Leading from the frontlines of failure

From rewarding flawed code to delivering food incognito, successful leaders use humility and frontline experience to uncover business flaws

- Dougal Shaw

In 2006 Dr Ewan Kirk founded Cantab Capital Partners, a fund with close ties to the University of Cambridge.

He prided himself on running it like a scientific research organisation and it became one of the top-performing investment funds in the UK. Kirk served as its CEO and CIO until it was acquired in 2016 by GAM Investments. An incident took place in his time there, which has stayed with him, he told me. It formulated his personal philosophy around failure.

One day a computer programmer came to him and said he had a great idea. He wanted to change the software in a certain way that he thought would make everything run ten times faster—an attractive idea if you work in the world of financial information, where incremental margins can mean huge financial gains. Kirk said: 'Absolutely, go ahead.' It was a difficult, risky task. It was like trying to change a tyre on a car while it's driving, Kirk explained to me...

Eleven months later, just before bonus time, when everybody does their best to impress their managers, the programmer returned to Kirk, with a sheepish look. He had a confession to make. 'I'm sorry, boss,' he said, 'but I've found a problem in the code and this isn't going to work after all. I will have to revert everything to as it was and the last eleven months have actually been a waste of time.' Kirk considered carefully his response to this frank confession. 'I gave him an extra bonus for that,' he told me, 'because it was a brilliant thing to do.'