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In it for the long haul with a curious and open leadership mindset
CEO turnover is less than five years. How then do you stay relevant and fresh 13 years into the role? CEO of Australian Pork Limited, Andrew Spencer shares his key lessons from 13 years at the helm.
Why you should listen: a leadership journey can be full of twists and turns
How failure is essential to leadership
The one thing that really gets you earning your money as a CEO
How a simple shift in terminology changed an entire approach as an industry
How corporate culture is not one-size-fits-all
#boundlessleadership
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Shownotes:
About Andrew Spencer:
Australian Pork Ltd CEO Andrew Spencer shares how corporate culture is not one-size-fits-all
Andrew Spencer has been the CEO of Australian Pork Ltd since 2005. He is the Chair of the Australian Farm Institute. He has a 30-year career in agribusiness, both in Australia and internationally, including South Africa and France, in the agricultural biotechnology and seeds markets. He is an avid fisherman and skiier.
Resources:
Andrew’s most recommended book:
How to lead a quest - A handbook for pioneering executives
TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast, your source of strategies and insights to make you a better leader, influence, improve, inspire.
Zoë Routh: Hi, it's Zoë Routh. I'm in the hollowed office of Andrew Spencer, the CEO of Australian Pork Limited. I've known Andrew for, yonks, a good ... Since 2010, I think. It's been good eight years or so. I'm delighted to interview him. He's been the CEO here for a donkey's age, and I'll tell you a little bit about his history. He knows a lot about culture and people. I'm really interested to interview him about what it's like to lead an organisation for so long and you learned about leadership and people as a result. Welcome, Spence.
Andrew Spencer: Thanks, Zoë.
Zoë Routh: We're just having a giggle because I introduced him beforehand as Australian Spence, and then we had a giggle that he's now starting his new empire, Spence Limited, so welcome. Tell us a little bit about your journey. You've been here forever, but before you got to Australian Pork, what happened?
Andrew Spencer: Okay. I'm a Victorian. I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne as a kid, but my family always had farms. That's why I see myself as a country kid more than a city kid because I spent all of my spare time on our farms. That led me to head towards Melbourne Uni when I was ready to do an agricultural science degree. After that, I commenced a career in the chemical industry. That slowly moved from chemicals into biotechnology and other things.
Andrew Spencer: That was a 20-year career, about 10 years of which was in Australia, and 10 years of which was overseas. I could give you the name of the company, but they're about five because that industry has gone through enormous consolidation over the last decades, so there's a lot of different companies involved, and I never left any particular company. I just kept getting soaked up in the next merger or acquisition or whatever.
Zoë Routh: Okay.
Andrew Spencer: I lived in Germany for three and a half years. I lived in South Africa for a couple of years. I lived in France for five years. I see that 10 years of my life as being an enormous period of personal growth and professional growth and some amazing experiences, probably the most memorable being living in South Africa. There's a little bit of me now that's still in Africa, I think. I've sort of got this-
Zoë Routh: Your big toe.
Andrew Spencer: Something about that proportion of me, but I've had the mantra since I lived there that everyone should try and spend a little part of their life in Africa because it really does give you perspective about how lucky we are that we live in more civilized parts of the world.
Zoë Routh: When you lived in South Africa, I'm just curious about that now, what was it like? Was it violent? Was it scary? Was it abject poverty? Like you said that it's important that everyone go to Africa to live a piece of that. What do you recall about your experience there?
Andrew Spencer: All of the above. I looked after 15 countries in my job, so I did a fair bit of traveling, and I lied in South Africa. Now, South Africa is about the most civilized part of Africa, Southern Africa anyway, but nevertheless, it was one of the most violent parts. When you live there, there are rules you have to follow to manage the security risks. They'd become a part of life, and you don't tend to worry about it moment to moment. You just follow the rules, and you're looked after.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, you see some amazing poverty. You see people who are motivated by some of the most primal parts of themselves, of what life means. That's all over Africa, and you see some of the most beautiful things you'll ever see in the national parks and the wildlife. It's just incredible.
Zoë Routh: Yeah. It is pretty wild. When you're in survival mode, it does bring out our animal instinct because we are fighting for survival. In Australia, we don't often see that. That's for sure.
