Transition time

Yes, it has been quiet on the blog. Too quiet in fact and here is some back­ground infor­ma­tion as to why and what’s being done about it.

Back­ground

“Peo­ple are con­cerned about your blog.” In the hushed world of bank­ing, this was a clear sign that I was in trou­ble. Peo­ple didn’t like my blog and it could become a career issue. At issue was the fact that I had an iden­tity out­side of the cor­po­ra­tion and peo­ple were wor­ried that what I was talk­ing about on my site would be asso­ci­ated with the cor­po­ra­tion in spite of my specif­i­cally men­tion­ing that all opin­ions on this site are my own.So I was left with a cou­ple of options: be quiet and keep pro­gress­ing my career or find a place that would be more friendly to my blog­ging. I tried the for­mer but, as more and more sto­ries popped up, I found it harder and harder to be quiet. I wanted to com­ment, I wanted to write but I had to bal­ance that against the idea of being gain­fully employed in what was an oth­er­wise good job.At the same time, I was get­ting a lit­tle antsy. I wasn’t happy with the work­load. I was also think­ing that I needed a change of scenery since I’d been at the firm for a long (in my view) time. I didn’t want to become a lifer and my options in terms of career growth were to move to Lon­don or Hong Kong, both open options but nei­ther really appe­tiz­ing to me. I wanted to stay in New York and I wanted out of finance. The goal became to restore a good work/life bal­ance, to con­tinue being cre­ative and to be given enough flex­i­bil­ity in terms of what I could do in my pri­vate life.So I started putting out feel­ers to see if there were ways for me to grace­fully get out and find some­thing more in line with my media background.Why did I want to go back to media?In order to answer this, I have to give newer read­ers a lit­tle back­ground about me. I’ve been involved in the media space since the early 90s and in the inter­net com­mer­cial media space since pretty much its incep­tion. It is, and has always been my first love.

Why I went into finance

When I went to the bank­ing side of the world, the attrac­tion was two-fold:

• one, I wanted to learn more about money flow and how money moved around the world once you had sent it to a credit card clearinghouse.
• two, I wanted to work on large scale global project because they seemed much more chal­leng­ing and there­fore more interesting.

Along the way, I learned a whole lot of things. Six years in the finan­cial world taught me how to prop­erly man­age global projects in a widely dis­trib­uted envi­ron­ment. They also made me more under­stand­ing of the need for strong project man­age­ment, the issues around reg­u­la­tions and a lot of legal stuff that I was aware of but had never expe­ri­enced first-hand.All said, it was a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence that made me a stronger project man­ager and allowed me to really under­stand how large orga­ni­za­tions work and how to work within them. It also allowed me to mature as a man­ager. I have to admit that when I joined the bank, I may have been a good startup guy but I was not equipped with the proper skills to work in an orga­ni­za­tion with hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple. Through a mix of great men­tor­ing, amaz­ing edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties and lots of hands-on expe­ri­ence, the bank allowed me to acquire skills few peo­ple have.In this process, I also learned that trans­ac­tion flows were actu­ally rel­a­tively sim­ple to under­stand, once you had prop­erly dis­sected them and it gave me a cou­ple of insights as to the nature of money (more on that soon).Fast-forward to today and there are a num­ber of things on the hori­zon that gave me pause about the future of banking:

• Reg­u­la­tory con­straints have made banks hyper-conservative: this makes it very dif­fi­cult to try to do any­thing inno­v­a­tive within the con­text of a large finan­cial orga­ni­za­tion. The inno­va­tors gen­er­ally tend to be smaller more agile play­ers who don’t have as much to lose initially.
• The mort­gage cri­sis is just the begin­ning: In talk­ing with peo­ple who trade finan­cial instru­ments, it is becom­ing clear that no one really under­stands the mag­ni­tude of the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis. Peo­ple know it’s bad and expect it to get much much worse but no one has any idea as to how bad.
• Trans­ac­tions are easy to under­stand but much of the inno­va­tion in finance is actu­ally com­ing from non-financial actors. Mar­gins on money trans­fers are drop­ping as reg­u­la­tory costs are increas­ing and com­pe­ti­tion is increas­ing. At the same time, the real value of trans­ac­tions is not in the trans­ac­tions them­selves but in the meta­data asso­ci­ated with the transactions.

