#38 - Andy Keough CSC, Managing Director of Saab Australia, on the Transition from the Navy to the Corporate World, Leadership and Self-reflection

Andy Keough grew up in Sydney, and always had a dream to serve his country. After finishing high school, he decided to join the Royal Australian Navy where he served for  two decades and built and illustrious career, which included the commanding of two Collins Class submarines and an exchange with the US Navy Submarine Force in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In 2006, he was awarded the Conspicuous Service Cross Award (CSC) for leadership in a recent deployment. 

In 2007, Andy decided to try his hand at corporate life, where today he finds himself as the Managing Director of the defence and security company Saab Australia. He was previously Chief Executive of Defence SA and held many senior management roles in ASC.  

Further to his Directorship duties at SAAB Australia, Andy is an Adjunct Professor with the University of South Australia,  Chair of the Australian Industry Group (AiG) Defence Council, Co-Chair of the University of Adelaide Defence Advisory Board,  Board member of the Training & Skills Commission  and Board member of  SACE 

In this episode, Andy was kind enough to share his journey and experiences of his career, from joining the Navy, to the experience Being a submarine commander, to the transition to corporate life. We discuss the culture of the navy, his thoughts on leadership, and how important it is to  have the ability to self-reflect. 

If you enjoy this episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and check us out on synergyiq.com.au.   

Where to find  Andy Keough

• LinkedIn

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Books mentioned on this episode:  

• Troublemakers - Silicon Valley's Coming of Age - By Leslie Berlin
• Good to Great - Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't - By Jim Collins

Transcript

Synergy IQ: 0:01

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Daniel Franco: 0:20

Hi there synergizers and welcome back to another episode of the creative synergy podcast. My name is Daniel Franco and today we have a really great and humble gentleman by the name of Mr. Andy Keough on the show. So Andy grew up in Sydney and always had a dream to serve his country. After finishing high school he decided to join the Royal Australian Navy, where he served for two decades and built an illustrious Korea, which included the commanding of two column class submarines and exchange with the US Navy submarine force in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In 2006, he was awarded the conspicuous Service Cross Award for Leadership in a recent deployment. In 2007, Andy decided to try his hand at corporate life with today he finds himself as the managing director of defence and security company Saab Australia. He previously held roles as chief executive of defensive say, and many other senior management roles in ASC. Further to his directorship duties at Saab Andy's an adjunct professor with the University of South Australia Chair of the Australian industry group defense counsel, co chair of the University of Adelaide defence advisory board, and a board member of the Training and Skills commission, and a board member of syce. In this episode, Andy was kind enough to share his journey and experiences of his career from joining the Navy to experience of being a submarine commander to the transition into corporate life. We discussed the culture of the Navy, his thoughts on leadership, and how important it be nice to have the ability to be able to self reflect. It's a podcast for the ages and one that I'm sure you enjoy. We'd love your support. So feel free to be hit the subscribe button and check us out on synergyIQ.com.au and synergy IQ on all social media outlets. Cheers. Welcome back to the creating synergy podcast. My name is Daniel Franco, your host and today we have a great man Andy Keough, CEO of Saab, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks.

Andy Keough: 2:20

Great to be here.

Daniel Franco: 2:21

A little bit nervous about the book. I will jump straight into it. Andy, you have a decorated career in the Defence Force and in particular Navy in submarines. Can you talk to us about your decision as a young nd Heo to dive straight into the defense force and what made you sort of take that path with your life.

Andy Keough: 2:51

So like most kids coming out of school, I didn't really have much of an idea about what I was going to do, I'd applied for a few university courses here and there, but even going to university, I wasn't really sure what you really did at university and study. So with that sort of ambiguity around I had an interest in, I suppose defense and Defense Forces just from a natural sort of inclination and watched movies about Battle of Britain movies when I was very young, and things like that, and had a bit of interest in it. And so growing up, I thought that might be a path but wasn't really that convinced or set one way or the other. And then just towards the end about I was about halfway through year 12. My mother happened to yell over the fence to the next door neighbor and say, Oh, yes. And he's off to the the defense force, he's going to join the army and go to Duntroon Of course, the neighbor next door happened to be in the Navy said, we can't have him do that. I'll have to take him down or navy base and show him what we do in the Navy. And so you know, he went out of his way took me down to a base in in Sydney walked around there for the day went out the middle of the harbor when when the diving courses out there. And from that, you know, I got a different insight into the Navy. And from that change my sort of thoughts or ideas around going into Defence Force and predominately army because I've been in Army Cadets at school. So it was a logical connection. Change though the Navy, which I had no interest in, prior to that. And there it started.

Daniel Franco: 4:24

So what was the what was the emotion connected to wanting to join, though, like you obviously knew the risks that could eventually eight should ever you know, should we ever go to war or anything like that. So what was the what was that emotion that sort of connected you to that decision?

Andy Keough: 4:44

Well, I think like most seven, eight in your boys, you're not really doing a huge amount of detail of processing and stage. You've got some pretty simple sort of criteria about sport and trying to avoid academics or get yourself across as as best you can. You at home as well, yeah, so so it was really that idea. And particularly, you know, going off and going into the Navy and going and doing your, your university course through there, you spent the first three years, you already had a job, you're going to get a degree, and straight after that you had a career to go into. And of course, navy, like many organizations, very large. And therefore you can move across, you can be a helicopter pilot, a diver, you can drive a ship, a submarine hydrographic vessels, there's a whole range, of course, areas you can go into, which allows someone like myself, who doesn't have a set fixed view of what I want to do. It allowed me that flexibility, as I found to be able to go and select a career path that matched with my interests.

Daniel Franco: 5:46

So what was that interest? Where did you find yourself in what what area?

Andy Keough: 5:51

Well, I think it evolved with time. And when I first went in just like many you do your degree and just getting the degree otherwise, the first thing I can say with some, you know, Armani these days, probably because I have so much to do with the education sector that it wasn't the first and highest priority for me getting through going through university was about in my perspective, that getting a piece of paper, yep. Because my real job started after I left university so so I got through that enjoyed it played as much sport as I could had a great time originally, it was in Java spy on the south coast. And so it was ideally there with a whole group of other kids running around forming good friendships. You know, one weekend, every month, you'd be on the bass doing duty over that weekend, and you'd be taking the power boats out and driving them around Jarvis Bay, or taking sailing boats out or doing jobs around the place. And of course, every weekend, you're playing sports, so it's a pretty good, pretty good lifestyle to go out to. Yeah,

Daniel Franco: 6:52

so as a civilian excuse the ignorance, but what was your job? Every day? Like? What did you have to do in that sense?

Andy Keough: 7:01

So naval college first year was like any first year of military organization was pretty tough, you're waking up sort of getting up at six o'clock in the morning, you're on the playground out there, and you're in your PT gear, ready to go and do some fitness. And so you'd be running or up and down the beach or something, which sounds great. But you know, in the freezing in the freezing dead of winter, when it's raining, it doesn't sound like the most exciting things are even reflection. But you do that and then you come back, you change breakfast, off university courses for the course of the day. And then after that, you'd be cleaning up things getting ready study dinner, rounds, after dinner, c'est bien spected after dinner for your room to make sure it's clean, finish more study, go to bed, wake up, repeat, do it again. So very sort of fixed in the way it is. But it was, you know, things you're doing round. And again, the people you are connecting with the bonds you are growing, many of whom I still keep in contact with Eli was fantastic.

Daniel Franco: 8:03

Do you think those disciplines that you learn every single day, you know, from getting up and making your bed in the morning to the you know, the way you behave and act with with everyone is certain individuals? Is that something that's carried through your life?

Andy Keough: 8:20

I think there's many aspects of it you tap through in your life, obviously with some that discipline resonates better than others. And some people are not naturally disciplined or ordered in their thinking or or in the way they do. So they tend to once they come out of that very strict controlled structures of default, closer to back to what they were originally. Other people take it up and embrace it and sort of use the rest of life. I think I'm somewhere in between. I have a little bit of routine and like routine and structure, but not necessarily all the bound by it. But normally just a little things like meetings have a meeting starts at eight o'clock or 10 o'clock you usually they're a couple of minutes before and if you're running late, you have a sense of discomfort and natural sense of I should be there on time, or at least a little bit early. So some of those things were

Daniel Franco: 9:05

is that because you feel like you're letting someone down or is that because you're bound by time.

Andy Keough: 9:10

I think it's been bound by time and things start on time. And that's the structure and order you heard about. And without that you kind of get into this, things get a bit sloppy. And of course in some businesses, I know in business that's quite routine you walk in and people are still walking in two or three or five minutes after the start. But when you've got to, as I later did went into the Navy and into submarines, when you got a submarine there and things have to happen on time and you want things to be precise and crisp. Then it's got it's got to start with some of those basic philosophies.

Daniel Franco: 9:43

Absolutely. So for young teenager came up to today, in the same sort of scenario didn't really know what they want to do with their life comes to you for advice. Would it be your advice to golf like your neighbor did to you and go off and show them the ropes And what they could be involved in.

Andy Keough: 10:01

So I've done that a few times, not necessarily to show people around, but to talk to them down what the career is, ultimately, it comes down to their choice. And their decision. And I think, in talking to people, what you've got to be really careful about is you tend to imprint your sense of this was right for me, therefore, it is right for a whole range of other people in many cases not. But I certainly benefit a lot and enjoyed a lot. And I think if people can understand, particularly some of those paradigms, about the military being this very, you know, strict and controlled and, you know, orders left, right and center, you can break some of those paradigms down. It's actually no, it's pretty reasonable in our society has changed, it has changed as well, then that helps people make a more rational basis decision. But certainly for my time, my growing up and 22 years I had in the Navy, it was fascinating. It's fantastic. And every couple of years, you're moving jobs. So you've still got the same employer, that you're moving around, and you never, you never get bored. That's for sure.

