Charles Ormiston, Founding Partner of Bain Southeast Asia, and Jeremy Au discussed:
1. Founding Bain Southeast Asia: Charles established Bain's office in Singapore, which initially faced major skepticism from Bain’s leadership who favored Hong Kong as the regional hub. Believing Singapore’s strategic location to be better suited for Southeast Asia, Charles stood firm - even at the risk of his career. His bet paid off when the Singapore office flourished and became the regional leader. He pursued a unconventional hiring strategy for that time: prioritizing local talent over international hires and avoiding expatriate perks like housing allowances. This talent core cultivated a leadership pipeline deeply committed to the region’s long-term growth, with key figures like Edmund Lin rising from the office's second employee to Chairman today.
2. Reengineer Your Career: After a health wake-up call, he decided to hand over to Till Vestring and move to an advisory role. His successor led Bain to new heights by expanding to a regional footprint with Bangkok, Jakarta and other offices. After a 14-month break working with nonprofits, Charles returned to focus on "transformation" projects which aligned with his strengths. This pivot allowed him to achieve a new "capstone" level of career impact and personal satisfaction.
3. Angsana Council on China vs. USA Rivalry: Charles co-founded the think-tank with Peng T. Ong of Monk's Hill Ventures to improve global understanding of Southeast Asia’s high-growth markets. Their research is powered by prominent members like former Indonesian trade minister Gita Wirjawan and former Singaporean foreign minister George Yeo and partnership with Bain & DBS Bank. Charles shared how many business and political leaders had once underestimated China's ability to rise as a global innovation leader. ASEAN countries must navigate the increasingly complex global rivalry in order to maximize benefits and reduce risk from this trade & research decoupling.
Charles and Jeremy also discussed being inspired by in-person meetings with Lee Kuan Yew and Bain's Chairwoman Orit Gadiesh, how consulting has evolved in the era of hybrid work, and his personal passion for cycling.
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(01:18) Jeremy Au:
Hey, good to see you again.
(01:20) Charlie Ormiston:
Thank you, Jeremy. Great to see you. Welcome back to Bain.
(01:23) Jeremy Au:
The wonderful Bain office. I always get so many good memories coming back.
(01:26) Charlie Ormiston: Although now this isn't my office. Everything is shared including my office.
(01:30) Jeremy Au:
The big difference between when I first came on, where everybody was in the office all the time, versus now, it's hybrid, or everyone's working from everywhere, so everybody's sharing an office.
(01:38) Charlie Ormiston:
It makes life easier, to be honest. I think it's a big boost to productivity, but within balances. And the biggest challenge that we have is, how do you ensure the casual learning that takes place in the office place? It just doesn't seem to take place as much over Zoom. At the end of a Zoom call, you don't say, Hey, let me catch you for five minutes just to chat, which you do in the office. So I think it always needs to be a mix. But I can be very productive working from home, and I understand it's the same true for everybody here.
(02:03) Jeremy Au:
Yeah, I mean, I think you strip out that two hour commute and then suddenly hey, you know, at least you're getting something done, right?
(02:08) Charlie Ormiston:
Although my commute is pretty productive. I try to ride my bike, so I get an hour and 19 minutes of exercise every day.
(02:15) Jeremy Au:
So for those who don't know yet, could you introduce yourself real quick?
(02:18) Charlie Ormiston:
So, I'm Charlie Ormiston. I guess one of my things I'm most proud of is I founded Bain in Southeast Asia back in 1993. Obviously, there have been huge number of people over the years who contributed to the growth, but still it feels good to know that I kind of planted the flag here and saw the potential of Southeast Asia and also, just liked living here. And I liked working on problems that primarily involved growing faster as opposed to seeking greater efficiency, which was the norm in consulting in the US, but I'm other things as well. I've been very involved with education in Southeast Asia.
At one point, chaired the board of United World College here and helped their expansion. I helped with a group of people to set up SUTD, which is one of the five major universities in Singapore now. And I have active personal interests, whether it's bicycling or golfing and others. So, well rounded, but very much a resident of Singapore, still an American.
(03:10) Jeremy Au:
Yeah, I think it's incredible and let's go all the way back to the beginning, right? What were you like as a teenager? Were you rebellious? Were you studious?
(03:18) Charlie Ormiston:
Very rebellious. I think the interesting thing about, the difference between me and a lot of my peers was, for example, I was suspended from high school three times for various transgressions. And at one point, I wasn't, I was supposed to give the graduation speech because I was the president of the class, but it was kind of pulled from me because of something I had done. I won't go into it,but in the end, there was enough protest that I was allowed to give my speech, which was kind of nice.
And the reason that was important is my parents weren't fully aware of the problems I caused, but if I didn't give the speech, they would have known. And so there was kind of a perfect cover up. I went to Dartmouth College, and the irony was that the public school I'd gone to was good, very good in some circumstances, but actually the education wasn't good enough. And so when I arrived at Dartmouth, I was put into remedial English. And I'll never forget that one girl in the class looked at me. And, you know, let's be clear, it was fairly apparent I wasn't a minority. And so, she said, what are you doing here? And I replied, well, same as you, I didn't pass the test. And she looked at me again and she said, you aren't even an athlete, which is, I guess, apparent by my physical stature. And, I just, I didn't know what to say. And, and it was also very clear I needed this class. I did not know how to write a good essay. I didn't know how to structure my thinking in a way that would get me through Dartmouth.
(04:40) Charlie Ormiston:
And that's when I actually learned how to work really hard. And Dartmouth wasn't easy for me. There were a lot of people who came from more privileged backgrounds, had better education levels than me. But in the end, I graduated at the top of the economics department and that set me up for a lot of success in life. And I do think, there's this great wisdom, 25 years ago about the lessons of a tiger mom. I forget the exact title but it's a very controversial book in the US and it was widely praised in Asia because it was an Asian professor at Yale who asserted that the way that Asians and Americans raise their kids are quite different. That Americans try to find the potential of the child, whereas Asians believe you're capable of anything as long as you work hard enough. And the right answer is probably somewhere in between, that there are natural talents, but this idea that applying discipline to your personal habits, and maybe it's even delayed gratification, that recognizing that working hard a day will have benefits down the road. I learned myself at college, but are often the same values that are instilled by Asian parents. And so I see this when I came out to Asia for the first time in 1986. I just saw a set of societies that had kind of the discipline. the love of culture, other things that were very attractive to me. And I think it's one of the reasons that Asia, for this period of time, has been some of the fastest growing economies in the world.
