The Exchanges

Q Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?

A Two people that stand out. When I was growing up, my best friend's father had a really interesting career where he tried a bunch of different things, and he landed on his calling at the age of 63 as a Jungian therapist. And he was one of the older dads, and so he had already discovered this when I was growing up. And he would give me Myers-Briggs tests and other things and say, Matt, my one gift to you is I want to help you discover what really fits you so that you get energy from it and you can skip all the mistakes that he made to find it earlier. And that was such a great gift in my teenage years to have someone teaching me that. And helping me see that and helping me find that and making it very clear that that was the goal. I'd say the second person is my wife, Jen. She helped me unpack what I really wanted to do in my career and in my life at the pivotal moment. And she has this very unusual gift of warmth and care. And I know that she has my back, but also holding me to a higher bar than anyone else in my life and challenging my thinking. And I'm so grateful to her for that. But that mix, I also learn a lot from her and want to role model what I see in her that she's so good at.

AI assessment note: “Two people that stand out. When I was growing up, my best friend's father”

Q When you had, say, a small team that you've brought together with clear, diverse, Backgrounds, skill sets. What tools did you use to get them rowing in the same direction?

A There's all kinds of different tools, and there's three dimensions to this. There's the organizational high performance, there's team high performance, and then there's individual high performance. And I think you're honing in on the team component of that. So when you're trying to optimize a team, there's all kinds of tools on self-assessment. So whether using Myers-Briggs, HBDI, DISC, and we used most of them in that work where you're helping people understand what makes them tick, and then you're sharing that with the team and helping the team understand what each person's bringing to the table and how they're wired so that you can optimize the collective work. There's some really interesting work at the Harvard Negotiation Project where they have done a lot of research on difficult conversations and they have a number of models there. You basically had The people at Harvard who teach about how to optimize a negotiation, turning those tools into things that teams and companies can use to get better, to actually be really good at conflict, and to use debate very constructively so that it's producing something good and reducing unnecessary conflict.

AI assessment note: “whether using Myers-Briggs, HBDI, DISC, and we used most of them”

Q to work. Celeste lifts that ceiling. Now the deals you walk away from are the ones you meant to. DealCloud with Celeste is generally available now from Intap. Learn more and book your demo at intap.com slash capital allocators. You mentioned twice the preparation that goes into it. How have you found preparation works best to create? Create the setting so that a panel flows as well as it can.

A The way that I think about preparation for a panel has three dimensions. So one is, what's your goal and structure? Like, what's the sweet spot of what will be most helpful to the audience that is currently in the minds of the participants? So that's number one. Number two is the chemistry. So actually taking the time in a prep call to build rapport and chemistry with the other panelists is really important. Which means that you're understanding who they are, what they care about, what their personality is like, so that they're comfortable with the facilitator and with the other panelists so that you can get them into a highly productive space, and that starts in the prep call. And then most importantly, before you get on stage, being very intentional about getting that chemistry warmed up before you get on stage, that's unbelievably important. And then the third thing is about the substance of it, so there's no substitute for You actually really do need to do the research on the topic. You really do need to think about what's the most interesting thread for this particular audience that they're going to find helpful.

AI assessment note: “The way that I think about preparation for a panel has three dimensions.”

Q to start because it's top of mind. Threads across interviewing public speaking, both panels and public speaking. Preparation. Can't underscore how important it is, but it's got to be the appropriate level of preparation. If it's too much, you can get too wedded in it. Being present in the moment. Listening. Active listening. What that means. Understanding who the audience is. Summing up. And then afterwards, a feedback loop. Thoughts?

A I think you nailed it. I would just respond to that great list just saying you have an audience and we have an industry full of really, really deep experts in the art and science of investing. And I think what you've shared with us today is the art and science of interviewing and how building out that craft is only additive to the craft of investing. And In some ways, I think a lot of people approach interviewing as a, how hard could it be? Of course, I'm good at this. I'm an expert. And I think the takeaway from this discussion is it's actually pretty hard. So good news, bad news. So the bad news is in order to become great at interviewing, it is really hard and it takes years to master. The good news is you've elucidated today some very specific concrete practices that people can start using very quickly. And then I think to your feedback loop point, just like investing, it's iterative. So every time you do it, you can get a little bit better as long as you're reflective and you're getting the feedback so that V two V three V four just gets better and better and better, which as listeners of your podcast, we know that your episodes just get better and better and better. I think it would only be fair to pose the same questions to you that you tend to pose to the rest of us. So let's give it a shot.