Daniel Franco: 11:06

Absolutely. Do you have like there's a lot of books going around at the moment, Navy SEALs saps, the whole sort of scoop and they go through hell weekend? Did you ever embark on anything like that where you had to go through? I mean, obviously, the seals are is a different NSS is a different kettle of fish altogether. But did you ever have to go through that really tough training.

Andy Keough: 11:27

So I think there's a few gates that people go through varying heights, and certainly, the seal course and essays, courses held up on on very high esteem. But I think even just coming into the military, it's a it's a significant change to many people to their lifestyle. And so for many that is as challenging as what seal Corps is, because by the time they're going on a seal course, or going on the essays course, they've actually been in the military, for a period of time, they've got all some of the basic skills and understandings, they've got networks and connections out understand it, and they can train for it. So the shock and the jolt to them. Whilst it's significant. It's also you know, many people just coming off the street, there's a decent sort of Jolt or change to them as well, just by the way things are done differently to what they used to. I suppose for me, probably the biggest hurdle was doing the submarine command course that was called the parrisha. Principally call the perish because most people perish on it. And, and that's right at the end of your submarine career. So you've gone through an entire career, you're qualified and submarines, you've done a number of jobs, you could have spent somewhere between 1015 years on submarines as a submarine officer. And then this is the final course you have to pass in order to command a submarine. And so it's six months over in the Netherlands, on the Dutch submarines, doing some fairly intensive work over there. And I suppose like many things, it's the task is a challenge. And it's very demanding of the course. But it's actually the consequences of failing that probably puts most pressure on people. And in that case, my course we had six that started myself and Brazilian pastors to the past out of the six. And none of those others will go back to see, again, in a submarine, there's always the tradition that, you know, when you fail, parrisha That's it. Your career is over. Now, there have been people who have gone back and done other jobs on a submarine like an exhale, again, they've gone back because there's been shortages or whatever. But generally, that was the tradition that once you're finished in submarines, you fail that course, that's it. And so everything you've worked for, to get in command has gone, all the people you've gone to see with the last 10 or 15 years, they're no longer a key part of your life in many cases. So that puts an enormous pressure on people. And Zed there are sometimes a during that course, really intensive, particularly the C phases where you started about four o'clock in the morning, you're running operations, you might be practicing laying mines in a certain area or taking photograph of some unique coastal installation. It's very shallow water throughout. So it's not like you can, you know, seek the protection of the depth in many cases, so you tend to be quite a, you know, challenging environment throughout that and you've got pressure being put on you, if there's not pressure on you, that will stimulate pressure on you through doing a whole range of other things. So, and that's day in, day out, you're out there for weeks on end, sort of doing that work. So it's um, that's probably the toughest jump.

Daniel Franco: 14:41

It almost sounds a little bit counter productive to me in the sense that if you spent 15 years getting to the point where you can get on the parachute, only to potentially not get through and all that all those years and money spent to get to that point. So what is the outcome for those who don't get through

Andy Keough: 14:59

our I generally go off and do other other jobs in the Navy gentlemen, they might go out and command a patrol boat, for example, or one of the support ships.

Daniel Franco: 15:08

So it's a it's not all lost, it's no, no, they don't have to

Andy Keough: 15:11

leave. It's not as if they're forced out of the Navy. There's plenty of other career opportunities, but it's unusual to be changing your career specialization, sort of 15 odd years into your career, to be then jumping into something else. But these days, they're much better with preparing people for it. So the pass rate is usually a bit higher. But it's still nonetheless a challenging, challenging course. And, and ultimately, yes, there's a waste in terms of all that, that experience a person's had. But equally, the causes are designed to make sure that the people who get in command of a submarine have got some core fundamental skill sets that they can lean on when when things get tough.

Daniel Franco: 15:53

Yeah, brilliant. So submarines are most I would say, most Australians know that, you know, we're building submarines. And we're doing a whole heap for the summer into the moment and many of the many defense businesses are working on as we speak. But the idea of the submarines played quite foreign to Australian steel in the sense of what they actually do. And we are obviously surrounded by ocean. So there is an element of understanding they do protect us, but can you explain to us, what you when you get deployed to go? What is the process? What is your everyday command, I suppose if you can share that.

Andy Keough: 16:34

So perhaps to talk about the role of submarines first. And, you know, I could reflect on modern history that actually, if you look back into the early days of submarines, the first submarines were ordered in about 1909. A turned up in 1914, just in the outbreak of the First World War. They arrived in Sydney in about May, and by September, the two submarines had been deployed to Papua New Guinea, along with an Australian task group to go and look for some German ships that they believe were operating in that that area at the time because they'd set up some wireless stations, etc, up in that area. So I suppose the first lesson, an observation of submarines is that we don't use them in defense. It's not like they sit in Sydney Harbour and defend the harbor. We've always used them to deploy at range. One of those vessels are lost in on that operation, a one that's just been found recently. The second vessel came back to Sydney and prepared itself and then early in 1915, it deployed up to up to the Dardanelles, and as the Anzacs were landing on one side of the Gallipoli Peninsula, the very that very morning, the submarine it was making its way in through the Strait of into the seam Amara, and, and there it goes and demonstrated the the other advantage of a submarine was that its role was to interdict the Turkish supply of communications, the water tray that was coming in to reinforce the troops. And so it very quickly made its presence known it attacked a few ships, went and fired a few shells and things. And it goes that very quickly stopped a lot of the reinforcements coming in behind the Gallipoli Peninsula. And so suddenly, everything rather than going by sea, which been relatively quick, had to go overland by car. So it certainly impacted on the supply lines of the Turks during that campaign. And that's a good example of our submarines working out long rains, just the presence of the submarine is enough to shape the enemy's decision making to make them do something different to what they would normally do if that submarine threat wasn't there. So I think from the history, you can see what the submarines have done, I think, to perhaps best characterized submarines, despite satellites, which are often transitory, despite aircraft, drones and everything else that have endurance period that are measured in hours. And of course, rarely are they getting into days of insurance. Even within an piloted aircraft. A submarine literally sits out there for weeks. And for weeks, it can sit in one area, they can see exactly what's going on. It can record everything going above and below the water. And it forms an understanding of what's going on in that area, what's normal. And therefore when things happen that are different. It might be military activity, it might be something going on, it can quite easily see that and have a broader context what's happening, and therefore can make some fairly good decisions and it can act on those decisions, if if called upon. So the best way I characterize it, they are our eyes and ears that go a long distance undetected from home to see what's happening in our backyard, so that we're not surprised in a time of crisis.

Daniel Franco: 20:01

So obviously very valuable. What? So what's it like inside? Like, when you're deployed? How long? Are you in the depths of the water? And what does it feel like to be in there? How does it? How does your body react? You know, if you look at the space station, it has an adverse effect on the on the human body because there's no gravity is the extra gravity underneath the ocean? Is that all? How's it work? Yeah.

Andy Keough: 20:28

So it's, it's a remarkably normal environment in there. So you get on board the submarine, there's fluorescent lighting in there and bright lighting these days LED lighting inside the submarines. And those lights, in many parts that submarine stay on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So it's relatively normal in terms of his air conditioning running. So it's all controlled temperature, most of the times, sometimes if you're doing certain operations, you'll shut down the air conditioning to be extra quiet in certain occasions. But mostly it's running, you're in a good environment, it's it's relatively cool that 21 degrees and and you get into a quickly establish a cycle or a routine. Most people are in watches. So usually, six hour watches, say six hours on watch, six hours off, watch six hours on so ones to sevens or seven to one. So basically, you're taking over and seven o'clock in the morning, you're in charge if you're a watcher leader, or if you're running the diesels or back in the engine room, you're in charge of that sectional responsible that job for six hours to one o'clock until the same person who you took over from then comes and takes over from you again. And so you just cycle through and it each time on the ends of those watches, you're having, you know, either lunch or breakfast or dinner as you come on and off watch, and in between the rest of the time. So when you hand over your role and responsibilities, about half an hour lost in doing that, have some go to sleep for about four and a half hours, wake up, have someone to go back and watch your watch. And you roll through it like that. So the routine you get very quickly into just a routine day in day out doing that sort of work. And of course, that might sound a bit boring or not so exciting. But it's what you're doing at the time. So if you're out exercising with the fleet, which Australian submarines do quite a lot, preparing them in terms of how do they work with a submarine alternately, how do they go and find an attacker submarine working their skills and coordination, particularly when you got air assets like helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft involved, there's a lot of coordination has to go on to do that a lot of practice needed to do. So if you're doing that, you'll be going from one exercise that might last two or three hours, it might be a very basic structured exercise, where you're sitting in a known position and the ship comes up to you and you sort of wave at them and they wave at you and I turn on the signer and they follow you around for a period of time and track you and if they lose you, then you find you're either put your mouse up or you fire a smoke so they can actually see where the submarine is, and they come back closer to you and they refined you and then they keep tracking you. That's a very basic, very structured serial, just to get the ship more so the operators who are on the ship, who are looking at the sensor data, to get them used to seeing what it's like being in contact with the submarine, you have everything from that through to extremely free play exercises where the ships are in a certain area, you've got to go and do a job it might be laying practice mines, or more simulating laying mines on Sydney Harbour or Port Gamble or something like that. And there'll be a whole bunch of ships and aircraft out there trying to find you. And they'll be you know, understanding where you have to be at a certain time. But other than that, they've got to do their best to find you and likewise, you go do your best to avoid them while still achieving your mission. So you go all the way through those very free play scenarios. And of course, they can be conducted day and night. So so you're just rolling from one exercise to another to another all the time. True. You're doing new things, different things. And there's a lot of safety structure around them to make sure that submarines kept safe that it kept safe as well.

