Sometimes its hard to get your head around how far we’ve travelled. Our people occupy bright, air-conditioned offices (for the most part), sit at carefully designed workstations (desks in my day) and
are surrounded by constantly updatable technology. In fact, such is the power of mobile
communication it can be argued that much of today's commuting is unnecessary as home office
working is very achievable. The IT sector has given us a lot.
We have also managed to create virtually an entirely new industry language to explain what we do
and that which we are attempting to achieve. Expressions such as alpha generation, market beta,
and tracking error abound helping us to be confident that we are giving careful consideration to the
complexities involved in managing our client’s futures. Much of this we have imported from the
scientific community. Indeed, we have the academic world to thank for the lifeboat of QE, though it
remains to be seen whether its impact will prove to have been a rescue. But at least for now, both
financial markets and economic growth remain reasonably buoyant globally.
However, our industry has also witnessed some lopsided learning. Whilst we have observed and
imported many useful concepts, technologies and processes in the stewardship of client assets, we
cannot claim to have applied such learning evenly across our organisations.
Take our distribution and client functions for instance. Yes, we employ CRM systems and work hard
to ensure we “know” our customers mandate requirements and are all aligned in our client
interactions. This emphasises ensuring we are accurately recording the progress of our contacts with
clients. However, with one or two interesting exceptions, we observe a lack of innovative thinking
by our industry when it comes to truly appreciating the qualitative nature of our client relationships.
This we find bewildering given the potential for sustainable competitive advantage such analysis
clearly provides.
We also note interesting survey feedback from client organisations. It is clear there is unanimous
agreement on the need to ensure that our crisis management plans and procedures are robust.
However, it is equally apparent that within organisations many employees cannot define what these
should be and whether in this context they have any individual responsibilities.
We live in delicate times, politically, economically and increasingly environmentally. If financial
markets and economies are to continue to grow it will be because we have looked outside of our
industry for ideas that may help us avoid repeating the errors of the past.
