Paul Scurrah From Afl To The Boardroom How To Stand Down 8000 People Empathically And The Secrets To

The Australian Financial Review.

Probably the single best tip I got is don't readily give things away for nothing

because the opposition will value it at zero.

So I had stress fractures that were getting worse

so I had to surgically straighten my leg.

I sawed it in half below the knee,

wedged a piece of my fibula into the tibia,

straightened it, but it was a long recovery.

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 Paul Scurrow, the chief executive of Pacific National.

Hi Paul, how's your morning been so far?

So far so good, Sally, thanks for having me.

Excellent.

Now Paul, as I said, you're the CEO of Pacific National,

Australia's largest private rail freight operator.

Which transports everything from coal, grain, steel and other construction materials

to retail goods and manufactured goods across the country.

You have apparently 3,400 employees and you operate 570 trains.

And you personally are also a former chief executive of Virgin Australia.

So you must really love transport.

The short answer is I do and I like complexity

and I love leadership and people businesses.

So is transport particularly complex, more so than other industries?

I've been in the travel industry, the aviation industry, supply chain, logistics.

And I do find it complex.

But I'm sure there's plenty of other complex businesses out there.

So I'm not sure it's any more complex, but it is pretty complex.

Okay. Paul, on that note, we've only got 15 minutes.

The clock starts now.

My first question is about your morning routine.

What time do you get up? What happens?

So I get up at 6 a.m.

I order my morning coffee from my local coffee shop on an online app.

So by the time I get there, it's ready.

And the first thing I do when I sit down with my coffee is I read the news.

Just to be across what's happening.

There's a lot of influence in what I do that comes off of political decisions,

economic decisions, social decisions, policy decisions, all of that sort of stuff.

So to be across that is very important.

So that's my morning routine.

And how long do you do that for?

I could go from 20 to 30 minutes.

And I have gotten into the habit of working from home for an hour before I go to the office.

And I find that I get an enormous amount done then as well.

So from the coffee shop, you'll go back home for an hour?

Yes. I find it's very effective to focus at that point in time to clear out the clutter in the inbox.

And if there's any urgent phone calls to make, I'll do it then.

Okay. And breakfast or no breakfast?

I haven't been eating breakfast for quite a few years.

I just decided that I was going to fast for a period.

And the earliest I eat is 12, 12.30.

And do you find that helps with concentration?

Yes. I find that the lighter I eat, the more energy I've got.

So what time do you get into the office?

So 8.30 ish, but it's not a really defined goal to get in there.

I try to make sure that there's not another meeting till 9.30 ish or on.

But I also find that it's really productive to come in after the traffic from a time point of view.

So what do you do in terms then of looking at your emails throughout the day?

Do you then say not look at them until lunchtime or the evening or how do you manage that?

I'm actually very prone to distractions.

So the iPad, the computer, the phone are often on do not disturb for a deliberate period to say I need to focus.

And so that's a habit I've formed far more strongly lately because I realised how distracted I was getting.

And so it is very important to clear out anything that you might think is urgent or going to distract you for the rest of the day.

But then be deliberate about windows of time later in the day for when you can focus on those things and not let it run you, you run it.

So do you also block out periods of the day or the week, which is just your thinking time?

There's lots of keep free in my diary and my assistant's very good at doing that.

And it's for exactly that reason.

I've seen it in many of the companies I've run where people's days are back to back to back to back and you wonder when they get the time to do their job.

And so deliberately now for myself and the companies I run, I make sure people have a lot of free time to do the job they're paid to do.

So in your case, how many hours a week would you have a free time?

I think probably a day and a half of my week is free time to make sure that I can actually clear everything out, make decisions, read papers and do what the job is.

And that is to lead and make decisions.

OK, my next question is, what is a pivotal moment in your career, a project that you worked on or something that happened that really changed the trajectory of what you were doing?

So there's two answers to that for me.

The first is when I got my most senior leadership job and I was quite young and I got the job ahead of quite a few experienced people that had a lot more tenure than me and frankly, a lot more subject matter.

How old were you?

30 and it was an executive general manager role at Anset.

And so that was a division of 500 people.

And I quickly realised that in order to add value, having a subject matter debate with any of my team was fruitless.

And I learnt that I could add value through leadership, through creating an environment and a culture, through preventing roadblocks.

You still have to know enough about it to make effective decisions.

But it taught me that leadership is a real thing and done the right way.

I can have a really positive outcome.

And not long after that, and this is the second pivotal moment, was being at Anset when it went into voluntary administration.

And you just see some of the mistakes that were made.

And the lesson in that, and this has stayed with me since that time, is that being a leader, being a CEO is really a constant balancing or juggling act.

