The Australian Financial Review
I'm influenced by that longitudinal Harvard survey that says, well, what really makes
They're happy through their lives and it actually isn't career success.
I mean, I think I subscribe to the view that the best predictor of future performance is
past performance.
I'm always a bit sceptical about people who just endlessly want to talk about what they're
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 really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Mark Scott, the vice chancellor of the University of Sydney.
Great to be with you.
Oh, it's wonderful to be here.
Now, Mark, as I said, you're the vice chancellor of Sydney University.
The university, which was founded in 1850, is Australia's oldest.
You have around 40,000 undergraduate students and 28,000 post-grad students and you employ
about 9,000 staff.
You are also a very big business.
Last year, the university recorded a $3.4 billion revenue in 2023.
I must say you also work in a sector that has been under pressure from various governments
and other people for quite a long time.
I imagine you've got a pretty stressful job.
It's pretty demanding.
I'm always asked to compare it to previous jobs I've held, like running the ABC, and
this is as demanding and this is as complex an organisation as I've ever run or been part
We might come to a few of those things later, but as advertised, we only have 15 minutes.
Let's start the clock now.
Mark, what does your morning routine look like?
What time do you get up?
Around five and with my good wife, we head off to the gym a couple of mornings a week.
Personal trainer waits for me there.
That's strength training, really.
I try and do the cardio on my own, on my exercise bike and doing strolls.
That's doing the stuff that I really don't do as well on my own.
Are you a breakfast person?
I am a breakfast person.
And what do you have for breakfast?
Well, I've grown into a muesli and granola and Greek yoghurt kind of person over time.
And I think if that's on the menu and that's what I'm making at home, that's what I will
And you know, it's quite interesting in my time in education, we've thought quite a lot
about cognitive load and things you need to think about.
And I don't spend a whole lot of cognitive load working out what I'm going to have for
breakfast if there's the same thing every day.
That's fine by me.
Okay, let's move on to career advice.
What is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I think when I was studying in the States, I was very kind of concerned about what I
was going to do with my career.
And what were you studying?
I was studying public administration, but I was conscious that I think my grandfathers
and my father had had this same career through their lives.
And there was a sense of they found out what they were going to do.
And I didn't know what I was going to do.
And it was a professor who said to me, you're thinking the wrong way about a career.
That really a career is about getting opportunities.
And with those opportunities, you get you grow different skills and have different experiences
and they open the door to new opportunities and the way you that's the way you go.
And I've sometimes reflected when I'm doing a graduation address, you know, on the line
from Kierkegaard, which basically says, you know, one of the complexities of life is that
you've got it's got to be lived moving forward, but can only be understood looking backwards.
So don't spend too much of your time trying to plan or orchestrate where you're going
to go or what you're going to do.
Instead just be open to all the opportunities where you are now.
And if in fact you do that really taking advantage of all that's on offer, then new and interesting
doors are more likely to open on the back of that.
But you can't over plan it, you can't overthink it.
And at times I've seen people I felt have had their careers derailed because of a single
minded ambition about one opportunity or one job or one prospect.
And anything that's not that is a failure for them.
So do you have a particular passion for education?
In the last few years, you have worked in education and in media.
Yeah, I think I've had this dual track of great interest, started off in education,
started off as a teacher, worked quite early in my career on education policy.
And that actually got me into journalism.
My first job as a journalist was education editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
And then the journalism led through to my time at the ABC.
But then the opportunity to come back to education and to be able to work in educational leadership.
So both have been real passions.
And I think with education, it's been helped by the fact that my wife, who you've spoken
to on this podcast.
You know, I'd been teaching for a couple of years and Bryony actually said to me, look,
if you're interested in media and politics, which I was, then you need to kind of scratch
that itch and find out if that's really of interest to you.
And that's actually started me on the pathway that ended up in journalism for a period of time.
So they were they were always both there and they remain both kind of very compelling
to me to this day.
Let's go to our next question, which is, was there a pivotal moment in your career that
you can point to that really changed the trajectory of what you were doing?
When I was at Fairfax many years ago, I was the deputy editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
And in a sense, I was being lined up to be editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, which
was quite an iconic job that so many aspired to.
And the CEO at the time, Fred Hilmer, thought, well, there'd be others who could be editor
of the Sydney Morning Herald.
He wanted to make me head of, in a sense, head of HR across all of Fairfax organization
He thought to have someone running the people strategy of Fairfax who understood newsrooms
and understood journalists would be a real advantage.
Now, I was a bit crestfallen at the time.
I wanted to be editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, but it was amazing for me.
It got me to think through how you take organization through change, because that was just at the
beginning of the dot com revolution.