So look­ing at all this, I had to bal­ance whether I wanted to stay in bank­ing or do some­thing else. That was the easy deci­sion. The tough one was fig­ur­ing out what some­thing else would be.

Back to Media

I had options: with a sec­ond Inter­net renais­sance loom­ing, it seems that I could pretty much go to any star­tups. And, in putting out feel­ers, it was inter­est­ing to see how many were inter­ested. What they were inter­ested in were my abil­ity to under­stand large scale projects, my strong project man­age­ment back­ground, and my under­stand­ing of large scale trans­ac­tional systems.As they high­lighted those facts to me, it became clear that the bank­ing expe­ri­ence was a great entrée in any area. So I had to choose.Fortunately, I also had a good back­ground in media and the recent changes seem to line up with my think­ing and skills:

• Media is increas­ingly becom­ing about trans­ac­tion. For exam­ple, if one looks at the recent suc­cess of Google (an adver­tis­ing com­pany with a side busi­ness in search) and Face­book (and adver­tis­ing com­pany with a side busi­ness in lead man­age­ment), it is clear that media is all about facil­i­tat­ing more and more and smaller and smaller transactions.
• Cou­ple the pre­vi­ous point with the fact that most media is mov­ing to the mod­els that were estab­lished by the inter­net (or rev­enue is being siphoned from those media to the inter­net directly, as we’re see­ing with news­pa­pers) and it is clear that mar­ket­places will exist to medi­ate rela­tion­ships between buy­ers and sellers.
• Large media com­pa­nies could man­age this change but they are still beholden to the for­mats they have stakes in. We’re see­ing that with the music indus­try still think­ing it sells plas­tic CDs instead of of its con­tent, the movie indus­try think­ing the same and the print indus­try being wed­ded to its printers.
• Because of that, the change will have to come from an indus­try that is not weighted down by a par­tic­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion medium.
• Tra­di­tion­ally, the indus­try that sells mes­sag­ing and fig­ures out dis­tri­b­u­tion is the adver­tis­ing indus­try. Media buy­ing is the arm of that indus­try that is most likely to enact (and there­fore profit) from the change. Large media buy­ers are uniquely posi­tioned to help their cus­tomers present their mes­sage in a more effec­tive fash­ion across media and, due to the unique exper­tise they are accru­ing across media are also the best ones to under­stand where the mar­ket oppor­tu­nity may lie.

So with all that, let me get to the real announce­ment relat­ing to all this:

I HAVE LEFT HSBC AND WILL BE JOINING GROUPM ON DECEMBER 3rd. 

Who is GroupM? What will you do there?

GroupM is the media invest­ment arm of WPP, one of the (if not the) largest adver­tis­ing groups in the world. In other words, it’s exactly the place to be if you believe in and are inter­ested in the kind of change I high­lighted above.Thanks to the great for­ma­tion that HSBC has given me, I will be join­ing groupm as the project man­age­ment office direc­tor for the com­pany. In that capac­ity, I will head the company’s PMO and will work on a num­ber of really inter­est­ing ini­tia­tives. Based on my dis­cus­sions with the peo­ple there, I’m very excited about the oppor­tu­nity and it also looks like I’m join­ing a pretty amaz­ing team of very smart peo­ple (I hope I can help insure that the aver­age smarts are not low­ered by my presence).Also, I’ve worked closely with my new man­ager and the folks in H.R. to ensure that spe­cial pro­vi­sions have been made relat­ing to my blog­ging. The terms are fair to both sides and it will ensure that I can basi­cally start blog­ging again in my spare time. How­ever, I sus­pect that a lot of my blog­ging will go to more dis­cus­sions of the chang­ing nature of finance and money. The rea­son I had not writ­ten about that in the past is that, due to my work­ing in a finan­cial insti­tu­tion, I steered clear of any­thing that would relate to that world. But I did learn a lot about it and, more impor­tantly, I did develop a few the­o­ries about it that I have not seen writ­ten about in too many other places. Now that I’m freer to blog, I think I can start writ­ing more about it.At the same time, I might be more care­ful in my writ­ing about adver­tis­ing since that’s the world I’m mov­ing back into. Peo­ple hire me as much for my insights into a par­tic­u­lar indus­try as for my other skills and I want to make sure that the keener ones are kept as a pro­pri­etary advan­tage to any employer.