(06:01) Charlie Ormiston:
So I went from working in the US for a couple years to wanting to work abroad, and choosing Singapore and realizing that, wow, not only is it a fast growing place, it's also a very safe place, very stable society, and it's very close to a lot of very interesting places: Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, down the road, India, China. And so, I decided this is where I wanted to live. I worked for a different consulting firm, firm here in the 80s and then went to business school, got married to a Singaporean and always wanted to return to Singapore, but I didn't know when. And then the opportunity came in '93. At that point, Southeast Asia was booming. Not everyone in Bain wonders in Southeast Asia, but certainly the people who were active in the region did. And so when I put up my hand, they said, it's just a matter of time before we'll call you and say, Hey, come out, work on this project, and then we'll try to turn it into something bigger. So in '93, after business school and after I had joined Bain, that opportunity came in.
And without, a little bit below the radar, and this is probably where the rebel in me helped, we didn't have permission to set up Singapore. But the lead partner in Hong Kong wanted it. The lead partner in Australia wanted it. And so we quietly built an office. And about two years in, we were bigger than the founding office, the Hong Kong office, by a factor of two. And yet the center found out about us and decided to shut us down. So I got a call and said, look, I want you to move to Hong Kong. Take your best people. The rest we'll take care of, but we don't want so many small offices and we want to concentrate you in Hong Kong. And I said, no way. We're being successful here. We need to have regional coverage. If that's the way you feel, then I'll leave Bain. And so there was a little bit of negotiation for a few weeks and they made a decision that okay, I could keep the office open if I could attract a more senior partner as well as another partner to join us. And so that was easy to do actually.
There was a lot of demand to move in. So within a few weeks, we'd secured the people and then the quid pro quo was we could keep the office open and we've prospered ever since..So from a starting point of one in '93. We're now between six and eight hundred consultants in Southeast Asia, and we cover six offices in all the major countries. And so it's been a, I think if there wasn't a rebellious Charlie Ormiston in 1995 who was willing to resign rather than move, we would have lost tenure in that whole process. So that, that's kind of the background of why, what it took, to get somebody who was rebellious enough to want to set up an office in Southeast Asia, probably too early for his years. But at the same time, I completely respected the infrastructure and capability of the senior people in Bain. And I wanted to be affiliated with it. I could never have done this on my own. So I got the best of the world, both worlds. I could be an entrepreneur, but in the context of a very supportive company that provided all enormous range of benefits that I couldn't have done on my own.
(08:45) Jeremy Au:
How has it been like to be both the president and a rebel within this context?
(08:50) Charlie Ormiston:
The key is to have enough distance between you and the center. And you know, there's an old Chinese saying about, I think something about Beijing, the king, the emperor is very strong, but he's far away. I wish I knew the Chinese. and so it's similar in this context that I wouldn't have been able to do what I wanted to do in Cleveland or Denver or maybe even Chicago. There would have been a lot more oversight. There would have been this worry about scale, etc. But I was far enough away that as long as the reputation was good and the economics were acceptable, I could do what I wanted. And again, that was a perfect environment to grow. I think we started with a different mindset than the other major services firms. It wasn't just our competitors consulting, but some of the big law firms, et cetera, in that we weren't top down driven. I was young when I first set up Singapore. I was a manager in Bain. I wasn't yet a partner. It took two years to get to that point. And most of the people I hired were junior to me.
So we had what would appear to be a very junior team. But one of the things that I was able to do is we mainly work with the account heads of Bain's most important clients. And these are some of the best people in Bain. And so while there were some people from other offices saying, well, where are you going to learn from? You only have this one partner in Hong Kong. I was like, no, you're wrong. Each account is run by one of the best partners in Bain. And I can learn from them. And so I had some of the best coaching and mentoring of any partner in Bain, even though I was quite distant and far away.
I think the second is that we didn't move in a lot of expatriates, especially Americans or Europeans. If we had expatriates, we, they often came from India or other parts of Asia. And the reason for that is we made a decision not to offer any expatriate benefits. So there was no housing allowance. There was no education allowance. There was no home leave, there was no tax equalization, all these things that expatriates expect. So they would move elsewhere in Bain or they wouldn't move. That slowed our growth in the early days, but Jeremy, you were here somewhere in the middle of the seven partners that I was working with in 2007. They're all still with Bain in some capacity in 2024 and very, very few firms, especially premium consulting or services firms can make that claim.
And I think that's because the people I attracted, although they were all junior, they were incredibly committed to building this business in this office. And every one of them in their own right has become a a major leader in Bain and has founded either a practice or other offices or run large client relationships. They've all been very, very successful. Some of that through my coaching, maybe my leadership, but more broadly being part of Bain and their own, the kind of person that would join me, a relatively junior person is the kind of person that doesn't need a lot of oversight, doesn't need somebody else to motivate them. They are, they are driven to build something on their own. And so each in their own way has founded something arguably as significant as founding the Singapore office.
(11:40) Jeremy Au:
And I think what's interesting is that you spend that time looking for the right people as part of the team. How did you find them? What were you looking for?
(11:48) Charlie Ormiston:
A lot of the early recruiting was a joint enterprise between myself and Ed Lin. Ed was the number two employee, joined early '94, from San Francisco. So he was, he may have even taken more risks than me because he was, he was joining a pretty junior guy to, and leaving a very successful career with Bain in San Francisco to do so. Ed was a phenomenal interviewer and he was also phenomenal at that first year of orientation and how to become a very high quality consultant. And so I think it started with, we basically agreed the cost of hiring somebody who either didn't work out or worked out but didn't stay was too high for us.
And I would say that our interviews had four to five x the time commitment of the interviews of a typical Bain process or our competitor firms at that point in time. So if we were about to give you an offer, we would almost each go through another round of evaluation. We'd involve, say we were interviewing you in London. We would involve two or three very savvy partners or managers in London to help us make this decision. Tell us if we were wrong. And then we would just sit down and really talk to them about why were they joining, what was going to be their commitment. And we would screen out people who just wanted to do it for two years and then they were thinking about doing something else. We wanted them to, now they didn't have to make a personal commitment to us, but we had to see that the mindset was that they wanted to help us build the firm. And, and each of those filtering processes, whether it was the other partners, whether it was the second analytical round, whether it was that test of commitment, we probably screened out another 10, 15 percent leaving us with half the candidates that normally you would give an offer to. But as a result, we ended up with much higher levels of acceptance and retention because the people who we did give offers to were impressed by that process. They could see how seriously we took it.