AI assessment note: “I think you nailed it. I would just respond to that great list”

Q I've heard from time to time about people saying if you're giving a big presentation to focus on one person so that you're just talking to them. Is that something that you've found helpful?

A I actually do find that one helpful. I find it helpful in a slightly different way. When I'm on stage, my goal is for the audience to feel that they're sitting with me in my office talking to me one-on-one. So I try to replicate the same tone and style That goal of wanting it to feel the same way, I completely agree with. And I don't just focus on someone in the audience. I'm a very interactive person, and I think in today's world, people are not that interested in one-way communication. I'll actually walk out on stage and try to acknowledge someone in the audience or thank someone, not just look at them, but to interact with them as a way to Just like the Sinatra rule, just kind of get myself into the mode that I'm shooting for.

AI assessment note: “I actually do find that one helpful. I find it helpful in a slightly different way.”

Q Once you got there, what did you do in that role?

A We would be looking at new strategic space, trying to figure out how could PwC win in a new business. And the other part of the experiment was we'd take these teams of five ish, really talented global leaders from different countries and different disciplines across the company. And we would experiment with that deliberately very diverse team against hard problem. And so it was a dream job because I was analytically helping those folks pick apart the problem. With the top leaders in our company as mentors and advisors, but then I'm also coaching them on how to deal with the inevitable conflict you have with a team with such a cross-cultural diversity, different perspectives, quirks, all kinds of stuff that you need to analytically figure out how we win. And then how do you help these humans win and how do you help prevent them from killing each other, but actually pivot that conflict into an economic force Where they're actually benefiting from all of that difference, and they're using that debate, and they're harnessing all of their strengths against this problem, and then they're creating a new business that actually creates the next career path for themselves. So there's plenty of personal benefit and collective benefit in that, and I just became kind of a student of how do you unlock that to chase this big opportunity.

AI assessment note: “We would be looking at new strategic space, trying to figure out how could PwC win”

Q How did you think about the different reputations of the firms coming into BlackRock, quite a different reputation than Apollo historically?

A Yeah, I mean, I think both had reputations for being challenging, and I think Larry had always been tough on HR and skeptical about all of this work. I think Apollo also specialized in complex investing, and oftentimes investing in struggling companies that needed to be restored to health. So I just saw that as an interesting challenge, and to say, wow, what an incredible track record. How do you achieve Such great results. I want to help them figure out how do you keep evolving? What's missing in the culture? What does the next generation want? How is the industry changing? How's our business model changing? And I found an incredible group of people who were just so smart, so collaborative, so used to solving problems and debating things together and co-creating. So the co-creation point was really natural coming to Apollo and really high bar that you got to know what you're talking about. You got to be able to have real conviction. One of our values at Apollo is challenge convention. You know, our coffee bar is called the Contrarian Cafe. We love people with different ideas. We love people who are challenging our thinking. So when I figured that out about the culture, I said, oh, this is great because I'm challenging the thinking. And that's respected as long as you do the work, as long as you're prepared, as long as you approach those conversations in the right way, as long …

AI assessment note: “I think both had reputations for being challenging, and I think Larry had always”

Q When you're talking to people that are at much smaller, say boutique asset management firms, What tools do you think a leader of one of those organizations can use effectively that may not have the breadth of resources or the depth of team that you see at an Apollo or BlackRock?

A Obviously in a smaller firm, you're not going to have a big HR team. You might not even have an HR team at all, but the good news is everything I'm talking about is readily available to everyone. You know, these books that I, that I've mentioned are easily accessible for a firm that doesn't have an HR team. You got to use executive coaching. There's a number of amazing executive coaches out there who really understand asset management, who know our business and can help you using three sixties and employee surveys. In a small firm, you might say, oh, I don't need a survey because everyone just tells me all day long. You'd be surprised what they tell you when it's not attributed. You're just gonna get more information. I call myself the walking suggestion box because I need people to trust me and to tell me exactly what they're feeling and to just take in that information in an unvarnished way so that I can understand and help figure out how do we make really good choices about what we want to do next in the culture. You can absolutely do that in the smaller firms. If you have a really great culture, you are getting that information. I'd still do a survey because you're going to get something a little bit extra that will give you the insights in the same way that when people who haven't had a three 60 before, it's so helpful. Even when you're in a feedback rich environment, when…

AI assessment note: “You got to use executive coaching... help you using three sixties and employee surveys.”

