What makes a company last for generations? It's not their strategy. It's what people do day in day out. When things get tough, it's the people that pull through, not the plan. And we see this in all the companies that we invest in. Culture separates the great from the good. And so the question becomes, what is great culture? To me, it's how you make decisions, how you argue, how you debate, how you fix your mistakes, how you act when you don't have all the answers. Strategy is important, of course, but you can always write a new one. So the question becomes, what is a winning culture to you?
Welcome to the investment conference 2026. I am Patrick Duplacy.
And I'm Shelpi Nanda. We'll be your hosts for today.
The topic of this year's conference is what's a winning culture. In an age where you can copy a competitive strategy, poach their talent, replicate their technology, culture is the only true competitive advantage.
And show the hardest to build.
That's right, Patrick. Which is why this conference brings together leaders that have wrestled with the hardest questions about culture. How do you build it, transform it, scale it without losing what makes it special? And perhaps most urgently, as AI reshapes organizations, will your culture keep pace or hold you back?
And that's what brings us together today. So, a very warm welcome to everyone present in the room here.
And to those of you joining us via live stream from around the world, we're happy to have you with us.
We have quite the lineup today, each bringing a different answer to what makes a winning culture.
And here's how the day unfolds. Four sessions ahead. In part one, we look at the fundamentals. What's a winning culture? Why does it matter?
Part two tackles transformation. How do you transform culture in established organizations?
In part three, we look at high performance cultures in the age of AI.
And part four closes with something special, a live podcast with Jamie Dimon.
What better way to end than in good company?
Absolutely. Now to set the stage, I'd like to invite Nicolai to share why culture matters now more than ever.
Well, I have a confession to make because when I was a bit younger, I loved earnings calls. I loved first quarter calls, second quarter calls, revenue, margin, cash flow. You know, I read balance sheets in bed a bit like you guys read poetry or do you read poetry? But then I realized that there was something else which was much more important because where did the numbers come from and what made them change? And that's when I realized I needed to spend more time on culture. Because numbers, they tell you where a company has been. Culture tells you where it's going.
So in the fund we invest 20,000 billion Norwegian kroner. We are invested in 7,000 companies across the world and when we invest we have an investment horizon of decades. So when we look at who are successful and who fail, we don't look at quarters. We look at many years, many tens of years. And I've been convinced that it's all about culture because companies which in many cases look exactly the same, you know, same sneakers, same elevators, same banking products, some of them end up winning and some of them end up bankrupt.
And we see it everywhere. But of course, no more extreme than in the banking sector. Some end up staying for hundreds of years. Others are gone. And it's not about the balance sheet. It's about the corporate culture. Who do you hire? Who do you fire? How fast do you make decisions? How worried are you about telling the truth to your boss? That's all culture. It's about speed, innovation, risk-taking.
Now, let's think about 2007 for instance in Finland. Nokia, they controlled half the world market for mobile phones. Half the world market. Then the iPhone was launched. The mid-managers saw the next day that this was a real threat to the business. Didn't dare to tell the top management because of fear of failure. Six years later, Nokia gone because of a culture of fear.
So where does culture come from? Well, it comes from the top. I have now in the Good Company podcast spoken to 200 companies. Now, according to my wife, 200 companies is not enough to become a good listener. But I'm trying hard. So, I sit down with the head of Jivona and I ask him, 'What is your culture?' And he says, 'You know what? It's about performance. It's about taking the right amount of risk. It's about empathy.' And then I said, 'Well, but you're just describing yourself, aren't you?' And he starts laughing and he says, 'Well, and that's exactly why it's working.' So, basically, culture is coming from the characteristics of a CEO and it's being transmitted to the corporation. It's not what you write on the wall, it's what you do every day.
Now, the world is changing faster than any time before. And AI is reshaping all the organizations. So it's not a matter of should we adopt AI, it's just a matter of how fast can we adopt it and what is it that prevents us from doing it in the organization. The companies getting it right, they are the companies where people can make a difference straight away where speed matters more than hierarchy. And the ones getting it wrong have cultures built on fear and cultures where it's about this is the way we've always done it. These companies will be gone soon.
But then there is a new term which I love and that is called high agency people. High agency people is people who do original things with speed and with force. And we have a lot of them here today to talk to you. So you will see cultures from many different directions, different countries and different industries. But what all these companies have in common is high performance culture and a level of ambition that is world-leading. By the way, way beyond the type of ambitions we typically see in this country because here extreme ambition means beating your neighbor to the ski tracks on the Sunday.
But ambitions really matter because if you have high ambitions, you achieve great things even if you fail. If you have low ambitions, you achieve nothing even if you succeed. So the companies we are meeting today have extraordinary growth, market share gains, return on capital and it's been going on over decades and today we are going to learn from them. They are what we in the oil fund call kickass companies. And what better way to start than with David Rubenstein. He co-founded one of the most successful investment companies in the world. He's a master interviewer who has sat down with hundreds of CEOs and politicians. He knows exactly what separates winners from the rest. Please help me welcoming my friend David Rubenstein.
Thank you, Nicolai, very much. I'm happy to be in Oslo. I didn't come here to lobby for a Nobel Peace Prize, so if anybody wants to give me one, I'd be happy to take it. But if Mr. Nobel were still alive today and I had a chance to meet with him, I would say to him, well, if you're going to have a peace prize, that's a good idea. But why don't you also have a prize for corporate culture? Because companies that are great and create good cultures can change the world just the way great peacemakers can. Think about it. The iPhone that was referenced earlier. The iPhone was maybe one of the most successful consumer products ever and it has changed the world as have all smartphones as well in ways that I think benefit all of us. And so when you have a great company that produces a great product or great service, it can help the world just the way great peacemaking can help the world.
Now when I was a little boy in Baltimore, Maryland, growing up, I can't honestly say that my role model was a great corporate leader. I was focused on baseball or sports or other things. And little boys in my era wanted to grow up to be sports heroes. Today, younger people in their teenage years probably don't want to be sports heroes as much as they want to be corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. And that has changed the culture of the world. Think about this. In any given year, there'll be roughly 50 to 60 million new companies started. 50 to 60 million new companies started around the world. About six to seven million a year in the United States, about 8 million a year or so in Europe and maybe 20 to 25 million in Asia and other parts of the world as well. So 50 some million new companies started. After one year about half of those won't be around and after another two years another half won't be around and after another year about half more won't be around. What companies actually get to be there for five years or 10 years or 15 years?
