In early 2021, I interviewed then-chief executive and managing director of Qantas Alan Joyce for our virtual Redefining Leadership Series during the Covid-19 lockdowns.  

Though the airline had been hit hard by the pandemic – with shares trading at around half their current value – Joyce at that time presented as a ‘master of the universe’.  

He was confident in his own skin and in his response to the unprecedented turbulence, seen by many at that time as Australia’s most successful businessperson. 

Five years later, and having just completed Joe Aston’s much-hyped The Chairman’s Lounge over the Christmas break, it saddens me to reflect on Joyce’s spectacular fall from grace, the glittering non-executive director career he would have expected all but over.  

I should disclose this sadness has a personal element, since I came to know Joyce and become friendly through our mutual interests of the arts, philanthropy and the marriage equality campaign.  

But even putting the personal connection aside, as the leader of a business, this tale contains  many lessons – one that current and emerging leaders of our financial services industry in particular will want to heed. 

Assuming Aston’s journalism is accurate – and having occasionally featured in the Rear Window column he edited at the AFR for a decade, I know he isn’t always! – the main charge levelled against Qantas is around the length of Joyce’s tenure and a series of corporate governance failures.  

Joyce served nearly 15 years as CEO of Qantas – well beyond credible best practice guidelines for tenure of directors of public companies from proxy advisors and corporate governance experts, the consensus among whom seems to be anything more than nine years is questionable.  

Aston extrapolated on his views in an interview with our editor-in-chief Aleks Vickovich at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium in the NSW Blue Mountains in 2024, citing academic research that suggests holding positions of power over excessive lengths of time can have profound – even traumatic – impacts on the human brain.  

The book alleges a culture of hubris and sycophancy, where executives were more focused on their own bonuses and luxurious frequent flyer incentives than they were on shareholder and customer value creation. And the chair and board were largely absent in their duty to hold Joyce and his management team to account.  
 
For the superannuation sector especially, there are important parallels. The competency, skills and independence of trustee boards continue to be a hot topic in the industry, even though many sector leaders like to pretend these issues have been long dealt with.  

Early glimpses of analysis conducted by The Conexus Institute of super trustee board composition, which will be unveiled at our upcoming Chair Forum in the Mornington Peninsula,  confirm there are still sitting trustee board chairs who have served for as long as 17 years – almost twice the maximum advocated by institutions such as the OECD and UK Corporate Governance Code. 

These statistics are particularly egregious given many super funds and their proxy advisory body ACSI hold themselves out as enforcers of good corporate governance of the companies and assets they are invested in.  

But it is of course not only the super sector that can learn hard truths. The financial planning industry (and its adjacent world of platforms, research and managed accounts) has also disappointingly shown that there is reason to hesitate in calling it a profession after the shocking and unacceptable Shield and First Guardian disaster. 

Though they might be a minority, the advisers, licensees and service providers caught up in this fiasco have done enormous damage to the reputation of the industry and its ethical standing. It seems, sadly, that the hard work of our Professional Planner publication and many others to campaign for higher professional and education standards and elimination of product commissions have not ensured that the barriers to entry are high enough to keep out any unethical practitioners. 

The Federal Court also found Qantas had contravened consumer law over misleading practices relating to flight cancellations, which is just one of a number of ethical issues canvassed in The Chairman’s Lounge, providing an interesting parallel.  

We should all pay close attention – and hope Shield and First Guardian or other latent ethical issues in our industry are not the subject of Aston’s next salacious thriller.  

Colin Tate AM is founder and managing director of Conexus Financial, publisher of Investment Magazine.