Q At the height of an emotional trigger in a situation like that, did you have a favorite phrase or hack to bring down that de-escalation and move things into the direction you want?

A When any team gets stuck, what you're trying to do is shift the energy and reframe it. One of my signatures and my own personal style is I use humor a lot. It makes work more fun. It also helps disarm people. And sometimes you have to take that situation and just laugh about it. Are we really that fired up about this issue that doesn't really matter? And so that's probably my go-to move. Sometimes you just have to call a timeout and say, I think we're a little stuck. Let's go take a walk around the block. Let's come back in 15 minutes and let's just all recommit to shake that off. We actually did the same thing in government in those trade negotiations. When you're stuck and it's getting heated, the strategic pause is helpful. And you're actually just taking a break because it's no longer progressing. It's stuck and you got to shift the energy. Another move, we did this in government and we certainly did this at PwC, is Change your location. Like, just get out of that space, because if the space is no longer productive, move to a different conference room, move it outside. You got to get yourself into a context that is productive.

AI assessment note: “One of my signatures and my own personal style is I use humor a lot.”

Q What was the impetus for you of moving from BlackRock to Apollo?

A I'd been at BlackRock for eight years. We'd built something really special. I had a great run there. I think I was just ready for my next challenge, and I had learned this work at PwC. I'd helped build it with Ajay at MasterCard. I'd helped build it at BlackRock. I wanted to do it again, and I was really attracted to Apollo and the alternative space. What an extraordinarily smart group of people, and I felt like the alternative industries Been late to this. So asset management was late, and I think Alts was also late as a group of companies. And I felt like, okay, after eight years at BlackRock, I think I've learned how to do this. This is a different business model, but it's in the same kind of family. You're applying human capital tools in service of great investment performance and great commercial performance. And I found my colleagues at Apollo really open-minded and Much more humble than I would have expected in alternatives. Just like at BlackRock, need to see the data, need to see it actually work. The theory is kind of interesting. The impact is, is, is what we're looking for. I was just exhilarated by the opportunity to work with the folks at Apollo and take a run at this.

AI assessment note: “I think I was just ready for my next challenge”

Q From the investor, the allocator perspective, if you're looking at an investment management organization and trying to understand, are they doing the things Internally with their people that are more likely to generate long-term success. What types of questions would you ask?

A Having written a bunch of HBS cases, I guess I'd start by saying, so what do you learn from your employee survey? Like, what do you guys think you're really good at? What are your employees asking you to focus on next? And then you'll find out if they have a survey, or they have a point of view, or if they're balanced in their thinking. Are they seeing clearly What's working in their culture and what needs to evolve? Because that tells me a lot about the hygiene of the company and are they doing the work to make me comfortable as an investor that they understand that the goal is outperformance for decades and that we're a work in progress on that. So I'd be asking about at the three levels, the organizational level, what are you doing as an organization to achieve outperformance over a long period of time? Like what are those practices? How do you run your investment teams? And how do you make sure you're mitigating your blind spots? How do your ICs work? Take me into that so I can understand your practices, because as an investor, you're betting on those practices leading to outperformance. And then how does an individual stay sharp? How do your investors learn? You know, what are your habits at those three levels? Because that's what you're investing in. And I think companies that are really good at this, and I've worked in some of the bigger ones. So at our scale, there's a …

AI assessment note: “I'd start by saying, so what do you learn from your employee survey?”

Q What are the biggest lessons you took out of those types of high-stakes negotiations?

A I'm a rule of threes person, so I'll try to articulate it in three. Number one is preparation. These are very complicated negotiations because you're looking at all kinds of economic factors. You're looking at growth rates. You're looking at what could possibly be mutually beneficial. You're trying to understand who you're sitting across the table with. We wanted to go into those discussions knowing everything, every possible facet inside and out. What wonderful training as a Building strong relationships with the folks on the other side of the table. So getting to know them, breaking bread with them, building the goodwill that you knew you were going to need when it got down to the finer points that were going to be the toughest, because every negotiation would kind of live or die on those finer, hard points. And so investing in the relationship was incredibly important and thinking about those relationships in multidimensional ways. And then the third thing is it's a long game. So in trade negotiations, the decisions you're making will resonate and reverberate for decades. And sometimes it takes years to get deals done, which is pretty frustrating when you're in the middle of it. But if you realize you're working a long game and your goal is to, in our case, to benefit us companies, to help them thrive, but also to do good things for the global economy. If you believe in free…

AI assessment note: “Number one is preparation... Building strong relationships... And then the third thing is it's a long game.”