Well, there are companies that have charismatic leaders. Typically, it starts a company might start with one or two or even three charismatic leaders that have a vision of what they want to do. Second, they have a product or a service that they're interested in selling to people and convincing people their lives will be better with that product or service. And they are not as focused on making money as they are on getting people to buy into their vision that this product or this service will make people's lives better. They also have a willingness to try to work hard to get to their end and their willingness to make certain that their product and their service will get a fair hearing from around the world. But the companies that survive for 5 years and 10 years and 15 years and 20 years are companies that have more than a charismatic leader and a good product or good service. They have an incredible culture and it's culture that enables companies to go from one generation to the next generation.
As we all know, very rarely do you see a great company survive the founder's demise. It happens and Steve Jobs is a perfect example of it happening. Steve Jobs started the company in the late 1970s and he was actually thrown out of his own company and he was out of the company for about 14 years before he was brought back. And then he changed the world by a number of products and services that Apple developed. And then when he passed away, he was leaving behind a company many people thought couldn't survive without the founder. But because it had an incredible culture, the company dramatically grew. When Steve died, the market capitalization of the company was about $350 billion. Today, it's about three and a half trillion. So it's up about 10 times. How did the company go under Tim Cook's leadership to such an incredible place in the world? Well, it's because the culture that Steve Jobs had built was expanded by Tim Cook and ultimately that culture permeated the entire employee base and entire customer base of the company.
And so what you have sometimes is you have a number of charismatic leaders who build a company. They sometimes can make it go to the next generation. Sometimes they cannot. It's very difficult to make a company go much better after the founders are gone. It happens from time to time. We don't know for example what will happen to Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway was built by one charismatic brilliant investor and he made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Now there's a transition and time will tell whether it works or not. But generally, if you have a good culture, a good culture will enable a company to survive. And what is a good culture? It's a good culture that a company has and enables it to survive not more than five or 10 or 15 years but 20 or 25 years or beyond. It's a concern about making certain that the customer comes first. Making certain that the employees are treated fairly. Making certain that everybody has a chance to succeed and has be listened to and make certain that you're producing a product or a service that really people want and really does something useful for society.
And producing a culture like that is like your own DNA. Everybody here has the DNA from their parents. And your DNA is really what shapes you to some extent. To some extent, you can improve upon what your parents did. Some cases maybe you won't improve upon what your parents gave you. But many companies can improve upon what the founders gave them by using the DNA that the founders gave them. And they can even go beyond that. And so when you're looking at corporate culture, what you have to do is look at what the founders created, but can that founder's culture go beyond when the founders leave the scene? And those are the great companies. The companies that survive for 25 years and 30 years and 40 years and beyond are the companies that people will always emulate and want to have as role models because they're the ones that have a culture that people admire. They're the ones that put customers first. They're the ones that put employees first. They're the ones that put the people that provide services to the company, the suppliers first. Making certain that you worry about other people more than yourself is the most important thing in corporate culture.
And in corporate culture, the companies that survive the most and that really prosper are not the ones where the CEO is making the most amount of money or is worried about the amount of money he or she is making. Worrying about other people is what makes companies survive and do so well. So as we look at corporate culture and we talk about it today, just think about this. In the end, the companies that we all want to have as role models, the companies that we all would like to build or invest in, the companies we all think that we'd like to have our children build as well if they start their own companies would be ones that have a corporate culture that puts the customer first, that makes sure the employees are treated well, that has a vision of what they want to do for society to make the company succeed and make the world a slightly better place. The concern about making money is not generally the thing that makes a company prosper at the beginning. Certainly, you need to have a culture that really drives everybody and having everybody pull together. And that's what when I'm investing in companies, what I'm looking for is companies that have a culture where people want to come to work. They like working there. They think they're doing something useful for society. And making money is a nice measure of success, but it's not the main measure of what a company's all about.
And so as you think about corporate culture and through this conference today, just think about whether these companies that you're going to hear about are companies that have a culture that you want to have as you want to invest with. They're companies you'd like to work at, you'd be proud to have your children work at, and the kind of companies you wish you had started because those are the kind of companies I think that we all want to have in our portfolio and all the kind of companies we want to have as companies that are trying to make the world a better place. Companies have a good and everlasting corporate culture that really will survive the founders and that will ultimately make everybody think they're producing a product or service that makes the world a better place. Thank you very much.
Thank you, David. Our next speaker started investing from his Harvard dorm room in 1986 and founded one of the world's leading alternative investment firms just a year after graduating. Kenneth Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel, which manages over $60 billion in capital. At Citadel, winning is core. They hire the top 1% and create an environment where that top 1% push each other to be even better. How do you build a culture where the best want to stay and compete? Marlon Nurbach, the chief investment officer for market strategies, joins him to find out. Please welcome Kenneth and Malin.
Thank you, Ken, for joining us here in Oslo today. I cannot think of a better person to talk to about winning culture. So, winning is one of Citadel's core values alongside integrity, learning, meritocracy, and extraordinary colleagues, but winning is the one that stands out there. So, why winning?
So, first, it's just wonderful to be here today. Thank you so much for having me participate in this wonderful conference. And one of the things that is very true is that this team which has done such an extraordinary job of managing the sovereign wealth of the nation has been focused on delivering for the people of Norway. You have had a winning team which has really delivered in a profound way for the people of your country. Let me be clear. Why do we actually enumerate winning as one of our core values? Because regretfully in the United States, we went through a period of time in which winning seemed to be out of vogue. We lost our way in the wilderness. And great firms are focused on winning. As David Rubenstein put it, can you create a product that the consumer will value, the consumer will pay for, and what the consumer will reward you for creating and for building? Firms that are winning firms do just that. And firms that create inferior products are firms that fail. And what worried us is in a culture where participation trophies were becoming ubiquitous, we lost our way as a country and what it took to win. And we at Citadel really do believe in the importance of winning for our clients. That's core to our business. And I was thinking about what David had to say in terms of companies and products. One thing to keep in mind is at Citadel there's no shame in making money. We manufacture money. Our clients give us capital with one goal in mind. Can we manufacture more money with that capital?
You certainly manufacture money in a very impressive way. So when it comes to a winning culture, Nicolai just mentioned speed as one of the pillars to a winning culture and your colleague here just told me that one thing that amazes him with Citadel is that you can still move at the speed of a startup even though you are thousands of employees. So how do you do that?
So I wish we could. I wish we could. But as you grow, as a business grows in complexity and grows in stakeholders, grows in regulatory footprint for example, it actually becomes necessary to have more process, more bureaucracy to make sure that what you do is on the right side of the road. So startups have greater flexibility than your established firms but your established firms have far greater depth and resources. What you have to be very focused on is that you are controlling the size of the bureaucratic state that you keep a constant focus on the ability to rapidly make decisions and when a decision is made to rapidly execute upon that decision. But because you have a bigger footprint, you're still going to have to go through a few more steps than that smaller startup might have to go through. But with more resources, with the ability to interact with other global players on a far more stronger playing field, we're able to move quite quickly. On decision-making though, this is one where large firms do tend to find themselves lost in the wilderness. I'll tell my colleagues all the time. They put something to my desk for input from me. I'll give them a date. I'll be back to you in 72 hours, 48 hours, 96 hours. If you don't hear from me, I gave you a yes. It's your call. Don't let yourself in management be an impediment to decision-making by those who are junior to you. And in some sense, negative consent to move forward is really powerful because it tells people that they have agency that they can make a decision.
