Boardroom Confidential with Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz

BENNETT MASON

Hello and welcome to Boardroom Conversations, a podcast from the Australian Institute of Company Directors. My name is Bennett Mason and thanks so much for joining us. And each episode will have candid conversations with some of Australia's top directors, leaders and experts, delving into their backgrounds and discussing many of the key issues that boards are grappling with today. I'm pleased to say our guest this time is Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz. She's a director with Macquarie Group, Rio Tinto, plus the chair of the Australian National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. She's also a trustee with the Sydney Opera House, a member of the Insead board and a Senate fellow at the University of Sydney. Of course, she's also a former chief executive of property developer Mirvac and the past president of Chief Executive Women. Susan, thanks so much for joining us.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Thanks for having me.

BENNETT MASON

Let's start by talking about your career. You've had these executive roles. You've now got a number of board positions. But looking back, what do you think were some of those pivotal moments that shaped your approach to leadership?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I think the first pivotal moment was actually a moment of serendipity. For my undergraduate degree, I wrote a thesis on the migration of Icelanders to Australia, and I'm sure you can understand that's fantastic career preparation. And when I finished my thesis, it suddenly occurred to me that I would need a job. And so, I called my supervisor. And that very day he'd had a call from Knight Frank, the real estate agency, and they were looking for a researcher. And I thought, I know nothing about real estate whatsoever, but I can research, I can write, I can analyse, went and got the job. And that set me off in the real estate industry for over 30 years, all over the world. So, one of those sliding door moments that sent me into an industry that I absolutely loved because of the eclectic nature of urban issues and the impact it has on real people's lives. So that was a sliding door moment. Another pivotal moment, I think it was very important to me, was when I decided that I was lacking in very basic business essentials and that I should get an MBA. Largely to do with my thesis on the migration to Iceland as being really good business preparation. So, I got into the business school Insead, which is based now in Fontainebleau and Singapore, then just in Fontainebleau. But I had no money and banks didn't lend to students who didn't have any assets in those days. And so I was working at Lendlease at the time, and I went to David Higgins, who was the chief executive at the time, and I said, please can I have 80,000 francs and I promise I will come back. And he said yes. It was the most extraordinary statement of faith and absolutely changed my life. I could not have gone on to do the roles that I was lucky enough to have post-MBA, if I had not had that education. So a huge moment of transformation in my life. And two more that I call out. One was during the GFC. I was living in London and I was made redundant. I was raising a special situations fund. One day we had $1 billion soft-circled, the next day Lehman went broke and we had nothing and I was made redundant. It was the first time I'd been out of work for any length of time. And it was quite disconcerting, but taught me not to confuse positional and personal, which is a lesson that has stood me in very good stead as I've gone through the rest of my career and understanding that work is not who I am. It's what I do. And then finally, the on the job learning of a major transformation at Mirvac over a decade really shaped how I saw the power of engagement, the power of leadership, the burden and privilege of a leadership shadow. It was as a searing leadership lesson.

BENNETT MASON

I imagine when you started writing that thesis about Icelanders moving to Australia, you never thought you would end up the chief executive of a large company like Mirvac?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

No, it never occurred to me, and I had no particular ambition to be a CEO. I was in London, and I recall the day the head-hunter called me to say they would be interested in the ASX 50 position. I was in John Lewis buying shoes for one of the children for school and I said “no thanks” and carried on buying the shoes. And three months later they called back and they said, “Look, the board really would like to speak to you. Would you please come?” And I thought, that doesn't knock on your door twice in your life. Very often, I really should pay attention, and came and met the board and decided that that was something that I thought I could add some value to. And there we go.

BENNETT MASON

What made you say “no” the first time when you were buying those shoes?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I was perfectly happy in London. I had three young children who were in great schools. We loved living in Europe. I had a great job at LaSalle, which I loved. I loved the culture of the organisation, and I had no particular ambition to be an ASX 50 CEO.