Daniel Franco: 24:26

And what do you do from a complacency point of view? If you say can be boring? Is there an opportunity for people to become complacent if they are near or?

Andy Keough: 24:36

Oh, look, I think there's a there's a time certainly when you're deployed sometimes. You know, there's an old saying which is probably there's an element of truth to it, which is it's 99% of she Borden in one percenter shoe Tara. But, you know you do get into the routine people get into a routine or rhythm but What you find is because of the training and the enormous amount of training you do, just preparing the submarine to go in and see, as a part of what's known as the licensing process, you can get people who are effectively operating sort of in a fairly quiet state. But if something changes, and it might be as simple as you know, the periscope Watchkeeper, for example, he might matter something an exploitive loud, everyone in the control room will suddenly sit up, and they'll be ready to launch it is instantaneous. Because the crew has been trained to such a high level and that starts before the submarine goes to see you're doing days and days of training and simulators practicing your core drills. You then go from the simulators to the submarine alongside the wharf and you're practicing on that simulating as if you were at sea, even though your long side of wharf. He then take the submarine and you drive it around on the surface and you do drills whilst that the end of that you get your license effectively or your tick to dive the submarine, you go out you dive the submarine but you're still restricted in the depth of water you can operate. So it's not like you're going to go out and deep deep water, or into really busy shipping lanes and be challenged by lots of traffic. So that's quite a controlled way, you enter a whole series of exercises and work during that. And then once you've gone through a certain gate through that you then released out into unrestricted operations. That's just the safety side of it. And then you go and practice all your operational work on top of that. And once you go through that, you then got the tick to be unrestricted operations go and do exercise the fleet. And if you're going to deploy an operations, and sometimes you got more specific training on top of that to actually practice again. So it's an incredibly detailed process you go through, and a way of safely controlling the release of the submarine and making sure that the crew, many of whom some of them might change over during the last meeting spirit all go back out there in maybe the same roles, but on a different submarine or a new roles. They go out there and put through the paces and assessed to see as individuals but also as a team that performs correctly. It's, it's brilliant,

Daniel Franco: 27:17

I love it. It's an amazing role that I haven't thought about half of those things that you've just mentioned. And so that's it. From a personal point of view, you received the can speak your Service Cross, which is awarded to members of the Australian Defence Force and our quote for outstanding devotion to the duty or Outstanding Achievement in the application of exceptional skills, judgment or dedication in a non war like situation. So you received one of those awards in 2006. Firstly, congratulations. Thank you. Secondly, what? What did you receive before Can you vote

Andy Keough: 27:50

so so so it was a deployment we did on HMI machine. And in 2005. And it was a long deployments, a six month deployment we came out of, we've done all our work ups came out of Western Australia, up to Guam, up to Guam out of up to Japan, and came out Japan and then ended up you know, Thailand after that, then Singapore then home. So it was a long, long deployment. For one of those stretches, we had 55 days away from port. And so it was enormously complex and challenging. It's often seen as cliche but I have to say that the award itself is really recognition for what the crew did as much as any girls. I'm the fortunate one who sits on as the commander of it, and you get the recognition of it. But it's certainly as much as the the effort that a whole host of individuals put in during that time. We couldn't have done it without your team right now. Absolutely. And some of those some of those people were, you know, going through some incredibly difficult challenging circumstances themselves. One, for example, you know, his wife was pregnant due to have a child whilst he was kind of on deployment. And so that would have been a significant challenge and considerate consideration for him. We actually gave him the choice to whether we want to post off the submarine before he left because of that significance. And he was adamant he wanted to do it. I then double check with his wife to make sure she was happy for him to go away and she was happy as well. So but that certainly nonetheless would have been a really challenging time for him. Another one was a gentleman who there was prior to that in about 2003. We had a one of our submarines had a flood onboard, and he was involved in that he was on on the submarine at the time. And he was right in the area where the flood came in. And

Daniel Franco: 30:03

from someone who's claustrophobic that is not.

Andy Keough: 30:07

Yeah, so he, he described it in quite Yeah, quite animated detail about how he felt like he was just in a washing machine being thrown around. That's how much water was coming in. And that's how quickly it came in. But, you know, again, the safety procedures work, the team responded, they, you know, there's one vowel there's one button on the submarine. That's called the shuttle hole valves button. And basically, you hit that button, and every valve going into the submarine instantaneously shuts, which is what they did, they put on speed and submarine popped up the surface. So dramatic is it was an extreme as it was, because it was down at the deepest step submarines going to, nonetheless, they recovered. And it's a part of the training, it's a part of the engineering that goes behind the design of the submarine a range of factors. But nonetheless, this individual was at sea again, and he struggled for a period of time, he found it really challenging. So it was a challenging deployment. As I said, you know, we had about 5055 days underway, we did pop in grabs and fuel after about four days. So you could say 51, for men to win. And enormously challenging the work we were doing in those 51 days, it was a very flat out sort of period. And but nonetheless, extremely important work that we had to be done.

Daniel Franco: 31:29

So obviously can't go into the details. But how do you feel from a leadership perspective? Like you've quite literally got the hand the lives of these people in your hands? How do you? Who did you at that time, manage that and manage through those thought processes?

Andy Keough: 31:49

Well, I think it's one of those things that you just trained to do. And so the training kicks in and takes over. I think it depends on

Daniel Franco: 31:56

train for, for that, though, like, what training do you go through?

Andy Keough: 32:00

Well, the previous sort of 15 years, yeah, to that point, was probably probably the best leading, it's just constant. iteration and experience are disappearing, just being putting under pressure on in difficult situations as an individual or as a team. You know, as I said, hence, the reasons I talked about parrisha being so demanding you put through those paces. So to come out the other side commander submarine, and it's not to say that on day one, you feel comfortable in it by any means, you've got an enormous amount of learning as a commander, stepping into that type of role, just as a CEO has stepping in a new role. You make mistakes. I think with time what I reflect on and changing, you know, flicking back on that leadership style, which is very structured and very at times demanding circumstances, I think in the corporate world, in nearly all cases, you can afford to be a lot more collaborative, you can certainly afford to be a lot more engaging and open with your people, because it's a much easier environment to do that in. And I think at the time also, particularly when you're so task focused, you know, you operate like a machine, sometimes you just, and people to a degree, expect you to be because in some cases, when it's really a stressful situation, they do look for you to make decisions and make things happen. Many cases are not like that many cases, you have the ability to engage with people and ask and collaborate and, and I really, I think I rarely ever had to give an order. You just ask people of course, you're the commanding officer. So it gets done. That you very rarely had to order anything to happen unless it was a formal order, like a steering order to steer the submarine or what speed but most days, you just ask some people do and and 99.99% of the time people understand why it has to be done anyone they get it, they understand it, they see the task. Most times they've done it already, in advance even seeing or notifying. But yeah, there's certainly I'm certainly extremely challenged, but the leadership side of it is it is the challenges particularly one of the things I talk about in parish, the parish, of course, which is quite a, in some areas, dated philosophy. But when you're doing all that training, the instructor that I had, would never give you any feedback. So you come through doing a two hour session where you've been simulating laying mines or, you know, doing an operation. It's been stressful. You have ships around you, you've had all these things to deal with even it's just in the simulator, it's stressful enough. And the end of it as a Dutchman he'd sit there and he'd go, Yup, okay, finished next. And he's gone. point was, if you're going to go finish this course and Commander submarine, no one's going to be sitting behind you, critiquing you. On what work you do, no one's going to be giving you advice on what you could have done there, or what you needed to improve on. As a commander, that's what you had to do yourself, it was your one primary job is to self reflect. And to understand whether you're performing at the right level, you're doing the right things if there weren't better ways of improving what you were doing. And so that's one of those messages again, which carries through and it applies in certain circumstances in certain domains. It's very focused at the work you do as a submarine commander to make sure you understand that the ultimate responsibility rests with yourself. So that's why people get through generally tend to take those things in their stride, they move on. I think you also see the reflection, I think, with time of the stresses of the job as well. I mean, one time I come back from a long deployment and the first submarine, I picked up the submarine in Singapore, we've done a number of exercises, that's just around the time when East Timor was bubbling away. So we're into Darwin, and, you know, caught up with things around there. And then we came home just before Christmas. And I remember we had to get a submarine ready, because we had to deploy next year to Hawaii. So it was a long trip. And those days, it was one of the longest trips that the Colin's class submarines, we're going to be taking from Sydney to Hawaii on diesel submarines about 2021 days, and there's a lot of ocean in between there. So you want to make sure if it's gonna work to get you across without any issues. So a fair bit of stress. And I remember coming home on a submarine coming home from from Singapore, I remember I was getting this little twitch in my eye and my my eyelid would flat out to the point where I'd sit there sometimes listening to people might have my hand over my eye because I felt it sort of this nerve twitching. Anyway, I thought, well, this is it obviously need glasses. You know, Dad said when you get to sort of 40 or something, you need glasses, and I was about mid 30s At that stage. Obviously that did so and so optometrists over the Christmas time got booked in. He did all these tests, look, demise did all this sort of stuff. And he was quite, he's probably in his early 60s, and he just leans back to you guys. Okay, so I've done all my tests, and I've got my results, you know, so. So I need glasses do and he goes, No, he goes, Do you have any stress in your life at all? And I said, No, not really, we just got back from a three month deployment, we've got a couple of weeks to turn the submarine around, we've got to get people through maintenance and through leave and this get everyone together new team, build them up, go through licensing, very short hop and then request to Hawaii. No, nothing more than just the routine. That's it. Why is that? What's that got to do? It goes? Well, actually, it's stress related, really. So it's just one of those indicators that you know that your body does at times take on huge amounts of stress. And, and it's helpful after that, because having seen it and seeing that context, don't go, Ah, right, I've got to now think about how do I better manage stress rather than pouring yourself into a job and pouring yourself into a task to the point where you start to see physiological effects or you start to have impacts, it's that ability to sort of pull yourself back from that edge and go, now I need to take a break here, whether I think I need it or not. Because I've got to balance these things out. And in the long term, like most careers, you know, they're like a marathon, it's not a sprint. So