Andrew Spencer: That's true, and you also see things that, for example, you're exposed ... We were exposed to the aid industry. The aid industry is run by very well-intentioned people who'd do some fantastic things, but the aid industry is also, if managed poorly, a very damaging thing to parts of America. I mean, there was the situation where the EU had an excess of wheat. They sent 40,000 tons into Tanzania as an aid shipment because Tanzania was having a bit of trouble. The next year, there was no local grain in Tanzania because all the grain farmers were out of business. All that free grain put them out of business. The similar thing is happening in the textile industry from donations of clothing. You learn that when it comes to helping people, you need to do it smartly so that you're not damaging local industry.
Zoë Routh: That's terrible, so aid put people out of business in the end.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah.
Zoë Routh: Oh, that's horrible. You left out South Africa and you ended back in Australia.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, I went to France for five years, ended up back here without a job because there wasn't a job in that conglomerate for me to work at here. One of my best friends was the managing director locally. I was out of a job for about six months. I did a little bit of consulting. I saw the ad, or I was pointed towards the ad for this role as the CEO of Australian Pork Limited, and I wasn't particularly interested, but I applied and went along for an interview. I found the people that I was talking to, which was a number of the directors, were very impressive people, really professional people, and I followed the process until I was convinced that, yeah, this would be a great job. It has been.
Andrew Spencer: I've been here for 13 years, and I recently announced that I won't be re-signing a new contract. My contract runs out roughly the middle of next year. That'll be 14 years. I think it's time for the organisation to have a renewal of leadership. I think it is necessary for that to happen eventually.
Zoë Routh: We've spoken about that over the time that we've known each other, and I remember having a conversation with you about complacency in leadership. When you're well-established as a leader, and you're in your job for a while and things are going well, and you flagged your concern then, what about complacency? How have you dealt with the risk around complacency? You've been conscious of it. How have you managed to keep it at bay if you think it has?
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, I'm not sure we had, but it has been something I've been very aware of. We, as an executive team here, there are five of us, we get away two or three times a year. We go offsite, and we talk about bigger picture stuff, longer-term stuff. For the last couple of years, I mean, we went through a really strong period in the industry between about 2010 and the end of 2016. Up to about 2015, 2016, complacency was a major issue we would discuss at those meetings. We're asking ourselves, what are we missing about how we can set ourselves up to maintain this really positive environment for our industry? We wrecked our brain.
Andrew Spencer: Now, the industry, since the start of last year, has been in a lot of difficulty because we had an oversupply of pigs and the prices collapsed. We think back now, how did we miss that, and what could we have done to avoid that? There's no simple answer, but it's a question we will continue to ask ourselves even as we come out of these present industry difficulties about how we could have acted to have either made the downturn less imposing on the industry or not occur at all.
Zoë Routh: Did you come up with the answer to that? Were there signals out there in the environment? When you did your environmental scan, could you look back and say, "We missed this particular signals," or did it just catch you out of the blue.
Andrew Spencer: It caught us pretty much out of the blue. I think there were a couple of trigger incidents that happened in our industry, and there were things we couldn't predict, like a fire, a fire at a major processing plant that limited capacity. Then pigs have to be held back on farm for a bit longer. They grew bigger. By the time they're eventually processed, there was more pork in them than what would have normally been expected. There were a number of different things that led to this happening, but none of them, if they hadn't happened, would've avoided it happening. It was going to happen anyway.
Andrew Spencer: We look back now. We can explain it in the statistics, but the statistics we have now, we didn't have then. One of the major things that we missed was that the productivity of our farms have improved enormously. Looking forward, it was very hard to predict that that was going to happen. That led to a lot of the oversupply problems that we've had in the last couple of years.
Zoë Routh: It was difficult to predict productivity on the farms, why? Because the individual farmers were doing their own innovations to increase productivity, is that what you mean?
Andrew Spencer: Well, the good times led to a lot of investment on farms. The quality of the sheds and the temperature controls for the animals improved a lot. We were sort of assuming that the general productivity increase would continue as a straight line, but it actually tipped up quite a bit. Some of that was due to that investment happening on the properties and improving the infrastructure, and some of it happened due to better genetics, which genetics is handled through the private companies. That was one that was almost impossible to predict, but it has happened. Looking backwards, we can now see that quite clearly.
Zoë Routh: I know that in the work that you did prior to the downturn, the most recent downturn, you looked at different scenarios in the future of the pork sector, mostly around legislation of imports and that kind of stuff, and that was one of the factors that you guys looked at. In doing that kind of scenario planning, you hadn't anticipated pork prices collapsing in whatever the drivers were?
Andrew Spencer: Well, the industry does have a habit of going through a cycle every seven to 10 years.