BENNETT MASON

And yet you did take on the role, you had very successful time at Mirvac, a major ASX listed company in Australia. After that, you transitioned to your current board positions. What lessons did you take from being the chief executive at Mirvac into those director roles that you have now?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Well, first thing I would say is, you positioned that as very successful, but it was really, really hard at the beginning. When I arrived at Mirvac, staff engagement was 37%. The market didn't appreciate how the board did the CEO transition, quite rightly, actually. They exited the previous CEO and installed me on the same day, which was a surprise. And markets don't like surprises. And I'd been out of the country for 20 years. So, the first bit was enormously challenging and it took some time to get momentum, but in the end was a very significant transformation. And ended up with staff engagement of 90% at the end of that period. But the things that I've taken into my board roles and advocacy roles is the centrality of purpose, that it has to go hand-in-glove with generating financial returns. Because most people don't get up in the morning and say, “I should go generate some EPS today.” Of course, companies have to do that. They're there to serve all stakeholders, but primarily their shareholders by generating appropriate returns. But it's not a galvanising mission for many people. The people of Mirvac do get up in the morning and think about the impact they're going to have on the world, and how they're going to change the environment for the better and leave the world a little better place than it was when we found it. So understanding the power of purpose and staff engagement in driving results is something that I'm now trying to apply in a different way in my role as directors. And as I said before, really having an understanding that you don't confuse the personal and the positional. A lot of things come to you as a CEO, and if you think that it's because of you, as soon as you stop being the CEO, you swiftly realise it isn't anything to do with you. It's to do with the position, because they rapidly attach themselves to the next person that is in that seat. So, a healthy perspective on who you are as a person is not what you do for a job.

BENNETT MASON

I think that's good advice for everyone. You've now made this transition from your executive career to board roles. What sort of mindset shift did you go through when moving from those executive positions into your non-executive roles?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

So when I was considering making the transition, I spoke to a lot of people who'd done that transition, and everybody gave me the counsel that it is very different perspective, and I slightly dismissed it all. “Yeah. Right. Fine. Of course.” And then about a year in, I was feeling slightly wobbly about the whole thing because it's quite a different experience. You're not in the business every day. You don't work with the same team every day. I'm outside my domain expertise, largely other than the Housing Council. So steep, steep learning curves and the role of board cannot be confused with the role of management. You can't drink the Kool-Aid. You're there to govern and to ensure that there is proper governance and that we are serving the stakeholders through the running of that business. And because boards meet infrequently the opportunities for human interaction and building trust, it takes a long time in comparison to being immersed as an executive in the company, particularly a company in crisis, which is a very galvanising experience. And I was feeling a little unsettled about this, and a friend of mine gave me a great analogy, and she said, “You've gone from this very scaffolded job where you knew everybody and they knew you, and there was a certain amount of love in both directions, and you knew the content cold. And now you're on six lily pads and you have to jump from one to the other, and they're all a bit wobbly.” And every time then thereafter, I felt that sense of unease. I would be, “This is okay. It's just the lily pads.” And so, understanding that shift of what the board is there to do and the different dynamic of human interaction at a board level compared to the executive is something that I continue to learn and is a definite mindset shift. And I would say that I don't miss being a CEO at all.

BENNETT MASON

Did you think you would?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

No. Because one day I just woke up and I thought, “I'm done. It's time for me to hand over to the next person.” And fortunately, we had excellent internal candidates at Mirvac and was delighted to be able to hand over to Campbell Hanan. But I knew I was done and I knew I didn't have another executive role in me, so I don't miss that at all. But I do miss a lot the tribal sense of belonging. When you work with one group of people every day, ten years on one mission, there's something very intimate and tribal about that, and I do miss that a lot.

BENNETT MASON

You miss parts of the chief executive role, I understand that. We talk a lot about board composition, the backgrounds of people who sit on boards. Now, what do you think it adds having a former chief executive on a board?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Bboards definitely need to be diverse, and they need to have people who've got a wide range of backgrounds. You need domain experts in the particular subject matter that you're dealing with. You need people who've got executive experience. You need people with governance experience. Now, the broader we can make our boardrooms, the better. And I think they are still too narrow, that we we've got a small pool of people and we tend to draw from people we know. And I've actually been surprised at some of the succession conversations in the boardroom. They’re a lot about, “Who do we know and do we think they're a good guy?” And there should be more to it than that, with a greater range of diverse backgrounds, experiences and opinions in the boardroom. So, a board full of chief executives wouldn't be very functional. But some chief executive experience is good because you understand the loneliness of the role of the CEO. And that's a good appreciation to have.

