About

This is a question I’ve posed to thousands of people, and I always mentioned Hans Levander. So this is the first time that I can actually say what made him so special for me as a leader. It’s a combination of things. Hans was both visionary and strategic. He could really develop big pictures. He was Senior Vice President for Technology in all of power generation for ABB. So influencing the work of about 40,000 people. He could develop big pictures about where we needed to go in the industry and work together with people to develop the strategies about how to get there. He was excellent at doing that. Another aspect of him was he was not just supportive of his people. He was protective. If anybody was attacking his people, he would defend them 100%. If there was anything to be sorted out about what the person had done to warrant the attack that would be done in private, but not in public. He was a very clear communicator. He could get his ideas across very well and very simply. The room understood what he was saying and what he was looking for. He could also be very demanding. He set high standards for us, but did it in a very congenial manner so that people were more than happy to strive to deliver those high standards. And a final thing I’d mention about him is, he was open to ideas from other people. He didn’t think he had the whole story. The first time I went on a trip with him, I was just a research engineer at the time. We were talking at dinner and I told him about a book I was reading, Maverick by Ricardo Selmer. And the way I explained the book, I found out later it got him so interested he went out and he bought a copy of the book for everybody on his team and got them to read it, which really surprised me. So, he was an all around good guy.

I had many influences early in my life, but the key moment came in my final undergraduate year. I was going through a pretty difficult patch in life outside of college at the time and my confidence levels were pretty low, I have to admit. We had this visiting Professor Simeon Ola Fatunla from the university of Benin in Nigeria, who was a guest professor for a year. He was teaching us numerical analysis and I met him on the stairwell in the mathematics building in Trinity one day when I had just come back from taking an entrance exam for Irish Life, which was the biggest employer of mathematicians in the country at the time. He said, “I didn’t see you at the lecture this morning, where were you?” And I told him about this exam I’d just taken and the jobs they were doing. He exploded in anger and started screaming at me, “this is a complete waste of talent! You’re much better than anything like that! You have to do a PhD!” That really cut through to me and I thought, “oh, maybe I could actually do this.” Because of my confidence levels I’d gone off the idea of doing it, and he gave me the final push I needed. But not only me, I found out later that he was a great evangelist for mathematics across all of west Africa for numerical mathematics and did an awful lot of work on that. He died, unfortunately, very young. The story closes back in 2010 when I was running an EMBO course in Cambridge. I saw that there was an Ola Fatunla on the participant list and I wondered if they were related. It turned out that they were cousins. So that was pretty cool.

The number one book—and I’ve also recommended it to many of my coaching clients—is Awareness by Anthony de Mello. It’s a great book for learning to reflect about oneself and develop an awareness for what’s going on around and, more importantly, what’s going on inside. That’s a book I’ve read many times and I always get something new from it. Running at a close second would be Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. He was a great mythologist. This book was basically his PhD thesis from 1940. It was he who showed us the structure behind all the great stories—that they have certain building blocks that they all contain and they can really help us when we reflect on these stories and take a look at our own lives, to help us to understand ourselves and other people a lot better.