Bain’s Worldwide Managing Partner on Leading with Vision and Innovation

Welcome to Beyond the Bio, our people podcasts that dive steep into the exceptional leaders of pain and spotlight the incredible work they're doing. Today's episode is a bit different because we have our first returning guest, but with good reason. When Kristoff Davusri joined us on the podcast back in 2021, he was a partner based in Brussels, including our Amia private equity practice while helping clients be more thoughtful about how to invest sustainably. Today, Kristoff has taken on a new role as Bane's worldwide managing partner, succeeding Manny Masada who joined us on the podcast just last year. We usually start with our guests by telling us about their career journeys, but Kristoff's kind already done that and history doesn't change. Rather than have him share that story again, let's just take a few minutes and replay that portion of his first episode. If you're a long time listener and remember Kristoff's story, you can skip ahead about 15 minutes. We'll pick up after that with Kristoff as he talks about what excites him about his new role and his agenda for Bane of the years to come. Alright, let's get started. Welcome Kristoff. It's great to have you here. Great to be here, Keith. So Kristoff, as we always do, I want to get started with a little bit about your education and early career path. So why don't we start with enrolling in your master's program at the University of Gent? What was the plan, what career path did you have in mind when you started on the journey? Yeah, so as you say, civil engineer, classic construction engineer from the University of Gendem, Belgium, I don't think there was a big master plan of becoming an engineer. So I was good at math at school and by being good at math and you look into the options and what career options can be out there. Engineering was the obvious one. It's an education with a lot of opportunities coming out of it. It's kind of the obvious one that they recommend to you when you're good at maths at school. That's what I did. Did you get a lot of advice from family and friends on the career path ahead of you with that degree background? Yeah, I think I got most of the advice from my teachers at school, actually from the math teacher, probably mainly because none of my parents actually were really into business. My mom is a preschool teacher. My father was working at the distribution center of Volvo trucks. So none really had background at university, you know, was kind of the first generation in the family going to university. I relied a lot on some of the mentors and teachers at school that helped me think through career opportunities. When you went to the degree program that you went into and you finished, did you want to be a civil engineer? Did you have an eye towards business or how did you choose what to do on the back end of the degree? Yeah, I think I got more into it, which might sound funny from an artistic point of view. Actually, I think I was always interested in architecture and construction was relatively close. And one of these people that likes bridges or can look into a bridge as a piece of art. And I think it's one of the reasons why I did end up at the construction site. I'm not really an engineer of computer science or designing cars and motors, et cetera. But I think the more artistic point of view, I always find interesting. So that's why I got into the construction site. So I didn't see you come through the AC process for the BBM interviewing that we did after school. Did you consider Bane when you finished that program before you went to your industry job? Tricky question, because I actually applied at Bane at that time, which was in 1996. I still have the letter of the then office head wishing me all the look in my career. But I got laid in the process. Bane was just starting up in Belgium. I applied. Two or three people that I recruited at the time, I did make it. And so I first went into a Procter and Gamble for four years before Bane contacted me back through a headhunter. It's not because you wanted to go into Bane, didn't have the first opportunity to get into it. That therefore there's no opportunities later on in the career. So at Procter and Gamble, they have a lot of roles around product management. They obviously have a lot of brands that people know. Did you go on to the business side at Procter and Gamble or did you do something different there? I didn't go on to the marketing side, but I went into the purchasing or strategic sourcing side out of the European headquarters, first in Brussels and then in Geneva, which was actually one of the best schools I think I've gotten through at Procter and Gamble. So the marketing is typically local when you start. So you get a local brand, you work into the local country. On the sourcing side, actually it's a global organization where immediately you part of global sourcing teams. I had the opportunity to be part of the sourcing team that was opening up sourcing in China at the time. The late 90s spent a lot of time in China in the Middle East developing global suppliers. And that is really I think the education that helped me on the business side at that time. And so it's been a great school actually at Procter and Gamble. And how much responsibility do you have early in your career, two and three years out of university as a buyer and a global organization like PNG? Was it a lot of responsibility? Were you just learning by being part of the team? Talk a little bit more about that. I think PNG was great. I've given young people a lot of responsibilities, of course, as a huge company. And so for them giving relatively young people responsibility for tens or hundreds of million of dollars of sourcing value wasn't exceptional at the certain moment. That was a global buyer of citric acid and there were two huge global buyers. It was Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola. And when we were going to develop the sourcing in China, you could go as the lead buyer in the world of citric acid. And that gave a lot of learning and a lot of opportunities to grow actually and to take responsibilities early on in the career. When you're doing that and you're building those skills, at some point you probably thought I should do something more business related. How did you end up back at Bain? It sounds like you were given a lot of responsibility, had a ton of learning. And honestly, for a first generation college student, your career was going well. So what was the motivation to change? Well, it's one of the elements