Con­clu­sion and Thank Yous

So there you have it. I’m mov­ing to groupm; I’m leav­ing HSBC.However, before I close this out, I’d like to add a few thank yous to the peo­ple I have worked with at HSBC:

• First, I’d like to thank Kevin New­man and Ray­mond Cheng for giv­ing me the ini­tial oppor­tu­nity. While both of them have moved to other parts of the orga­ni­za­tion, they were instru­men­tal in bring­ing me on board and they are respon­si­ble for my ini­tially join­ing and then stay­ing on much longer than I had ini­tially thought I would. Mark Mar­tinelli also pro­vided a fan­tas­tic guid­ing hand and a tremen­dous amount of spon­sor­ship that prob­a­bly ensured I’d stay on for an even longer period.
• I was also blessed with hav­ing to deal with a great man­age­ment team. Over the years, men­tor­ing by Rob Mian, Fred Hoysted, Gene Lavis, Bill McCloskey, and Mark Hib­bard helped me bet­ter under­stand my own strengths and weak­nesses and become a much more effec­tive manager.
• I was also very lucky to deal with under­stand­ing inter­nal cus­tomers like Larry Camp­bell, Daniel Hal­lac, Ian Haynes, Chris Walsh, Michael Art­ley, Joe Gar­ner, Jef­frey Hughes, Bahvya Shah, Julie Lakha, Matt Doo­ley, Joe Gar­ner, Julian Soper, Bev McArthur, Megan Heinze, Tom Can­non and Ver­ity Coe.
• Inter­nal friends worked hard to help me shape the best approach to prob­lem res­o­lu­tion and, while it is hard to get every sin­gle name rec­og­nized, I’d like to also thank Satin­der Sad­har, Simon Cox, Stew­art Nacht, Kelly Hair, Fer­nanda Cabas, David Ruiz, Serge Besch, Vadim Per­makoff, Venkat Lak­sh­mi­narayanan, Aditya Kom­maraju, Rajnish Jain, Amichai Licht­en­stein, Stu­art Bain, Pedro Cre­spo, Celia Bradley, Sarah Car­roll, Sreeni­vas Dug­gi­raala, Ains­ley Rattray,and many oth­ers… It’s amaz­ing that I could actu­ally do all this off the top of my head and a tes­ta­ment to the amount of really great peo­ple work­ing at HSBC these days…
• In 6 years, there are count­less oth­ers I’ve inter­acted with who have made me a much bet­ter per­son. They’ve seen me grow as an indi­vid­ual and as a man­ager, they’ve for­given some of my mis­takes and they’ve taught me impor­tant skills. I will miss one and all but, at the same time, I’m excited about the new chal­lenges com­ing ahead.

So look­ing back, it’s been a fan­tas­tic time at HSBC and I assume that it will be even bet­ter at groupm. There we have it, the big secret is out. I’m look­ing for­ward to the new chal­lenge and I’m sure the new job will keep me very chal­lenged and very busy but, at the same time, I’m also thrilled to be able to say that the blog will get more lively: I’m back baby and this time, I’m gonna stick around.…