Zoë Routh: Okay.
Andrew Spencer: I've seen two of those cycles in my time here. One happened in 2007, 2008. We lost about 300 producers, and that's a bit number in our industry.
Zoë Routh: Yeah.
Andrew Spencer: Prices collapsed, and we eventually, because all those producers went out, our supply collapsed as well, and that led to prices coming back, and they went to very high levels. We now have similar situation in the last couple of years. Of course, we ask ourselves, what can we actually do to reduce the impact of this roller coaster that we go through every 10 years? The funny thing with markets is that they're not driven by logic. They're driven by human emotion.
Andrew Spencer: There's a lot of numbers and analysis that goes into a pool of information that people look at, but at the end of the day, they make a judgment that's based on their gut feel. That sentiment is actually what drives markets. Some of the decisions that are made clearly lead to these cycles. Understanding the role that we can play to reduce the volatility has been an extremely difficult process. We still haven't go there.
Andrew Spencer: We rely on good, timely, perfect information to get to market for sound business decisions to get made, but there's always a lag between the point the of the decision and the consequence of the decision. That lag is often happening in parallel for many, many decisions. It leads to a situation at the end of it that you might not have been able to predict.
Zoë Routh: Yeah. It's definitely dealing with leading in volatility, complexity, uncertainty, that whole VUCA thing is definitely something that, as an industry leader, you need to contend with all the time. What would be your advice to your successor around that? What would have been the key insights and lessons you've taken in your 13 years, and will be 14 by the time you leave, that you can hand over to the next person at the helm?
Andrew Spencer: Well, the ability of the industry to manage itself and for the market to be healthy does still depend on very good information. My advice would be don't take your foot off the gas on getting really good information, and make that information go forward. Do the surveys that produce your intentions, that sort of thing, to understand what's happening with supply. The second bit of advice I leave him, which is probably-
Zoë Routh: Or her.
Andrew Spencer: ... or her, good point, which is probably we didn't do as well as we could have would be to continually talk about history, continually talk about what has happened and that many of these downturns have happened in an environment where they were totally unpredictable so that people have the right respect for what has gone on in the past that will temper the aggression, maybe, or moderate to a certain extent, their growth aspirations, or the things that they decide to do in their business, that they have the right level of risk understanding in their brains, going around all of those various decisions that they've got to make. That's something maybe we could've done a lot more of, just talk about history, and make sure people don't forget the really important lessons that we've learned in the past.
Zoë Routh: I think that it's a really important business insight there because when things are good, we assume and hope that they'll just continue to grow in an upward direction. We forget. We seem to have a little memory erased that, yeah, business doesn't go in an upward trajectory. It goes in an oscillation, up and down. When we're in those drops, we just don't want everyone to stay there. All we want to do is get out of them. I think that's a really useful piece of business advice for your industry, but also more broadly, as a business principle.
Zoë Routh: I don't think it's ... As a business person, you need to work with your level of risk and have your buffers around that. I think that sort of preventative measure or just in case stuff for rainy day preparation is really critical. That's around preparing the business and your successor for that key educational point. What about culture? I mean, I've worked with you and team over the years, a couple of times around bringing your team together and building a culture. I know culture is really important to you. What is your philosophy and approach to dealing with culture here in the organisation?
Andrew Spencer: I see culture as a consequential phenomenon of behaving in a way that's consistent to your values. We have strong values around being dedicated to our producers and being reliable and recognising people for their achievements and respecting our colleagues, but understanding the directions we're going to take, and we have a very clear and formal disciplined planning process around the strategy we believe is the right one for the industry, making sure that everyone is clear of their role in that strategy by giving them the right resources to be able to do it, and making sure that we have the right capabilities and skills in the organisation.
Andrew Spencer: All of these things and measuring everything we do and reporting back and talking to people. Hopefully, at the end of all that, you have a company that has a very strong and good culture. It's also about the people that you employ. It's not that you employ good versus bad people, it's that you employ people who fit in with the aspirations of the organisation and with the personality, to a certain extent, of the organisation.
Andrew Spencer: We've had some people that we've employed who are very capable people and who have, potentially, a lot to add to the organisation, but for one reason or another, they actually don't fit with who we are, and that's not a criticism of him. It's probably a criticism of our recruitment success. We've worked very hard to make sure this doesn't happen too often. It's an interesting observation that you can have these very smart people who actually just don't really fit with the way you do things internally. It's not that they're good or bad. It's just that they're not for the job you've got.
