People Model Shifts

Collective intelligence that harnesses technology and is built around diverse skills is critical. Investment professionals need deeper situational fluency and emotional intelligence to complement technology. Diversity is a big contributor to better decisions.

The investment firm of the future will:

Build stronger lineups of diverse skills
The complex nature of investment firm business and craft leads to highly specialized professionals. But firms will need more diversity, which calls for more “T-shaped professionals”—those that have both domain-specific specialist knowledge as well as wider understanding and perspective.

Create greater collective intelligence
Investment relies substantially on group decisions. Getting the best possible results from groups involves exploiting their combinatorial elements: governance, process, teamwork, and culture come to the fore, with technology as a new component to add to the mix. We can define the goal as T-shaped teams that successfully merge narrower, specialized skills with wider vision skills.

Have leaders who intentionally build culture
The most sustainable and leading edge cultures are built on people (how people are valued) and clients (how clients are served). They are also aligned to strategy, synced with leadership, and widely owned by all employees. At most organizations, culture resides in the background, but to be truly effective, a firm’s culture must have the sustained attention of its leadership.

Recognize the merits of simplicity and the problems of complexity
Investment firms should adopt an “as simple as possible, but no simpler” mantra; understand limits of team size in organizational design; and build out with technologies that simplify the human element.

The required shift involves making investment thinking more rigorous, integrated, and customized. Doing so means taking thinking and acting out of separate silos and creating a unified and integrated portfolio process that considers both industry realities and unique client needs.

In the investment industry of the future:

The required shift involves making investment thinking more rigorous, integrated, and customized. Doing so means taking thinking and acting out of separate silos and creating a unified and integrated portfolio process that considers both industry realities and unique client needs.

“Modern ecosystem theory” will emerge, a unified investment approach that is an open and collaborative competition for capital centered on delivering client/end investor outcomes.

The skills model adds more people that are “T-shaped,” those that are adept at reconciling deep-level knowledge and understanding, with a wide perspective across the whole organization, and recognition of the limits of their knowledge.

The people model develops “T-shaped” teams—that is, teams with broad and deep collective intelligence that act using the power of one-team culture and cognitive diversity.