Then we had some principles that were unique in our industry at that point in time. Every person we hired, we expected at the 18 month point, would go abroad for six months to a year. And the reason was, rather than bring in expats to sit on top of the people we hired in the local market and teach them how to be good consultants, we felt it was more important for our people to go abroad. And it's difficult to succeed in another office, as a foreigner, as somebody from another office. It's never easy. And then come back knowing that they had succeeded. And also that they were as good as anybody else in the world. That personal knowledge that they had versus me telling them you're as good as anyone in the world. But by the way, we keep parachuting in these expats from abroad to teach you how to do things. We were also quite strategic about it. We knew who were the top accounts in Bain that could potentially be clients of ours in Southeast Asia. And we did our best to put them in those offices working on those clients.
So after six months to a year, they would move back and then we'd go to the client head and say, by the way, those two people that you really liked on the team are now in Singapore. Is there anything we could do for them in Asia? And so a lot of our early growth was not top down, but global client had trusting that we had high quality people experience with their client in Southeast Asia. And it was a way of accelerating our growth rate, which was particularly important given at that time how junior our team was, relative to some of the other firms in the market. So that's how we built it. We built one brick at a time, people who were capable, committed, and there was just something that told us that they would put the team before themselves. And I think you know, the proof of the pudding would be it worked out pretty well. Our retention was very high and our reputation both internally and externally was very strong.
(15:13) Jeremy Au:
I think you mentioned that, you're making decisions that are contrarian to industry practice or kind of like company practice and so forth. So what other you know, kind of criticism or skepticism did you face during this time?
(15:25) Charlie Ormiston:
Well, there was enormous skepticism of the cost of putting people abroad. My counterpart in Hong Kong said, you're doing this completely wrong. You should start them in the other office so that we know their first year isn't very productive. And then that's kind of born by a big office. And then you move them to Asia when they're more productive. And, and there's a simple shallow logic to that. But the data didn't support it at all. First, if we started them here and they worked here for 18 months, they became part of our community. And when they went abroad, it was never as good as it was here. And so they couldn't wait to get back. They valued being sent abroad. It was good for their CV, it was good for their experience, and by the end they were always proud of what they had accomplished in the other office, but they wanted to come back. If you start them in abroad, only half of them will end up showing up in your office. They will find a girlfriend or a boyfriend locally. They will be worried that they now have a mentor in their new office. And if they go to the Hong Kong or the Beijing or the other office that they don't know anybody at that point. And so there'll be reluctant to move at the end of the year. And a lot of them won't.
So our, I only remember one person not coming back. Whereas I think our, our, our rate in Hong Kong was only about half actually came back. So then they were like, this is too costly because there were some of the costs of hiring them and then only half of them show up.
The second was, although we would lose them at a key point, productivity at the 18 to 24 month point is very high. Our data was that they would always come back for at least a year, if not two. And those are even more productive points. So the irony being that yes, we lost a key point. But we gained by them coming back. And then our ability to, to target the people who are going to stay for the longterm to pay for their business school, have them return was much higher than in environments where they hadn't created quite the same bond with the people that they recruited. So it was, we were very clear to our employees that our offices were not going to be as nice as the rest of Bain. And it was readily apparent to anybody, they were smaller, the furniture was crap, I mean things broke. Our first two offices were taking over from bankrupt companies and we just bought their furniture at five cents on the dollar.
It was that bad. Because we wanted to put the money into three things, training, salaries that were equivalent to the rest of the world, and these relocation programs. And, and people saw we were investing in them, not in the pretenses of looking like a five star company, which we were, but at that point we couldn't afford it. And so the firm said, look, we'll let you do this because you're funding it out of your own cash flow. And you're allowed, this is a good thing about Bain, to mix how you, how your budget looks. Now, I think it would be harder in today's more Byzantine Bain bureaucracy, where everything has to be the same around the world and there are all these global standards, etc. But in those days I was, and the team was given quite a bit of freedom to approach it the way we wanted. So I, I think we had our priorities right. We didn't just say people are our priority. They could see where the budget was going. And they, they appreciated that the investment was primarily in the people. Not in other aspects of the model market.
Now we're free freeloaders. We primarily relied on existing Bain clients and MNC work in the first, say, 10 years, whereas a lot of our competitors doing a better job developing the local market. And when we started to really go after that in about 2003, it was hard and it lowered our profitability. Local companies didn't want to pay as much. They weren't as sure of the value. They were skeptical of consultants, all things that we didn't face as much with a large established bank client. And our economics were, wasn't just, our effort, but the time and the client base that we went after. And so, when we started to change that, then we had to be more thoughtful about our, our economics locally and our cost structure, etc. But in the early days, we had a lot more leeway to focus on people and to invest in them at kind of world scale levels
(19:07) Jeremy Au:
And I think that was the early stage and I joined at the middle stage. I joined in 2011.
(19:14) Charlie Ormiston:
Okay. That's, oh that's almost yeah, that's late middle stage. You would have joined after we had four offices, whereas when I handed off to Till in 2007, we had only one office and it was really Till's efforts and the efforts of the people who founded Bangkok, KL, and Jakarta that established our regional footprint. And that was a costly but necessary endeavor.
(19:33) Jeremy Au:
So I think maybe we can contrast those phases. So there's an early stage where you started out and then there was a middle stage, right? So what was the contrast between these two phases from your perspective?
(19:44) Charlie Ormiston:
For me, almost every five years, there's probably a key inflection point in our business. I think initially, you're just a startup, and your entire focus is delivering work at the quality of the global firm and what your clients deserve. And given the lack of experience of a lot of the people you're initially hiring, how you do that through just sheer effort, and the engagement of me, but also the other managers and partners who had started at the time, I, I know the hours at work, the personal sacrifices they made to do high work were higher than would be in today's world.
Then, you were still in kind of the boom years of Southeast Asia. And ironically, the 97 crisis didn't affect our business cause at that same point, the internet was coming in and there was a real boom in demand for consulting. And so we didn't find 97 to be, it was if anything, accelerated or growth for a few years. And so that was an interesting point where there was just a lot of demand and we could grow pretty quickly but we were no longer a startup. We were now, we started to have directors and more senior partners who could bring in their own clients. And we started to have our own local client base. And, quite a few of those companies are still our biggest clients today.
(20:49) Charlie Ormiston:
Then the first crisis we faced was 2003. So it wasn't the 97, but the combination of the dotcom bust then SARS really hurt our business. And, this is pre-Zoom, so our ability to do remote work during SARS was non existent.
And I don't remember how low our revenues fell, but they would have fallen by at least half if not more. And for a small office, that was quite a shock. And so I remember, how we managed through that crisis, how our team stayed together, how we reaffirmed, the essential values, what we're trying to do, both for clients and for our employees. People are looking. And if you make mistakes at that point, if you, if you only focus on revenues and you've neglected your employee base, your loyal employee base, you'll pay a big price. And, so I think we managed through that well. Bain has a tradition of, of leadership rotation. In 2000, I took over, not just Southeast Asia, but Greater China for Bain, and, and helped to grow that market.