that I often mention to young people as well is it's good to look into what people do that have been in your role and stay for ten years in that role, and what are those people doing when they continue under the firm or when they leave the firm? I saw that a lot of the people that started into sourcing, either stayed into sourcing and when they went out of Procter and Gamble, they often go into sourcing at another firm and it's not what I wanted to do at that time. And so when I got actually re-contacted by Bain at that time through a headhunter, I thought that was a great opportunity to maybe see something else than staying into the sourcing world. So I'm incredibly grateful for everything I've learned. But at the same time, I thought joining consulting for two or three years might provide more options to my career. And so that's why I joined Bain at the time. So the search for him calls you back and you get another round of case interviews. Did that go well? Well, I think those people that had prepared better at times for interviews and then I did. But I think some of my friends were still at Bain and they say, "Let's hire even at the interviews. We're not perfect." Very well said. And that goes and that went well so far. So you joined Bain and did you have any exposure to Bain while you were working at Procter and Gamble? Were you working in parts of the world in procurement, in consumer products? You probably came across us a little bit. So did you know what you were getting yourself into when you joined? No, because Procter and Gamble is not really a firm that uses a lot of consultants. And so it was a bit of a jump into a different world, which at times was interesting because you come from a world with a lot of autonomy where you're negotiating big deals with deleting chemical suppliers and you move into a world where your manager tells you to improve your tagline, the y-axis on your slide and the sources on your slide. So that was a bit of a learning curve, let's say. I think once you get it, when you're sitting in client meetings and the client reacts to your slides, you all of a sudden start to understand the importance of taglines, axes and sources. And because it's exactly when I thought, "Why does that care?" and the client points you to it. You know, it's important. But I think that's an easy learning curve getting into the business, learning the job, knowing exactly why that's important. And then adding on the experience that you've built throughout the years from the business world that you've been into was, I think that mix was really helpful. And I think, honestly, I needed probably the four years in a firm to be an effective consultant as well. Did you know that you were going to focus in private equity from the beginning because that's where you ended up now. But I would have assumed with your background in consumer products, you would have started in the consumer products practice and probably built out a nice niche for yourself doing procurement work as a consultant. It's maybe a fun story, but when I joined Bane, I had explicitly mentioned I come out of procurement. I was working procurement at the leading consumer goods firm. And so if I wanted to do world-class procurement, I would have stayed. Similarly, if I wanted to be a construction engineer, you know, I would have done it. So don't put me into construction and procurement. When in the first year, there was a case of procurement in a construction company, I say, now, you know, now they're going to staff me onto it. And to the credit of Bane, they didn't. It would have been the easiest solution, but they didn't staff me on it. And it's one of these moments of truth that I actually knew this is a great firm. Now coming back to you early, question I did start into the consumer world. It's what I knew it's what I liked. A lot of the work initially was with leading consumer goods firms. That's what I really enjoyed it. But it's through one of my clients that I worked with as a manager, turning around a business of a large consumer goods firm that I started to appreciate transforming companies, turning around companies that client went into private equity and that's how I followed into the private equity world. So it's been a natural transition, let's say, from consumer following the clients into private equity and obviously I had done several diligence because it's a core part of Bains work to already get acquainted with private equity. Christoph, can you talk a little bit about the relationship you had with that client because I think a lot of people look at partners and assume that they're just calling around CEOs, trying to introduce themselves to CEOs and I know my experience was that the CEOs that I know I often knew before they were CEO. What level was that client in the organization when you met as a manager and how has it grown since then? There's a few of those relationships and the one that I mentioned that person was us to lead the transformation of a small business unit, kind of $200 million business unit of a large CP firm. He was put there from corporate in order to facilitate the division to drive the turn around. As I said, small company, heavily lost making and we worked hand-to-hand, that was a young manager at Bains. So he was there to transform the company. We worked together for over a year on making that profitability after 80 months. It was from -20 to +10% profit. That was a great success story. It was actually sold to private equity behind that turn around and a transformation story. I was a manager and he was sent by corporate to drive a corporate transformation of a small unit. He then became the CFO of the European division of that firm and from that went into private equity and from that became one of the leading managing partners in one of the leading private equity firms. We had the pleasure of working together for a long time but he didn't start as a CEO. I didn't start as a partner but we've enjoyed working together. We've enjoyed creating results and that's how the relationship grew. And the relationship today, as you think about it, I imagine that you've had a lot of opportunities to leave and go work for private equity firms or even join your friend at their firm. What keeps you at Bains focused on the client work as an advisor as opposed to going in and joining an operations team or joining an investment team at a fund. And these are personal choices, right? There's people that like staying in a Bains people that like taking the external opportunity. I've always enjoyed the team side, the talent side that