For Josh Lewsey, winning at sport is comparatively simple. It’s winning at business that’s more of a challenge. “When you work in a sports environment the currency of performance is pretty straightforward. You compete on tries, goals or such like in order to win or lose.”
However, “businesses are more complex, multidimensional environments with many factors and potentially [different] agendas that may have differing opinions of what constitutes performance and success”. Therefore trying to succeed at business can be a bit like “playing a game on a pitch that changes shape”.
Lewsey may be one of the few people truly qualified to make this comparison.His name and face will already be familiar to rugby union fans from his days as a Wasp and a member of England’s winning World Cup team in 2003. Less well-known, but no less impressive, is his success off the field.
By 2009, when he quit professional rugby and joined PwC as a management consultant, he’d already graduated from Bristol University, completed a postgraduate diploma in law and been commissioned as a British army officer. Also an INSEAD business school alumnus and possessing an executive MBA from Imperial College London, he’s now located in Hong Kong. After almost five years as a strategy and transactions partner with EY-Parthenon, he’s recently been appointed CEO of Teneo Value+ in Asia-Pacific and also professor of leadership at The University of Law Business School.
It might seem incongruous to have had two seemingly contrasting careers but, in fact, Lewsey sees his past as being in the pursuit of a single goal: “I now see there’s been just one spine through my life. From competing against my brothers, to playing sports, being in the military and then business – it’s the idea of ‘leading performance’.”
Rather than being completely different worlds, he feels that leadership in sport, the military and business exists on a “fluid spectrum”, and whilst having differing languages and currency of performance, he draws on these experiences and considers the mindset similar.
“I’ve been around some amazing and, indeed, some rather ineffective leaders in my life – in some successful environments and some unsuccessful ones. It’s all about learning from those ups and downs, so you can take an organisation, formulate a coherent strategy and then execute effectively.”
His current role at Teneo Value+ involves working with private capital investors and company CEOs to create value by identifying opportunities, financially quantifying these and executing against them. While opportunities differ for each client, he finds the problem in optimising value often lies in misalignment or a lack of multidisciplinary skills.
“Many business schools develop people for finance, operations or other such technical verticals but when you get to be a CEO, the skills you require all come together. I see many CVs where graduates are super bright, with amazing technical skills in one dimension, but they often lack the ability to apply a holistic lens to problem solving, or aren’t able to see a company from a rounded perspective,” says Lewsey.
That’s where his work with The University of Law comes in. He hopes his role will help students understand the need for a cross-disciplinary approach earlier in their careers. “The University of Law is in a unique place because it has corporate governance at the heart of what it does, which pulls together a range of skills – leadership, strategy and financial performance for example – that are only usually brought together in the position of the CEO. So making sure the university builds its criteria and curriculum to develop this is really important, not just in terms of optimising a company’s short-term performance but also in factoring in governance for longer-term value creation.”
Lewsey, whose mother was a teacher and whose father came from an agricultural background, feels fortunate that he’s been able to channel his talents into the competitive world of global finance. “A grammar school boy, I had no clue when I left school,” he says. It was his professional rugby career that freed him up to study subjects that interested him. “You only play 80 minutes of rugby a week, so the rest of the time you can play PlayStation, or you can do other things,” he says. “I always enjoyed learning although there wasn’t an end stage in my mind at that time.”
As he’d gone to the University of Bristol on a military bursary, in the first few years as a graduate this extra time was focused on his army training and then a two-year military commission. Later, it included establishing a leadership development company and capital markets investing as well as the further education that led him to find a passion in organisational performance.
Having discovered his niche, he’s particularly excited to be shaping tomorrow’s business leaders. “In the future, the what and the why may stay the same, but the how is changing: through digitisation, working from home and different ways of working. As this evolves, it’s important that the leaders of tomorrow have rounded skill sets so they can lead across cultures, geographies, languages, jurisdictions – motivating disparate individuals to a common aim.”
The leaders of the future will be able to take inspiration from Lewsey’s story – one of hard work and perseverance. His advice for the next generation: “Be long-term, rather than short-term, greedy. There’s no fast-track to being as good as you can be, but you’ll get there eventually if you work hard enough.”
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