Already a subscriber?Australia Post chief executive Paul Graham started working straight after high school and never had a career plan, which goes to demonstrate that having a plan, and not having a plan, can land executives in exactly the same place.
People will say that I move at a fast enough pace during the day that I probably get my steps up anyway.I try to. I travel quite a bit, but since COVID I’ve made a routine of going to the office. Part of that is just my own routine. I feel comfortable doing that.We’ve got a lot of real estate that’s sitting empty and we’re trying to encourage people to come back to the office and strike that balance between work from home and being present. It’s more about collaboration, not about productivity.
Someone had the faith that I could go and do that. It really opened my eyes to the Asian opportunity. So I think that was a really good turning point for my self-confidence. I used to go to India a lot and was thinking about how I could connect with the culture. So I’d read all the newspapers, all the gossip columns. Bollywood is huge, so I’d watch the Bollywood movies, which I love now, and that would be a fantastic talking point with a person in the warehouse, with a taxi driver, all the way up to the chairman.
But things happen, and you have good days and bad days, and you bring that home. I am conscious of the fact that it’s not fair, and I try to manage that. That’s something I think a lot of executives are challenged with, and we have to be mindful of it.I’m not a big party person. I’m an introvert by nature.Are you a big traveller?We were lucky that we lived as a family in Asia for a long time, so we were able to travel all of Asia.
I think it was good for my kids to grow up in a different environment and appreciate different cultures and both have turned into very global adults now, with a particular interest in food.When you travel now, are you very conscious to be at home for key dates? It’s good to worry about it, but sometimes you’ve got to put things into context. The reality is that life will take care of itself at the end of the day.