One of our key internal principles is the most junior person who is closest to the information. That's the person who optimally should make the decision as often or as frequently as possible. Now, will they make mistakes? Of course they will. But they will grow much faster in a culture where they're empowered with agency to make decisions. They will learn from their successes and they will learn from their failures. But most importantly, they are rapidly learning and that's how we create leaders.
So it's a good point and talking about developing people. So the Wall Street Journal reported that you spend several weeks every year reviewing the performance assessments for thousands of employees. So why is that where you choose to spend your time and what does it say about the culture at Citadel?
Well, first of all, I think it says that I deeply care about how my colleagues are advancing in their careers. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns of where we are not developing talent strongly enough and aggressively enough. So where in the business are our newest hires, whether they're out of college, out of a PhD program, a lateral hire from another global investment bank or global investment management firm, where are people not flourishing? And I'm trying to understand what do we need to do as a firm? What do we need to do differently? Whether it's professional development, whether it's the experience that people have, whether it's the trust that are placed in our newer hires, what do we need to do differently to get more out of people? One of the things I'm most proud of at Citadel is the extraordinary amount of human capital that we've developed over 35 years. People who run today one of the world's most successful hedge funds who run one of the most successful securities dealers in the world and bluntly countless people who run many of the financial institutions around the world whose roots trace back to Citadel. I think these are all a testament to our consistent focus on developing people to be the best that they can be.
So, Citadel was a pioneer in quantitative investing and you've been using machine learning for well longer than most of us knew what that was. So, how do you with that head start? So, 10 years of head starts on the AI movement today. How do you make sure you stay ahead?
Well, I think that's actually a wonderful story about the kind of firm we want to be. I remember when TensorFlow was released and five of my colleagues came to my office like the day it came out and they literally said TensorFlow which was Google's machine learning toolkit was going to revolutionize the world with complete conviction and I said okay. And they were basically saying we want to go spend the next couple of weeks really engrossed in what this body of knowledge means and how we can apply it in market-making in securities. And I said, 'Well, I mean, of course, go for it.' And really the point of the meeting was not permission. It was their excitement over this transformative technology. Like they wanted to bring me behind the curtain to think about what machine learning was going to mean for our business. And I remember calling one of those colleagues about four weeks later and saying, 'Okay, so what are your initial findings? Like what have you gleaned so far from using TensorFlow?' He goes, 'Well, it's in production.' And I'm like, 'What? What do you mean it's in production?' He goes, 'We use it to quote the US equity portfolio. We've been doing that for the last two weeks.' And I'm like, 'It's been four weeks since the meeting.' He goes, 'No, no, like a group of us work pretty much every single day, 12 to 14 hours a day, because this is one of the coolest things we've ever worked on, and this is going to transform the world, and we're already using it in production.' That's a winning culture.
That's a winning culture. And around technology, so with GenAI technology is not only for the technologists but for everyone. So have you changed the culture around how you manage the culture around technology adoption in the firm?
So I think it's important to remember that about one in three people at Citadel are a software engineer. So the firm is very deeply invested in technology like it's core to what we do. I think it's just important to keep that in the back of your mind when you touch on this topic. So for us with generative AI, I think frankly one of the biggest problems out of the gate was there was perhaps too much enthusiasm for embracing GenAI that the early generation large language models were really fascinating to people because for the first time machine learning didn't create a vector of zeros and ones. It created written word. It could write a poem. It could write a song. Could write a story. It could write a narrative. I mean, it interacted with people in a way that technology has rarely interacted with individuals and it was incredibly alluring to people to how do I use this to change what I was doing at work. One of the tougher conversations I have with a colleague is I said, 'All right, I want a list of all the GenAI-based projects that we have at Citadel.' And he came back with 200 projects. I said, 'No, no, five. We're going to do five.' And he's like, 'Well, what about the other 195?' He said, 'We're going to kill all those. We're going to do five. We're going to actually push them really hard. We're going to see what works and what doesn't work. But we can't afford to let everybody be pursuing random ad hoc projects. Like it's just too expensive. It's too much of a distraction.' Now, of the five that we pursued, we had a real success with just over half. Now, of note, the GenAI models have gotten markedly better. I don't think we incurred any cost of killing 195 projects. And I do believe that over the course of the last six months with the introduction of OpenAI o1, with Claude 3.5, I think you have a transformative sea change taking place. You've got many more use cases today that are practical that are implementable that are meaningful in impact than you did two years ago. So I think one of the key challenges for a business is always that dilemma between being on the bleeding edge and being on the leading edge. And I think good companies think very long and hard about where's it worth being on the bleeding edge. So it was with TensorFlow. And where do you want to be on the leading edge? Where do you want to be a fast follower? Where do you want others to sort of pave the way in front of you and you can follow quickly and capitalize on their learnings? I think it's very important in running a big business to think about when do you want to be in the bleeding edge, when do you want to be in the leading edge, and pick that path with volition. Don't let that come down to random happenstance.
So one of the places where you're in the leading edge is hiring the top people. You have hundreds of thousands of applications every year and you said Citadel hires winners in life and not just winners in business. So say I'm applying for a job at Citadel and I'm sitting next to you for a job interview. So, what's the one question you would ask me to see if I was the right cultural fit for Citadel?
Oh, I wish one question would do the trick.
What's the most essential question?