Daniel Franco: 38:45

it's a good point, if you go back to the Dutchman, for example, is telling you that the ultimate role is to manage yourself. Yeah, and be self reflective. That's not only for performance, it's also from a mental perspective as well, understanding self and the stress that you're going through and all that and the signs in Luckily for you, the sign was a twitching eye and something a bit more visible. But for others, it's not, not like that. So it is something that we should always keep in the back of our minds, only managing our performance, managing our mental health as well. So thank you for bringing that up. In regards to going again, the Dutchman and and sort of the directives and you said at times, you know, you were very commanding in your approach, the culture of the Navy, is that one where, you know, people would come to to work, I suppose, and say that they love the culture here. Is that how it works or how does how does it all wrapped into an ecosystem? Yeah,

Andy Keough: 39:50

so it's been hard for me. Talking about Navy I can only reflect on I left in 2017 14 years ago. So the culture of Navy that is today and I'm not qualified to talk about. But certainly as an outsider looking in has changed dramatically from where I was there. It's an enormously more, they really focus on the team and the team behaviors. And the team values as well. So, but certainly my time, and, and again, I wasn't submarines consider themselves to be, you know, the elite side of it, just like the Special Forces guys, we took the Special Forces guys on the submarines, we look at them, and they'd look at us, and we'd be thankful that we're on the submarine in the nice relative comfort. And as we're pushing them out the submarine in the middle of the night, to jump on little boats or to swim ashore, we'd be quite happy to be inside our warm little drive shelter. And of course, they'd be quite happy to be leaving the very constricted space that they were previously in. So the team and the leadership's depend on what area but when you, you tend to get those more elite areas or those more high performance areas, you do have, you know, these very tight bonds. And you have, I think one of the points I reflect on in my career now in industry is that you in the Navy, you did a lot of training. And when you weren't training, you're actually executing, and when you finished executing, you'd be back to rest, and then back out to training. And because of that, you have this, you know, extremely high level of alignment in your team. So as I said earlier on, you can have a team that's sitting in a control room that's kind of idling at 10 or 15% capacity, because there's not much going on, it's over in mundane, which is driving along. And literally within seconds, you can make one or two orders, or one or two commands, and suddenly you've got people up, sitting on the edge ready to go. Now, you try to do that in the corporate world. It's it's not, it's not gonna happen. It doesn't happen, right? But but the the analogy there is, because you had such high alignment, you could afford to be very economical. And at times, it was designed exactly for that with your directions or your commentary, because everyone knew what you're thinking and what you were talking about, and what needs to be done. It's very task focused in the corporate world, often, when you get a management team, one of the most interesting conversations or questions you can pose to them, is the question of, you know, what are our top three priorities. And in fact, I learned this some years ago from a consultant. And he's got a series of three little post it notes and pass those around and asked two questions. One was, you know, what are our top three priorities, and you write them down. And then at the end of that, you stand up, and you put them up on the wall. And you'll be amazed for a team, whether it be a management team, or whether it be a project team, you'd be amazed as the project leader, or the CEO, the variance in what people think is important, and what the highest priorities are, because they're thinking it through their lens with their perspective. And so, and if you're lucky as I was, in one of my jobs, where I was working on maintenance facility, and everyone knew they were there to do the maintenance of the submarine. So it was a highly aligned again, a highly line organization said, what are we here to do? Number one was, you know, to deliver safe certified submarines back to the Navy, tick. Fantastic. The next question is, then how do we do that? What's the mental model? What's the process we use? draw me a picture of how we do things, and the outputs that we deliver. And again, if they pass the first question, it's, it's highly unlikely they will pass the second question because, you know, people have these different mental models and paradigms about how they go about their work. But unless you can, again, get lime in on that, it's very hard to do that reflective work, that reflective piece, which says, Hey, today, we had a problem with doing this job. And the part of the problem was training. So we need to be out, reach back and see where's the training impacted, we need to be able to look at the instructions the person was using, maybe the levels of supervision, maybe the tooling was incorrect. But unless you've got those feedback loops, that go back, and you've got a mental model that describes that in people's minds, it just sits as another job to do and people then don't get that sense of Yeah, we had a problem. We've now gone back and fix that problem. Next time we go and do that job, and other jobs similar to it. You know, we'll do it better. We'll capture that learning and will embed it in the way we do our work. And so that's probably the biggest reflection is that element around, you know, being able to look at what you've done and being able to To get people who are highly aligned to understand what the goals of the organization are, what the priorities are? And then more importantly, how do you go about doing that? How do we come together as a team. And that's particularly important with these days, with the modern management structures, you have matrix organizations where you're a project manager is no longer controlling all of his dedicated resources. He's pulling engineering resources from the engineering team, he's pulling in project management tools from the head of project management, commercial offices are coming out of resources are coming out of another area of the business, and he's got to manage those and manage the stakeholders who control those as well, some years ago, seeing some work by NASA, which talked about them setting up a project management academy. And they said, interesting enough, it wasn't anything to do with the complexity of the projects that had some really, significantly bad outcomes with space shuttles and a few other landers, not landing on, on, on the planets as they are supposed to. But their reflection was there was nothing wrong with their technical skills. And there's nothing wrong with him pushing the technical barriers and boundaries, they were, their challenges came around teaching, particularly their case, a lot of engineers about the soft skills you need, in order to run a successful project in this complex management environment. So things like the self awareness, that reflection, please, the communications, conflict resolution was some of the core soft skills identified, that importantly, they reflected, weren't being taught anywhere else. So a big part of their focus was to focus on those areas, and upskill their project managers to go about the work in a slightly different way.

Daniel Franco: 46:51

Yeah, that's you're preaching to the choir. And that's nice, because that's the areas that we work at Synergy IQ, and is that sort of that behavior or the human element of the business, and we see it on a day to day basis that, you know, this is a common theme amongst all corporate businesses, that the technical or the most technical leaders get promoted to the management position, or executive position, or whatever. And we're starting to see a big shift in that we're starting to see more people leaders move into those roles, people who can have those softer skills. And, you know, we said from day to day, that's 50% of your job 50%, the other 50 percents technical, you know, half half is making sure that you've got the people on board, you've clearly communicated what is the outcome we're trying to achieve here. And you're removing the ball onto the getting their way to help them reach their outcomes or help the business reach its outcome. So it's ultimately it's a big, big, big part. I want to dive into your decision to move from the Navy to the corporate world. What triggered that for you? When did you decide I've had enough? So I

Andy Keough: 48:09

don't think there's any one particular incident that that triggered it. But I think the time particularly when you're finished your seagoing career, and I was extremely fortunate that you are winning in command Rs 34. by Tom, I'd done two years, three years overseas, another two years, in around that 40 years age. And so I think I've done a job ashore, that sort of stage deals pretty much, you know, I was slated to go overseas to Newport Rhode on to a Naval War College over there, which would have been fantastic, but it's only for 18 months, I was going to come back, who knows where I was gonna go, could it be in Perth. So it was a little element of uncertainty that I wanted to sort of resolve. And also, I didn't feel that excited about having gone to see most of my career about unnecessary going down into Canberra and doing all the work down there. So it was a good time to then make a call to leave. So that was like 2007 I'd love to say that. You know, I did a fair bit of work in the lead up to it engaging with recruitment specialists, who was a good friend is ex Navy person and he took me through the whole process, what happens and the questions they ask and how you need to answer the questions and the research you're going to do, etc, etc. So I was all keyed up, ready to go practiced and worked it out. And then of course, the day I resigned, I think I told one person and by nine o'clock that night, I had a job offer. So so I really didn't unfortunately really go through that process by much and and the opportunity I went for which was a defense company was predominantly because the person I knew who was running it at the time, got on well with as well as they had quite a few others. The defense people in there as well people I'd served with previously I knew them. And so is this sorry, this was tireless in. So it was a very safe environment for me to go into in a very relatively familiar environment. Unfortunately, some of the tallest people, it felt at times like a navy old boys club, but But you had those connections, they knew what you knew. But more importantly, they knew what you didn't know. And so there was an opportunity there to fill in the holes. And it wasn't as if it's hard to the commercial side is hard to understand. But you just have to experience it, you have to see it, you have to soak it in and, you know, understand the lessons before you move on. And I remember my, my first reflections of that year was, we used to have a lot of management discussions about the car park, and there's too many cars in the car park, and there's all these problems and the staff are getting upset with it. And every two weeks, we had a management meeting and has been brought up and we're carpooling. And we're paying for people to take public transport, we're doing all these things. And, and by the end of that year, we'd lost two major contracts. And we didn't have a problem in the car park anymore. Because we had to let a whole bunch of people go. And that's the first lesson about us focus. Yeah, that first lesson about, you know, you've got to keep feeding the organization with work. And if you don't, the opportunities dry up, and you suddenly have some very challenging times ahead of you. So, so there's some of the lessons you learn pretty, pretty quickly. But again, you go through them, you experience Him, you learn them, you learn, thankfully, not because of your shortcomings, but you're just an observer. So they're easy lessons to learn, and ones that don't cost you too much pain, despite the pain to the broader organization that gives you opportunities to build up your knowledge. And so that was the great opportunity of going to that that company at that time,

Daniel Franco: 51:56

you're really interested in the transition from structure to potentially what is chaos in the corporate environment. I'll use an example. A friend of mine, very good friend, one of my best mates is in neurosurgeon, Ryan comes from comes from work every single day, after every everything in his life being so structured, you know, scalpel, it gets handed to him on a tray, literally right. And he just goes from it. Everything's in order goes home to his three kids. And it's just chaos. The corporate environment, the same sort of thing from that move to the, from, from the Navy to the corporate world where you could almost put down a command and it gets done or people like you said, they're sitting on the edge of their seat ready to go within a minute. When you've moved into the corporate world, how did you do with the time that it takes for things to happen? And the red tape that has to go through for decisions to get made? How did you manage to plow through that?