You can't go down one rabbit hole or one path blindly.

You need to know that you have so many interests around you that you have to keep a centrality to your decision making, knowing that that balance is very important to the success of the company.

And so I have a mantra, happy people, happy customers, happy shareholders.

And if you only get two of those right, then something is going to go wrong.

And in Anset's case and then later on in Virgin's case, we did have happy people and happy customers, but we didn't have happy shareholders.

And so it teaches you to have a bit of a harder edge around you to make sure that you make balanced decisions.

Shareholders will always want bigger returns.

Customers will always want cheaper and better service.

And your people always want to be paid more than you can afford to give them.

And so you have to find that balance.

Yeah, it's very good advice.

OK, my next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?

It was from James Strong, who was the CEO of Qantas, who I admired.

His advice was you can be decisive and hard edged with empathy and respect, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

So that was great advice.

And how has that played out?

Can you give me an example of when you've had to be decisive but do it in an empathetic way?

Well, I had to stand down 8000 people at one point in time at Virgin Australia through the pandemic.

Thinking back on that time, I think the secret was they are adults.

Treat them as such.

Tell them as much as you can possibly tell them, particularly in that stressful situation of going into a pandemic.

And remember, this is pre-jobkeeper too, so we weren't sure what we were able to do financially for them.

And saying we will do our best in this circumstance.

We will do our best and we will make decisions that respect you.

And at that time, you know, I was grateful for people like Matt Common and Michael Schneider from Bunnings,

who put their hand up and said, hey, we will help.

We know you train your people well from a service perspective and we can employ them part time.

So we had a huge effort in saying we will help you get through this,

even if it means you have to step outside of the group to work for someone else for a period of time.

So it was impossible to have town halls because people were isolated at home.

But we were doing three, four and possibly five live video updates per day that the entire cohort,

the entire, we had 10 and a half thousand employees, 8,000 of which were at home,

dialing in and listening to updates.

And so some of those were just, we don't have a lot to tell you, but we're here to tell you, don't worry.

You don't have to panic about what may or may not be happening.

We are still working through these things and we do not have an answer.

So it wasn't as if we were giving them answers.

But I think assuring them that we are still working on it was reassuring to the people out in wherever they were,

all over Australia, isolated at home.

Paul, you say that having happy people, happy customers and happy shareholders is a mantra of yours.

But how do you employ that during a time of crisis?

So what I learned through all the way back to the ANSET experience,

that lesson set me up, I think, really well to deal with the Virgin circumstance.

And when you set a program that spells out what's important to us, what's our purpose,

you set a vision of success.

In these circumstances, you have to redefine what success looks like and you have to really concentrate the time frame.

So normally you're saying our vision of success is, you know, in one year will be this, in five years will be that.

Here it's as quick as by tomorrow we need to have done this, by the end of next week we need to have done this.

And so you redefine success and say, in these circumstances, what is a happy customer?

And a happy customer would be one that we, you know, we were challenged with refunds or cancellations.

You know, what is the best we can do in this circumstance for them?

And no, they can't come to work today, but they can supplement their income by going and working in Bunnings or Woolworths or Coles or ComBank.

And what is a happy shareholder here?

Well, you know, how do we minimize the impact or the loss for them?

And we often talked about let's get the best bad outcome because no outcome is good.

But for all three groups, what's the best bad outcome we can get for them?

That's interesting, though, because redefining success and knowing when to redefine success seem to be key.

That's absolutely right. And this was an existential crisis.

And so survival was success.

OK, Paul, on that note, we are going to take a short break.

But don't go anywhere. We're going to come back very soon and open the chatterbox.

Can't wait.

Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.

I'm here with Paul Scarrow, the chief executive of Pacific National.

Now, Paul, this is our section called the Chatterbox.

In front of you is our lovely lo-fi brown box, inside which are about 15, 20 questions on little bits of paper.

I'm going to ask you to pick out them one by one.

And let's go. Let's answer some more questions.

It's a bit daunting. So let me grab one.

I get to read it. Thanks very much.

No sneak peek.

No sneak peeks.

When you were in school, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Oh, that's an easy, easy question to answer.

I wanted to be an AFL footballer.

Really?

I was obsessed.

I was a Collingwood supporter, but I grew up in Richmond Zone and I played football.

And that was my life.

I did go into Richmond's development squad.

I then went into the Richmond club itself in the under-19s for a couple of years.

And then I had a pretty significant injury, which saw me miss two years of football.

And that was probably the end of my career.

Oh, wow. What happened?

So I had stress fractures that were, you know, we did lots of long distance running in the preseason.

It was always on very hard pavement.

And so those stress fractures were getting worse.

