Malcolm Turnbull went to the annual dinner of the Business Council of Australia with a clear message for corporate Australia: you need to rethink your management culture if it is rigid and unyielding.
Business returned the favour with its own feedback: thank you for ending the Abbott era.
In a speech on Thursday night that traversed Turnbull’s now familiar themes – optimism, pragmatism, agility, consensus-building on economic and tax reform – the prime minister ventured some more broad-ranging advice for the suits.
Forelock tugging needs to end.
“We need to be prepared at every stage to say the way we did things yesterday, or last week, is not the way we will do them in the future,” the prime minister said.
“That means organisations need to be much less hierarchical, they cannot be blame-based,” he said. “You have to, as chief executives or senior executives; you’ve got to encourage the people that work for you to challenge you.
“You’ve got to ensure that you’re always testing existing practices. You know, the old phrase ‘not invented here, we’ve always done it that way’ is disastrous.
“It’s always important to be cautious, of course, but in a disruptive age of rapid change, deference, if overdone, can be death from a corporate point of view. Change is rapid. We’ve got to treat volatility as our friend, not as our foe.”
Business also traversed familiar territory. BCA chief Catherine Livingstone used Turnbull’s appearance at her function to argue for a reduction in the corporate tax rate.
But it wasn’t all formulaic.
The BCA usually characterises its public interventions with abundant caution, but the Turnbull-mandated era of excitement is clearly contagious. The prime minister secured this effusive welcome and endorsement.
“In just seven weeks in the role, the impact you have had on national sentiment is almost unparalleled,” Livingstone said of the new man in the prime ministerial suite.
“You have given us the permission to have conversations about things that matter to people, and helped, through your own example, to make those conversations positive,” she said.
“For some time now, the business council has been trying to start a conversation around fostering an innovation-capable economy to drive the next decade of growth and job creation.
“We now have permission to build on what we have been saying.”