BENNETT MASON

I'll just ask you one final question about CEOs, and that's about CEO succession. This is something you raised a few moments ago. Picking the next chief executive is one of the board's most important roles. What do you think a successful CEO succession or transition looks like?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

It is absolutely the most important thing that that a board can do. And a successful transition starts way, way, way before you think you need a transition in building the pipeline of talent that is available to take that position. If you're looking for an internal candidate, which sometimes boards are, and sometimes they need an external candidate for particular reasons. But let's assume you're going for an internal candidate. For years you need to have been building the talent pipeline and ensuring that you have a diverse range of men and women who've got the required experience, to be considered for that role. And then for it to be in a methodical and planned process, well signaled to the market, and with a very transparent and open assessment process of the candidates that then can be whittled down to a shortlist and decided on by the board. We've actually just been through that with Rio Tinto in terms of CEO succession, and I think it was very well handled by the chair.

BENNETT MASON

Let's shift now to the business landscape, the corporate governance landscape. We're living in this time of tremendous uncertainty and tremendous change. What do you see as the hallmarks of an effective board in today's complex and often volatile environment?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

An effective board manages to get the balance between safe and challenging just right. If a board is too safe, too friendly if you like, not that I'm advocating an unfriendly environment at all, but too cozy is probably a better word. If it's too cozy, there's not enough challenge to management.

BENNETT MASON

Do you mean too cozy with each other, too cozy with management?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Both, I think. But particularly with management, there needs to be healthy respect for the roles of each. But too cozy takes the challenge out of the room. Too challenging and issues go underground and they don't get to the board. And there is an element of fear that comes into the board. And my experience of the Mirvac board in my ten years that I was there is that they did have a very good balance between safe and challenging. If anything went, not how I was expecting it to go, the first call I would make would be to the chair. And I felt completely safe in raising any issues, but I knew I was going to be challenged about what we were doing as management and what different perspectives we needed to bring, had we thought through all the issues. So that's one, making that balance between safe and challenging. And then determining how to spend the time, the limited time that a board has, in the boardroom and in the business. To the extent that you're in the business working out what to focus on. Particularly, I think, in financial services, how much time you spend on compliance and regulation. You could spend all your time on, on financial regulation, such is the complexity of it. But to do that would be to miss culture, to miss strategy, to miss major decisions. And so ensuring that there's the right amount of time on the various different elements that the board needs to oversee and govern, is something that needs quite deliberate attention. Otherwise, in the case of financial services, you just get consumed by compliance.

BENNETT MASON

Well, what's the answer there? How do you balance risk, oversight, compliance on one hand that on the other hand, growth, innovation, strategy.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I think it's an art. And in large part the chair has a very big hand in making sure that the agenda is shaped properly, that the board is spending the right amount of time on things, ensuring that the board gets out into the business to visit parts of the business that don't get into the boardroom, which is a really important part of what the board does. There is a limited amount of time that you're in that room or you're in the business and that's part of the chair's role, I think, to make sure it's well spent.