Q Why don't you take me back to how you started a path that ended up in this HRC and asset management?

A Well, it's not the most linear path. Like most people, I think I was shaped by my parents. I kind of consider my vocation being developed out of that Venn diagram of my two parents. So my father, uh, was an entrepreneur and my mother's a therapist, and he instilled in me a passion for business, A passion for problem solving, how you grow a business, the challenges of growing a business, and the curiosity about what makes businesses tick. How you get it right, how you get it wrong. And my mom instilled in me the curiosity of psychology. What makes human beings tick? How do we help this person get better? She still laughs about giving me Myers-Briggs when I was 10 years old, and talking about the treatment programs of her patients, and she literally, like, Bounce ideas off of me as a kid. I was my father's permanent intern every weekend, and I was like her thought partner in therapy. And I think in many ways, my career is simply that I learned those two languages. I'm equally passionate about those two things, and I kind of operate in the intersection of those two worlds.

AI assessment note: “I kind of consider my vocation being developed out of that Venn diagram”

Q What's the onboarding process for the individual new employee partner?

A It has a number of different elements. I think part of it is helping people understand how our business works. It's a complicated business. In some ways it's getting more complicated. The world is changing, but people need to understand our business. So, you know, it's obviously training them about that, but it's just exposing people to it. We really want people to work across the platform. And if you're working in credit, you got to understand the magic of private equity and vice versa. That's one piece. The second piece is culturally The little things matter. The vibe we have in the cafeteria, the vibe we have in the coffee bar, the social events that we do, the ways in which we bring the team together so people can feel the power of, wow, it's incredible to work with such smart, passionate people. So connecting people together on a human level, that's really important. And then I think the work that happens on a team is everything. You know, if you look at employee engagement surveys, Everything correlates with the manager. So what's happening in that person's day job is really important. So you're trying to balance these three things of the curiosity of the business so they can understand what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it. Feeling the power of the culture, regardless of what group you live in. And then three, this sense of, are we getting the team dynami…

AI assessment note: “It has a number of different elements. I think part of it is helping people”

Q Asset management has long had the mantra that money managers may not be good people managers. How did you find your way from doing this in a real business where leadership and management tends to be more valued than we've seen historically in asset management?

A After PwC, I spent five years at MasterCard for their CEO transition when Ajay Banga took over, and that was a big transformation. In an industry that was more Tech and financial services, and working with Ajay to help optimize that culture and drive more innovation, which he was spectacularly successful at, and he now just took over the World Bank, where I'm sure he'll do great things as well. It was a really good bridge into asset management. To your point, everything we're talking about is in relatively recently introduced in asset management. I found it really interesting that asset management was so late in considering these tools, and that's, uh, frustrating in a way because it's so surprising for such smart people in this industry to not be thinking about this. I think the fact that HBS and Wharton and Stanford and all the top business schools have also been late to it didn't help because most of the leaders of these firms were educated in the same era, so they just weren't exposed to it, and You know, that's surprising and interesting, but it's also an unbelievable opportunity. And I put my energy around, okay, if I'm the first person to introduce, introduce some of these ideas, I'm happy to do that. What a privilege, because these tools will knock their socks off because they work, not because I'm special or I'm doing anything particularly special. I'm just playing the…

AI assessment note: “It was a really good bridge into asset management.”

Q What did you learn from the world of sports psychology that you've transferred over?