Andy Keough: 52:59

Look, I think as part of that is just the learnings you got to take on it's just acclimatized to a new new environment, a new situation. I can understand your friends dilemma I used to, you know, go home from work and have two two very young children my wife who sometimes you know, is is coping with the family for six months with nibbling away Yeah. On the one side, she tells a great story about how the youngest one who was probably a month, two years at that stage and managed to lock around the house when she went and saw the, the neighbor and she's sitting inside laughing at her, she's outside, they're crying because she can't get into the house. And I finally managed to break away in but but some of those challenges, you know, and that, that nature of the way work is but I think you just adapt to that relatively quickly, again, you come out of a navy environment, it doesn't mean that you are strictly defined by that and said some people, you know, certainly either more flexible, or ability to adapt to the environment around me a lot, a lot more readily than some. And so that wasn't really to me a huge issue. I think probably the thing which took a little bit of was interesting reflection is that when you come from an environment where you you live it, you breathe it for weeks, months on end. And of course the analogy in the corporate world would be you come to work on a Monday and you just stay you sleep there that night you work till nine or 10 o'clock at night you sleep to six o'clock next morning you wake up Pick up your little bed that you've slept on in your office, maybe have a shower if you're lucky you have something to eat you roll through work for the day and then click Next night now no one would do that. But that's what you're doing in the Navy effectively. But in the corporate world, you again that paradigm is not there and so I suppose that element around expectations of people and and certainly being sensitive I think and more where I'm sitting in my current company, the issue of the issue of the work life balance, you know, that's fundamental to the way the company operates. That's one of those kind of core elements of the business, the DNA, that you treat people with respect, you treat people like human beings you treat people like you effectively want to be treated is a high level of trust in people and teams, there's less micromanagement of people. And through doing that, you will find that the best people, the ones who have a self motivation and desire, that internal willingness to drive and make things happen, they will flourish in that type environment, some people will struggle. And I genuinely say that to people joining Saab, that if you've come here to be micromanaged, or if you need someone to micromanage, you're in the wrong company. Because that's not our style, that's not the way we work. You treat people like they're professionals, you treat people like they've, they've got work to do, and you get them off. And the job of management then is to try and take those blockages out of the way for them allow them to do the best work. And and if you look at some of the incredible work that we do in Australia, in a whole range of areas, but if I can reflect on the work here, you're getting people who are doing really complex projects, those projects involved, you know, high technology, and the ultimate use of that technology, in many cases to say protect a ship, or to allow a submarine to operate or to protect an army unit at a time of crisis. And that time of crisis is a missile or something being fired in, and they've literally got to respond within seconds. And they can't afford the software to lock up. Or they can't afford for the system not to process fast enough to get the countermeasures assigned and deployed within that short cycle time. So you know, there's something that that works in that there's something that works and having really good people working in teams, who just love the work that they do, I think there's a passion to it, that that comes through in the way that they engage with the work. And I think that's the great, you know, it's what I took from my career in the Navy was just the passion, the love for the work that I was doing. And similarly, you see that in in the various areas. And I think that comes back to your comment earlier about younger people trying to make a decision, one of the hardest thing is to try and understand what are they passionate about? And how do you translate that into a work environment? And can you find that synergy where you are able to be able to do something you're extremely passionate about in the work environment and get someone to pay for if you can, then it's a really, you know, fantastic environment to be

Daniel Franco: 57:58

spot on. So, going on your point of, you know, the work life balance and, and some people really flourishing in that environment, and not being micromanaged my sources around the place, they tell me that the culture here is brilliant. And since you become the CEO is really taking the next step of building a culture of trust, empowerment, innovation, as real focus on people. Where you think when you came into the CEO role within Saab, was that your primary focus was that where you you walked in and said, This is my legacy. This is what I want to build a culture of, of innovation and a culture where people feel value.

Andy Keough: 58:54

So I didn't before joining Saab, I really didn't have much of a close insight or never worked closely with Saab. I knew at a distance I knew the CEO at the time, he was a classmate of mine back at defense Academy in 8687. So I had a relationship with him. I knew what he was, what he was like and how he operated. But I would say that I'm not sure it's changed from the cultural perspective and some of the core values of respecting people and engaging with people and valuing people sometimes even putting well and truly putting people above the business, the short term objectives of the business. That's been a part of the DNA for years and years and it really draws back to the original DNA of when the Swedes set the place up 30 plus years ago. That's the way they operate. That's the culture of collaboration and consensus And certainly when you know I'm in this business, and we're dealing with the parent back in, in Sweden, we've got enormous delegations down here. So there's not many times I have to seek approvals etc, from them to do certain things. But in those times when you need to get decisions out of them, then you know, it's important you understand their culture, because their culture is very much about consensus. And you can't just walk into a meeting with a great idea and landed on the table and go, here's the idea, we're going to do this, this and this, and off we go. Which going back to my Navy career is kind of the way that, you know, it was, he could characterize many of the decisions been like that, not all the time. But that occasionally happened. And people would just assume that's the way it is and adapt and overcome and move on in this environment, and certainly with the Swedish influence that is imprinted on the DNA of the of the company, there is that sense of collaboration and consensus. So you've got to get people on board, not dissimilar to the Japanese, their work culture, which is one of having meetings series of meetings before the actual meeting. So that, you know, everyone going into the meeting knows what the key issues are, knows what's going to be discussed, their views have been taken and integrated into the plan. And so you get into the meeting. And it's very much almost like play acting through this, this event. But it's because you've done all the groundwork and preparation. And it just means when you go from that decision, which usually not always all go perfectly, but we usually go much smoothly, that you can go and execute much quicker, because everyone's aligned and all the questions and all the doubts and decisions, they're able to get explored in a very safe environment. Before the actual decision itself. And what's more, you also tend to have very much more relationship based focus in a business like this. So it's more about knowing the person and trusting the person rather than measuring the person and, you know, asking them for strict reporting guidelines. There's that building those ratios. And that's an important part of it can be sometimes a little bit of a shortcoming or weakness, but done the right way. And the right thing, I think it always puts the emphasis back on the individual to make sure they lift themselves to the standard. It's not dissimilar, you know, my very earliest days in the Navy, naval College, and it was a tough punishing first year there, it was hard, you're really challenged. And if, on the rare occasion, you failed to do something, or you breached one of the rules, inadvertently, even you were given a punishment, the punishment sometimes is pretty, pretty significant. But the way in which it was communicated to you was, you know, you're an officer now, and very soon, you're going to be leading people. If you can't look after yourself, if you can't manage yourself, if you can't control and discipline yourself, if you can't deliver results and be there reliably. How do you expect the people you lead to be able to do but it was done in a positive affirmation of lifting you to lift to that that level. I found this thing you know, and again, without going to the inner service rivals or cultures I found in when I went to defense Academy in my second year, second or third year, the culture was different. The culture was, let's say, for example, you had a parade, and you had to be there at eight o'clock in the morning. In the Navy, you're either there at eight o'clock in uniform, all ready to go. Or you're in trouble. Right. We found defense Academy what they did was, you know, for an eight o'clock meeting that get everyone up at six o'clock in the morning, and you'd be on the playground in your tracksuit pants so that physically they laid eyes on everyone's head, right, everyone's up everyone's good right now often have breakfast, then getting uniforms, we'll see you down there. And they kind of set up that thing that tried to prevent people from from failing or falling, falling short. And of course, that's great. That works well in some environments. But, you know, it dilutes that personal accountability that you had. And of course, when people then failed, not that I was in first year at that stage, but people failed in that dance academy there was that in those days many years ago, that context of you failed. Well, that's because you're a cadet and we don't expect much from you. And so here is your punishment, whatever. I said, not that it happened or I saw it happen that often. But that was the difference in the way the message was passed across and the way the culture operated.

Daniel Franco: 1:04:51

What's that marker management stuff that you're talking? Yeah, absolutely. feeding people. Yeah. And you hit half the target market or even quarter of the target micro I mean, say 25% of the people actually want to be spoon fed the other 75 want to do it themselves. So you can really fall on, on your bum in the in the wrong spot in the wrong places there if you take that approach.

Andy Keough: 1:05:14

Yeah, absolutely. And it's just one of those cultures the way the organizations operate. And that's why I tend to find the most interesting, exciting, and as I said, it's not mean it didn't start with me, it started many years before me the culture was imprinted from the the origins of the business and successive leaders have come in, by and large, because they've embodied or embraced that culture. And I'd suggest in my case, it's, it's about embracing that culture as the way the business operates. Similarly, you know, it's not just me, but it's also the way that my, my manager, you know, that I report up to in Sweden interactively. I remember one of my earlier conversations with him after about three or so months in the job. And I said to him, geez, I'm still getting my arms around things been here for three months now. And, you know, there's an enormous amount to know. And he goes on, just remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And so in that simple phrase, you know, he gave permission effectively for me to take time, and also that element, don't put shoes on oppression. Just take your time, you'll get there, it's fine. And, you know, if anything, you'll just redouble your efforts to make sure you don't let the person down. Yeah. So it does really put that emphasis back on the individual to lift themselves to be able to meet the standard that's expected across the organization. And again, you do so recognizing that sometimes there's going to be a percentage of people, a small number of people who are going to struggle are not going to be able to operate in that type of environment, and they're gonna, they're gonna find it difficult.