way. It's great to work with the talent that we have at Bains. It's great to work with our teams, help our teams grow, see our teams develop into partners themselves and create these CO relationships. I've also always enjoyed to work with that client but at the same time have the opportunity to work with some of the leading CP firms on the site at times. And so you have, often it feels like you're working at two companies at the same time, you have two sets of colleagues, one where you have the clear team dimension, well everything that Bains stands for from a cultural point of view. And on the other side, you have your client organization where you can work with as much passion for delivering the results together with them that you like. And I've always enjoyed that mix. It's because of that also because of the opportunities that I've gotten within Bains to also lead part of our business that have made the choice to stay at Bains despite multiple opportunities to take external roles. Welcome back. If you're joining us from the beginning of the episode, you just heard Kristoff share his journey to Bain. And today, Kristoff is joining as Bains worldwide managing partner, his new role as of July. Kristoff, welcome back. Thanks. It is great to be back on the podcast. And honestly, I hadn't expected it to be back on the postcast for sure, not in this role. Kristoff, how did the opportunity to become Bains worldwide managing partner come about? Did you see a job posting online? Like is it something you went and applied for? No, actually, you don't apply for these type of roles. First of all, I want to say that I'm incredibly humbled to be able to serve our clients, our teams, the partnership in this role for sure in a firm like Bain, where we have the culture of a servant leadership. Bain doesn't do elections. So we have a nominated committee like a lot of the major firms and Bain, the committee puts forward one candidate to the forward to the partnership and someone they believe will represent Bain and speaks well to the culture of the firm. And so in one way, that's what I tried to do for the last 25 years. I've been driving results with our clients developing people in the offices in the practices that I've let. And so one day, the nominating committee asked me if I was willing to consider the role. And so here we are. And as I said, I'm truly humbled to be able to serve in this role. And that's one of the things I've always liked about Bain. We talk about career progression. We did that in the year end episode in December. But the truth is your career never stops growing and taking new shapes and new forms at Bain at even the most senior levels of the firm. And it's funny that you would talk about the nominating process where the committee puts forward one candidate. I've now been through several transitions over my nearly 30 years here. And I would say that it's always someone we're excited about. And somebody like you said that it embodies the operating principles and sort of the ethos and brings the mission to life for the firm. So I was really excited when I heard your name get put forward. I want to talk a little bit about the context that you're stepping into as a worldwide managing partner. We're no longer in the middle of a global pandemic, but it's still a really challenging environment. So I'm curious what challenges are you seeing in the global business environment as you talk with our clients and our team around the world. We're indeed no longer in the middle of the pandemic, Keith, as you say, but our clients are navigating actually a tremendous amount of change at their industries disrupting pretty much all the industries. And the major trends that are shaping the future are actually quite clear. And they provide challenges, disruption, and also a lot of opportunities for the industry and for ourselves. The first one that everybody is talking about is AI beyond Jan AI. It's a technology that's still early in its penetration curve. It will continue to mature at immense speeds we believe in the coming decade and massive opportunities to truly create value. The second one is we call it a triple challenge around energy. Partially because of AI, we need to make sure that there's enough energy. It needs to be affordable and it needs to be to carbonized. And that is a challenge that companies face all over the world. The third one is a higher cost of capital. We believe the cost of capital will continue to be higher as the longer term capital needs behind tech, behind climate, combined with reducing labor forces in big parts of the world will most likely drive a more inflationary environment with higher cost of capital. And the final one, it's probably one that, as he does merge the press as the AI one, is that we're in a positive global world. People need to navigate the world in different ways than they could do 20 years ago in a world of globalization. Now you need to have a true global portfolio strategy. It's a set of exciting challenges and they are real for every single company that we work with. We get a lot of questions in recruiting about how different shocks to the overall economic environment or business environment. You know, they're good for being or bad for being. When people don't know what's going to happen next, that's always good for being because we're always a great partner for people to think through what are the scenarios that are most likely and how do you prepare for them? You can't pivot on a dime but you can certainly do some things today to prepare for the unknowns of tomorrow. And one of the things I've always liked about Bayon is that our mission has largely whisked the test of time. Back when we started a little over 51 years ago, we had a mission. And despite a wide range of challenges and business shocks over those five decades, the mission holds true today like it did when we started. And how does that show up in the context you just described? How do we stay relevant and on task as a firm? That's a great question. Get there. Maybe I start with reminding people about our mission, right? Our mission is to help our clients create such high levels of value that together we set new standards of excellence in our respective industries. And what's interesting about it is our mission is needed by our clients in times like this. Our clients need our mission in times like this. Whenever there's disruption, whenever there's this location, there's opportunities. Because when we look back, it's always times like these that competitive positions truly move. And what's interesting about your question