A Over the years since I graduated HBS, one of my bucket list ideas was to co-author a case. And since I graduated, I've co-authored probably 20 cases, and it's just been a passion project as a hobby more than anything else to just keep my thinking fresh. And I recently worked with a professor named Ranjay Gulati on a case on Pete Carroll. And I have a lot of respect for Pete. And he's been a real pioneer. He's been one of the most successful coaches in history. He's one of the few that's won a national championship in football and a Super Bowl. Um, but he also had a really interesting journey and, and reflected a lot on his failures, was famously fired by the Patriots and replaced by Bill Belichick. And coming out of that, he really clarified his philosophy. He was inspired by John Wooden, who I think was one of the pioneers in this space. Pete also learned a lot from Two of the iconic sports psychologists, Tim Galway, who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, and Michael Murphy, who wrote The Kingdom of Golf. And if you look at those books, those are about clarifying your mindset, having a system, being really disciplined around that system, and understanding that the mental game and the inner game, as Tim describes so well in his work, is just as important as the physical side. I think Pete has set up a system of With the Seahawks, that is all about competing at the highest levels f…

AI assessment note: “So if anything, my job and the task of HR is how do I help a company outperform”

Q So when you got to BlackRock, how did you get started bringing these tools into what was already a large organization?

A The great thing about BlackRock is it's a founder-led company. They had had a winning formula. I think part of BlackRock's story is about M&A. So I think like most startups, They were skeptical about HR and skeptical about what we're talking about. And that skepticism is actually really helpful in a way because there's a really high bar to say, okay, BlackRock's been really successful. Why do they need to do any of this? Because it's basically working. I think the team at BlackRock became more and more open because as they were buying these big companies and integrating them, I think it became clear that the challenges were new and different and scaling required other tools. And I think it created more openness. The skepticism I think is one of their superpowers. So I embraced that skepticism and said, okay, great. You know, let's look at these spots where, you know, you need help and it's not working and we need to optimize and let's just try some tools and they'll either work or they don't work, but if they work, we'll use them more. And if they don't work, we'll try something else. This industry has such smart people who are open-minded, but they're also really skeptical. So it's a high bar and Like anyone, they have to use these tools, work with them, try them, and see for themselves that they work, and then you create a pull, and then they're your greatest advocates. So I …

AI assessment note: “every single project we did was co-sponsored by the deep HR expert and a business leader”

Q What have you found since you've been here?

A Look, it's been an amazing run. I think merging with Athene and creating a whole new approach to the industry, bringing together alternatives, asset management, and retirement services with Mark Rowan, our CEO's vision for the industry and for Apollo has been amazing because his vision for the future and how much we could grow in private credit and capital solutions, And all of these new areas that are the Venn diagram between what Apollo is great at. Mark has a very clear sense of where he sees the puck going in the industry and where he wants Apollo to focus. And my job is to use all these tools to say, okay, great. How do we get the right people focused on that? And then how do we optimize at that company level, team level and individual level that we've got people fired on all cylinders that we're co-creating the culture that the next generation will thrive in. And that's humbling. Just like the Marshall Goldsmith of what got you here won't get you there. How do we need to change and how do we need to evolve and what's missing from the culture that would make it stronger and better? And if our goal is we want to be the best place to work in this space, we want to be the best in the world at what we do. We want to be the best place to be a partner in financial services. The other thing is when I joined, we had roughly a thousand employees at Apollo and today we have Over 250…

AI assessment note: “when I joined, we had roughly a thousand employees at Apollo and today we have”

Q How do you go about making sure that when all these new people come in, they're inculcated into this culture that you're trying to help create?

A I'm obsessed with, with how to figure that out. Mark loves the Peter Drucker quote of culture eats strategy for breakfast. So as CEO, he's incredibly focused on Your exact question. We're hiring all these new areas of expertise as we grow. How do we make sure we're not diluting what's special about the place and the magic of our model and our winning formula? We want it to still feel like a small village where you have a personal touch, where you know your colleagues, where you care about your colleagues, where it feels like a small company, but where we can take on some of the hardest, biggest investment challenges in the world. And how could both things be true? And I think a lot about personal touch. I think a lot about Pete Carroll's concept of, I need to learn the learner. I need to learn what makes this person tick, which reminds me so much of what my mom taught me. And it's actually not the golden rule. It's a higher bar than that. It's the platinum rule. The golden rule is treat other people the way you want to be treated. Great way to live your life. Even better, especially as we're striving to be more and more diverse, The platinum rule is actually taking the time to understand what that person needs from you. Like, what do they need? How do they want to be treated? What drives them? What's their story? What's coming from their background and what they're contributing…

AI assessment note: “The platinum rule is actually taking the time to understand what that person needs”