Daniel Franco: 1:06:58

Yeah. How do you set standards for that high performance, though, that high performance culture that you're looking for? Is there anything that you do in particular, it's our board? How do you manage that?

Andy Keough: 1:07:11

I think a lot of it's about back to the earlier point about alignment, it's being clear about our targets. So one things we spent a lot of time with, after I arrived was just looking at our strategy. And we had a sales strategy when I arrived, which was, which was very effective shows where we're going but I sort of enlarge that to a broader strategy to encompass things like people development, etc, and markets and what markets we're going to be in what areas we're going to go into. So more away more from just the understanding of what projects we were going to secure and when the to look at what markets we need to be moving in. A lot of that work had started well, before I came, but it was a way of just clarifying. So we've got our plan for 2030. More team knows what the targets are, we know in terms of portfolio diversification, what the size respective size their businesses that we're we're looking for, how we're going to shape how we're going to look at some of our challenges, we're heavily we're going to enormous amount of focus on maritime working, particularly combat systems work. That's fantastic. It's long term work that's been around and we'll go into the future. But you can't afford to be a one trick pony. So for me, putting emphasis on developing our civil securities team here, which is doing an integration platform, software integration platform that connects up large numbers of sensors. So effectively, it's like building control rooms, in a whole range of applications. So they broken that market. About eight to 10 years ago, they developed a product here in Australia, that that set a new standard for it because they applied what they learned in the defense space into a completely new domain and build a product that wasn't there to address a market perceived market need. And so now we've done over 50 installations of that. We're finishing off Sydney Opera House at the moment we've done the Clarence Correctional Facility in Grafton, New South Wales, the biggest correctional facility that's just been built. We've done that. We've done some work with a financial institution about connecting up all of their branches, ATMs and other infrastructure around Australia into one headend that will allow them to be able to reserve across their entire network, every branch, every camera, every luck, that you can control from a central area, if you so need. So it's taking those skills and putting those areas and that's why that market and building that business is important because back to your earlier point, about high performance. You get high performance out of people when they're they're drawing first they've got clear targets. Secondly, they can draw across a wide range of experiences sometimes Having super specialized people might help you solve today's problem, but it won't get you ready for tomorrow's problems. So, for me, it's a healthy way of developing our engineering capability to be able to have people move across projects from defense projects, which are very detailed, strictly controlled into civil projects where they've got to deliver a solution within weeks or months, that has to go into operation and safer, a correctional space a prison. You know, that's got to work 24/7, you know, and you can't afford to have any glitches in the software suddenly at midnight, or something that all the doors are unlocked. So

Daniel Franco: 1:10:40

I want to unpack as well. So your strategy at the moment, it's talks about people market performance, portfolio, sustainability, innovation, or the like. However, there is an approach to that's on your website that's on the sub website that says innovation is mission critical leadership style. Can you unpack that for me? Because innovation is this buzzword at the moment that all businesses are trying to achieve? You at? And you and the team are especially innovative and almost dedicate? We definitely want it part of your value system and value set. Can you unpack that? How it's a mission critical leadership style? What does that mean?

Andy Keough: 1:11:25

So I think if you reflect back on innovation, probably interesting reflection, I mean, back to the DNA of the company and DNA the way it operates. Think about Sweden 10 million people in Europe, large proportion, 60 odd percent of their economy is geared towards exports. You've got some of the most well known companies that are they, you know, obviously the Volvo has cars sold to a Chinese company now but trucks and other vehicles is still Swedish. You've got you know, large industrials, like ABB with pumps and control systems and electronics. You've got the electrical axes across a wide range of areas, the Skypes the Spotify is h&m, IKEA is it's from a country of 10 million people. Yes, pretty. And then if you you could name probably 10 or 15, globally recognized brands and people would know them. And probably the surprise would be are they Swedish as well. So part of that is in the culture, of being export focused, but also that understanding that you've got to keep innovating and growing and doing things differently. The magic, however, happens at the team level. And so you're really looking for team leaders, not just at the senior leadership position like myself, although we have responsibilities in the chain, but you are looking for those team leaders that are not just satisfied with doing something again, they're actually always looking for ways of doing it better, or doing something new. And that's just a part of the I think the culture, I'll make no sort of claim to say that we are experts in in innovation, or experts in leadership and innovation by any means it's tough. And it is a tough grind some time to do it, I think you've got to have a catalyst to start with something that drives you. So if you look at that civil security business I talked about earlier on the main catalyst. So that was some strategic assessment, which looked at the defense sector, and said in the 2010 2012 timeframe that it's going to be very hard to see how we maintain our workforce at the current levels, given some of the challenges and defense funding. So they look to where they'd apply those skill sets elsewhere. And the classic story who my predecessor tells at the time, was brilliant, because they effectively got shortlisted and won a contract to do a correctional facility, it turned out the solution they were looking to offer, when they actually, you know, went into deep detail of it wasn't going to work for the solution. And so suddenly, they're sitting there having been selected for a project and starting from a blank sheet. And that drove this massive cycle of innovation, engaging with the customer to really connect and understand how they operate. Now that's something where it's forced upon you through it through a catalyst like that. Because the challenge is when you are doing well, and things are moving along. The digging, some of them are really long term projects, how do you then stimulate that innovation? And that's where I think it's got to start at the top. It's got to start with the long term strategic plan which says, here's where we are today. Here's where we want to be in 2030 in order to get to 20. We can't just keep doing the things we're doing today. So we're going to have to do things differently. And often that solution, that innovation, that change most often comes from within the business, not the leadership, the leadership can point to things. And it can talk about trends. And we're going to look at areas and look at some of the strategic shifts, that that real innovation drive and translating that intent into action really has to occur in the engine room of the business. And so therefore, the critical element of when you talk about leadership, it's not my leadership, it's the leadership throughout the whole business that needs to embrace that. And we see that reflected in, it's interesting, we did some, we do a global survey every year. And when you look at our results from Australia, it assesses three areas, your manager, how he manages going. So that's an interesting, challenging time, it's not like, it's like a quasi 360, you know, your manager, it assesses the team, and assesses the job or your task. Now, the highest area, one of the highest areas of positive responses, or a survey before was around the manager. And the statement was along the lines of my manager, morals, the right behavior. And you kind of when you starting at a point like that, and that's throughout the business, that's like team leads, right down, doing software development, or executing projects, when you start with that depth of engagement between the team leaders and the the team members, then that gives you an enormous space, and a great opportunity to leverage off, it's pretty much then you just got to point in the direction, take away the barriers, if you can try and provide some funding when it becomes available, and allow the magic to happen. It's really hard, though, to create that from scratch, you couldn't go in and be extremely hard to go in and recreate that from scratch unless you had people around you who

Daniel Franco: 1:17:15

Oh, it is it is ridiculously I ended the statistics from you know, Gallup statistics. 85% of people leave a business because of the manager management. Right. So how do you maintain that do? Is it part of the induction process? Is it when people come on board? These are our expectations? And we're going to hold you to account? Should you step outside of these expectations? How do you manage that highperformance from your leadership teams,

Andy Keough: 1:17:42

I think that some of those expectations and norms about how you operate a self evident from the first day you walk into the business, because it's a widespread belief across the business of the way things are done. And so if you came into the business, and assuming you got through the selection process for came in, you would really struggle and you'd see some just differences between what you think how you'd approach a circumstance or situation as different to how the rest of the team respond. And maybe you can push through, maybe you got a strong sense of character and you can push through, but you'd have to be pretty, pretty low EQ to kind of exist in that environment for very long before you realize you kind of got yourself to a place that's fundamentally different at that point in time, you got the choice of either jumping on board and adapting, or its preparation. Well, yeah, it's gonna be difficult. Yeah. So so. And so that's the, the advantage that I have. And where I find great comfort is in the fact that's not me. In fact, sometimes I put out ideas, and I get my team saying, oh, you know, that's gonna, we need to make sure we do this, this this, before we do that, yeah. Okay, let's go do those things. So we can achieve that. So

Daniel Franco: 1:19:04

people already want to go. So in that scenario, and

Andy Keough: 1:19:07

looking at, it's also respecting that, you know, people are much more in tune to the people they lead. Because the relationships like when we had the COVID response, and we had to, we quickly had to respond to that. So within sort of 48 hours, we were kind of shifted from 400 odd people working here to to a core of about 100. And for us, the core business is our classified work that we do here. And so we didn't want people coming in with COVID, compromising that so that that could continue. We've got everyone out. And a lot of decisions, I made the easiest decision, right, we're out of here. But we still need to protect the core business. And everyone just then went on and went about their work. But you had managers who at that stage, engaging with it People said, you know, I know this person is going to struggle, either being at home. Because you know, he's a, he's an interesting character. And he's not going to do well in that environment, are there certain things there, so we need to bring him in. And likewise, we had people who should have been in at work during their work here, because it's classified work essential work. And we had to then give them additional give them different work to do. So they could do that from home. Because they're going to struggle coming into if you remember those early days, and it was quite difficult, like bringing people into a work environment where any one of their co workers could have come in. With COVID. That was a significant stress. And so you've got managers who are very attuned to people within the teams that can actually accommodate those issues and get the best out of people. And again, that's the type of people who do well in this type of environment. Yeah.

Daniel Franco: 1:20:59

And all environments, those who have built those trusting relationships, it's a fundamental for any business or personal success, isn't it really. Moving into the federal budget has come out and there's a fair bit of fear few funds going into the defense industry. I know I'm probably going to get a diplomatic answer on this. So I'll ask you anyway, where do you feel that defense Australia is going and the chat? What challenges do we face? You know, especially from the likes of China? And that, where do you feel our challenges face? A lie in the next 1010 years or so?