And the big question was, would newspapers have a future?
What would happen to advertise?
All of those questions were Fairfax was wrestling with.
And I had a box seat to observe all that, to learn from fellow executives, to look at
what was happening around the world.
And I think it broadened my insights and ambitions beyond what was going to be on the front
page of the paper.
So what were the key one or two things that you learned being head of HR?
I mean, there were good things and bad things.
We had some bad days.
We had some very tough industrial engagements at that time.
And at one point, horrendously, we lost an edition of a newspaper through industrial
And one of the things I valued, management will have things they want to do.
You'll have unions that will have clear views.
But it's good to keep talking and to stay close.
Even though it's been difficult or different at different organizations at different time
to keep talking, to keep understanding the perspectives of others that might be quite
different to you, I think has turned out to be quite valuable and quite important.
I think almost the tough thing about leadership is that you've got to change these organizations.
There's a line I would quote when I was at the ABC from the Italian novel, The Leopard,
which says, if we want things to remain the way they are, things will have to change.
And I think in these organizations that I've worked in, large, iconic organizations that
have been so strong and so good for a long, long period of time, the people there realize
if we're going to remain good, if we're going to remain a great media organization or a great
public broadcaster or a great global university, we have to change because the world is changing.
So how are we going to work together to bring the changes that are necessary to secure our future?
On that note, we're going to take a short break. When we come back,
we're going to open our famous chatterbox. Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Mark Scott, the vice chancellor of Sydney University.
Now, Mark, this is our section called the chatterbox.
In front of you is a cardboard box with about 20 questions in it.
Please have a fish and pick out your first one. What's your favorite meal to cook for a dinner
party? That's a hard one. Well, I don't think I'm particularly
distinguished actually. I think actually it's one of those areas where I regret I have not
actually done a more systematic development of my skills over time.
So just on that, you have had a very, very busy career for a long, long time.
Are there sort of some things like brushing up on your cooking skills that you have just had to
let go of because you just don't have the time? Are there other sacrifices that you've had to
make like that? I think one of the interesting challenges,
though, you get to at my stage of the career is whether, in fact, you use that as an excuse
too often. I don't think it really is an excuse for not leading kind of a balanced life or to
lose touch with friends or to not kind of develop skills that would be great, not just for your own
well-being, but for almost in a sense that broader social engagement with others.
One of the things I've mulled about lately is to not always answer when people ask me how I am
to talk about how busy I am. Yes, there are demands, but there are lots of jobs that are
demanding and there are lots of people whose life circumstances are far more complex than mine.
So you should be careful you don't kind of lunge onto it as an excuse. And I think actually,
as you're getting into a different stage of life, now we're at a stage of life where the kids have
left home and some of that intense parenting burden has gone. One of the things, Brian,
and I've talked about, what are you going to use that time for? Just continue to sit in your study
and to stare at the screen and to work more, or are you going to take advantage of the opportunity
to be a bit broader, to develop new skills, to address some areas that you probably should be
more focused on and to kind of reset and renew a bit? That's an interesting idea, actually,
to not allow your busy job to be an excuse for not developing new skills and for not seeing
your friends. Yeah, I think that's right. This is a very fine broadcast and podcast that you do here.
I do one at the University of Sydney. And one of the people I was speaking to for that podcast was
all about the medical impact of loneliness. And I think particularly for men, I'm influenced by that
longitudinal Harvard survey that says, well, what really makes people happy and happy through their
lives and happy at 70 or 80 or 90. And it actually isn't career success as much as the quality of
relationships that you have. Yeah. And that's a really good piece of advice for all executives.
Just don't drop your friends, don't drop your life because you are busy at work, but there's more.
Yeah, one of the things I think we've talked about over the years is you're not your business
card. And if in fact, you're just too hung up on the job, and yes, the status of the job and all
that the job demands, if that's what you become, then the time will come when you don't have that
job. Who are you then? And I think we've all seen people who really struggled when they are no longer
the job title on the business card. And so I think you, it's a bit late to start thinking about
it then, you got to start thinking about it now, I think. Yeah, no, quite agree. Okay, let's have
another go in the chat box. What should you not do when applying for a job? I mean, I think I
subscribe to the view that the best predictor of future performance is past performance.
I'm always a bit sceptical about people who just endlessly want to talk about what they're going to
do, rather than people who are in a focused, but I suppose modest way, happy to talk about
what they have done, the challenges they faced, the contribution they made and the contribution
others made, to almost build confidence in the recruiter around, we can think through what that
person will be like in the future because we can see what they've done in the past. And I often
encourage people when they're thinking about jobs to think through what you've done. And can you
think through the skills and the capabilities, what you've demonstrated, and can you tell that
story? And then can you help people draw that connection to the new job and the new opportunity?
I mean, it was interesting when I was being interviewed for the University of Sydney job,
I'd clearly never run a university, but I had helped run a large education institution,
the South Wales Department of Education, but I'd also run the ABC and taken a large
public-facing organisation through complex change. And so in a sense, it was me telling the
story about, yeah, what have I done? I've taken large complex organisations through change.
So it's a combination of both. It's partly unpacking what you've done, but also thinking
through, well, what is this institution facing? What is it going to be going through? What does
the next five or 10 years look like and whether I could find those links? So a lot of it is
thinking about your career in a different way, but also thinking carefully through, well,
where is this institution up to? What are they likely to encounter? And also in the conversations
that you're having with people about the university to really be asking as many questions as you're
answering, to really come to a deep understanding as to the challenges as they see it. Not exactly
who are they looking for, but what worries them about the future trajectory of the university
and what are the challenges that they need to engage in and fix in a sense, if they look
forward. Oh, so that's an interesting idea that it's a good idea for you as a candidate to ask
as many questions as you can, I guess, A, to show interest and B, to get a real sense of
what they would need you to do. I think that's right. And the other thing I'd add though is
to just be sure yourself that this is a good fit, that in your own mind, in your own heart,
this makes sense and this would be a good thing to do. So just on that, so when you say that
you're clearly doing something that you want to do, otherwise you wouldn't have taken the job
presumably, but then, you know, years later, you're being asked to resign by lots of different
bodies. How does that feel to be, to get the resilience to resist those sorts of comments?
I mean, they must be quite hurtful. It must be very stressful.
I think you need to be able to do two things simultaneously. One is to actually, on your own
and with those who are close to you, kind of deeply reflect on the experience. And I think
you can get into trouble if you think, if you just get defensive, if you just kind of swipe off at
the critics, if you're not listening carefully. And I think to be honest, over the last year,
you know, some of the things I think I've done well in my career is manage complex environments,
manage the politics of environments and the media settings of environments. Some of that stuff's been
tough in the last year, particularly around management of issues related to the Middle East.
Yeah, it's clearly been a really tough environment. What do you think you've learned from that?
Well, I think one of the things I've learned is that on an issue like the Middle East,
so many people are bringing so much of their own personal experience through this. I can never
think of an issue where I've seen more evidence of trauma. I think for our Jewish staff and Jewish
students traumatised by October 7, Palestinian staff and students who've had people in family
and friends in Gaza also deeply traumatised by what is happening. You've got to be deeply
respectful of that. At times you've just got to sit with those people, listen to them,
tell their stories, not rush those conversations, understand that people will be angry and people
will be upset and people will be hurt. And that's just the humanity of the circumstance.
You know, I've been talking about this with my team in recent days as we've kind of
set off into the new year, what did we learn that at times we didn't sit, we didn't listen,
we weren't curious enough and we would have helped things if in fact we had engaged in a
more substantive way. Yeah, that's good advice. Okay, Mark, on that note, that is the end of the
Cheddar Box section. I now have one more question and this year we're framing this a little bit
differently. If you weren't the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, what would you be doing?
I remember a great, you know, a dear uncle of mine, I remember he told me that he was
saving the Russian books for his retirement and then he died young. So I decided to start
reading the Russians early. I read the Brothers Kamarazov over the summer, I've been through War
and Peace, I've joined Anna Karenina. I do think there is this sense of reading the great books.
What are the books that people over years and years have just constantly find rich and rewarding
and transformational? And one of the things I've found is that reading big books, long books,
actually slow down your brain, slow down the dopamine obsession, the hit for the new and
just take you to a different rhythm of life. And the great books, they stay with you and they
change you and you feel part of this great community of people who've made this discovery
over the years. And that is our 15 minutes up. Mark, I really loved your advice to not over plan,
don't overthink your career. I love the idea that you are not your business card, you need to
maintain other aspects of your life, including your friendships in order to have a happy life,
you know, more generally. I love your advice in interviews that you really have to think about
what you have done in your career and what in your experience will help you and is relevant
to the new job. Don't just always say what you're going to do. And also this idea that you should
be open to all opportunities wherever they may be. So thank you once again for allowing us to
spend 15 minutes with the boss. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks, Shelley. And thank
you to everyone for listening. If you like the podcast and you want to hear more, consider
sharing the podcast or writing a review as it helps us to reach more people and follow us wherever
you get your podcasts. At The Financial Review, we investigate the big stories about markets,
business and power. For more, go to AFR.com and you can subscribe to The Financial Review,
The Daily Habit of Successful People at AFR.com slash subscribe. 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.