CIO

“As CIO, your role is pretty ceremonial, right? You're basically trying to put fires out and, you know, deal with people. Less about asset allocation. You've got portfolio managers do that and analysts.”

“When we were doing the Stanford CEO search, Seven or eight institutions that they compared themselves to that were ahead of them on a ten-year basis, on their, in terms of their ten-year number, all those CIOs had been in place for 10 years.”

“The reason you've seen so much So many changing seats over the last several years is that because of the increased transparency around performance, and then the, so then they get the relative comparisons where, you know, through, you know, the press has turned…”

“The most successful CIOs are leveraging their investment committees.”

“I'm always amazed when I see people under age 40 who are CIOs because, let's face it takes a long time to get reasonably good at all those different asset classes.”

“If there's poor performance, alarm bells come up and down the chain and the committee doesn't say like, Let's do nothing. They always say, like, we should do something, right? So this notion, and by the way, I think it's a Western thing, maybe an American thin…”

“GE did a study about future CIOs, and they concluded that alternatives was the proper background for future CIOs.”

“And importantly to our business model, we have this orientation of no CIO, which means we don't have a single decision maker that everyone is feeding the insights to. Instead, we have this concept of having a community of investment boutiques where we have 50 …”

“As in past years, our conversations with CIOs, interestingly, tend to cluster just below the most downloaded shows, so we compile an honorable mention of the top three CIO interviews as well.”

“These are the tools of really a five tool player, like CIOs of big pools of capital have to be able to do a little bit of everything. And these are fundamental disciplines that they're just not taught in the CFA. They're not taught in the investment business.”

“The first section is called toolkit and it's five tools interviewing decision-making or two of the five, the other three are negotiations, leadership and management. These are all things that CIOs and investment professionals need to be effective in their jobs…”

“Today, you're seeing the real great CIOs are looking for first time funds, spin outs, where you've really identified talent and you want to be there early so you can gain greater capacity and you're more actively involved early and you're capturing some of tha…”

“So one thing that comes up a lot for CIOs is I would say the peer comparison. This is especially true for colleges and universities where there's just such a football game approach to it and whose school is beating whose. And I think it's an enormous distracti…”

“You have CIOs that have compensation that is benchmarked against how they did versus their rival schools.”

“I do think when you serve on an IC, you have to remember that you're a coach and not a player in that regard. I have the benefit of seeing ICs from multiple angles, not just serving on them, but also we obviously have a lot of ICs that we present to here as we…”

“I want to have a larger number of team captains who are people who have been here for a long time, who we've seen their work product, we trust their work product, and those people can be empowered to make decisions on individual investments because those peopl…”

“And I think one of the great challenges on the CIO side is your job is to figure out systems input hunger, the soul of these people pitching you, but you're seeing them in very controlled context for the most part.”

“Managing people and managing investments are not the same side of your brain. There's no a priori reason that someone should be skilled at both. And maybe there's, in fact, the opposite. If you're an analytical, quiet person, you actually don't want to manage …”

“Usually that hunger dissipates after success, and you probably want to be off manager before that hunger dissipates, but it takes an incredible amount of fortitude to say, To someone across the table, hey, I know you're getting rich, sloppy, and lazy. You're n…”

“How I dealt with it in the novel was to think about the pressure of the CIO, a line that I often repeat to CIOs, which is like, it's three percent of the portfolio, but 97% of our headaches.”

“I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who do the CIO job because every day you're relearning things that you thought that you had figured out about a manager disappointing you, manager surprising you, things you missed”

“A CIO doesn't make that many decisions a year. You're not running a pod for .72. The ability to move a highly illiquid portfolio is not easy.”

“I knew that one of the big problems with CIOs is they stay too long. And I do think portfolios need refresh.”

“A CIO can't manage another CIO's portfolio because you really do gravitate to your strengths.”

“When a CIO departure occurs, the growing manager will have more options to continue a productive working relationship with the new CIO.”

“And I think that's another thing that's really important as a CIO is to give your team members the opportunities to grow professionally without dropping problems in their lap, being incremental about it.”

“First of all, I wasn't given a choice, but second of all, I think ideally that would be the best way to do it because it gives the successor the opportunity to get his or her sea legs under them without necessarily the scrutiny of sitting there in front of you…”

“Around us, CIOs were leaving their jobs without a transition, and the teams below them would leave In anticipation of a new boss coming in over them, and they wanted to take matters into their own hands rather than just wait for fate to dictate what would happ…”

“It's largely not an investment job. I think people kind of know that, but I'd take it maybe a degree further. There are many functions that make an investment organization work well, and they are all important. Some of them are important because if you step on…”

“On the investment side, most CIOs will embrace the opportunity to wait and see which managers Yale supports in size. They're happy to outsource wading through large fields of chaff and see if Yale finds wheat.”

“Career risk aversion drives a lot of behavior, and Bill felt to the extent you could put some distance between the asset allocator and the oversight or governance group, you had a shot at allowing the CIO to be more bold, because Bill always said, boldness is …”

“Yeah, he put in the controlling trust document the fact that he wanted the trustees to delegate investment authority to the CIO and CEO of the foundation. That's unusual. We do not have an investment committee.”

“It's not easy because there can be screaming opportunities and China might be perfect example today where intellectually a lot of CIOs know these valuations are getting unjustifiably cheap. But back to career risk. They don't want to walk in, in front of their…”