Andy Keough: 1:21:46

Yeah. Well, I think one of the, you know, COVID, has been an extremely challenging environment. For many, I think one of the learnings we can take from it and reflect on as many have is this element around self sufficiency and sovereignty in Australia? And what do we need to have in Australia, to match with our increasingly challenging environment. And so I think that's one of the things that we're reflecting on. Interesting enough, Saab as a company, started in 1937, in Sweden, and it started in the lead up to the Second World War, where everyone in Europe was seeing what was going on. Hitler had been in power for a number of years, and they could see all the countries building up their military capabilities. And the overseas suppliers that Sweden relied on, were suddenly working in their national interest, not worried about exporting to some other country. So they learned the lesson, the difficult way and set up a strategic capability to build aircraft. In that time of need. We're having that discussion in Australia now, which is around what do we need ourselves in Australia to best manage the type of circumstances that we reliably or realistically will be confronted with in the future, the region will continue to change, the growth and rise of China is inevitable. Some would say the rewrite of China, because they have for many, many hundreds of years been a major power. So that's going to be an interesting, dynamic, but it's not all about China. And I think the challenge is that if you focus on one entity, or you focus on one lens, you miss a whole range of elements and other challenges as well. So I think that's where we have to have a broader understanding about the changes that are going on. And not just from a defense lens, but a broader national security lens. And I'm really glad to hear a number of the strategic leaders now talking about this broader national security policy, which doesn't just cover how many bombs and bullets and tanks you've got. That's one thing. But more importantly, what about our economy? It's our economy in the health of our economy, the vibrancy of our economy and our ability of our economy to ride through difficult times like this difficult times where a major trading partner, for example, decides to impact upon that trade and cause us problems there. And I think that is one of the great gifts if you could say one of the few great gifts out of COVID and the challenging environment we've been through is this sharper? Focus on understanding what do we need to do in Australia? I think the sovereign piece we need to be careful because often people will just jump to a very small, tight defined solution. Oh, we need to build missiles here or we need to do this here. Well, we need to do those Seems that best makes sense. We can't do everything. We just don't have the scale. So what are those few areas that we really need to focus on? What are those key capabilities, those key things we need in Australia to make sure that when we look ahead, we look where technologies where is going, where the challenges and environments going? How can we best respond? And how can we make sure we ride through that best? I think another element to it is going to be around partnerships. And I think this is where the ability of Australia to understand its strengths, and play to those strengths is going to be critical, often, you know, in a strategy sense, and yet, people underestimate their strengths. Yeah. Because there's so innate to them, that they think everyone thinks that way and acts that way. But I think in Australia, that egalitarian way and manner, I think that openness that we have, and the values that we place on freedom of freedom of thought, the ability to protest, the ability to do sometimes, what some would would classify as being crazy things, we should sometimes celebrate those things, because there's a lot of people who fought and died to give us that opportunity to do that. And they're the things that I think resonate across a vast range of cultures, particularly when it relates to the children, and setting up an environment for each country, that the opportunities for their children and their children's children are better than what they have at the moment if we can tap into that. And understand that value of freedom and openness, democracy and the importance of those democratic debate and discussion is sometimes as difficult as it is, then I think we're in a good position. If we try checkbook diplomacy, if we try strong arming people, we are going to fail. Yeah. And

Daniel Franco: 1:27:01

to kind of dance through a question there, which I know you have to. But it for me, is there a real threat of actual war like I don't, in my, in my own personal opinion, I don't believe like that is actually capable of happening. It's just not going to be something that, you know, we've got the likes of the USA, or big brothers, the US in the UK sort of backing us up watching us over over us and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, with the push of a button, you can wipe it all country. Right. So to me, that just doesn't make sense. So for me, you know, the cyber security is areas that we need to really focus on. And, you know, the more softer areas, the infiltration of our of our great nation is one that is under threat. When people say just create more missiles, Is that realistic? Okay, is that

Andy Keough: 1:28:02

so there? Are there a range of responses we need? I think, importantly, people talk about war. And of course, that's a very technical term. But probably a better more accurate term is conflict. Yeah. And conflict. Since the start at a time conflict has been going on, and will continue to go on. And if you look at for example, he said there's Wars was not going to happen. But look at conflict. Look at Syria, Palestine at the moment, look at me look at Crimea, the Russian annexation of Crimea, look at the destabilization in eastern Ukraine. Like there's, there's those conflicts that have been brewing for decades. And in many cases, rarely a shot is fired. If a shots fired, it's usually not reported on or it's reported on remotely. But it's very hard for people to understand sometimes what's going on and what the fundamental causes are of those those issues. And so there will be tension in our region, at times that tension will play out in conflict, most often because of the people involved, and particularly the US presidents, and many of the actors in these environments, nuclear powers, so they're going to be very, very clear about how they wield their power. And therefore, it's the new domains. It's, you know, economic coercion has been around for a long time. Yep. So to has cyber has been around for a long time. We're talking about it more often now. But we've seen we see actors, you know, the the US pipeline ransomware Well, that's just people trying to extort money. We know that the greater threats albeit perhaps not as Not as numerous, but the great effects come from that, that security domain. Because that can fundamentally, you know, weaken the foundations of your, your society. So, and of course, we see often examples of news being manipulated facts being turned around, obviously, Donald Trump coin, the fake news, and people have a certain view about that. But I clearly remember in one of my trips to Sweden, seeing how a local news story which involved a couple of former African youths who were refugees in in Sweden, how this news story, which was covered on the local news to us being, you know, taken to a police station, for a minor altercation in a shopping mall, how that one story then gets turned into major riots in a Swedish shopping mall, because it gets picked up by certain news services, who designed this case, they traced it to a Russian news service that designed to then spin this story up, and then push it up onto the international news wire and the Nationals and pick it up. And suddenly, you're reading in the New York Times. And they're the things we've got to be careful of in the future. So beside here of tension and conflict. You know, for many years, some of the leading strategist I remember listening to an Israeli strategist in the late 90s, as I was doing a staff course, and he looked out amongst a sea of uniforms. And he said, I don't want to be seemed disrespectful, but some of the next major conflicts aren't going to involve you. And you're pretty uniforms. They're going to be people who engage in asymmetric threats, and asymmetric tactics to destabilize through avoiding conflict with you, because they know if they try and take you on, they'll lose. But they'll work around it. And sure enough, within three years that we had 911.

Daniel Franco: 1:32:09

It's a it's a scary thought, some of the creative ways that we can be targeted. What are we, when I say we as civilians? What can we do to in the meantime, that what is expected of us? Well, the powers to be are up the top making the decisions where where do we fall into all this?

Andy Keough: 1:32:31

Oh, look, I think, across society, I think we've got to look at some of those core elements of democracy. And be very clear now mind about what are some of the underpinning root causes that support that those fundamentals of democracy, education, critical thinking, some of the things that we talk about that is so much harder to do these days, given that, for many, in particular youth, the news services, which they rely upon, are being shaped to feed their very preconceived ideas that they have. Yeah, they only see the stories that they want to see. Is that correct? Yeah, the the, it's all shaped. So I think, you know, going forward having that reflection, and that understanding and training and people and accepting dissent at times constructive dissent, that allows us to critique and understand where we are, because unless we bring those broader voices, and not just here, but you know, some of the countries around us in our region, you know, I've got some extremely difficult and challenging times ahead, look at, you know, very near neighbor, Indonesian, some of the challenges they're dealing with, with COVID. On top of a whole range of economic challenges, you look at places like Bali and tourism that's just been smashed. And they don't have, unlike us, they don't have the massive export economy that we have to kind of lean back in the iron ore that we have and some of those other resources we can lean back into. So so we need to look out for those our neighbors at times, and we need to make sure that they have strong democratic processes in place and the the institutions that support those are supported through that.

Daniel Franco: 1:34:21

So we're coming to a close but there is one question that's been on my mind throughout our chat, and I was contemplating whether asked it or not, but I'm going to throw it out there. How do you feel Andy Keogh? How do you feel about defense in its own right, and its ability to cause harm to other human beings? How does that sit with you?

Andy Keough: 1:34:44

Yeah, I think it sits quite comfortably with me. Because I'm confident in the decision making process and I'm confident in the checks and balances that we have in our society. That makes sure that that power is wielded in a way that is just and measured. I think we see examples as allegations, abrasion report, etc. When individuals have gone off and misused, that trust or been potentially in environments where things haven't turned out or gone or executed the way they're supposed to. But by and large, if you look at the military, and the justification for the military, that being the defense of a national interest, the defense of the people, the foundation of that I absolutely agree with and supportive of, and it's like any of these elements you you trust, and you hope that you don't have to use it. By the very effect, the fact that you have such an effective weapon and acid there normally underpins the fact that you won't need to use it, because others will respond accordingly and perhaps, change their courses of actions based on the fact that they know what you've got. And of course, that's always that game of chess. Yeah, it is. And that's always that, you know, going back to the submarine domain, that's always an issue with submarines is that you never know where they are. You never know where they'll pop up. In my time in when East Timor was happening, we just happen to sail into Darwin at the time and the wharf was just covered with cameras, and of course, all the stories of the submarine where's it been? And what's it been doing? Is it has it been on spying missions and seeing what's going on in East Timor, all this conjecture, and no one. But for a few people knew exactly what we'd been doing and where we've been and what we've done. And it's that ability that unknown, that ability to respond in a way with a highly credible capability that underpins the some of the environment that we have today, the safety and security that we enjoy today in our environment. So

Daniel Franco: 1:37:09

one last question before we get into quick questions. And it kind of touches on what you talked about the submarine and no one really knowing what what you guys were doing the the clearance and security measures that go into the military defense, the whole piece is very obviously high and confidential. And you would have obviously another a lot of knowledge about what's going on in the world at the moment, your previous missions that you've deployed on, and some of the measures that you had to deliver on? How do you manage going home to your family, knowing that potentially, there could be a threat to them? How do you manage that in yourself? And obviously, not being able to divulge anything from a security point of view? How do you deal with your own internal emotions in that space?