Zoë Routh: How would you describe the company organisational culture here? You said that it has a personality. How do you describe the personality of APL?
Andrew Spencer: Well, I can describe how I would like it to be. I hope it is, but it's really a question that, for me, if you really want to know, you shouldn't ask the CEO. You should ask the people out in the floor, but I would like to think it's fairly relaxed culture. It's not very hierarchical. It's very open and transparent. It's reflected in that, hopefully, I keep my door open. If anyone's wondering past may want to drop in, then they're always welcome, that we'll always listen rather than talk, and that people are comfortable to be able to have a go and sometimes that doesn't work out, but they're not going to be punished for having a go. I'd like to think that's what our culture is.
Zoë Routh: It does sounds like a great culture, so how does someone not fit into that? They like something more formal, or what was it? Do you remember what the personality conflict was like?
Andrew Spencer: I'll give you an example. Sometimes, people come from the public service, and they expect us to work like the public service, and they can be very good people. We don't work like the public service. We don't measure the time that everyone spends sitting at their desk.
Zoë Routh: Oh, it's like time sheets and stuff like that.
Andrew Spencer: Timesheets, that sort of thing. People are expected to manage that for themselves, and they're trusted to do that for themselves. We don't have a very formalized process of promotion and development. It's a process that's driven by performance and individuals. You might imagine that someone coming straight out of the public service walking into a relaxed APL type atmosphere where we'd like to think it's a more human system, that it's not going to meet their expectations necessarily.
Zoë Routh: Well, it's less structured, I guess.
Andrew Spencer: Very much.
Zoë Routh: I know that in the public service, there is definitely career tracks and milestones, and it very, very delineated in terms of what you can do and where you can go and what the rules are around that. Yeah, you're right. It's something more organic, like APL, which is more relaxed, as you called it. That can be discombobulating for folks who are used to being very black and white in terms of what's acceptable and what's not.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah. That's true.
Zoë Routh: 13 years, long time, you've had lots of really great successes. The boards kept you around, so you can't be too bad.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, I know. You'll have to ask them.
Zoë Routh: What have been some of your key failures?
Andrew Spencer: There's plenty of failures, and I can't think of any in particular, but the trick with failures is, is that you need to try and manage them so that they don't have a massive impact on the organisation. You need to have failure. Failure is a fantastic opportunity to learn and to grow for all of the organisation. I always throw the adage around being a skier, as you are, throw it around that if you're not falling over, you're not trying hard enough. If you're not failing, you're not flying over. The trick is to manage failure so that it does not have a catastrophic impact on the organisation, so corral it.
Andrew Spencer: As an example, we spend a lot of money on marketing. Whenever someone comes up with new idea about if we spend money on this particular medium, in this particular region, we think it'll work better than what we've done in the past. There are many ways you can measure that now, but we don't want to risk the whole lot of their marketing budget, so we do it in maybe one state for a couple of months, and then we can have a look at the results.
Andrew Spencer: Then you can compare that to what we would've otherwise done. You can make a judgment about whether that's worked or not. If that's a failure, that's still a major learning. That's basically saying, "Don't do that. That's not a good idea." If it's not a failure, of course, then we can recalibrate what we do nationally to take advantage of that change.
Zoë Routh: I love it. That's like taking experimenter's view of the world, basically. Let's have a hypothesis. Let's test it. Let's get some information and make judgments based on that. A failure is just more information about what worked or what did.
Andrew Spencer: Absolutely.
Zoë Routh: Stacey Barr would love that. You know her work with PUMP, which is performance measurement specialist, and she's all about evidence-based leadership. I love that. Taking failure as a key insight tool.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah.
Zoë Routh: What have been your highlights?
Andrew Spencer: I think I've been blessed to work with a really strong and good chairman for many years, from the time I've been here. That's Enzo Allara. He recently retired at the end of June. Working with Enzo was just a real struck of luck for me because I don't think there's a lot of CEOs who get to work with someone who's as capable and who you can learn as much from as Enzo. Enzo came from the food industry. He used to be the chairman and managing director of Unilever Australia, and he's worked around the world with Unilever.
Andrew Spencer: He thought us as an industry that we're not pig farmers. We're actually pork producers. We're part of the food industry. He's taught not to be focused on what we do on our farm only, but to think about the impact that our product has on our consumers and the consumption of the product and what our consumers expect. They want our product to be affordable, and we can help them with that by being more productive. It's not all they want. They want our product to be high quality, and they want to be proud to purchase our product that it meets their expectations of good behaviour around how that product ends up on the supermarket shelf.