BENNETT MASON

We've been talking about that balance between risk and strategy. But what do you see as some of the other major opportunities and challenges for boards in 2025?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Some of the main challenges for boards in our current environment is how you navigate the primary responsibility of delivering good, risk-controlled growth to shareholders in accordance with the strategy. And also navigating the shifting sands of climate and diversity and innovation and AI. I’ll give you a good example of how that's shifted over the over the last several years. Back in 2013 at Mirvac, we launched our sustainability strategy, which we called “This Changes Everything.” And we said we're going to be net positive in water, waste and energy by 2030 and PS, we don't know how to do that yet. So please come and toil in our garden for a while and help us. And people did, but they also told us we were crazy and that we shouldn't set up goals we didn't know how to meet, which I thought was strange because that's the point of stretch goals, I think, is to push you further than you otherwise would be. And in fact, we made great progress. We were net positive in energy by 2021, nine years ahead of that target. But over the period, I am very sure that today no board would sign off on a strategy that said we are going to achieve these goals and we don't know how to achieve them. Because the language and the shift around greenwashing and green theatre has shifted, I think tolerance for making very ambitious statements, that you don't know how to make. Which I understand, but I think is in some ways a shame, because it takes that moonshot and that ambition out of the goals, similarly with diversity and inclusion. And we see it with the winding back of DEI initiatives in the US, I see companies including ones that I'm involved with, grappling with language and how we describe things in the annual report around what we're doing around diversity. And I have to say, I think the focus on taking the performative nature out of diversity and the “we do it because it's the cool thing to do”, taking that away is actually a really good thing, and re-examining why it is that diversity is a good thing for companies to have. Really a good thing, not window dressing or nice to have, or something that's fluffy. Really focus the conversation on that. Now for boards to navigate, what is the true value of diversity, how do we get to it and how do we describe it in a world where, particularly if you're working in the US, there is a real shift in the tolerance and language around that. And similarly with concerns around other elements of ESG. Macquarie Group, this year, late last year, along with most other big asset managers in the US, got a letter from 22 attorneys general in the US, mostly from red states. And the letter basically said, “You must pay attention to nothing other than making money. You cannot ring fence out industry. So you have to invest in coal and you have to invest in firearms. You can't make any decisions based on companies ESG policies. The only thing you can pay attention to is making money for your shareholders. You can't even join the Green Building Council because that's collusion.” And so, navigating that world is very difficult for boards to work out. Of course you have to serve your shareholders, but if you don't serve all the other stakeholders, you won't have a business that's sustainable in the broader sense of that word. So navigating all of that landscape, I think, is a real challenge for boards.

BENNETT MASON

Is there an answer? I mean, you're on the boards of these very large companies that are listed here, but they have operations all over the world. What's the answer? How do you try to navigate that extremely difficult challenge?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I don't think there is one simple answer, and it is a question of feeling your way, making a judgement call. I think a lot of companies are continuing to do the things they know are right. but working out how to position themselves, which is a little tricky in that environment, but with still the will to do the right thing.

BENNETT MASON

Those are the challenges. What about opportunities? Are there any opportunities out there that really excite you at the moment?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

The obvious one is AI, which is moving at such an enormous pace that is very hard to keep up with, but it will transform how we work and what we do and how we do it. So learning as quickly as we can, to ensure that we're getting the good out of that technology. And looking out for some of the pitfalls of AI and what it's learning on, how gender gets embedded in that in an unhelpful way, all of those things that we need to pay attention to as, as we learn. So there is a real opportunity there for productivity for the country, in fact, to focus on how we can leverage AI to make our companies much more productive. And I'm especially excited about that for the construction industry, which is, notoriously unproductive. In fact, productivity has been getting worse over the last ten years. Innovation is very low. It's highly fragmented, and AI can really transform that.

BENNETT MASON

AI is a great example of what we were talking about earlier, that balance between oversight and risk management. And then also strategy, growth, innovation. Do you have a view on how that applies to AI? Because that would seem to be one of the great challenges for boards.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I think AI needs to be used as a tool in the proper way. So, you can't type into ChatGPT or Claude, “What should my company's strategy be?” That requires considered thought, but you can ask it to help you formulate good questions or help you see what's been missed. We were talking at the University of Sydney Senate about trust in the higher education sector, and we had an AI app listen in to the conversation. And at the end of the conversation, we interrogated it and we said, “What have we missed, if we were thinking with our risk hat on? How should we be thinking about trust?” If we were thinking about the growth of the university sector, “How should be thinking about trust?” And it was a really helpful feedback, into the room to aid the Senate in its decision making.