In 2003, Greater China was separated from Southeast Asia and reported directly into our then worldwide managing director. And so we, we were able to focus a little bit more on Southeast Asia. And so that was a real transition for us as well. Again, coincided with SARS and the post dotcom. But instead of focusing on a much bigger region, we focused just on Southeast Asia for for a short period of time, but we have a tradition of leadership rotation. So in 2007, I handed off leadership of Southeast Asia to Till Vestring. I took 14 months off to do non profit initiatives. I had three that I did during that period. And I came back determined to only focus on client work and to allow till complete latitude to run Southeast Asia. Not every founder made those decisions. Some of the founders of Bain offices left the firm at that point and did something entrepreneurial. Or some continued to play kind of a executive chair role despite the fact that they were no longer running the day to day. I don't think too many did what I did, which is just step back and focus on client work. And I'm glad I, I made that decision. I think we all think we're reasonably indispensable, but, evidence would say that's not true. And the way Till took the office was different than I would have done and put us in a, in a stronger position six years later than it would have if I had continued to keep things concentrated in Singapore. And been slower to expand into the surrounding markets.
(23:05) Charlie Ormiston:
But the client work that I, that I undertook, I didn't want to do simple strategy project. I have to do what Bain calls transformations. And what we mean by that is with strategy, we're often looking at the teams, maybe like a golf coach would, and we're looking at the golfer and saying, what do we think is their potential? So I won't try to give them the swing of Tiger Woods if they're never going to be a great golfer, if they aren't committed to practice, if they don't have the physical characteristics. I have to look at their limitations and say this is what they're capable of. And generally when I did strategy that was how I did my work. I said here's your starting position, here's your capability set, your core competences, here's your organizational capability, and here's where I think you could go within those limitations. And that meant you avoided a lot of mistakes.
You don't, you don't tell a small startup that they can take on Pfizer directly. This is kind of Sun Tzu type thinking. You have to be careful, you need, you need to be conscious of what you're capable of and when you're on offense and when you're on defense. But, I did see that a number of companies, some being enabled, some on their own, maybe some enabled by our competitors, who knows. But were actually transforming, meaning they were dramatically increasing their organizational and operational capability to win. And therefore able to achieve growth rates or market share gains well in excess of the capabilities they started with. And that's what I think of as transformation.
And that's more interesting to me because strategy is as fascinating as is is limited to what the client actually ends up implementing, but transformation, we're more engaged processes where bain wasn't just committed in helping them with the right strategy. That was the core of the change. But in developing the capabilities and guiding them through some of the project planning initiative, the program oversight that leads to these great outcomes. But it's easy to sell these kinds of projects. I mean, you have to look somebody in the eye and say, this is where you want to be. This is where you are. And with our help, your chances of success are much higher. And how do you develop that credibility to, to get somebody to trust you? And it also, let's be clear, it's an expensive process to work with a consultant from that way, versus just by a report or a project. But that's what I wanted to do.
(25:18) Charlie Ormiston:
And I re-engineeredd my own career towards working on those kind of projects. And I think for me, probably my biggest success factor was an element of humility. That as good as my experience had been to date, even very successful client engagements up to that point, I didn't know how to do that kind of transformation because in, in Asia, the growth was almost assured because the markets were growing so fast. So I spent almost two years working on clients out of North America where Bain was supporting these kind of programs. And so I, I became an apprentice again. As senior a person as I was in Bain, at that point I was on the board of directors. I was a respected partner in Bain and expected to be a leader in Asia. I realized there were others that could do this better than me. So I worked on three major accounts where we were supporting transformation. And it was quid pro quo. I helped them with their Asia work. The same time I attended the key executive meetings in the U. S. It meant a lot of travel during that period to just observe how Bain worked with these clients, the role the client played, the role Bain played in transforming these companies. to this date, one of them is still, you know, just an extraordinary success in the technology space. And I was there at the early stages. And not everything we did worked. But in the end, this is a company that's now a leader in a space where they were, were a more distant follower when we first started working with them. And so then I was equipped to my own transformations. And I ended up working with one particularly large retailer, both in Asia, but the success of the Asia work led to the client I was working with becoming the head of their largest business unit
And I kind of followed him and formed a local team that supported him. And it's had a profound impact on that company. I was just looking yesterday that since our the start of our engagement in 2014, are up 3x and this is one of the largest companies in the world by any metric and a number of their competitors at the time have actually not just been flat, but two of them went bankrupt during this same time period. So it wasn't easy for them to transform. And so that was kind of a capstone to that part of my career, that I could go from being a founding partner of an office to helping to transform and be part of their journey, one of the biggest companies in the world, a global company. And so I, I feel lucky that I was able to make that switch.
(27:31) Charlie Ormiston:
And, it goes back to a book I read that was called "Transitions" and it was about career transitions. And it made one simple observation. If you really want something big and new to start, then something has to end. You can't keep just adding to your portfolio. And if I hadn't handed off Singapore, Southeast Asia, the business I was very proud of and I was very excited about, I wouldn't have been able to do something big as well. And I think everybody in managing their career has to know those points where, even though they're continuing to succeed, it's like a song on repeat. It's starting to feel old and it no longer sounds as good as it did when you first put it on repeat.
And you need, as soon as you realize you're in a repeat cycle, my advice is you need to stop and listen to some new music. And the same is true for your career. You need to stop, even though you're successful, and pick a new target that will make you feel equally proud, and will then, allow you to feel a deeper sense of satisfaction because you now had a portfolio of successes versus just building on one.
(28:30) Jeremy Au:
So you mentioned this phrase, re-engineer your career. What does that mean?
(28:34) Charlie Ormiston:
I think career planning is a combination of looking out, trying to identify, usually you're looking at models, so it could be a person something you've read where you'd say, that's what I would like to be in five years, ten years. And then being fairly methodical about, well, what are the skills I need? What's the network I need? How would I actually make that happen? You have to have a reasonable level of confidence in yourself. So it's like, maybe a young Joe Biden at age 18 saying, someday I want to be president. And I'm sure if he'd articulated that to people around him, maybe a few would say, Yeah, someday, Joe, you're going to be president. But a lot of people would have been quite skeptical. Or, someday, I want to be Steve Jobs, or I want to be Elon Musk. Or, name what appeals to you. This is the outcome that you want. But I think somebody's going to do it. it's like when you watch the Olympics. There's some eight year old that watched the gymnast this year and said, I want to be Simone Biles and it's, they may not be the one who chooses, but somebody is going to be the gold medal winner in, in eight years later at 16 or 20 when, when that eight year old will be, will be a peer of the people who win or will be the winner. And so you have to then work backwards. And so a lot of my early Bain career was just looking five years ahead and say, who are the people I admire the most and what are they doing? And reaching out to them and having discussions with them. One of the people who had the greatest impact on me in Bain was Orit Gadiesh, our chairman. She is a very thoughtful person who made a point of coming to Singapore at least once a year to help us out.
And, one of the things that, I think, the reason she liked to come to Singapore is almost every time she came to Singapore, I met her at the airport. And she said, Charlie, no one does this in Bain. Meet me at the airport. I said, but it's a chance to spend 30 minutes with you on the way to the hotel. I was basically, everybody else in the world was nuts. Why, why wouldn't you want to meet you at the airport? Because you're our chairman, you, you have so much experience. And I always had questions for her.And I remember the first time I did it, she was staying I think at the Westin Hotel, what was in the Westin.
(30:25) Charlie Ormiston:
And, She was jet lagged, so I think I picked her up at like 11 at night, we got to our hotel at about 12.
And she wanted to keep talking, she wanted to get ready for our interviews at 7. I am somebody who sleeps 8 hours a night, so the thought of doing prep at that point for meetings that were going to start at 7am, I just couldn't believe it, but I thought it would be an hour, but 3 hours later, we finished going through each of the discussions we were going to have over the next 2 days.
And she was ready to have some sleep and I just dragged myself home and then the next day, she was just on fire and I was, I was not, not probably my, my, my most effective self. But I learned so much from that preparation.
(31:03) Charlie Ormiston:
One of the most interesting things about Orit is she, she had experience working with the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF. She had been in the bunkers during the Six Day War.
And none other than Lee Kuan Yew found that background fascinating. I'm not quite sure how our first interaction happened with Lee Kuan Yew, but often when she was in town, he would want to meet with her. And I would tag along. So I had this, it would never happen on my own. My experience wasn't as interesting to Lee Kuan Yew. But I would sit in the Astana, in his library, with her and him, and they would discuss world affairs. They both knew Kissinger. She wass very involved with the World Economic Forum. She knew a lot of the world leaders that he knew quite intimately. And I was just a fly on the wall for these fascinating discussions.
But I also saw how she prepared for those meetings. And we also debriefed what happened in the meeting, what she thought she could have done better. And so the debriefing process from each of those meetings also helped me. And so somebody like Orit was the way that I was able to then form my own path for how to be somebody who didn't just find out about policy but influence it, or how not to feel intimidated when you meet a world leader, and how to actually come and just talk with them as a peer. You have strengths, they have strengths. So you're, once you decide on your vision. You're going to have to interact with people who are at or close to that ambition. And they're a key part for you building to the point that you want to build to.
But then there's also luck. And so, not all of your career path is planned. And if a great opportunity comes your way, you have to have an ability to assess that. And say, is this a point where I've been zigging and I need to zag? That there's something so interesting and it fits with what I know are my long term objectives. That I was wrong about the path I was on and I'm going to change paths.
While most of my career was within Bain, I've seen a lot of people very successfully leave Bain at key points when there was the right opportunity. I've also, and I've, I've almost always, I think, supported people when that really good opportunity came along. But I've also tried to talk a lot of people out of what I considered bad opportunities and not every time somebody offers you something, is it right? Given what I know about your long term ambitions and where Bain would fit in relative to other companies. So in re-engineering your career, there's a yin and yang. There has to be a planned element, which is pretty aggressive and considers all the factors it will take to reach your ambition. And then you have to have some discipline in a lot of the activity you have to undertake yourself. But at the same time, you have to be open to opportunities that represent different paths to that objective or, in some events, actually change your ambition. I never thought about doing that, but now that you've talked to me about it, that's very interesting, tell me more. But it should still be a very planned process.
So re-engineering is that whole process for both setting the ambition, and then setting, ensuring that you're on a path to achieve it.
(33:53) Jeremy Au:
How have you changed your ambition?
(33:54) Charlie Ormiston:
My initial ambition was pretty simple. I worked with a different consulting firm in the mid-80s. They were not on a path to success. And so when the opportunity came to go to business school, I accepted it. And when that same firm offered to pay for my business school, I turned it down because they wanted a two or three year commitment. And I could see that they weren't going to be one of the leaders in consulting. And it turned out to be true. They ended up selling themselves while I was at business school to a big insurance company. They became a very successful second tier firm, but it was fairly clear to me that the top tier was going to be Bain, BCG and McKinsey. And that's been true.
While I was at business school, well, in my business school essays, I broke a taboo. The view was that if you were applying to business school, you had to basically say, I loved my consulting career, but I will never return. That, that somehow wanting to be a consultant was frowned on by the business schools and would be a kiss of death in an application. I ignored that. And my essays were about how I wanted to join one of the big three consulting firms and set up their Singapore office. And it was all a roadmap to how I would make that office more successful than the firm I had worked for in the eighties. And I had six principles that I felt if I followed those principles, we could be highly successful.
During business school For the summer program. I based my selection among the big three on which one was more likely to support me to set up the Singapore office. And it was actually drawn to Bain, not because they at all committed, in fact, almost the opposite. They put this very, very, very smart partner in front of me during the closing process.
And he's a highly, unfortunately he's passed away, but one of the most respected partners in Bain. And he looked at me and he said, look, only the top 5 or 10 percent of partners are going to be given the chance to open off. I mean, let's be realistic. He said, I don't know you from Adam. I have no idea whether you could be in that top 10%. So there is no way I can promise to help you set up Singapore. What I can tell you is here's the characteristics, top and if you think you can become one of those, then the firm will back you. Everybody else gave me a whole song and dance of you're too young, but here's the person who's going to open it. And therefore you should go talk to them and maybe they'll like you and dah, dah, dah. But I thought that was the most honest answer. And interestingly enough, four years after I joined Bain, three years after I joined Bain, several people, not just me, Jimmy Allen, who set up Moscow, John Smith, who set up in Poland and Warsaw, Harry Strachan, who was a well established partner, set up Costa Rica. At that point, South Africa was set up by a couple of people. I was given the opportunity. And it was exactly that. I was probably, I don't know the exact number, but in the top 10 percent of, of people in my class at Bain, the opportunity came along and I was able to set up an office. And so there, there's an element of having faith in yourself, taking some risk, and also not believing false promises that are part of this whole process of creating a break.
