I have this big belief in being magnanimous.
There's no greater way of being magnanimous as when you lose, whether that's a pitch
or a flight, and being magnanimous in defeat.
And I think when you're doing things like that, it does really help you out in the long
term because I've had clients that we've lost and then seven or eight years later we've
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 aiming to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Michael Rubello, the chief executive of Publicist Group in Australia
Thank you for coming into our studio.
It's great to be here.
Good to see you again.
Now, Michael, you're the Australian and New Zealand CEO of Publicist Group, which is an
advertising and public relations company.
You employ more than 1600 people in Australia and New Zealand.
And you're the umbrella company for high profile agencies such as Suchy and Suchy, Leo Burnett
And I'm reliably told your clients include Toyota, Westpac, Arnards, Subway and Lexus.
And as if that's not enough to get on with, I should say that you are also a judge in
our annual BOSS Young Executives Competition.
And indeed you were one of the original winners of the first competition we held in 2004.
That's all above is correct, Sally, and I'm glad to be part of the BOSS family.
So look forward to continuing that chat today.
We've only got 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
So Michael, my first question is, what does your morning routine look like?
What time do you get up?
I tend to get up around 6am, 6.30am, just depending upon how the night before went.
I then head straight downstairs.
I turn on the ABC News radio, put the kettle on, make my wife and I a cup of tea.
I get ready for work.
Danny, my wife, starts to get our son ready for school.
He's had breakfast.
We've had breakfast.
Then I get in the car and I do the morning drop off.
It's a great way for me to kind of connect with him and catch up with him, even though
more often than not, you don't get much out of them.
But it's a really nice little journey that we have.
And then from there, it's a 40 minute commute to work.
And then I'm in the office pretty much five days a week.
I love being in the office.
Yes. Tell me more about why you love the office so much.
Look, I happen to work in an industry where we're just very creative.
So therefore our environments are very creative as well.
We're an ideas company.
Ideas are either created or executed with a team of people.
So I love being around that energy.
I find it uplifting and motivating.
So having people around me is part of my preference, really.
Interesting. So do you think you would be as creative if you all worked at home?
Look, I think you can get by, but I would say that we are definitely more innovative
when we're together. You just have those more organic kind of conversations.
There's more rub in the in the corridor, so to speak, versus having to diarise a time
to meet and chat and then formally come up with ideas.
And that's not how creativity works.
Creativity works in all the different spaces of one's day to day life in the office,
outside of the office.
So I think, you know, for us, we've definitely seen that we were able to survive
through Covid, but we're definitely thriving more creatively as a result of being back
together. So do you have any rules at all around coming into the office?
Yeah, up until January this year, we were probably giving people more of a goalpost
to work within. So it was in the office more often than not.
And now what we're saying that you have to do a minimum of three days in the office
and you can't have more than two consecutive days working from home.
But you have to be in the office on a Monday.
It's a global policy. You have to be in the office on a Monday.
And even pre this policy, what I did with my team was I just asked everyone if we could
be together on a Monday and then you could work out what your cadence would be from home
or from the office. Because I believe Monday is a great way to start the week.
You've got to win the week. And that was a great way to get the team together, discuss
what our plan of attack was for the week.
How do we align? How do we help each other?
And then you go away and do your thing.
Yeah, interesting. I love that. I'm going to take that on board.
OK, Michael, my next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that
really shaped you or changed the nature in some way of what you were doing.
It's a very clear, pivotal moment.
I think it was a seminal point in my career trajectory.
I was working at Saatchi and Saatchi at the time here in Sydney in the rocks in the middle
management level. And I was offered the opportunity to move to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam
and become the general manager and have full P&L accountability for a business of 40
people. And that for me was where I guess my leadership trajectory really started to
accelerate, because prior to that, I hadn't run a business.
But then I was thrust into this position of you've got 40 people, a mix of Vietnamese,
nationals and expatriates, and you're there to lead them.
You're there to drive the business forward.
You're there to set the strategic direction.
And at 27, that was a was a great learning curve for me.
And it wasn't just about having that title and having that accountability.
It was really understanding.
When you went to a market like Vietnam, which is in 2000, and when the expatriates would
tend to move to these types of developing markets, particularly in the advertising
industry, which wasn't as developed as it is now in Vietnam, your role was really to
impart knowledge, help educate, to train best practice, to take the learnings and the
tools and the processes that you learn in Western markets, whether that be Australia,
London or the US, and bring that into a market where people really wanted to learn.
So I found myself actually not just being a leader, but being a teacher and really
spending a lot of time in the craft of what we do in advertising, whether that was
strategic planning, whether that was really strong account management, whether that was
to work through different opportunities, new business pitches.