BENNETT MASON

We could talk about AI all day, but I wanted to shift to one of your roles, which is very much at the heart of a national issue. You're the chair of the Housing Supply and Affordability Council. Housing affordability is a massive issue, it’s on the front page of the paper, almost every other day of the week. What do you see as some of the biggest levers that we can pull to meaningfully address Australia's housing issues?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Well, firstly, this is the hardest thing that I do by a very long way. Partly because it's a very complicated problem with multiple facets, and there is no silver bullet as much as everybody wants there to be one. And the Council itself is very diverse. And I speak a lot about diversity. And particularly when I was President of Chief Executive Women, spoke about the power of diversity a lot. And I practiced what I preached when I ran Mirvac. But genuinely diverse teams or boards are difficult because people are coming from different points of view with different worldviews. And so, the problem is hard. And the Council is diverse, which is a good thing, but hard to manage and hard to chair sometimes. It's a very deep-seated problem and one that's been decades in the making. I think of the housing crisis as a human rights issue, that people have a right to affordable and secure housing. And in this country, we're not providing enough of it. We don't need to do too much problem admiration, but the problems are everywhere. There's 170,000 households on public housing waiting lists, 120,000 people experiencing homelessness. 60% of single renter retirees are living in poverty. Young people, being cut out of the housing wealth altogether. The number of years you need to save for a deposit is going up and up and up. It's up to 13 years now in Sydney. The problems are everywhere, And the temptation for policymakers is to go for demand side policies. They're quick and popular, but they only serve to push prices up. So, the hard work needs to be done on the supply side of the equation, because we know that our current rate we will produce something like 938,000 new dwellings over the accord period against the target of 1.2. And 1.2 probably isn't even enough to make a dent in in affordability. So, we need to focus on supply. And that means focusing on a whole raft of issues. It means focusing on planning approvals, land amalgamation, enabling infrastructure, modern methods of construction, building more social housing which we have done an appalling job over the last 40 years. It's now down to 3% of stock compared to 6% post-war. We absolutely need more investment in social housing. We need, as we've talked about before, to improve construction sector productivity. And we need to look at tax. We are highly incentivised as a nation to overconsume housing because of a combination of our tax settings being concessional capital gains tax, negative gearing and stamp duty. The three of those, the troika, combine to have us overconsuming housing, which pushes prices up. So the real answer is to look at all of those things at the same time for a long time, to make a dent in housing affordability. And they're all politically very difficult. Very difficult to think about increasing. The people who get a say on what should be built where are the people who already live there? And they are biased. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. They are self-interested in lack of change. The people who are going to live there don't get a say. I've got a great story around that particular example. When Mirvac was building Harold Park in Sydney, there was a very well organised residents action group and on the day of the sales launch, who should walk in but the head of the residents action group. And we were all very nervous on what was going to happen, what was he going to do? He bought an apartment. And I think it goes to show that people can't imagine what might be. When density is done well, which is a phrase I don't like because it implies that density is a bad thing. So you have to do it well. But a well thought out city with homes and dwellings near amenity, near jobs, near parks, near schools is a good thing. And when people see it done well, they’re like, “Oh yes, actually I would like to live there. I really don't want to live 90-minutes away from my job and commute and all the harms that that that brings.”

BENNETT MASON

How hopefully are you that these issues will be addressed and we will solve some of the problems?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I think we are moving in the right direction. I am very encouraged by the level of conversation around the housing issue, between the Commonwealth, states and territories and local governments. That's at a level I've never seen in my time working in the housing sector in Australia. There are meaningful planning reforms that have been done in many states, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia in particular. Very meaningful reforms, greater use of centralised planning and approval systems are decoupling it from local politics. A real focus on how government can use its procurement pipeline to encourage modern methods of construction. Getting the Housing Australia Future Fund up and running, which is putting pouring money into social and affordable housing. There's a whole load of things that that are being done, but it just will take time. And it's all very politically very hard.

BENNETT MASON

You've done a great job of outlining the many issues and obstacles and problems. You've also worked overseas for a long time. You've got this global perspective. Is there a city or jurisdiction or nation that has got housing policies right? Is there someone we should be looking to replicate.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

The problems that we've got in housing, we're not alone. There are similar affordability problems in lots of countries. There are pockets where things are done better than we do them here. Modern methods of construction. For example, in Scandinavia, I think something like 60% of new dwellings are using modern techniques, which actually aren’t that modern. They've been around for about 20 years. We don't apply them here. The argument is always we lack scale. Institutional investment in rental stock is something that's been around in the US for 30 plus years. Over the last ten years, it's bloomed in the UK through a series of policy settings. In fact, our own superannuation funds here invest in institutional rental in the UK and the US and Japan and not here. And it would be a great addition to our housing stock if we could get a vibrant build-to-rent market here, which is coming and it is still in its nascency, which brings a significant amount of risk into the system. But it is a housing tenure that we absolutely need. So we should look at what it was that the UK did that caused that sector to go from nothing to large in a decade.