So you asked about how did I make my own plans? So I guess I I started with this is what I wanted to do. And in my essay, I envisioned an office which was about as big as the San Francisco office when I started. Which was about 10 cars. They were organized by industry. They all worked effectively with each other. They had a very high work ethos. That's what I ended up joining the San Francisco office of Bain. That's what it was. It was an office that would just, in fact, most of our top leadership in Bain have come out of that office. I think four of our six worldwide managing directors have come out of the San Francisco office because it was such a great office. And that, so that was my vision. Get Singapore to there. I didn't have much vision beyond that. And, and what's ironic is that was the right time for me to step away because I no longer had a clear vision for what it would be like to run a cluster of four offices, it's now six. And so I got it to that point. And then I handed things off. What's ironic is, Bain & Company Southeast Asia is now larger than Bain when I joined.
It's six offices, which was the same as Bain when I joined. And about 600 or 800 consultants, which Bain was much smaller than that. We have about 60 partners. Bain was about 54 when I joined. So it's, it's very, I never imagined to be honest, even though I could have looked at the compounding and realize it occur that that little office in Singapore would become as big as Bain in 1990, which is pretty exciting.
My next one was I wanted to be, I knew to be respected in Bain, the most respected position was running not just a large account, but a very successful account. Success measured by the client. That their share price had improved. That they clearly were gaining share in the market. That they were innovation leader. That they were the most respected in their industry. We have a mission that says that together we will redefine our respective industries. Bain wanted to redefine consulting. We wanted our clients to redefine their industries. That was our aspiration. And the best Bain partners worked on those kind of clients. So that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to see both on the internal governance, but also on the client side, and it took a while. I've talked a little bit about that journey.
(38:42) Charlie Ormiston:
Once I had finished that, unfortunately, the constant travel and the stress, not just of the client work I was doing, but I was at that point chairing our worldwide nominating committee, which makes important decisions or nominations for our comp committee, our worldwide board, as well as our worldwide managing director. The stress of managing the process of selecting our worldwide leader for that round meant I just couldn't do it anymore. I had migraines, I had high blood pressure. I was overweight. I was unfit and it was clear I was on a path that would cause health problems if I didn't make an adjustment.
So I went 60 percent at Bain. So I only worked 3 days a week. And within 2 years I went down to 40 percent and then to 20. So I'm now a Bain advisor. And I would say probably 2 to 5 years earlier than I would have if I hadn't had health issues. Because I really enjoy working with Bain and there's still so much opportunity within the company to do a good job. Interesting things. But I also started to think about, well, what did I want to do next? And like a lot of people were in their late fifties, early sixties, we all feel maybe we all are overconfident that we have 10, 20 years left and do we want to do another big thing? that's one extreme to do at least one big thing to start a company, to become a CEO of a big company, to maybe become a chairman or join boards, to do a startup.
There's all kinds of opportunities within the business world, but there are other things you can do. You could become a major influencer of a, or supporter of a nonprofit. You could do something even more philanthropical, raise money, but there's another extreme, which is you shift from accomplishing things to living more day to day. I have a, there's an alumni who you may know, a guy named Edmund Wu. Edmund, he's, he's always been a quirky guy, great, great guy. I had, had him over for dinner at our house with a group of Bain alums about two years ago, he was about to fly to I think Vancouver or Anchorage, buy a motorcycle, ride to the Arctic circle, and then over the course of 18 months ride to Argentina. He had never ridden a motorcycle before, and he doesn't speak Spanish.
And we all thought he was nuts, but it was clear he was going to do it. And I've been following his trip. He's now in Peru. He's been going for about 14 months. He has two months to go and he'll, he'll reach Argentina and he's going to fly home. And this guy, he says, as long as I keep my expenses below a hundred dollars a day, I can do this forever. I basically generated enough income to cover a hundred dollars a day. And so here's the other extreme, which is to live completely day to day. Live for the day. And I follow him on Instagram. The beauty of the people and the sites is extraordinary. Now that's not for me. I'm not, I want to, I'm terrified of motorcycles and two, I think I'd get very lonely doing a trip like that, not having some continuity and companionship. I'm married. He's not. But nonetheless, it defines the other extreme, which is you define your life around living day to day. And I think he probably brings joy to the people that he travels with or he visits. They see somebody from outside and he's just such a warm person. He's a great musician. He probably plays in their bands knowing him and he enjoys their festivals and he just is having fun every day.
And I think a lot of life management at this stage for me is time around that continuum I want to be. I think a lot of people assume because I've been successful, I should be at the right side of that continuing to, when you're going to, why aren't you on more boards or why aren't you going for CEO? Well, you haven't started any companies yet. And yet I have to admit, I'm drawn more now to the left side, which is just enjoying life, helping people, not necessarily in an institutional way, but just day to day being kind and leaving whoever I met that day better off than people I didn't meet. And so I think it's an interesting, and so I'm now in that stage where I'm not re engineering myself for the next big thing, but I'm trying to understand how to live and just kind of be a better person and enjoy what I've earned and what I've, what I've accomplished to date, which I had postponed for years. Delayed gratification is the hallmark of a lot of successful people, but at some point, you gotta stop delaying.
And so a lot of my life planning is now exploring the left hand side of that continuum, the, the live for today versus the right side of the continuum. Accomplishing one more thing, one more trophy to put on the wall.
(42:56) Jeremy Au:
And so one of the things that you've built more recently is the Angsana Council. So I had the privilege of of helping to set that up. Yeah.
(43:03) Jeremy Au:
And you know, we were brainstorming things like the name and so forth. So I got to see some of your founder energy in those early days. so how did you, first, kind of sit down and say like, this is something that'd be fun to do.
(43:14) Charlie Ormiston:
I would start with, this would be in that opportunistic mode that I talked about earlier. It wasn't my idea. Peng, who we both know, founder of Monk's Hill, approached me. And he said, look, we talked three years ago about whether or not you wanted to, to help Monk's Hill in some ways. We're now raising another fund. We have some new ideas. And the other one was that as venture capitalist firms, and this was the heyday, it was relatively easy to raise money, a lot of firms were entering Southeast Asia that had great brands, great existing portfolios in other parts of the world, but they didn't know Southeast Asia. And Monk's Hill and several other firms in the region recognized that local knowledge was going to be critical, particularly if you were going to be founding businesses.
And so they wanted to both enhance their understanding of the markets and their access to decision makers, but also make sure that the market knew that they understood Southeast Asia better than some of these interlopers, these new firms that were coming in. And for me, that was very interesting because I had, a lot of my career had been across all of Asia, not concentrated on Southeast Asia, even though I was based in Singapore.