Andrew Spencer: If you change your view as to what we do from being a pig farmer to a pork producer, it's a subtle change in wording, but it emphasizes the consumer. The consumer is, who I think, we now have a much greater respect for, and we've changed a lot of the things that we do in our farms to try and align them better with our consumers and to align them better, frankly, with what the community expects.
Andrew Spencer: That means, not only are we more sustainable as an industry, but we're giving our consumer a product that they would prefer over some of the competition, and we do compete with important pork with things like bacon and ham because we are doing things that we believe are more aligned with how they would prefer that we did them. In a general sense, we've done a few things in that area that would be really powerful to the industry. I believe they paid back for the industry, and they've certainly made our industry, well, proud of how they go about their business.
Zoë Routh: I think that's a really, really important insight. Thinking about the industry, I've never heard anybody and the people I've met in the industry that call themselves a pig farmer. You're right. It's been pork producer. It's not something that you're consciously aware of as a newbie into the industry, listening to that, but it does have a subtle connotation that it's professional and that it's part of something greater than simply raising animals. That's part of the larger ecosystem of value and supporting people's lives and lifestyles. Yeah, that's a really fascinating point.
Zoë Routh: The other thing that I think was interesting so far about our conversation, so great to have Enzo's insight like that, and little subtle insights can have a big cultural impact across an industry. The other insight you had about systems producing different cultures. Coming back to the example of the public service having a structured system in terms of how people work and are recognised and so on versus a more relaxed version produces two completely different kinds of culture. It's not often that we make those things visible or obvious, and yet, those are things that drive so much of our attention or synergy in an organisation. Spence, what's next, right? You got months, yeah, to go.
Andrew Spencer: I've got 10 months to go. Yeah.
Zoë Routh: You have lots of notice.
Andrew Spencer: It's pretty weird when I tell everyone I'm leaving 10 months before it's actually going to happen, but I did that because I want my board to have plenty of time to find my successor.
Zoë Routh: The staff could plan a really good party.
Andrew Spencer: Yup. Yeah, of course, and it gives me enough time to think about, well, what do I want to do next, and to start to take some steps towards whatever it is. I don't know what that's going to be. I mean, my choices are pretty clear, I'll take another job or I take a couple of directorships if I'm able to pull some of those, do a bit of contracting, project work maybe. That's what I've got to work out the next few months. You'd be really proud of me, Zoë, because I was at a networking event this morning, and I've signed up to another on in December.
Zoë Routh: I know how you love networking.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, but I know I've got to do that sort of thing, and to make contact, and to understand what opportunities are out there. That's going to be a very necessary part of it. I've got to work that out.
Zoë Routh: I'm just curious now. You've been CEO of one organisation for a long time. Would you want to be a CEO again?
Andrew Spencer: I think in a perfect world, no. People have jokingly asked me that one of the other rural research and development corporation has just lost their CEO. That's the Meat & Livestock Australia in Sydney. People are going, "You'll be able to do that job now." I'm thinking, "No." I mean, that's out of the frying pan into the fire. That's even probably more stressful than this job. You shouldn't be scared of a bit of a stress, but I think the stresses that come with being a director of an organisation are quite different.
Andrew Spencer: You get a lot more time to be able to deal with them, and you do have a very different role within the organisation, more of a steward than an actual operator. That appeals to me at this stage of my career. I think I've got something to offer there but, of course, the market has to decide that. That appeals at this stage a lot more than just getting out there again being that guy full of adrenaline every Monday morning to start the week and get out there and push myself again. That's a different thing.
Zoë Routh: It is an enormous amount of energy to be CEO of an organisation. You're right. As we grow and evolve as leaders, we're looking to different kinds of challenges. You kind of nailed this CEO thing for a little while, even if it's a different sector. It's a similar recipe with different challenges, I'm guessing. In looking forward to board roles, which are huge, huge opportunities and huge ... What do you think the shift in leadership is going to be? What's the difference between, in your mind, between being a CEO and a board member, and what the opportunities are in leadership there.
Andrew Spencer: Yeah, so boards, by definition, are much more interested in things like strategy and governance, and they've got to be all over the financials, whereas CEOs, they're operating much more to deadlines and tasks and operations and people. People management is probably the key difference that you are much more focused on the vagaries of what's going on with your team.
