I still remember standing in the car park at Tullamarine (Melbourne) airport about 35 years ago. The carpark was in those days still a large gravel area. A colleague and I had just returned from Sydney after running extrusion trials on a new alloy with greater hardness and strength than many of the existing aluminium alloys. The trials had had some success that day and some issues. We met our boss’s boss and the big cheese in the carpark. So we stood there in the gathering dark at the end of the day debriefing about the trials of this new alloy. If the alloy was successful it would have a wide range of applications and expand the company’s income.

“How did it go” asked the big cheese. My colleague, who was the lead in the project, said “well we ran into a few problems”. The big cheese’s body language said it all – not good news at all. I thought to myself this will never do and piped up “we managed to double the speed at which the alloy extruded”. And you could see the big cheese and the boss’s boss happy to hear there was positive momentum towards achieving the requirements for the new alloy. What I learned that day was what you say and how you say it is really important. 

When I, together with my colleagues in the Asset Management Think Tank reviewed our experiences in asset management and in case studies, one of the key factors in the longer term failure of asset management initiatives was not creating the understanding and incentive for change outside a small section or part of the organisation. And one of the key reasons for this is not understanding the importance of communicating to different organisational elements of your company in a way that’s appropriate for the people within that element. Understanding this and communicating effectively is a vital part of personal leadership.