So it's something that I've taken forward since then to even working in Western
markets. I've worked in London and Australia and New Zealand.
But at the at the heart of it's about coaching and teaching.
And you never stop doing that as a leader.
Yeah. So leadership for you, at least a large part of it is coaching.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Now, Michael, my next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've
Look, Sally, the advice came about shortly after I was recognised in the Boston Young
Executive competition back in 2004.
And I had a coach at the time who was the chairperson of Saatchi and Saatchi, a lady
by the name of Sandra Yates, who was a very well accomplished businesswoman.
And she gave me this advice, which has stayed in my mind for 20 odd years.
And that was to master the art of patience and use patience as a strategic advantage
for your career. And at the time, patience was not my virtue.
I was 31 looking for the next mountain to climb, so to speak.
And it was something that I just rattled with me, but I had kept it there simmering
away. And over time, I now fully understand what she meant, because, look, I think it
has a huge application to when you're looking at the world.
And I have this very strong belief in that you play the long game and a lot of
businesses about the short game, short term results, that next deal, that next, you
know, the monthly or quarterly sales results.
Right. So I look at the world now with a much longer term view and make decisions
that may not necessarily yield tomorrow, but might yield fruit in a few years time.
It's certainly, I think, something that I did probably take from that advice.
So can you give me an example of how you play the long game when you're making
decisions at work?
Yeah, look, I think I have this big belief in being magnanimous.
There's no greater way of being magnanimous as when you lose, whether that's
a pitch or a client and being magnanimous in defeat.
And I think when you're doing things like that, it does really help you out in the
long term, because I've had clients that we've lost and then seven or eight years
later, we've won back.
Oh, that's interesting.
So when you lose a client or you lose a deal, you make a conscious effort to make
sure it ends well.
Professionally, civilly, make sure the transition is absolutely professional and
You make sure you honor all your commitments.
You make sure you do right by your people.
You make sure you do right by the clients that you're leaving, because you make a
lot of friendships in this business, too.
And I think that's really a really important way to go about your life.
So don't burn bridges.
Burn bridges is another way of saying it.
Okay, Michael, that is the end of our first section.
We are now going to take a short break, but don't go away.
We're going to come back and play our lovely chatterbox game.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Michael Rubello, the chief executive of publicist group in Australia
Now, Michael, this is our section called the chatterbox in front of you is this
really beautiful cardboard box inside, which I think today we've got about 20
Could you please start fishing in the box and pass me a question?
And I will, of course, ask you to answer it.
Sure can start fishing.
Have a little forage.
Do you have a favorite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?
I love voice to text and voice to email.
I love being able to do it by voice and then correcting it yourself.
I think is a great use of time.
The other one I've been using for a long time, which is a really simple hack,
it's just Google alerts.
I have a number of Google alerts that I set up to keep me informed of latest news
or information around my clients, our industry, different brands, because I love
being able to send to a client.
Hey, did you know this is happening with XYZ competitor?
And I think that's been really helpful for me over the years to be proactive
So Google alerts is great for that.
You just set it up on the browser and away you go.
It comes into your Gmail account every day.
So you, for example, will get information on the competitor of one of your clients
and you'll just email them or send a message and say, Hey, did you see that one
of your competitors is doing XYZ?
Those two are very simple things to do.
So yeah, I think all those things help you just show that you care.
And this is a way of you doing it, not spending too much time doing it.
So it's actually very time efficient.
And look, sometimes you got to, you got to filter cause you go, is that really
relevant for them?
Have they already seen it?
It's something I share with the teams as well to go, you know, if you're working
on a client's business, you should set these up yourself and make sure that
you're trying to add this value as well.
Tell me about a time when you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
Look, I think we all fail.
I think, and I was talking about earlier about, you know, when we either lose a big
pitch or we don't successfully kind of get an idea through that we were really
passionate about or really believed in the moments where you kind of have to
really kind of go, well, it's a loss, but there's also a learning there too.
So are there any common reasons as to why you might lose a pitch, say?
I think the art of new business, you need to, I firmly believe there's 50% you can
control and the other 50% is up to the pitch gods because you're all operating
in a work stream where you have no idea what the other tenderers are doing.
And no two pitches are ever the same.
There's always learnings about how you may have approached things either from
a strategy perspective, either from an insight perspective, how you showed up to
certain meetings, because I believe that every moment in that process is a moment
of truth, so you need to really turn up and be at your best at every interaction.
Actually, are there things you do to make sure that you do this?
What do you do to make sure that you show up as your best self?