Andrew Spencer: For me, when I'm paid once a month, I look at that paycheck and I think, "Most of that is about people. Most of that is because they reckon that I can handle the people issues," because the other issues, a lot of other people can do that stuff, but the people is really where you are earning your bucks, for me. Operations is all about that. The day to day management of people is the big difference, I think, with the director role versus an operational role.
Zoë Routh: It's fascinating to hear you say that because I think people often think that CEO role is all about strategy and delivering results. Yes, that's a key responsibility, and then the real mastery, the skill is, as you say, in the people side. What's been your key insight in learning ... What have you learned most about people in the 13-year journey?
Andrew Spencer: I think having lived overseas and being exposed to all those different cultures and different languages, I mean, the first time I could speak a new language, I felt that I just discovered a new world. It's like another dimension because you find yourself dreaming in another language. All of a sudden, you're aware of these places that you never knew existed that you can go to, another language opens the door to another world.
Andrew Spencer: Those opportunities to live overseas makes you realise that people are different. There's nothing good or bad about that. They're just different. Let diversity brings with it amazing differences in skills and talents, so the real, I guess, the real challenge of being a good leader is to put a variety of different people together and have them work together in a way that emphasizes their strength and doesn't emphasize their weaknesses, and covers their weaknesses. For me, that's the biggest learning. I mean, when you start out straight out of uni, you are the centre of the universe for you. The way you do things is-
Zoë Routh: I'm glad you moved on from that.
Andrew Spencer: I hope I have. The way you do things is the best way to do it. What you realise over time is that there's a hundred ways to skin a cat, and they're all good ways, and that you need to understand and be tolerant to other people's abilities and trust them. Once you come to that position, you can delegate and trust other people to get on and do it with your support rather than you having to look over their shoulder. That's a big jump for a lot of managers.
Zoë Routh: Yeah, you're right. It is. It's one of the ones that I work with extensively for new leaders. That's a big one. I know I can trust myself. How can I trust them? It's all about the delegation skill and helping the others learn the skill themselves as well. All right, so one last question. When you were part of the Leader's Edge Mastermind, I sent you a book every month. You complained viscously about it. Out of, not necessarily out of the books I sent you, but what is a great leadership book that you've read that you could recommend?
Andrew Spencer: Well, I presume that we have to disclose at this point that I've read nearly all of your books, Zoë.
Zoë Routh: Nearly? Which one haven't you read?
Andrew Spencer: I haven't finished Loyalty yet. I'm not a great reader of leadership books or management books because the way I de-stress is to go home and not think about that stuff, but I have read a few, and I've read some of the ones that you've sent me. Some of them haven't been touched much. I can't even remember the one that I read that I quite liked. It's by your red-headed mate with the beard.
Zoë Routh: Oh, Dr. Jason Fox, How To Lead A Quest.
Andrew Spencer: Yes, it's got Nordic dogs and dragons and things in it. I can't remember what it's called.
Zoë Routh: It's called How To Lead A Quest.
Andrew Spencer: How To Lead A Quest, yeah. I think that had a lot of interesting tools, really, in there about how to do certain things and how to change your frame around how you see certain things. That would be one of my favourites that I'd recommend.
Zoë Routh: Yeah. It's beautifully written. He is quite quirky, and he is masterful with language. It's one of my favourites too. All right. I like that you'd recommend that. I'll put that as a note in the podcast show notes, which will be at zoerouth.com/podcast/spence, S-P-E-N-C-E. We'll have a link to that with the transcript and with that book recommendation. Andrew, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insight and the afternoon with me.
Andrew Spencer: Thanks for being interested in it, Zoë.
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Related episodes leadership journey:
E176 - The Biggest Mistake CEOs Make - with Author Mike Goldman
E135 - Culture is Everything - Reward Behaviour AND Results - with CEO Craig Dower
E134 - My Biggest Failure Was Needing to be Right - Marene Allison, CISO Johnson & Johnson
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About your host, Canberra leadership expert Zoë Routh:
Zoë Routh is one of Australia’s leading experts on people stuff - the stuff that gets in our way of producing results, and the stuff that lights us up. She works with the growers, makers, builders to make people stuff fun and practical.
Zoë is the author of four books: Composure - How centered leaders make the biggest impact, Moments - Leadership when it matters most, Loyalty - Stop unwanted staff turnover, boost engagement, and build lifelong advocates, and People Stuff - Beyond Personalities: An advanced handbook for leadership. People Stuff was awarded Book of the Year 2020 by the Smart WFM Australian Business Book Awards.
Zoë is also the producer of The Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast.