A long-term investment that no board can afford to ignore

We have a moral imperative, and an entirely vested interest, in realising that we owe economic growth to the younger generation.

During my father-in-law’s funeral recently, I noticed a man I didn’t know giving condolences to my wife. Marilyn, a heart surgeon with extensive NHS experience, at first didn’t recognise him. But, after the burial, it dawned on her: he was a former patient whom she had saved. While consoling my wife for her loss, I found myself mulling over that encounter. My wife saves lives. Her work has meaning and a professional gratification that mine, as a chief economist, likely never will.

Life choices

A pay cheque is important, but hardly the sole reason to enter or remain in a profession, as many business leaders have been pointing out for years. 

So what do investment and business professionals get out of this? Sure, being “right” is a reward. But to be honest, after so many “rights” and “wrongs” over the years, after so many crises, I, and frankly, we all, know that no one can consistently predict the future and beat markets. 

Helping clients achieve their goals, such as putting their kids through university, saving for retirement, buying a house, and financing their businesses, is gratifying to be sure. Helping one’s firm, or business partners and clients, to think about the economy with a clear head, even more so.

But for me, at least, none of these could compare with Marilyn’s experience. A patient doesn’t come to your father’s funeral because you “helped”, but out of true gratitude. Adding to the complexity, Marilyn told me a few days later that she often gets “Merry Xmas” and other messages from past patients. When I asked her how she’s never mentioned it during our 18-year relationship, she shrugged and said, “It’s normal; that’s why I didn’t mention it.” 

For my profession, where something as simple as enrolment in a course may be celebrated very publicly (people often profess to be “grateful” and “humbled” when they merely begin their Chartered Financial Analyst path), this sort of actual humility, by another profession— notorious for its egocentrism no less—opens a door to an outright existential crisis. 

So what is it that we owe our profession and to each other, apart from upholding key values such as integrity, responsibility, respect, diversity, excellence, independence and stewardship? 

We owe growth to a younger generation. 

Investments and economics are professions that are most successfully built on accumulated and collective knowledge. And because there’s no formula for consistent returns or predicting the economic future, discussions around principles and views of life are often involved. The sort of ideas that can be passed down—and also up—the ladder. But it takes time, and appetite.

To see young people you worked with grow, learn of their accomplishments, and to invite them out for a pint whenever you visit town: this is a big reward in itself. 

Short-term vision 

Yet, as management often presses for immediate deliverables (Management By Objective (MBO) never truly died), those responsible for the younger generation are often tempted to overlook its growth needs. Some would go as far as to lay blame on “Gen Z” for being difficult to work with. 

Maybe, with trade wars threatening many business models, people might think this is not the time for firms to be “romantic” or be thinking about moral philosophy? 

There is never a wrong time to be good (that’s the whole point). And, even morals aside, it is still a question of short-term benefits versus long-term investments. Over the short term, there are few immediate benefits from training, discussing and growing the younger generation. Yet, short-termism should not be a guiding principle here.

Long-term success of any firm, the type that makes it a candidate for higher price multiples, often relies on “institutional knowledge” of its environment, clients, supply chains and so forth. That success is concomitant with the acceptance that this knowledge is not just the privilege of top echelons but lives across all ranks and cultures within a firm. Avoiding discussion, losing young people to the competition (more than half of whom say that their boss could have kept them), chips away at institutional knowledge, and often prevent firms from growing towards their potential. 

What we owe to young people, when paid, can return a huge dividend to motivated business leaders and forward-looking organisations.

George Lagarias – Chief Economist 

* Please note this article was first published on Board Agenda.