BENNETT MASON

Let's pivot now to another topic that you've been very passionate about and very involved in over the years. And that's diversity. You've somewhat recently finished up as the president of Chief Executive Women. On gender diversity, where are we seeing progress and where are we still falling short?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Definitely are seeing progress. And this year is the 40th anniversary of the founding of CEW and at the dinner that we hold around the country to raise money for scholarships,  I talked about what things were like in 1985 when CEW was founded and what things are like now. And there has been progress. Sometimes it can feel like there is no progress, but there genuinely is. In 1985, only 5% of women held a bachelor's degree. And now we've got the most highly educated female workforce in the OECD. The gender pay gap has significantly dropped from in the 20s to now, around 11%. That's a significant improvement. We've got 36% of directors are women on boards. There definitely is progress. 44% of members of parliament in the Senate are women. And so there is and has been progress. We've got for the first time a national gender equality strategy called Working for Women. We've got superannuation on paid parental leave. We're moving towards universal access to early childhood education. We're paying our care workers slightly better, although still not enough. And there's been a big focus on domestic violence. So definitely progress. But on the other hand, we still have 91% of ASX 300 CEOs are men. Men occupy 70% of the feeder roles to CEO positions. 30% of Australian men believe that gender equality is no longer an issue in Australia, and that's the highest level in the world, with one exception, Saudi Arabia. So, there's a long way to go in understanding the issue, working out what we need to do about it, making sure that we're looking at the issue as a matter of economic performance and not a tick the box exercise. It’s not about virtue signaling. It's not even about equity. It's about getting the best talent around the table, drawing from 100% of the population, not 50% of the population. So, we have a long way to go.

BENNETT MASON

What's the role of boards in this, and how can boards do a better job of fostering this culture of inclusion and belonging?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

First, it has to be genuine. It can't be warm and fuzzy. It has to be, we are doing this because we know it works. We know that having an organisation with a high sense of engagement, a high sense of belonging, diverse perspectives around the table do create better outcomes for all stakeholders. The academic literature is perfectly clear on all of that. It can't be tokenistic. It can't be window dressing. It can't be inauthentic. So, it has to be genuine. And boards, I think, can hold management to account for making sure that talent pipelines are balanced and have diversity in them, making sure that promotions and pay rises are done equitably and fairly and paying attention, very close attention to that. Because with all the best will in the world, if you take your eye off the gender pay gap, it just comes straight back in. Nobody means for it to. It just does for a whole host of reasons. And being really clear on what are the attributes that we're looking for in our senior executives when those decisions are being made and holding men and women to the same standard. I'll give you an example, and I won't say which board it was, but a board that I was on had a senior executive leave and it opened up the opportunity to shuffle the executives around and give them broader experience so that it deepened the CEO pipeline. And we were talking in the boardroom about how this could possibly be reconfigured with the chief executive in the room. And it came up could XYZ woman do this job? “Well, no, because she doesn't have A, B, C and D.” Which I said, “Fine, that's fine. Let's just make sure we give her A, B, C and D and opportunities to grow those things so that the next time we have this conversation, she has been given those opportunities.” Very swiftly, the conversation then went could XYZ man do that job? “Yes, he's a good guy.” All he had to be was a good guy. The woman had a laundry list of things that she had to demonstrate in order to be considered for that job. There was no ill intent in that conversation. It was just the natural response of how people without being really conscious. And once you start, once you see gendered things like that, you can't unsee them. But it wasn't seen and it wasn't called out. So calling that out and actually the very next conversation was could XYZ other woman do that job? “No, she's a single mother.” At which point I did actually intervene and say, “I'm sorry, that's not our job. Our job is to offer the opportunities to qualified candidates. Their job is to manage their life. And you would never ask that question of a male candidate. It wouldn't cross your mind that you should make that comment.” So boards calling it out when you say it is something and holding management to account on how they're promoting, how they're recruiting, how they're retaining women and men in the organisation.

