Somewhere in your firm there is work you have never done before, and a big bank that wants it by next quarter. AI has changed what your clients expect from you faster than your people have changed what they can deliver. So you need someone senior to go and build the “new thing”, and the leaders you would trust with it are the ones who built the old thing. You have asked one of them. He said “let me think about it”.
I know what he is thinking, because I thought it myself when Morgan Stanley asked me to go set up the India office.
Six years in
I had spent six years at Morgan Stanley building an audit and risk / management control group that did not exist when I arrived. My boss and I got along well. Then things reached their peak, the way they do, and it was time to move.
The head of institutional equities asked me to join his group. The first project was to open the firm’s India presence. Morgan Stanley had never gone into an emerging market. This would be the first.
“You are the only Indian looking guy here”
I did not want to go.
I did not feel qualified. Doing business in India was a mystery to me, and I had left the country in 1979. Bombay had its own “Wall Street”, and I had never worked a day on it. An “operating job” was something I had never held. Six years of running audit, and now they wanted me to run a business, from scratch, on the other side of the world!
I had two children in New York. If I went, the plan was: it would take a year or two, with a flight back every quarter to see them, until the assignment was done.
Kim, my fiancée at the time, said, “let us do it”.
So we went.
Bombay, 1995
We moved in early 1995. It was a startup inside a very large firm. There was nothing to walk into. The office had to be built.
What I had, it turned out, was seven years inside Morgan Stanley. I knew how the firm worked, who did what, where the nuts and bolts were. And I was not afraid to pick up the phone to senior people in New York and ask for help putting it together. That was the qualification. Nobody had listed it, including me.
I became Chief Operating Officer of Morgan Stanley India. On December 1, 1999, the phone rang at 5:30 in the morning, Bombay time. It was John Mack, telling me I had been made Managing Director.
The job I did not want was the one that did it. Again.
What I would say to you
Your leader is not telling you he cannot do it. He is telling you he has never done it. Those are two different sentences, and only one of them is a reason.
I hear the second one every week now, from people twenty-plus years into a career. “It has taken me 22 years to build my position in the company. Everything I do now is to protect it.” Or, “I do not know how to look at opportunities, because everything looks daunting.” I understand every word of it. I had my own version before Bombay.
It took me years to learn one habit. I stopped saying “I do not want that” when a new thing came at me. Every entry I ever got into a new area came from keeping my mouth shut at that moment. I told Price Waterhouse not to put me on a bank, and the bank became my career. I was sure I was not qualified for India, and India made me a Managing Director.
The bank will not wait for your leader to feel qualified. It hands the new work to whichever firm sends somebody. So go back to the leader who said he would “think about it”, and ask him what he is protecting. Listen to the answer, because that is where the “no” lives.
Then tell him what I wish someone had told me. Fear does not mean stop. It means you act with the fear, or in spite of it. Every leader I have watched take a chance on themselves came out ahead, and none of them felt ready the day they said yes.
I did not “want” the best thing that ever happened to my career. He may be doing the same thing right now, in your firm, with your client waiting.
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Raju Panjwani | Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley | I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology firms, on becoming the leader the business now needs.