Look, I don't think there's one. It's a mosaic. Okay, we're all people. We're complicated. And what you want to understand is what is the mosaic of this person and how does that fit into our team holistically and the team they're going to be a part of. So there are a few things that I'm deeply interested in learning about you. Nicolai, you spoke about ambition. Okay. I actually prefer the word aspiration over ambition because I think it appeals to our deeper inner meaning more directly. What do we aspire to do in this world? What do we aspire to create or to change? I want to know your ambitions or aspirations. I want to know what does success look like to you? You know, I had a young man from Harvard with me years ago and I asked him, you know, this is going to be right to the point. If you made $10 million, what would you do? And he goes, I would quit and I would climb the highest peaks around the world. I said, okay. I said, 'I don't think this is the right firm for you.' And he goes, 'Well, you've already made an offer to me.' I said, 'That's wonderful. I strongly urge you not to accept it because I don't want to hear from somebody who's 22 years old that there's some number that represents their magic number. If they made that much money, they're going to climb mountains around the world. I want to hear how they're going to climb the next mountain at Citadel, how they're going to grow a business for us, how they're going to change the firm, how they want to lead our Asian business, or like look, if I made $10 million, I'd like to think it was done because I was very successful at X and that I'd have more responsibility here to have a bigger impact on the firm. That's what I want to hear, right? So, I look for people's aspirations. I look for their track record of being a winner. You know, I love people who competed in competitive sports in high school and college. They're not going to play tennis for Citadel's tennis team, but their willingness to get up every single day and go to practice. Their willingness to put it all out, in this case, on the court and to win or to be beaten says a lot about their resiliency and their perseverance. And those are really important life skills that you learn in playing competitive sports. In fact, in choosing to compete in any arena, speech and debate, as a musician, competing in any arena tells me that you are willing to win and to lose. And that is such an important life skill. You know, people forget that my average equity portfolio manager is right in about 53% of their stock picks. Okay. Could you imagine like you're going to your surgeon, he goes, 'Yeah, about 53% of my patients live,' right? What a humbling job. You're right about 53% of the time. If you're right about 53% of the time with the right upside downside ratio, you're actually extraordinarily good as a portfolio manager. But that means you go home a lot of days really wrong and really humbled. Do you have the mental fortitude to come back to work the next day and get right back at it?
Well, I think those are some great advice and insights to a winning culture and I think that's a good note to end on. So, thank you so much, Ken. This has been very insightful.
Thank you, Kenneth and Marlon. Our next speaker brings a distinctive approach to culture. Michael O'Leary is the group CEO of Ryanair and previously served as CEO of the airline. He transformed a struggling airline through a low-cost model. Today, it is Europe's largest and one of the most profitable airlines. His approach, a relentless focus on cost and execution. The result, a culture of extreme efficiency and an airline that has made travel affordable for millions. Daniel Balthazar, co-chief investment officer of Active Strategies, will explore how he did this. Please welcome Michael and Daniel.
Michael. Warm welcome to our conference.
Thank you very much. Great pleasure to be here.
We met in this office a couple of years ago for an investor meeting.
After that, I received a letter from you thanking me for the meeting, which made me really feel really, really special. Never happened to me in my 25 years of doing this. What does that tell me about you and Ryanair?
Well, firstly, it tells me you didn't buy enough of our stock after that meeting, which is why I had to do the follow-up letter to encourage you to buy more. And we have a cost focus as well. We like to buy low.
Oh, there's never been a better opportunity. Stock is down about 25%. Just don't tell anybody because we're buying it as fast as we can at the moment and I don't want to be competing with anybody else in the room.
Very good. So if the culture is set at the top, how does that translate into how 25,000 people behave every single day?
I get very nervous at these culture meetings. I'm skeptical when we do all the cultural stuff. I respect David, but you know, I don't want to be running a company that survives 300 years and for 55 generations. We want to make money for the next 5, 10 years. And if we do that there's a reasonable prospect we'll survive 15, 20 years but ultimately somebody's going to come along and reinvent the wheel. I don't think Nokia failed by the way because the management were arrogant or there was a culture of fear in Nokia. Nokia failed because fundamentally the iPhone came along and totally transformed the technology and that bedevils all of us. What keeps me awake at night? Star Trek. Because it doesn't matter how bloody cheap my fares are going to be. And when it comes to flying in Europe, no one's going to beat Ryanair on price ever, but somebody sometime is going to invent some way of beaming people across Europe. Although the European Commission will probably find some way to tax it for some environmental cause, da da da da da da, but ultimately we will get the technology or some sort of transformative technology will come along and it doesn't matter how good our culture was or how good our cost base was, we're going to get blown out of the water. Until that time comes, our culture is we kind of we do not and I kind of shout and rant and rave at everybody. We're not interested in explaining our culture. Our culture is we want to deliver the lowest fare most on time flights and we'll do it by having the lowest cost base in the industry and we will keep transforming our cost base.
We lead the airline industry across the world. We were the first people to get rid of travel agents. You know when the internet came along because we've been paying 20% for distribution for 15 years in an industry that had a 1% margin. Why the hell are we paying 20% to mom and pop travel agents? Internet came along, we were out the door, banned the travel agents and were gone. We were the first people 15 years ago to charge for bags. And as you know, as it says in the good Bible, Moses came down from the mountaintop and the fourth commandment is thou shalt be entitled to bring free bags on board aircraft forever more. But by charging for bags we went from 80% of passengers on our flights bringing a bag on a stay duration of 2.5 days to 20% of passengers today now bring a bag in which means not alone have we gotten rid of huge amounts of labor at our airports and again I slightly disagree with David I want to treat people well but ultimately I want to get rid of as many people as I can within the business but and the ones who remain I'll treat well. Pilots, for example, are egregiously expensive employees. By law, they can't fly more than 800 hours a year, which is 18 hours a week, which I think is ridiculously unproductive. And for that, I pay them about a quarter million each. So, but technology will in time come along. You know, if the US military can fly drones or fly aircraft across, pilots will ultimately get competed out of the system. I want to treat my pilots very well. I want to treat my cabin crew very well, but at the back I also want to find some way of finding a technology that'll replace them all. And then the cost of flying across Europe, even with the EU's environmental taxes and ridiculous regulation, will become even cheaper than it ever has before. So our focus and our culture is all about make it cheap, make it on time. After that, go away, you're not getting anything else. And then be viciously obsessively focused on how do we make it cheaper, cheaper, cheaper by constantly reinvesting, reinventing the system and fundamentally changing customer behavior.
Charging for bags was one of the greatest initiatives we've ever come up with not because and everybody's obsessed with oh we just want the money. I would happily give away the money ultimately to shareholders but give away the money if I can get rid of the last 20% of bags. I would have no check-in staff. I'd have no baggage handling staff. I'd have no lost baggage staff. The aircraft fly about 3% lighter, which reduces my fuel consumption. My fuel bill's about 5 billion a year. So the hidden benefits of getting rid of checked-in bloody bags is that we're consuming less fuel. And with jet oil today at about $157 a barrel, anything I can do to get out those kind of costs, we will do. And that's why we are the most profitable airline in the world. We are certainly the biggest international airline in the world. And yet we plan to grow in size from 200 million passengers last year to 300 million passengers in the next 8 years by taking delivery of 300 new aircraft from Boeing, the Max 10 aircraft which are 20% bigger in terms of seats but they burn 20% less fuel per seat. I am going to transform my economics for the next 10 years with this new technology. And they'll be flown by the same two pilots, the same four or five cabin crew. Which should make us hugely lower cost, widen the price advantage I have over every other airline in Europe. And I'm going to blow them all up and own the industry until somebody in a back bedroom somewhere invents some way of beaming people across Europe and then I'm screwed.
