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Who knew creating a YouTube video for a fund manager would create a moment of communication epiphany? It happened just this week …
I have had the pleasure this past few weeks of working with a highly talented fund manager who has relentlessly pursued a single passion over the past 14 years.
The guy is a boutique global equity manager, based in Sydney. His passion is to understand what makes global companies tick, pulling apart their financials, their business cases and the environments in which they operate. He buys long, he gets on planes to meet business chiefs. He is a patient, contrarian investor.
His fund has realised excellent risk adjusted returns since inception. He has added serious wealth for clients, and he eats his own investment cooking, so to speak. But that doesn’t drive him.
What drives him is the thrill of getting to the heart of the ‘why?’ of each and every company in which he buys stock.
Anyone who has read the 2009 book ‘Start with Why’ or watched the author Simon Sinek on his TED video will understand what I mean by this. For those who have not, here’s a link.
Anyway, back to my client the fund manager. We are working on producing a series of short videos together. This has required many hours sitting in a room pulling apart his own ‘why?’: never an easy thing to do, especially for oneself.
My job in this process is to help tease out and capture the words, concepts and ideas tumbling at pace from my client who is himself a business person, entrepreneur, passionate investor, storyteller … among other things.
And at one point in this highly intensive process, after paraphrasing and adding a few touches of my own to his personal words, his message, and repeating them back, the guy turns to me and says: “hey you are masterful, I have no idea how you do what you do. You capture the essence so well, that is a true gift!”
I naturally agree. No, actually, I am a little taken aback.
And I say: “Well, I say the same about you. I have watched you pore over spreadsheets, talking on the phone to analysts, watching markets in different time zones, filtering immeasurable numbers, statistics and data … you too are totally masterful at what you do and the numbers prove it!”
Rather than that being an awkward moment of weird mutual appreciation between two grown men, it was a rather useful point of reflection about the power of being congruent.
Each of us doing what we do best as our passion, being conscious of the essence of our individual ‘why?’ (for me, that means getting to the core of the message, helping clients better convey it, and putting concepts into words that are at once economical, expressive and essential.)
So the point of this?
The point was an important lesson in the fundamental building blocks of great communication. As Sinek and others have taught us: inspirational stuff happens once we connect with our ‘why’? Communication which effects change and alters how people think, feel and act is a valuable by-product of that connection.
Each of us is now eagerly awaiting the video shoot.
