Where’s The Passion Gone?

Oh for a bit of enthusiasm!  I sometimes wonder where has all the passion gone?  When I started recruiting for venture capital and private equity more years ago than I care to remember there was a real excitement in the voice and demeanour of the candidates that we talked to.   Maybe it's just the increasing professionalization of the industry, but it’s a rare day when we see somebody coming through our door with a real fire and passion for our industry.

There is a huge pressure on young people to perform academically and career wise.   We expect them to have superior technical skills and outstanding academics. We want blue chip firms on their CVs and 'second tier' isn't good enough.  And in order to achieve and obtain the levels of excellence which we require they need to have been dedicated to high levels of academic attainment throughout their relatively young lives. They’ve committed large amounts of their personal time to gaining the results we want to see and they’re driven to succeed in our conventional terms of academic and career progression.  

We sometimes try to balance this by looking for evidence of wider achievement and more varied experience.  Perhaps it's sporting, perhaps it's music, perhaps it’s charitable, perhaps it's more entrepreneurial.  The balance is much harder to find – after all when do they have the time to achieve in these other areas - and a streak of entrepreneurialism an even rarer find.  

And what of people who have not had the opportunity to gain such blue-chip experience and build their CV in the way we conventionally demand.  I recently ran a workshop at a less well known International Business School which has attracted high achieving candidates literally from around the world - from Africa, from Latin America, from Central and Eastern Europe, from Asia.  But their achievement was not the conventional achievement we look for.  What all these MBA students demonstrated was a drive and hunger to get them out of their country and into a wider international field.  They took responsibility for their own personal and career development and had not had some of the privileges that we have in our more developed economies.

I met young people who had set up and run businesses in Africa working against the odds to run commercial ventures in the face of corruption and lack of opportunity. I met people who had worked in family businesses in Latin America and achieved massive success as a result of their energy and intelligence.  I met students who had worked in manufacturing companies and put whole new processes in place that slashed costs and moved the businesses forward in international markets.   Few of them will have the opportunity to make one of our shortlists as on paper they just don't make the grade.  However, if I was scoring them on raw talent, commercial acumen, drive and enthusiasm they’d be in the top half of every shortlist.  What they lack in our traditional view of academic and career excellence they more than make up for in ability, ambition and passion.

Can we afford to compromise on blue chip academics and technical expertise and focus on a more worldly level of experience and approach?  I think we can and should.  Diversity in our workforce is going to be vital if we want to grow private equity particularly outside of the US and Western European markets.  So ask me for some raw talent and I’ll show you some –  it won’t be what you’re used to, but it could make a real difference to your business.

Gail McManus - PER