Well, we do a lot of rehearsals for starters, and that's something that is
really important even for smaller interactions, not necessarily for the
final big dinner month of the presentation, how you respond to procurement,
are there questions, are you on time, are you ahead of time?
So all those things are really important.
But within all of that, you've got to be yourself, you've got to be authentic.
And in these processes, what clients are trying to look at is,
what are these people like?
Okay, that's great that they've got really great strategic thinking,
but are we going to get along?
And so you've also got to do, you can't come across too machine slick as well,
even though sometimes that's really important, but you've also got to be able
to impart who you are as a team, as individuals and build that connection.
So you'll do say, mock meetings where you do a Q and A to sort of rehearse
answers and to make sure that you're on top of all the things you need to be on
Once we've got our proposal together, we will spend time working through what are
the different questions that may arise from that, from a commercial perspective
through to a strategy perspective, to an idea perspective and be really prepared
And that's where you learn from previous experiences too, and taking that
forward, that you maybe have not been as prepared or maybe that question was so
left field, how do you make sure you're ready for something like that?
That may be with this type of client.
Yeah, that's really good advice.
The more prepared you are, the better, but you don't want to come across as
Okay, Michael, next question.
What is your favourite party story you like to share?
I did a course in being a sommelier about 20 years ago, and I can help people just
very quickly over a glass of wine, determine the age, varietal, the type of
wine, the vintage within about five years through a few simple exercises and
markers that you can look for, you can smell and you can taste.
So that's kind of like a dinner party trick that I might bring out.
So what are the two or three key things I need to do to determine the wine, the
variety, the year?
It's all about the powers of deduction, really.
And a lot of it comes out of this, out of the nose and the bouquet.
So that's probably where about 70% of your information comes from.
So I have to swish the glass.
Swish the glass to open up, let it breathe.
Sight's another big thing too.
Sight can tell you how young a wine is, if it's new world or old world by the
vibrancy, age can come through the translucency on the very edge of the wine.
It's called rim variation.
The more translucent, the more age there is on a wine because the sediment falls
Sally, we could do a whole podcast on this if you wanted to, but there's quite a few.
All this and I haven't even tasted the wine yet.
Though the tasting is really only to verify your theory.
So if we blind tested you now, how confident are you that you'd get it right?
I would say that I would get probably close to 50% right.
And to actually get the certification, you had to get 17 blind taste tests
correct out of 21.
So I think I could probably get to 10 out of 21 today.
Which is quite a few years later.
On that note, Michael, congratulations.
You have graduated from the chatterbox.
I now have one final question, which we ask all our guests.
And that is, if we gave you a year off, because somehow we were the holiday gods,
if we gave you a year off unencumbered, you could do anything you liked.
What would you do?
I'd love to move to New York.
I would take my family with me that year of being unencumbered.
I would turn up with my resume to the United Nations headquarters.
I go to the receptionist and say, here's my CV.
I'd love to work in any one of your 17 sustainable development goal areas.
And so in what capacity would you like to help them literally to do any sort of
dog's body work or actually in the advertising communications?
See, our expertise is so translatable that we could go into communications
and we can go into ideas.
I think the best thing about what we do is we come up with ideas for problems or
solutions and there's some big problems in this world.
So, you know, one of the things that we love doing is being able to help solve
problems that can help people.
And so there's, I think there's just so many different areas that someone in the
advertising and marketing space could go into to help different areas of the
United Nations and then people do, and they've got, you know, big communications
departments at the UN as well.
But I would be quite open.
I mean, I'm not qualified to go on the front line, but I could be very helpful
in coming up with ideas and helping those come to life and bringing on
partners to make that happen.
That is such an admirable thing.
I wish you the best of luck in going to the reception at the UN and with your
CV, put it on the desk and see what happens.
Thank you, Sally.
I might give it a crack one day.
And that is our time up.
Michael, I've loved hearing about the art of patience and how you're really
employing that now and the fact that you play the long game that you don't worry
if you lose a client because they might come back in five, seven years.
I love the way you prepare so thoroughly for pitches.
I love your wine tips.
I'm going to put them to very good use.
And I love the Google alerts.
So simple yet effective.
And please do a Google alert for 50 minutes with the boss podcast.
I think you already are.
Thank you, Michael.
On that note, thank you so much for coming in and allowing us to
spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thank you, Sally.
Thanks for having me.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
If you like the podcast and would like to hear more, please 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 view, the daily habit of successful people
at AFR.com slash subscribe.
This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton and produced and edited by
lap fan video and audio assistance.
And our music theme is by Alex Gow and our executive producer is Fiona Bufini.
The Australian financial review.