Excellent. You operate in a hyper-competitive industry.
Are you kidding? Hyper-competitive is Europe? No, they're all useless. Government owned, heavily regulated, hugely government subsidized. All the legacies are running around at the moment trying to get bailouts. God bless the Republicans in the United States. They're now about to bail out two of the most bankrupt airlines, Spirit and JetBlue, who should have been allowed to go to the wall many years ago. So, no, it's not a hyper-competitive industry. It's a very badly regulated industry. It is government-owned which is why it is inefficient, hugely expensive and inefficient in Europe. So all I have to be is modestly competitive to be better than the rest of the competition in Europe but that's not setting the bar very high.
Amazing. Most people though, most employees, they don't like an over-focus on cost. How do you keep them motivated?
Fear, terror, stalking the corridors late at night. We don't, I mean you know the great thing about Ryanair is we've been doing it this way for 30 years. So you know we hire about 50 graduates every year. We hire people who want to work hard. We try to set an example there. It is a very slim kind of management. There is only three layers of management between somebody on the front line and me. And therefore we keep it very flat. But the advantage we have is we're a single, you know, we're a one-good kind of operation. It's only an airline. All we have to sell is a seat. So we don't need complexity. We avoid M&A. We don't get involved in, you know, buying hotels or buying airports or buying whatever else it is. We buy aircraft hopefully at times of distress when Boeing or Airbus needs orders and then all we do is sell seats all day long. So we don't need a lot of complicated management and then but we are very good because I think we have a very flat management structure. We're very good at pouncing on new initiatives as they come along. And the great advantage of being the great strength of Ryanair is we're not very much beloved. We finished last in almost every passenger survey. We have never won. There's an award in Ireland for the Irish Travel Agents Association which there's only two airlines in Ireland. Aer Lingus have won those awards which is the ex-state airline. Aer Lingus have won the travel agent airline of the year award for 30 years in a row. I have promised that I will quit if we ever win that award. So but the advantage of, sorry I just cut the advantage of not being overly sensitive about my reputation or our image or being culturally popular is we're ruthlessly low cost and that gives us huge freedom to chase those kind of cost-saving measures or to reinvent the way we drive the airlines and then ultimately all the other morons will follow us along. I mean the American airlines have just discovered charging for bags 15, 20 years after we started doing it. Now they're trying to do it as a way of gaining revenue whereas we did it not as a way of generating revenue but as a way of eliminating cost.
It's fascinating because most of the CEOs we talk to they talk about more customer centricity, keep the customer, heck, put the customer in the center of everything. Yet you're doing the opposite but win.
But that's because we have an enormous price advantage over everybody else. Customers ultimately in every survey, 'Oh, I wish they were nicer. I want a refund of a non-refund.' What part of no refund don't you understand? I don't care if your granny died or your cat was ill and you couldn't travel on the day. It was a non-refundable fare. Now I want you to fly because I can sell you about 6 euros of ancillary revenues on board my aircraft. But I'm 216 million and we appear occasionally, it happens even to us. We occasionally mismanage situations. We get a huge amount of adverse publicity and what I notice every time we get a lot of adverse publicity is bookings go up. Elon Musk who I have never met, never had any interaction with. We had this issue we were trying to put Wi-Fi on board our aircraft at the start of the year. I think free Wi-Fi on board aircraft is coming. The problem at the moment is the technology doesn't yet exist. We have to put a couple of dimples on the outside of the aircraft. It would be about a 2% fuel drag and my fuel bill is 5 billion a year. 2% fuel drag is something of the order of about a hundred million and I'm not paying 100 million to put free Wi-Fi on board for my passengers. Starlink which is a terrific technology. I have no issue with the Starlink technology. Starlink believe passengers will pay you 12 euros and it'll pay for itself. Clearly they've never met any Ryanair passengers. Because by the time we've gone up and down the cabin selling them teas, coffee, scratch cards and anything else we can kind of think to sell them, we don't have time to be running up and down taking one euro transactions. So I happened to say look Starlink is great but you know the system doesn't work, we're not taking a fuel penalty of 100 million a year because that would be 50 cents on every ticket and someone told Elon Musk that I'd slagged off Starlink so he popped up something on his internet feed going who is this wanker in Ryanair who's this Ryanair gobshite he's clearly an idiot he knows nothing about flying so I pop back who is this idiot in Twitter running that cesspool that is Twitter having a pop off me I'm correct it does have a fuel drag, he says it doesn't have a fuel drag and then he says I know nothing about avionics which is probably true I know very little about avionics but he knows nothing about flying low-cost airlines either. He then ran a poll on his Twitter X, I don't have a Twitter site by the way thankfully I have better things to do with my life but he ran a poll at his 1.5 billion followers should I buy Ryanair. We politely pointed out you're American therefore you can't buy a Ryanair. We're European and you have to be more than 50%. You won't. And next thing it exploded during the second week of January, which is one of the quietest weeks for bookings in Europe. And my bookings just took off. Next thing we're running around, how do we manifest? So, we ran a big idiot seat sale. We got AI to come up with some ads of me smacking him over the head with some and him choking me. Da da da. And we manufactured about $30 million of free publicity. I was holding a press conference in Dublin back in January to do my kind of usual this summer. We'll do 25 new routes. They took the press conference live on Sky, CBC went live to this idiot in Dublin talking desperately trying to make some news about how Elon Musk is wrong. We got about 30 million free publicity out of it and bookings for about 6 weeks went up by about 3 percentage points.
Did you send him a thank you letter?
Did you send Elon Musk a thank you?
No, actually we sent him a free voucher for a free Ryanair flight round to the Twitter offices in Dublin. And got a photograph of me handing in the free Ryanair voucher. He hasn't claimed it yet, but I hope he will at some point in time in the not too distant future. So, one of the other things we do is we will jump on any bit of cheap publicity we can because cheap publicity in our business where you have such a price advantage drives enormous sales and enormous bookings. And so as long as it doesn't revolve around safety, and I remember Trump getting elected the first time said if he murdered somebody on Fifth Avenue that he'd still get elected. And we were thinking, well, maybe if we murdered somebody on Fifth Avenue, would it drive bookings up on Ryanair? We thought, no, that was probably pushing the envelope a little bit too far. But other than that, if it doesn't involve safety, we're up for any bit of cheap publicity we can get.
Okay, so to summarize, a cost focus, free marketing and an incredible sense of
Humor definitely created a winning culture. Thank you very much, Michael. Please join me with a show. Thank you very much.
Michael and Daniel, Michael, could I ask you to remain seated for a panel discussion? Okay. So far, we've heard some very different approaches to building winning cultures. Now, let's bring those perspectives together. David and Kenneth will be joining this panel, and joining them is Robin Group, the CEO of MAN Group, a global alternative investment firm with over $200 billion in assets. She brings another lens to high performance culture. David will moderate this session. Please help me welcome them to the stage.
