call it networking.
You know, come to a networking dinner.
What on earth is that?
I don't need to network with people.
I just need to talk to people and get to know them.
So this obsession now with networking and making sure you connect with everybody, but make sure there's a reason you're connected.
Oh, can we all just be a bit normal? Be real. Be who you are.
You know, we're all a bit obsessed by different parts of social media.
I mean, we have a whole social media team at the museum, of course, as well.
We need to. We need to be there and be present in that.
But I think just seeing it as an opportunity to get ahead through networking.
So are you on LinkedIn or Facebook or what do you use?
I am on LinkedIn.
I don't traffic on it a lot in the sense that a lot of people friend me and I'll friend them back if I like them.
And, you know, and I do post things about what the museum is doing.
That's my gig. I am the director and CEO of the Australian Museum.
So I'm out there promoting what we do as often as possible.
But you're not there commenting on other people's posts and having conversations.
Oh, no, I'm not. It's not how I like to have conversations.
You know, you call this chatterbox and we're having a conversation, which is great.
My mother said to me when I was little, did you have gramophone needles for breakfast?
Because I never shut up from age three and started yapping.
So I'm a natural conversationalist and I like to talk to people.
And I prefer that rather than just having a social media connection.
You know, people monitor the number of likes they get.
Goodness me, no, I monitor the number of really serious, full on practical engagements that happen.
No, that's really good advice.
And on that note, Kim, we have concluded the chatterbox section of the 15 Minutes with the Boss podcast.
I am now going to ask you one final question, which we ask everybody.
And that is, if we were the holiday gods and we could give you 12 months off,
you could come back to your job at the end. You are unencumbered.
What would you do? I would have been tempted to say, really, just take the year off and travel
and have kicked back in Italy with a good glass of red wine and a bowl of pasta that lasted for a year.
But I'm actually going to say something that is my deep desire.
I would love to have time off to go and study more.
Even at my advanced situation, I would love to go and do a year of museum studies at Cambridge or Oxford
or a year of sustainability study at one of these great institutions.
Maybe sending me in that direction in the latter part of my life as more a specialist than a generalist.
And do you think you would want to do that so that you can do something completely different after the Australian Museum,
like go on boards or become an advisor or work on different projects?
Or do you have something in mind that you'd like to do?
Serving on boards is something that I've done already, you know, and I've had some experiences, so I'd like to build on that.
But mostly, I'd like to learn some new things for myself as well,
because I do believe in the concept of lifelong learning.
And the more we learn and feed ourselves, the more curious we become as people.
And I think curiosity is really the key to success.
Yeah, I love that.
And on that note, Kim, our time is up.
Thank you so much for coming in and having a chat today.
I really love listening to your advice about how not to be a lousy boss
and really invest in taking people along the journey with you.
I think your advice about preparing for an interview is fantastic.
You've got to rehearse for an interview like you would rehearse for a speech or a presentation or anything else.
I think everyone should think about the importance of personal engagements over the number of likes they might get on social media.
And I really am going to take on board your advice to be a lifelong learner.
So thank you so much again, Kim, for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
It's been a delight. I've really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much. And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced by Lapfan and Martin Peralta.
Our theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.