NicsaTalk - Chairman Emeritus at Invesco, Marty Flanagan

Our guest Marty Flanagan served as a director, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Invesco, one of the world’s leading investment management firms, for nearly twenty years. Join us for a frank conversation about his career and lessons learned in his long and high-reaching leadership journey. Recorded at Nicsa’s Strategic Leadership Forum 2024, at which Marty received Nicsa’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Transcript

Justine Phoenix: 
Hello and welcome to NicsaTalk, a podcast where people from the asset and wealth management community share their stories, expertise, and lessons they learned along the way. Nicsa is a not-for-profit trade association connecting all facets of the asset and wealth management industry. I'm Nicsa's Justine Phoenix, and we are live recording from the Strategic Leadership Forum in Orlando where our guest speaker just received a lifetime achievement award. Today I'm excited to introduce Marty Flanagan, chairman Emeritus of Invesco. Welcome Marty. 

Marty Flanagan: 
Thank you, Justine, and pleasure to be here. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Absolutely. We're so happy to have you join us. So we are going to start out, as we always start out with our ten second challenge. Describe what you love about this industry in 10 seconds or less. 

Marty Flanagan: 
I love the people of the industry because the comradery is amazing and there's an absolute focus on client success. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Excellent. So tell us a little bit about how you wound up in the industry and are there ways that your background may be different from what you might think is a traditional career path? 

Marty Flanagan: 
Well, it's a good question. Out of college I was with one of, at the time of the big eight accounting firms and became a CPA. I had always been interested in the markets. My family had a background in the commodity markets in Chicago, so I always knew I wanted to get there and I was very fortunate to work for Sir John Templeton, a famous global money manager. 

Justine Phoenix: 
That's amazing. That's amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about what you learned from John? 

Marty Flanagan: 
He was probably the greatest influence on my business life and frankly, huge influence in my personal life. The one thing that stands out the most would be that I've learned, I saw him prepare and prepare and prepare for any meeting that he would have. He would then go into the meeting and simply ask questions as if he had no understanding at all, and I would watch him. I could almost see his brain move and churn and change his point of view when he had a new set of information. So I always learn from that, be prepared, be willing to change with new set of information, and it's a really good career advice. 

Justine Phoenix: 
It is really interesting in terms of, this seems to be a current theme on our podcast, is there's either one individual or someone in your career early on that influences you, influences your style, and in turn you are probably going to be influencing someone else at that point as well. So it carries on. It's sort of an interesting legacy. 

Marty Flanagan: 
I think that's true, and it was for me, and I took that idea and continued to evolve it into, as I became a business manager and this idea, be prepared and change your view with a point of facts. I turned it into this idea of be the last one to speak in a meeting, and what that really meant was be prepared. I'd go in a meeting, I'd be prepared, I got a point of view, but I would ask questions of everybody around the table and I would bring out the thoughts from the introvert in the room or just make sure everybody, I had the view of everybody. I change my mind with better facts. It was good development for the team, team comradery, and it's just a very important practice I use in my career. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Tell us about a defining moment that helped shaped your career or launched your leadership skills. 

Marty Flanagan: 
This will sound repetitive, but John Templeton shaped my career and launched my career. He was a global investor. He thought globally and as I evolved my career into a business manager, the principles that he took to investing, I adopted as a business manager have a global point of view, better opportunities. If you look around the world, you minimize risk with a more diversified portfolio of businesses, and I just continue to evolve that throughout my career. But he would surely be the person that has had the greatest influence. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Every leader has had challenging times in their careers and either in your career or maybe in the industry in general. Talk about a challenging time and how that shaped and formed you. 

Marty Flanagan: 
The reality of our industry is we have bear markets and the question is severity of the bear market and how challenging is that? If you think of the.com bust, that was a challenge because it puts a lot of pressure on the profitability of an organization. The financial crisis was a different one that was even much more difficult. But in those times of challenge, the most important thing is to never lose sight of clients, ensure that you are leading the team and that the team is focused on client success and use the challenging time to really improve the business. And it's a lot easier to make difficult changes in a challenging time than it is at the top of a bull 

Justine Phoenix: 
Market. It sounds contrary to what anybody would think, right? 

Marty Flanagan: 
Yes, it does. But for me, that's been my experience and that's how we've had the best outcomes. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Excellent, excellent. So well I'm going to ask you to use a little bit of predictions for us. Where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years? 

Marty Flanagan: 
As I said, it's a great industry. It's going to continue to grow. That's will grow in the United States. It'll grow globally. It will grow at different paces around the world. But the reality is it is all the science from maturing industry are within the asset management industry right now. So competition is high. The need to have scale within an organization is just a reality, so the stronger are going to get stronger, the bigger are going to get bigger, and I think you'll end up with some very large firms and a good number of specialty type firms. Firms that will be challenged will be the ones that are really sort of in the middle and just being somewhat average, 

Justine Phoenix: 
Quite frankly. Okay. Okay. Well, we've talked about your career and you've had some lessons learned along the way as we started out, if you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would that be? 

Marty Flanagan: 
If I knew earlier how important it was to develop people and bring people along, that would be one. What I mean by bringing people along is a little bit of a follow on to this idea of be the last one to speak. Individuals have all sorts of talents and everybody has their own characteristic, and so really focus on what are the strengths of the individual and how can you further advance those, but also understanding, as we say, the flat spots of individuals and really just being much more, getting comfortable with being transparent and communicating in a clear way and just not communicate, help do something about it, give them an experience that will highlight their strength and put them in an experience where they'll have to work and focus and try to develop where they need improvement. And so it really needs to be an active engagement with the individual to help them develop their career. What will that do? You'll have an individual that obviously is getting better at what they're doing, but they'll also feel much more part of the organization. They'll be a culture carrier to the organization and they will feel good about themselves. They'll have a thriving career. 

Justine Phoenix: 
It's really also creating a culture too. That's part of the culture. If people feel that it's an inclusive environment, but also that as an individual, they're being looked at individually, right? That their career path is being viewed for them and them only. I think that's a great way that creates an entire culture in an organization when you have that point of view. 

Marty Flanagan: 
I think you're exactly right, and what I would say about my career as I step away from Invesco, what I'm most proud about is the culture of the organization, and it is those characteristics that we care about clients, we care about the individuals within the organizations that make a difference for our 

Justine Phoenix: 
Clients. Yeah, I mean, we just have a DEI perception survey for the diversity project North America, and the number one thing comes up every year when we do the survey. Culture is the most, you have to get culture right. 

Marty Flanagan: 
It is the most important thing any organization can do. The other thing that I would say is the characteristic to continue to lean on is the characteristic of curiosity. It helps become, you'll learn more, you become a better critical thinker, and it really will advance what you're trying to accomplish in your career. 

Justine Phoenix: 
Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Once again, Congratulations. 

Marty Flanagan: 
Thank you very much