Good to see you again, my friend. I get to follow that act. That's going to be tough.
So, Robin, you are the CEO of Man Group, right?
And you're not a man, right?
Well, since I last looked, yeah.
And you're the first woman to be the CEO of Man Group in 250 years or something like that.
Something like that, yeah.
So, how did you get to that job?
Yeah, determination. How did I get to that job? One, I worked there for a decent amount of time. Two, I've held lots of different roles. And I've got lots of war wounds to show for it. And I was the best person for the job when it came open.
Okay. And the best person for the job always gets the job.
Okay. And Ken, your firm has been extraordinarily successful in everything it's touched. But in the great recession of '07-'08, you came very close to not being that successful. Were you ever worried that you weren't going to survive in the '07-'08 period?
So '07, no, '07 was actually a phenomenal year for us. But there was a day in '08, I remember getting the elevator at home and saying like literally, I hope when I come back we're still in business. And CNBC had a van parked outside of our four walls trying to get that bankruptcy footage. So, it was a tough 16 weeks in 2008. Now, the good news is history's written by the winners. We've had a great run since 2008 and that moment's largely become a footnote in our history, but one that I'll never forget.
Michael, you're identified as the CEO for a long time of Ryanair, but you didn't start Ryanair. Mr. Ryan started it. Had you not been working for him, do you think you would ever have wound up in some capacity like your job you have now? Because the personality you have now, did you have that personality before or did you grow it as you kind of were running this airline?
Did I always have a deformed personality? Probably. I was educated by Christian Brothers and then Jesuits. So it was a miracle I survived that. Would I be in the airline industry? No. I would hopefully have gotten a job in a proper functioning industry where you could make money like Kenny. But unlike Robin, in my case, I got the job in Ryanair because nobody else wanted it. The Ryans had set Ryanair up at the start of EU deregulation back in 1987. They wanted to kind of compete with Aer Lingus on the Irish-UK routes and they lost 20 million in three years and the thing was going bust. I was this bright young guy coming out of college, had my accountancy degree. I was actually very quiet, reticent. I never wanted the publicity. And eventually they ran out of chief executives. There was nobody left to run the bloody place. So I was sent in to just staunch the losses. Do whatever you want and go whatever you want to do. My first recommendation was close this turkey. It's never going to make money. It's doomed to bloody fail. This industry is for the birds. And Tony thankfully sent me off to see Southwest in the States at the time when Herb Kelleher was doing what he did so well in Austin in Texas. He was a legend and he was the guy who kind of created the low-fare industry. And I was sent off to see him. And I have this legendary dinner with Herb Kelleher.
What do you remember at the dinner with Herb Kelleher?
Absolutely bloody nothing. He was at the time about 65. I was about 26. He drank me under the table before the starters had even got there. But I saw Southwest. We come from Europe. Everything was slow. A plane would drive in and an hour and 15 minutes later turn around because the pilots had to have a smoke and the camera crew had to have a whinge and everybody had to call their union to see whether they were feeling like going out in the next flight of the day. This thing arrived. It was like a Formula 1 pit stop. Aircraft in, everybody on it, aircraft out, gone. And it was pretty clear if you could turn planes around in 15 or 20 minutes instead of an hour and 15 minutes, you get two more, three more free flights per day per aircraft. So that's where it all came from. So it was the combination of Tony Ryan's stupidity in setting up an airline, but Herb Kelleher's vision in saying you can actually run a very efficient airline, which is the key to Ryanair's success.
Now, earlier you mentioned a couple times safety as being an exception to some things, but sometimes people would say, well, if it's a low-cost airline, maybe they're going to scrimp on safety. How can you assure people you're not scrimping on safety?
You can't. But ultimately, we've now been doing this for about 35 years. We have the youngest, newest fleet of aircraft in Europe. We have a fleet of 300, 650 Boeing 737s. We bought them all from new. We own them all. They're not owned by some bloody leasing company. So, you know, we own them all. Depreciation only charge. We have no debt on the balance sheet. We train all our own pilots. We have 16 simulator centers. We do all our own aircraft maintenance in-house and we're about to take the engine maintenance in-house as well. So the best you can do is you point to your record over 35 years. And certainly in our first 15 or 20 years it was a bit cheap and you know they don't do the maintenance. I think that's kind of disappeared. But you're only as good as today. We do three and a half thousand flights a day. We'll carry 700,000 people today. Today we have to do everything safely. Tomorrow we have to do everything safely. And it always makes me worry statistically the bigger and bigger and bigger we get. I always worry statistically you're likely to have a screw up somewhere along the way. But so far for 35 years we've managed to avoid it.
Okay. Ken, many people don't realize you operate two big businesses. One is the most profitable hedge fund ever, Citadel, but you have a separate business, Citadel Securities. What is Citadel Securities and why did you start that business when you already had a very profitable hedge fund?
So, Citadel Securities is one of the largest market makers in the world. In fact, we trade about 25% of the US equity turnover every day. And over the course of the last couple weeks, we've averaged about a trillion dollars a day in turnover. So, it is a firm that is at the center point of liquidity around the world. It is powered by world-class technology, great predictive analytics, and a really, really brilliant management team. So, it shares much of the same DNA as the hedge fund side of the house. Great people, great technology, great analytics. It's very much similar to what we do in the hedge fund in terms of the culture and ethos, but we do it with a very different commercial intent.
Now, there's a story that might be apocryphal. Many stories about people who are famous have apocryphal background stories. One of the apocryphal background stories about you is that when you were in college, you got Harvard University to allow you to set up an antenna that would receive stock quotes. So as a student, you could trade stock. Is that true?
So it was a satellite dish actually. Yeah. I was updating my Xbox with my son next to me and he was about 13. He's 18 now. He looks at me goes, 'Dad, you were alive before the internet.' And back in the 80s, there was no internet. There was no like stock quotes were actually hard to get. So, I had a satellite dish on top of the dorm room. The cable actually came through a fourth floor window down an unused elevator shaft and into my room. And that gave me access to real-time prices from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
And if you hadn't done that or if your early trades hadn't worked, would you be doing something more important like being a lawyer or something?
I'd be doing private equity, David.
Right. Okay. Well, there's no higher calling than private equity. Of course, I'm chasing girls around the college dorm.
So, Robin, you're a publicly traded hedge fund. Most hedge funds are privately owned. Why are you publicly owned? And what's the advantage of being publicly owned in the hedge fund world?