And yet this was the market I originally, I started in and I have some fascination with, and I also wanted to learn more about Southeast Asia. No one ever becomes an expert in Southeast Asia. It's too complex. Also, at this stage in life, when you aren't institutionally bound to people and your reputation, which was tied to your company or things that you were doing, you do lose access to people. They're kind of like, well, what can you do for me? And so something like this was an opportunity to maintain my relevance to what I'll just call interesting people in interesting conversations. So without too much, I mean, I reflected on it. It didn't require a lot of selling for paying. I said, sure.
I'd love to do it. It's been a fantastic collaboration. The focus has been on increasing our understanding of Southeast Asia. Influencing policy so Southeast Asia grows faster and then having some impact on investors who are interested in the region. That this is a good place to invest and maybe a spillover to that is Monks Hill is a great company to invest with. But I think their heart has always been in the right place, which is, let's focus first on on the first three and then the spillover will occur. We don't have to manage that too closely. We formed a council of trustees, Gita Wirjalan, who's a former trade minister in Indonesia, Doris Magsaysay Ho, who is from a well established family in the Philippines. I think her grandfather was one of the first presidents in the Philippines. George Yeo, who was a former Foreign Minister of Foreign Affairs here in Singapore, other ministries, defense official, but also had a significant career in the private sector as well. Peng, who was the founder of Monk's Hill. So between the five of us, we have access to each other, and these are people who have succeeded in government, in education, in policy, in business, all four.
It's not like we have one educator and one business person. It's interesting how well rounded, these are all renaissance people. And it's just been a fantastic sounding board for me. I have taken the lead on developing more formal intellectual property, which started as this outlook for the next 10 years. And, thank goodness Bain was willing to co sponsor it, and provided teams that helped do primary research that was required to do something of note. My opinion on Southeast Asia is really not that relevant. My opinion backed by a lot of facts and, good research from what other people who were thinking about Southeast Asia or growth in general in developing markets is much more impactful and useful. And so I would say version, if I were to rate myself, version 1.0 was a very solid B. It was a good report. The good thing is though, that in the subsequent two years of interacting with business people and government policy makers and educators and other people writing about the same topic and, and businesses, it just kept getting better and better.
The insights as people reacted to the material and helped me think about how to do it better. So as we thought about version 2.0, we had both that legacy of continuous improvement and input, and in addition we decided to to also collaborate with DBS Bank. And Taimur Baig, who's a personal friend, somebody I know from some mutual acquaintances in a book club we're in. He has a very different background than me. He's an economist, he worked for the IMF, he's worked for a variety of banks. He's now chief economist at DBS. And the way he looks at the same problems is different. And between the two of us and our teams, he brought a team of economists from DBS who are incredibly good at the kind of forecasting that we needed to do and understand the data sets that we were working with. But Bain is very good at studying the business environment and the case study. So the, the, the joint collaboration produced a better report. And, and I would say now we're an A minus, I think it would be stupid to give us an A because Taimur and I were just talking this morning, we were at a conference, investor conference, and we already have, 10 ideas for how to make the report better.
So how can we be an A if we have so many ways to make it better, but the reception has been moldables of before and this weekend, two groups reached out to me. One. And none of them now I even know how they got the report. But they have, somebody sent it to them and said you should read this. I've had inquiries from Mexico, Germany, Ireland, U. S. People I don't even know are reaching out and saying, Hey, could you speak to our group because this is really interesting. We've also had interactions now with the governments of Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, which we didn't really have early on after the first report because I think they see that our intentions are good and that the learnings that we have synthesized are relevant to every country in Southeast Asia.
And so I I'm very bullish on what we've been able to accomplish that it's consistent with what the Angsana Council set out and that where we'll go next, we'll, we'll probably have more impact even than what we were able to do in the last two years. So it's been very rewarding for me. because it, it, it, it was a zag. It was a, a move in a direction I hadn't really considered before. A vehicle working with Monk's Hill that wasn't really on my radar, and it's worked out very well. Yet I maintain my affiliation with Bain as an advisor, and that's probably the zig. I can, I know how to manage that, and I get a great deal out of that as well. So there's a, in the end, usually people in their 60s in today's world have a portfolio of things they're working on. And each one is a different set of individuals, different institutional strengths. The way they add value is unique with each four. And that can be very gratifying to spend your 60s and your 70s working across that portfolio of opportunities.
(49:52) Jeremy Au:
You know, what's interesting is that you've done so much research and obviously over your course of your career, but especially with these deep dives over the past year on Angsana Council. What has been one thing that the research has confirmed for you versus what is one thing that the research has changed your mind?
(50:07) Charlie Ormiston:
I think one of the stories of the last 30 years is the rise of China. When I first worked in the region in the 80s, while Deng Xiaoping had started, some of the famous quotes about the black cat or the white cat, as long as they catch mice, had probably been uttered. And Shenzhen had some duty free zones. No one thought about it as a, what would become the largest manufacturing center in the world. It was still a communist country. It had too many constraints on investment. It wasn't clear who you worked with. Transport systems were terrible. Logistics were terrible. A lot of the people hadn't been educated in English. It was very hard to operate in that market. And so while there were some people, especially from Hong Kong, and even at that point, it was really only Hong Kong. It wasn't Taiwan. Then they opened up to Taiwan investment, and I think that had a profound impact. Hong Kong was more of a financial center and a trading hub. But Taiwan brought in all this manufacturing expertise that was desperately needed in China.
From then on, starting in the early 90s, and you started to see China grow. And I did a lot of work in China, but it was always just to access the local market or some work on export, but even then it was hard to develop low cost, the lowest cost in the world manufacturing. And then that all changed. So suddenly China became the low cost place to manufacture for the world, although still very difficult to do business. They also made it easier to own a hundred percent of your investment in China, which in the early 90s wasn't possible. You had to set up very complex holding companies, and there were only some sectors that you can invest in directly. The rules were Byzantine, and so people avoided it. People don't like challenging rules. And then, and China kept going, and it was growing at rates people forget in the 10s, 12s, 14 percent a year. It was the double digit growth for multiple years in a row. And so I won't say I always underestimated China, but hand on heart if you had said this is where China's going to end up, I still couldn't fathom it.
I had too much respect for Japanese manufacturing, Taiwan manufacturing, Korean manufacturing, German manufacturing, US innovation, to think China would emerge as the leader. It just felt like they would always be kind of doing well, but they are clearly now an innovation leader on the part of the U. S. And the U. S. and China are clearly ahead of the rest of the world. And the rivalry between those two countries means they will probably maintain their leadership, and it's actually the others that will fall off. It's hard to keep up with the China U. S. because of the size of their domestic markets, the number of high quality universities, the pools of capital that they're each able to access, or just in excess of any other country or region in the world.
