I’ve always written poetry – apart from my voracious appetite for novels as a child I read a lot of ee cummings, Alan Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Kenneth Slessor and James Joyce and loved to play around with blank verse, stream of consciousness narrative and forms ranging from sonnets to haikus. At one stage I inveigled my way onto a bill of poetry readings at the Art Gallery of NSW, which to me at the age of 20 seemed the height of mainstream acceptance, and showed me that even nihilism had a bourgeois audience.
I also had two passionate amateur photographers in my father and mother and learned developing and printing black and white photography in a darkroom at home. By the age of 13 I was taking hundreds of photographs a month and had succeeded in having my first pictures published, giving me bragging rights amongst my friends as I received cheques for $15 a time – a mountain of cash for a schoolboy in 1973.
Two sides of my ancestry were also invested in music. My English grandfather John Bailey was an army man and the founding music director of the Gurkha Regimental Band in the early 1950s, which now enjoys worldwide renown at military tattoos. My Russian grandfather, Jack Roeytenberg, was a composer, band leader and pianist who ran a nightclub in Shanghai between the wars, was the founder and principal conductor of the Kuala Lumpur symphony orchestra, and was a popular live radio performer on Radio Malaya in the pre-war years. Jack was also commissioned by the Sultan of Kedah, a principality in northern Malaya, to compose what remains to this day the anthem of what became the Malaysian state of Kedah. I lacked the discipline to learn to read music, so throughout my composing and arranging of music for soundtracks, videos, radio documentaries and short films over the past 30 years, I’ve been drawing on what I inherited, not what I learned.
My BA in Communication provided a great blend of practical training in writing, radio and television editing and production skills, along with theory topics like semiotics, linguistics, mass communication and culture. But instead of graduating to become a radio journalist at the ABC or a writer on Kerry or Rupert’s ticket, I accepted a job as a PR officer for ICL computers, in 1981 the second biggest IT company in Australia and the worldwide inventors of world’s first retail barcode scanning systems, which we piloted at Woolworths in in Sydney. It was a valuable opportunity to demystify technology, just as mainframes were being eclipsed by the first personal computers, and the world was about to change very fast.
After three years I bailed out, heading through 10 Asian countries to France and then Spain, spending two years in Barcelona and Asturias, playing guitar on the street, teaching English to Catalan students, and getting stories and photographs published in The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and other broadsheets. Then to the UK for nine years and California for five. These were the watershed years of my career as I managed to gradually bring the creative and strategic worlds together.
In 1995 I passed up some lucrative offers for financial services roles to instead join a graphic design agency, Landor Associates in London as its first European Communications Director. The timing was perfect; the world of corporate and retail visual design was morphing into brand identity, and not many journalists were yet articulating the value of aligning brand and business strategy. I used my writing and PR skills to grow the company’s profile and help raise the London business media’s awareness of the value to competitive differentiation of smart branding.
It was possible to be a pioneer in the mid ‘90s, and the Financial Times asked me to write its first management report on consumer brand design across Europe – a 250 page tome which kept me crisscrossing the UK and the Continent for several months, and opened many doors for me including my mind to the reality that art and science were really coming together as a better understood, mainstream discipline at the heart of business. It was as though, after years of bringing half of myself to my job, I was now employing my left and right brain equally.
I won’t describe my professional journey in detail, but from London I was transferred to Landor’s headquarters in San Francisco where I saw more and more evidence of the growing importance of innovation, design and creative thinking in business – notably in information technology (Johnny Ive’s first iMacs for Apple), and Ideo’s design thinking approach applied to industrial companies.
After my ride on the dotcom rollercoaster, I was approached by Deloitte Consulting, which was looking for a head of global brand strategy to oversee its planned $9 billion spinoff from its audit practice, prompted partly by the fallout from the wreckage of Arthur Andersen. The job was a dream: a $90 million budget to create a new name, visual identity, positioning strategy and global advertising and PR campaign to launch the new brand. For various reasons, the two firms decided to reintegrate instead of separating so the brand and global campaign we put together never launched – however I did end up overseeing the brand development process that simplified Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and its multiple variations, to Deloitte. And put an innocuous but friendly green dot into the new logo, earning me the name ‘’the Father of the Dot’ – a quirky visual feature that has become the best loved and most distinctive element of our global brand system today.
At that point I switched continents back home to Australia, where Deloitte in 2003 was hemorrhaging clients, money and people. Morale was at an all time low.
Since then, we’ve gone from being around half the size of our next competitor to #2 – tripling our revenue and doubling our size in the process. And we’ve filled more than the equivalent of a few trophy trash cans along the way, as Australia’s most innovative firm, best employer, best place to work for women, and along with a bunch of marketing awards, we’ve also won Auditor of the Year and Accounting Firm of the Year, which we currently hold simultaneously – the first time any firm has done so. We ascribe much of this success to our investment in creativity and differentiation.
This article is an edited extract from a speech delivered to the Currency House Business Breakfast on 17 September 2014