Well, not my choice, by the way. So, I haven't sat in that seat. So, 35 years roughly of listing. So advantages, everybody knows what's going on at Man Group. There is nothing to hide. And so in those quarterly updates that we do that Michael looks so forward to doing, we are completely transparent. And clients like that institutionally, if you're going to be in a space where people are looking at you and saying, 'Hang on a second. Are these people who we want to do business with?' Sometimes there's an advantage to having to tell everybody what's going on in your firm every quarter. So that's an advantage.
Right. You came to this firm largely as a lawyer and as a compliance officer.
Usually compliance officers are people who tell you you can't do this, you can't do that. How did you go from people telling you you can't do this, you can't do that. You usually don't rise up to be the CEO. So were you a not that good compliance officer?
I believe that sometimes the best people to understand risk are the people who want to take the risk as well. If you sit me in my executive team, they'll probably sit down and tell you perhaps the person with the highest risk tolerance in the organization is me. And that's something that either I've grown up on because I was a sort of a litigator I guess in American terms or a barrister if you go back into the UK. So I'm an advocate. I understand risk. I've grown up in risk. I've run towards risks when sensible people have run away from them. And that makes my understanding of risk management, which is what we do all day, what we deliver all day, quite acute. So, no, it's not usual. Was I a terrible compliance officer? I don't think I was terrible, but I understand risk.
Okay, Michael. Not long ago, you said that you wanted to charge people to go to the bathroom in your planes. Did that plan ever work and why were people so upset about that? Because couldn't they go for 45 minutes without going to the bathroom if they didn't want to pay?
This is one of the great free stories that keeps on giving. I did an interview with some BBC news journalist about 25 years ago. We were on about something else. I think taking seats out and putting sand in cabins and you know like the tube in London they'd be hanging on to the rails and she said what's next, you going to charge for toilets? And I said, yeah, we have a team working on that at the moment. And you know, if we could take out the two toilets at the back, we could put in six seats and six seats, we'd put 4% lower fares. And it still comes back every 25 years. You're the guy who wants to charge for toilets on board planes. There is actually, we won't do it, but there is a theory in it. Actually, if you could take out two of the toilets and only have one toilet left and charge for the planes. You look at the extent to which people obsess about not paying for our baggage fees on board. You people packing up and weighing their scales in their bathrooms. I'm not going to pay bloody Ryanair for the bag. They'd do the same thing with the toilet as well on board and we could put extra seats on the plane and with extra seats we'd be able to charge lower airfares but we're not going to do it.
You talked about once about charging extra for people overweight.
No, no, we were very good. We actually never did that one because it wouldn't make... Don't give him ideas. Never mind. That actually came out of the states. I think we're with respect quite a lot of physically challenged people. The Europeans are a bit slimmer although because we're paying so much stupid environmental taxation over here. No, we've never planned to. Aircraft weights are done on average weights for adults and children. So it would make no difference anyway.
You have a good business in Europe. Why don't you just take that business to the United States? Why don't you go to the United States?
Because that is where the culture starts to go wrong. You believe in your own... This works very well in Europe because we have pretty much incompetent competition in Europe. Lufthansa, Air France, KLM and these guys run by incompetent European government-owned airlines. The US airlines are a bit more aggressive. They are much stronger and much more well embedded. And the minute we and our management team says this has worked great in Europe, let's all go off to America, California or Florida and we can run an airline over there, they'll all be out the door to go to the sunshine. I mean, if you've spent any winter in Ireland, everybody wants to get the hell out of the place. So, that would be distraction. The other, I mean, I think Kenny's demonstrated over many years in Citadel, zealous focus on your business. Do not get distracted. And I don't want to go to... Europe is a deregulated market. The only good thing about Europe is it is a deregulated market for air travel. So, thankfully, I get very little government interference. The minute I go outside of Europe to the Middle East, to Asia, to the US, it is hugely government regulated. And the states is already a reasonably well-run, although it's quite expensive. It wouldn't work because and it would undermine Ryanair because we'd all get distracted.
Now, you were trained as an accountant, but usually the accountants I know are usually low-key people, very boring people. How did you get this personality as an accountant?
I mean, well, firstly, a lot of people question whether I was trained or even trainable. I did pass the exams, but only barely. You know, I grew up on a farm. So I'm a farm boy. We learned how to work hard. I was always, if I came through accountancy, I wanted to be very kind of quiet and retired. I don't like the publicity. But I recognized when I got into Ryanair we had no money for advertising. So it had to do something. Branson at the time was running around getting all the cheap publicity. Herb was very good at it in the states as well. So it was the obvious thing to do was okay you can't be successful here if you're going to be quiet as a mouse accountant. So, let's reinvent now. And remember, the Irish are generally good at being brash bullshitters. So, there is a gene in all of us where we just talk a lot of rubbish and we're very good at talking lots of rubbish. In fact, we've built a generation on it.
Would you hire an accountant with your personality?
Would I hire an accountant? Well, thankfully I have much more sensible people hiring accountants than the likes of me. You're not doing that. I would hire people. I mean, I look at CVs. So, Kenny looks at CVs. He gets these small lotus out of Harvard. I want people if they grew up on a farm, they're in the door straight away. And the thing I look for is not what your degree was, is what summer jobs did you do during your holidays from school and from college. And if you worked hard and you went out, you got part-time jobs. Those are the people I want working in Ryanair. I want people who work hard. Brains, it's the airline industry. We don't need a lot of brains and we don't need very bright interns because it's a stupid industry anyway.
Ken, recently the mayor of New York pointed out that you had bought an apartment in New York and he wanted you to pay a so-called pied-à-terre tax even though you have employed thousands of people in New York. You're building a new building in New York. You're contributing a lot of tax money to New York. Did that upset you?
What upset me was the actual personal attack. Like you were at the White House correspondence dinner on Saturday where they tried to assassinate the president and not too far from where I live in New York is where they assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. So I think the willingness of the mayor of New York to make this a policy debate, a personal attack, just demonstrated a profound lack of judgment. Just a profound lack of judgment. And I understand that New York has bills to pay.
Would you like to run New York for us for a couple years?
I'm unelectable, Kenny. Nobody would vote for me.
Yes, but you'd actually be a distraction from running.
Are you going to, Ken, you're going to go ahead with your building in New York?
Well, you know, I'm meeting with the governor Thursday.
Okay, you'll figure it out.
And we'll talk about our future direction in New York. Here's the real question. Is New York going to put their fiscal house to order and run itself from a position of a strong government that's pro-business or are they looking to play like why do the Americans think we can do socialism? Like we have none of that in our DNA and we're just going to screw it up.
Now Ken, you are a very large maybe the largest donor in the United States of various political candidates and you've met many of these political candidates. You're probably smarter than all of them. Why don't you just run for president yourself? Have you ever thought of that?