And probably one thing that, that the research confirmed was just how competitive China is. And when we look at Southeast Asia and the benefits they're going to get from what are called China plus one strategies, China plus one is the idea that people who are wholly reliant on China have to find an alternative to China, not necessarily for all manufacturing, for at least some. And Southeast Asia in most people's mind will be one of the major beneficiaries of China plus one. But what I keep reminding people is, is at least in my work, Whenever we look at a plant outside of China now, it's generally not going to be as efficient, reliable, scale, even as innovative as the facility you have in China.
You need to do it. Vietnam will get some, Indonesia will get some, Thailand will get some, Malaysia will get some, Singapore will get some. But unlike when we moved a plant from Korea to China or US to China or Germany to China, where the Chinese facility ended up being the lowest cost in the world, we don't expect that same thing for other parts of the world. So what the research has done is confirmed that China has become an innovation leader in the world, is the most efficient place to produce most things in the world, and that while Southeast Asia will benefit China plus one, it won't necessarily beat China.
What has the research taught me that I didn't know before? I think, what I've learned is the limitations of the old model that everybody thought 30 years ago was the way everybody should go, which is the Japan Korea Taiwan model, which is Protect your local markets. Focus on export oriented manufacturing. Use that as a discipline to ensure that government subsidies are well spent because the discipline of the international markets will ensure that they become more efficient. And the limitation of that model was that by overprotecting your domestic market, your services sector became non competitive and these big companies that were successful, took advantage of their success, became chai bowls, became too large and actually ended up strangling the local economies. And so they just didn't meet the potential they would have if there had been more competition in the domestic market.
So governments, and Singapore by the way, I think has fallen into the same trap. Although it's a very successful market, and on the superficially, the data would say Singapore is now number one in a lot of set things but you actually shouldn't compare Singapore to countries. You should compare Singapore to the capital cities of countries. So compare Singapore to two or the New York city or Tokyo or Shanghai. That's the right comparison because it's just the city state. And then Singapore, you used to sit the, the local companies just haven't done as well, I think because they were overprotected that at a key point, you have to lower the protection and force them to compete and maybe allow private equity to come in, buy off bits and split them up, which is what has led to a lot of efficiency in US and you have, and is now happening in Japan.
And it hasn't happened here in Singapore and it needs to happen. So what I've learned is that the Chinese model of allowing more foreign direct investment and still supporting companies through state backing has been the most successful model. in the last 30 years, and that the Japan Korea model isn't. And therefore, Southeast Asian countries look For what should they do? They need to be very careful about protectionist approach, but they also shouldn't fall into the trap of completely free enterprise. They have to see a role for government in helping to guide and support local industries. And getting that balance right is unbelievably difficult. The country does it best as Singapore, but it's not perfect. And then of course, a lot of the Chinese city provinces within China, like, like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, they do it very well.
(56:10) Jeremy Au:
Last question here is, could you share a time when you personally have been brave?
(56:15) Charlie Ormiston:
That I've been brave? It wasn't actually moving here in 93, because that fulfilled a dream I had from 5, 6 years earlier. Handing off the office in 2007 was, brave may not be quite the right word. It was brave, because I gave up the security of being the clear leader, and especially here in Asia, a lot of people thought I was nuts. And in fact, they thought, I remember one client I had, because I took a sabbatical afterwards. He said, you've handed off leadership of the office and you're taking a sabbatical. Can you just be honest with me? Were you fired? And I said, no, no, no, this is common in being, take a sabbatical. And he goes, I don't believe you. And I said, why wouldn't you believe it? Because, because no one in my company would do that.
If I left for a year, there's no hope I could come back to any kind of position of power of influence in the company. And then at the end he goes, if, if what you tell me is true and I still don't believe you, then Bain is probably the best company in the world because handing off your leadership role and taking a 14 month sabbatical and believing that they will treat you well when you come back is either courageous or stupid, and I think it's stupid. Now this is a client that's particularly blunt, and those are pretty much the words he used. So I guess that was braver than I expected at the time. I think then probably the bravest period I had was working with a client in the U. S. On a transformation where the previous two CEOs had failed. And when we looked at our plan, there was at least 80 percent overlap with what they were recommending. And in fact, the 20 percent was more nuanced. And so the difference was that we had to get board support. And we felt like we had to communicate to the market in a way that they would believe us.
And we accomplished the first, but not the second. So the board agreed. The way we did it, I think we did a good job packaging what we were going to do, et cetera. But in essence, profits were going to fall for two years and they would only fully recover back to the point of when we started in year three. But the street hated it. And over the next six months, well, no, over the next six weeks, the shares fell by about 18%. It wiped out 35 billion in market cap. And I was under enormous pressure at that point. And so was my client. My client was actually running the BU. But it was one of Bain's largest relationships. And so the global head of this practice area called me and said, What are you doing? Our reputation is at stake. Everybody knows we're working with this client. And I said, we absolutely believe in this strategy. But what I realized is, We were promising growth and a significant improvement in customer satisfaction with the company. And what the street likes is cost reduction. So if I promised 10 percent cost reduction to the street, the shares would go up that day, even though it may destroy morale, it may hurt productivity in the longterm. We may even lose shares as a result of the cost you know, this simplistic view that, you know, as long as I get my money quicker, I'm happier as an investor.
And what I realized that even though they know the math, that if we improve the growth rate significantly, the shares would be worth more, they've just heard it too many times. And so they take it as when you promise growth, as opposed to cost reduction, that they shouldn't believe you because it's too hard to do. So then when we did achieve the growth that we set out, in fact, we exceeded it. The shares rebounded. The shares are now up. Two hundred, no, three hundred percent, three times, not from the low point, but from where we started. I just looked yesterday. And, enormous market, and it's four hundred billion in market cap improvement. extraordinary turnaround. That my client stuck with me was braver than me. And I have enormous gratitude to his belief in, in me and in Bain, for that. But his job was on the line too. We were in it together. That was a very brave point. That was probably where all the health problems occurred because it was so stressful.
I think every firm that goes through this process has to believe that true transformation requires growth, not just cost. There's no, a cost transformation is simply an enabler to a growth transformation. If you don't have a plan how you're going to grow, then don't bother with the cost reduction. It's just, you're not a good enough leader then because great institutions grow and you have to find a way. That's our job as consultants. That's your job as a leader. And so the bravery is doing that even though there are more people throwing stones at you than you ever expected. And still, as long as you believe you're right and you are right, it it true. Eventually you have to be right. You have to get the growth then that's bravery. That's courage.
(01:34) Jeremy Au:
On that note, thank you so much for sharing your journey.
(01:37) Charlie Ormiston:
Thank you. I enjoyed it. It's, um, a chance to reflect.