So they had to surgically straighten my leg, sort it in half below the knee,

wedged a piece of my fibula into the tibia, straightened it.

But it was a long recovery.

I did then go back and play at VFL level later in my career and really enjoyed that.

But my aspirations to get to the top level were dashed off the back of that injury.

How did you cope with that?

Because you really, really clearly had your heart set on being an AFL player,

yet like so often happens in sport, you have an injury and you can't do it.

How did you pick yourself up? Was it hard?

It was hard. It took a long time to get over it, actually.

But you do learn a lot.

I do learn a lot.

I'm really grateful to Aussie Rules AFL for the life lessons that come with it

because schools don't teach enough about goal setting, about discipline,

about, you know, monitoring progress and KPIs and those sorts of things.

And football has been really good at that.

And leadership was one of the things that I learned, you know,

the importance of leadership in a team.

I had a lot of energy and I had a lot of ambition because of what I'd learned through that.

And I rechanneled that into my corporate career.

Thankfully, I think it's worked out really well. I wouldn't change it.

OK, next question, Paul. Have a fish.

Do you have a favourite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?

Again, very easy because this is something that I'm constantly focusing on

with the challenges that I've got.

But it is that focus process that I go through.

And I call it my focus moat because I look back somewhat jealously to leaders of the past

who basically had just an office door that was guarded by an assistant and a landline.

And they were the only ways you could get to them.

And so their time, their focus was really controllable.

And that has been whittled away over the years.

So I have got a process where I deliberately rebuild what I call my own focus moat.

And that is lock myself in an office, lock away time in my diary, turn off all the distractions

and make sure that I'm in control of my focus.

And then when I'm in that focus zone and inside my focus moat, my productivity goes through the roof.

So you have a morning habit where you have the first hour at home building that moat on purpose.

Correct.

And you're getting rid of all the emails and all the distractions so you can go into the office

and actually focus on the job.

Yes.

OK, let's have one more question.

Who is the best negotiator you've ever come across?

I've seen some amazing negotiators and I've seen some people who should be good given their role

being pretty poor negotiators.

So what I've learned is the best negotiators are all committed to getting an outcome.

And the best negotiators are those who understand that perfect is not necessarily always possible

or hardly ever possible.

And so what's the best compromise you can get to where both parties walk away feeling somewhat satisfied?

And probably the single best tip I got through all of this is don't readily give things away for nothing

because the opposition will value it at zero.

So everything's a trade-off.

So how do you stop yourself from doing that?

I think the skill on the other side of the table is when people make it feel trivial, it's just this.

Just throw it in.

And obviously it's important to them.

So the line that I learnt is if you, then I.

If someone asks for something, you say, well, if you throw this in, then I'm willing to agree to that.

So try and trade on everything because everything should have a value.

And that's also a different way of saying what is the path to yes.

Interesting. Okay.

On that note, we have finished the Chatterbox section.

I'm now going to ask you one last question, which I'm going to modify in your case because you're indeed

leaving Pacific National at the end of the year.

So my question is quite simply, what are you going to do for the next 12 months and beyond?

Going to ski a lot, a minimum of two, maybe three months.

I will ski.

The freedom to choose is something that I'm incredibly grateful for.

But I also think without time pressure that I will do some travel to events and concerts in beautiful parts of the world if I can.

What sort of concerts?

Music concerts.

So, you know, I'm really open minded to it might be it might be going to see Taylor Swift, for example,

because I think the combination of being a famous act in a great location would be a great experience.

I'm a big NFL fan as well.

So hopefully getting to an NFL playoff game and potentially going to some far flung places that I haven't had the luxury of having the time to have done and just letting the travel take me.

And in that time, I'd like to find a way to either learn something or give back something or mentor and do something just because I want to do it.

And do you think you might do another big executive job?

I haven't ruled it out, but I'm probably a little young to completely walk away from it.

I am getting old, but I have a few more years in me.

So I wouldn't rule it out, but I haven't got anything in mind and I'm not chasing anything.

And if it doesn't find me, I'm fine with that as well.

On that note, Paul, our time is up.

Thank you so much for coming in today.

It's been really great hearing from you about the focus that you put around your time to help you get the most out of your day.

I really appreciate your mantra about happy people, happy customers, happy shareholders.

If you forget one of those, you will find problems at some point down the track.

I love the way that you talk about redefining success.

You have a success in the company in general.

But then if you are in some sort of crisis, you have to totally rethink what that means for today, tomorrow and next week.

And I really like your advice about negotiating trade on everything.

Don't give away anything for free.

And thank you again, Paul, so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.

It's been an absolute pleasure, Sally. Thank you so much.

And thank you to everyone for listening.

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The Australian Financial Review.