Didn't you just say I was smarter than all of them? I mean, David, what a nightmarish job these people sign up for. To be the president of the United States, you wouldn't want to do that job. Okay, if you could snap your fingers and be in the Oval Office, of course, I'd love to do that job. That would be like such... I love solving problems, but it's not that simple. You've got to go through a campaign cycle, which is just the most humiliating and degrading process in American society.
So, you're also a very large donor to lots of charitable causes. How do you deal with people coming to you every hour on the hour for charitable contributions?
Kase and Julia, you have somebody that takes care of it for you. I do. I've got two outstanding people that take care of it. You know, my job is to manufacture money. We spoke with that early on. I've got my investment team. I focus on the business as much as I possibly can. I've got great people around me who are involved in our philanthropic efforts, who are involved in our political efforts. They know the values that are important to me. They know the key objectives that we're trying to obtain. Like, how do we educate American children to be the future leaders of the free world, but my day in and day out, it's about driving the returns for our shareholders.
The US hasn't had a recession for more than 10 years, a technical, more than a technical recession. Usually you have them every seven years or so. Are you worried about a recession in part because of the war in Iran or anything else coming to the United States?
I mean, look, the business cycle has not been banned. We both know this. You know this. We all know this. Everybody in this room knows this. The business cycle has not been banned. We're going to have a recession around the world at some point here in the foreseeable future. What worries me is not the fact that we're going to have a recession. It's that we're losing the fiscal space to engage in countercyclical spending to keep the economy on the strongest possible footing. And frankly if there were a panic in the credit quality of the leading sovereign debts around the world, the US, it happened in the UK just what about 18 months ago now was it, Liz Truss's moment.
10 days of excitement. Yep. I mean terrifying is it not as a risk manager.
Right. So the key is the western world has to put its fiscal house in order so that we have more flexibility and more capacity in the next downturn to keep people employed, to keep our businesses going, to keep our economies as strong as possible when they're under duress.
Okay, Robin, this week in the United States, the king of England is visiting the president. You're a British citizen.
What do you want to have the king get out of those meetings? Many people in England focused on that and why send the king, why not send the prime minister to meet with the president of the United States.
It's great when you're asked to speak about why the king is doing something anyway. So I saw on social media, I do that thing, interviews with the American general population about did you know the king and the queen is coming and a lot of them said not really and I'm not sure why. And when asked what they should do, the American population, these folks on social media said they recommended certain burger joints that they could go and visit, which I thought was very useful. In the UK, when asked, there were at least five interviews where people felt sorry for the king having to do this visit because what were they going to do? And how predictable or unpredictable is that conversation? How meaningful is it going to be? I have to say I haven't spent much time thinking about what I think the king should be doing. I strangely, I'm a little like you. I'm kind of focused on what we're supposed to be doing every day which is returning value to clients. Nevertheless, these are difficult times and what we need is sense and stability and what we need is some version of how we find solutions and things. And if the king can add to that debate, terrific. But I don't think I'd be holding my breath.
Let's suppose I have some money and I want to invest in Man Group and I say I don't really know much about investing but I'm going to give you I don't know $100,000 or $100,000. What kind of rate of return could I expect to get if I went into a reasonably safe but hopefully profitable investment that you would get to buy from me?
So number one let me just explain Man Group deals with institutions and we don't deal directly with wealth and retail. So, I'm just being mindful that somebody doesn't ring up the phone at the end of this. Number two, it depends what you're after at the moment. And I think if we really think about wealth portfolios right now, what worries me or what I think about a lot is whether wealth and retail are having the access to diversified portfolios that they should have to try and weather the storms of these volatility that we're seeing in markets. So, with 100,000, it depends on where your risk profile is. It sort of depends on how old you are. It sort of depends on how much risk you want to take. It sort of depends about whether you want to be in Europe or whether you want to be diversified. It sort of depends whether you want to lock your money up or not for a period of time. So I think it depends on a bunch of questions in the middle of that. But the thing that worries me or the things that I think we talk about a lot with the people in this room about how do you navigate markets at the moment when you have such volatility and such dispersion, if you want to go into something relatively flat and relatively safe.
In the hedge fund world, there seem to be many more men running hedge funds than women. Why do you think that is and is that going to change anytime in our lifetime?
It's an interesting question about whether the historical bunch of people who have gone into these careers are right. There's a certain gendered nature to this. When we started looking at this years ago, we started to look at hang on a second, what are we recruiting from? And is there some bias in the pool? And then we looked at the pool and then we looked at universities and we looked at who was taking the courses from whom we were hiring from and they were predominantly being populated by men. That is changing, but it's changing slowly. And what you're not going to do is find us clicking our fingers and finding different populations of gender makeup. We want the very best people to run money and ultimately there is a little bit of bias in that or a little bit of gendered nature in the pool of people. Would I like to see it change? For sure.
Michael, let's suppose you want to go on a vacation outside of Europe and would you fly another airline and do you fly other airlines to find out what mistakes they're making? And what airline do you think is the best next to Ryanair?
I occasionally have to go to the states on investor road shows David to explain to investors like you don't put the hundred grand into Man, put it into Ryanair shares at a 22% discount year to date. I mean I fly whoever's cheapest going across the Atlantic. That's my only other kind of...
You don't, when you fly for you're going on vacation with your family. You don't fly first class on some other airline. You always want to be in the coach.
You know I want to be on Ryanair. I want to be seen on Ryanair. The great thing of flying on Ryanair too is I can't fly, I have to fly in rows three, four or five because if I'm up in the front row of seats everything's we're doing some VIP kind of nonsense. So and the great advantage of it too is when I'm flying with Ryanair I'll go up and pull the boarding cards at the boarding gate. Inevitably I get about 25 Facebook pictures and I appear on all these people. So God your man is up there doing cutting edge front line back to the shop floor kind of stuff. No actually I'm going on the same flight as you but it's good for cheap PR.
You ever have you have complaints? Do you tell them right then and there or do you...
I have lots of complaints usually that I'm pulling the boarding passes too slowly or I'm the reason the flight is going to get delayed but I'm also respond, I run our complaints department where we have a very prompt policy of responding to all complaints within 24 hours usually with a polite no.
For most passengers what's the most important thing, price, safety or getting there on time?
Safety is, but I mean assume that safety is a given because without safety you have nothing. 99.999% of passengers when making a booking, what's the cheapest fare to XYZ. It is not available, same, it is not, destination obviously, route, frequency, but 99.99%... which is why the internet has transformed air travel and machine learning, which we had, they probably didn't spend enough time, machine learning is going to transform it again for the next 10 or 20 years.
Okay. Ken, when you're hiring people, do you want people that are high IQ, are hard workers, good athletes? I mean, somebody comes in front of you, but they're first in their class at Harvard, but they're kind of nerdy and they don't really talk very well. Do you hire them or you rather have an all-American athlete who looks great? What kind of people do you want to hire?