BENNETT MASON

Let's talk a bit more about pipelines. You mentioned that we now produce this huge amount of university graduates who are women. And yet, as you said, we've got very few ASX chief executive women. Where does the blockage occur in the pipeline and how can it be addressed?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

My experience is that the blockage normally occurs, the attrition, if you like, normally occurs in mid-career when families are grappling with early childhood situations and it becomes very difficult to manage and afford to navigate through that. And there is definitely an attrition of women at that point. Keeping women attached to the workforce during that period is really important to keep them as candidates for senior executives. And secondly, and I think I'm probably the only person in Australia with this view. I think there are multiple ways to become a senior executive. The conventional wisdom is that you have to have run a big P&L to be considered for a senior position, and certainly for the CEO. But when I look at what did I do as a CEO, what was my job?  Was I the chief deal doer? No. Was I the chief investment decider? No. Was I the chief order giver? No. I was actually the chief storyteller. And the chief “get the right people in the right roles” person. And the chief leader of purpose and strategy and ambition. And I spent the vast majority of my time working on the humanity of the organisation, the humanity of our people and our communities and our stakeholders. And there are lots of ways you can get those skills. Of course, you have to understand the finances. Of course you have to understand how to make money, and of course you have to deliver that for your shareholders. But I am convinced that there are multiple ways that you can get through that pathway, which is important for women because they're still congregated in what are considered soft roles, which I don't think of as necessarily soft at all. Actually, when I express this view, I usually get criticised by a certain journalist for holding this view, but I remain convinced that there are multiple ways, that there are effective CEOs who come through a different path than the traditional run a big P&L.

BENNETT MASON

I'll ask you one final question on diversity. Obviously, with gender diversity, there is still a lot of work to be done, but you listed the number of successes that we've had. What can we learn from those accomplishments, and how can they be applied to other types of diversity? Because we know there are many underrepresented groups, whether it's in boardrooms or at the chief executive level.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

The diversity that matters actually is diversity of thought. And it's very hard to get to. So, we use proxies. So, we use gender diversity. We use socio economic diversity. We use all sorts of different diversity as a proxy to get to diversity of thought. But that's what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to “you and I think differently about this, we will create a better outcome when we put those thoughts together to solve a complex problem.” So, making sure that the “why” is enunciated properly, I think is absolutely important. If diversity is seen, as we were talking about before, inauthentic, tokenistic, fashionable, then it doesn't resonate with people. People can smell inauthenticity a mile away. The “why” has to be enunciated. Why is it that we want people with different perspectives in a room, working on some of our most complex problems? The simple answer is because we'll get a better outcome. That's the reason why we do it, not any other reason. And we should apply that to all sorts of different diversity. I’ll give you an example of that. I was at the economic roundtable, recently, and there was a picture taken of the people at the roundtable, and I showed it to my 19-year-old son. He said, “Wow, that's a white group of people.” And I looked at the photo and it absolutely is. And so, we do really need to pay attention to more forms of diversity, given the diversity that exists in our country and a very successful multicultural society, our leaders do not reflect that.

BENNETT MASON

Susan, I'll ask you one final question. You've got this packed portfolio. You have all these board roles. How do you fit it all in? How do you manage your time, energy and impact?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

I'm fairly efficient. I'm an introvert, and I am ruthlessly efficient. And so, there's not much time for, as my mother would say, not much time for faffing around. And how I manage my energy is, as an introvert, I read a lot. I'm always open for book suggestions and things to read, and I like to hang out with my young adult children and my family as a way of recharging and building energy back. But I genuinely enjoy the things that I do. They're all varied and different and sometimes perplexing and all challenging. And so, there's a lot of energy that comes from working on things that hopefully will be important for the genuine lives of people in this country. If I could look back in ten years’ time and we have actually made a difference to housing, that would be an enormous thing to have been a part of.

BENNETT MASON

What are you reading now, apart from board papers?

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Well, board papers do take a long period of time. They can be up to a thousand pages long, which is an enormous amount. I've just finished a book about Vienna and the importance of Vienna in history and what it gave to the world, which was a very interesting book. And I've just, halfway through The Material World, which looks at things like sand and glass and all of the things, the materials that fuel the world that we live in, that we take for granted every day. It's a great book.

BENNETT MASON

Thank you very much, Susan. It's been great to have you. We'll let you run. I know you've got a packed schedule, but it's been terrific to have you on the podcast.

SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ

Thank you very much.