Andy Keough: 1:38:09

I think it's a lot less for me, particularly because you tend to be quite compartmentalized in the way you're thinking and thought process. And likewise, again, I left the military quite a while ago. So you're away on a long deployment, you come back, you decompress. You go back into the. And again, our geostrategic environment, the last 20 3040 years has been relatively, with few exceptions, relatively benign, obviously, conflicts in the Middle East, etc, notwithstanding. But

Daniel Franco: 1:38:43

I mean, from the you know, the weapons that you might be making here, it's our view, there is knowledge of what is coming potentially, oh, there's

Andy Keough: 1:38:52

knowledge of what happens when they get used and yeah, absolutely. And again, that comes back to that use of weapons and things and adjust and appropriate man. I think the challenge, I think the challenge these days for warfare. And there's some really great books out about the pilots of those remotely piloted aircraft. So some of them are sitting in Creech Air Force Base, just north of Las Vegas, they're flying an eight hour mission, that aircraft they're flying is over in the Middle East somewhere flying around, potentially, you know, losing off Hellfire missiles and they finish their eight hour shift. They close the door, they hand over somewhere else, drive a short distance home, and then the home just like that, there's no long flight, there's no decompression, and doing that, that that's the nature of modern warfare and conflict that I think is the most challenging element and that's where, again, it comes down to the mental health side of it. Picking people who are and training people who have got that but also just watching for signs and making sure that Is the sport in place to look after people who are in those really difficult situation. It's not dissimilar to what a different lens but not dissimilar to what our first responders deal with deal with people who go and bushfires police every, every night of the week. Ambos. So, I think having a, an understanding of the ongoing trauma that they deal with in their environment, and being able to support them is a critical thing. And it goes so from a military perspective to me, it was never really that difficult to reconcile in mind,

Daniel Franco: 1:40:38

you just managed with no choice. So moving to a close now, we often throw some quickfire questions at the end of, of the podcast, where big readers and learners here at Synergy IQ and creating synergy podcast. What are you reading right now?

Andy Keough: 1:40:58

I'm reading a book about the startup of the Silicon Valley. And the history of it, and how the innovation precinct worked at that time. And it tracks the lives of about five key individuals in a number of areas such as the universities, and some of the companies that were there.

Daniel Franco: 1:41:15

What's the book?

Andy Keough: 1:41:17

Forget the title, no. troublemakers, troublemakers, troublemakers. So it's good. And it just, I mean, it shows those personal connections and networks that people have and the way these paths intersect at times. And the incredible innovation precinct, they're able to sit up there. And of course, you look at that and reflect on what we've got here in Adelaide, and some of the things that are going on with lot 14, space, defense, cyber, etc. You can all see the preconditions for some great opportunities in the future.

Daniel Franco: 1:41:51

Silicon Valley is in bit of trouble at the moment, there's a lot of people fleeing. Purely because the unemployment is gone through the roof. There's people camping out in the streets and in front of people's homes and stuff like that. So fingers crossed, we do it right here. On our stage, self development book, if you were to say that going back to that young teenager is coming to you for a career advice. Do I join? Do I join the navy or not? What's one book that you would recommend to someone who's growing in their career from a self development point of view? One that's held you in good stead over the years.

Andy Keough: 1:42:29

Good to Great was probably one of those ones that talked to you know, it's a long, yes. quite old now. Jim Collins. Yeah. Jim Collins. So it kind of just connects to that whole idea. And because that's often, you know, when you go into some of these businesses, because he looks at some of the culture and the core and why certain companies went really well. And some companies who are great companies kind of fell off the rails, and a lot of it, is it around the cultural piece. I think that's probably one of those from a business management perspective, and thinking strategically about how you take organizations and let's face it, you know, when a company's going to go off the cliff, and it's got some really, you know, challenging in environments in whether it's going to bankruptcy, etc. Or whether and startup the culture is kind of caught predetermined to you have to make decisions, you have to make things happen in both those instances. But most of us won't be in that circumstances, most of us are in a circumstance of taking an organization that's going good. And trying to make it better than what it is. Yeah,

Daniel Franco: 1:43:33

absolutely. Yeah. It's a brilliant book. Do you listen to any other podcasts?

Andy Keough: 1:43:38

Now? Don't listen to many podcasts, actually, only, you know, very limited.

Daniel Franco: 1:43:42

There's some good ones out there. If you had to pick someone that you admire, or look up to, who would that be?

Andy Keough: 1:43:52

A lot of people they're

Daniel Franco: 1:43:54

wanting to hear first one that comes to mind.

Andy Keough: 1:43:59

I think who would be Oh, it's a tough one. That's a tough one. Yeah, I've just more thinking about them. There's a lot of people out there that you just sort of take little vignettes of why they do things and the inspiration I suppose that comes with was seen.

Daniel Franco: 1:44:18

Okay, let's I'll rephrase it. What about elite there's a leader in business that's doing some good things and you go you know what, I like that. It's doing none of this Sweden is oh, well, I

Andy Keough: 1:44:28

think you know, there's there's a few people live in in Sweden than I do, you know, who are incredible leaders. You know, if I take someone who's at a at an Uber, high level, you know, super high level someone who, you know, have limited engagement or involvement with that, but has a way of operating that's that's really interesting is the chair and absorb as smart as Wallenberg because, you know, his his great, great, great, great grandfather that kind of started the investment that eventually came not in 37 years. It's great father, his grandfather, I believe, who starts up and so there's this dentistry, there's this, there's this sense that this is not just about the next quarter's earnings. This is not just about here today, but there's this overall drive, to see the strategic future and to be planning for the next 50 to 100 years ahead of what SAAB is going to be in that timeframe. And that's incredible. And you you think about that, and I think there's, it throws to me, again, back to some of those philosophies I talked about with, with the way you motivate people and throws to me this kind of challenge, which is, if I do well here, or if I do poorly here, I'm not, I'm not, it's not about money. You know, there's this part of this story, this narrative, this family dentistry, that you're a part of, or being a very small part. But there's more to it, and the values that come from that the relationship that comes out, and the importance of actually being trusted as a business and as individuals comes through. Because if you're going to be in business that long, and particularly in, you know, very tight areas like defense, you know, you've really got to have trusted relationships and partnerships, and you can't afford to compromise them.

Daniel Franco: 1:46:44

I'll have a bit of a quirky one, if you had access to a time machine, you could travel up and back. So return trip, you can go either forward or back in time, where would you go?

Andy Keough: 1:46:56

It's tough, because I think, you know, the, we're spoilt for choice. In Australia, you know, particularly the COVID thing has just reminded us of some of the incredible environment, the environment we grew up. Yeah, actually, I shouldn't if I'd got Fordham at my bed, go back and I buy that house or not buy that house or buy that car or not buy that car?

Daniel Franco: 1:47:22

Is it? Yeah, but

Andy Keough: 1:47:23

I don't I don't think I'd fundamentally change. I think, you know, where we are today, where I was extremely fortunate. My career is really fun, exciting, exhilarating things, I wouldn't want to change that. Looking forward, I think I tend to, by nature, look forward too much, if anything, trying to

Daniel Franco: 1:47:48

look and plan for the future board and see if you can get your predictions. Right. If you

Andy Keough: 1:47:51

don't, that you don't therefore enjoy the current Yes, I think, you know, for me, it's about really enjoying where we are at the moment where I am at the moment where the businesses at the moment of the challenges ahead, what's behind. I suppose if I had to go forward, I'd love to go forward to 2030 to see our what this place looks like then, to see the extra investments to see the national business to see that we've been successful. I'm sure we will be there always be nice just to duck ahead and see what it looks like. Because

Daniel Franco: 1:48:24

I'm sure it'll be if you didn't where you went wrong. What you can do.

Andy Keough: 1:48:27

Yeah, that's right. Some reflection I can take back to the first day. If you

Daniel Franco: 1:48:31

had one superhero power. What would you choose? If you could sorry, if you could choose one superhero power? What would you choose?

Andy Keough: 1:48:39

reading people's minds that would be that would be good way. Just yeah. And sometimes not too much detail. Yeah, I was gonna say I have enough trouble reading my own. Yeah. Sometimes I think just being able to read and sense people and understand not what they're saying. But what is resonating within them what is truly how they truly considering or looking or assessing something, I think that would be would give you a fascinating insight. So you can shape that because that's that power of communication, not just to pass a message, but have that deep understanding that you connect to a person as cliched as that is. And they truly deeply understand what you're trying to do. And that's always something that's incredibly difficult challenge.

Daniel Franco: 1:49:37

Absolutely. Beautiful. Thank you very much for your time today. Indeed. It's been absolutely amazing having you and learning a little bit more about your journey and your thoughts around the business world and the defense industry. So thank you for joining us. If people wanted to get in contact with you, where could they find you?

Andy Keough: 1:49:56

LinkedIn with 3000 of my best friends yet

Daniel Franco: 1:49:59

so LinkedIn He's probably the best way not that you respond, you want to be contacted, whether he responded not as the other issue. So thank you very much again for your time. Yeah, it's been brilliant, much appreciated. Thanks. See you guys. Thanks.

Synergy IQ: 1:50:15

Thank you once again for joining us here at creating synergy. It's been great spending this time with you. Please jump onto the synergy IQ Facebook and LinkedIn page where the discussion continues after the show. Join our mailing list so you'll know what's happening next at Synergy iq.com.au. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. And if you really enjoyed it, please share it with your friends.