that our mission has whisked to the test of time, it is because our mission was created in times like these. Bayon was founded in 1973. And if we think back about 1973, supply shocks, energy shocks, capital cost that were an inflation that was significantly higher than today, geopolitical turbulence, and also the start of a major technology wave with PCs, microprocessors, mobile phones. And so Bayon in one way was built in times like that. Our mission was created in disruptive times. We are made for times like this. And therefore, our mission has never been more relevant than today. We're again in a time with massive forces. The four forces, as I mentioned before, where our clients need our mission. Now we did a series on the podcast not too long ago where we had leaders in our firm, Mani Miseida, your predecessor, Ivan Heinzschah, who's now our chief talent officer, Melissa Ardebein, who's leading our diversity teams and others. Talked about our operating principles and how they come to life because the mission sort of sets what it is that we get out of bed to do every day. But our operating principles talk about how we do it. And I know we've updated them over the years, but they've also largely withstood the test of time and how do those show up for you as the leader of the firm sort of keeping us focused on the most important things. Yeah, what's interesting since I took the role I had the opportunity of engaging with hundreds of our most loyal clients to understand what they like, what we can do better and what sets us apart. And what struck me is what truly sets us apart, what makes us distinctive is how we work with them, how we team in the most effective way with them. And some of them asked me, how are you actually doing that? And I realized that this is in the way that we've set our operating principles that we train our people in our operating principles that make us distinctive. We are guided by true north. We only do what's truly right for the client. We have a passion for results. We are practical and at cost. We work with diverse teams. We work always as one being. And another banging never lets another banging field. You know, these are our operating principles. And when you operate them every day, our clients feel it. Our clients love it. They need our mission. They love the way we work with them. They love our operating principles. They are distinctive. And I imagine your new role keeps you relatively busy. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of the client and making sure that we don't lose sight of our most important customer, the client themselves? There's no better way to give the pulse of the client than to talk to the client. They know what's happening at the front line. They see what's happening with their customers. And they're happy to share how we can serve them better. How we can drive even better results with our clients. And therefore, I got a lot of energy of talking on a daily basis with our best clients, keep the pulse and make sure that everything we do is relevant of driving the best results with our clients everyday. Christophe, with all of that being said about our mission and our operating principles at a recent global leadership summit, you talked about supercharging the business every client every day through the combined power of three things, breakthrough strategies, transformative technology, and extraordinary teaming. I want to take a little bit of time and walk through with each one of those three things mean. Because since that meeting several months ago, they've come up in multiple different forums and contexts that I've been a part of. And they're really providing the North Star, the guidelines, and the mission for each one of us as we lead different parts of the Bain family. Yeah, I talked about the forces that we see in the industry, on the AI side, energy, post-global, etc. And there are three core components of how we believe we can drive and we will drive differentiated results with our clients nowadays every day. In today's world, in order to drive results with your clients, you need all three of them. And those three are first, as you said, the power of breakthrough strategies and full potential thinking. It's critical in today's market. Then it goes back to our core principles, to the core mission that has always fueled our success. We help our clients in turbulent time, create lasting competitive advantage so that they can lead in a rapidly changing world. The second one that you mentioned was transformative technologies. And in today's world, it's not just optional for our clients. It's mandatory to make sure that technology is at the heart of the strategies and what you develop as a firm. And for us as Bain, we need to provide technology-powered solutions that will help our clients lead in their industries in today's world. It's technology and device we give, technology embedded in all the solutions that we provide, and how they can implement on the text tag that they're sitting on. And finally, also technology in the way we work together with our clients. And we're working on all of these fronts, technology powering the results that we provide to our clients. And the final one is extraordinary teaming. And it's not about the teaming of today, it's about the teaming of tomorrow, it's bringing together an even more diverse mix of skills, experiences, backgrounds, and teaming with external technology partners to help our clients to achieve those outcomes. Technology partnerships in today's world means the major cloud service providers, major AI, language model providers, systematic graders. It's the combination of the Bain team, together with the technology teams and our client teams that drive the best results. And so that's why we believe in order to win in today's world, you need to have breakthrough strategy and full potential thinking embedded with transformative technology. And the next level of teaming between the client, Bain, and technology partners. Yeah, the thing that stands out to me a lot having been here a long time. And I've seen us do big transformation work. And I've seen multiple waves of technology, although this one feels different and more ubiquitous. The teaming part is the part that's been really exciting, getting an opportunity to work alongside literally the people on the bleeding edge of technology, like who are creating the tools that will power us for a generation and generations to come. That feels different than it did in the past. And it's really exciting. What we try to do, and what we're going to build out further in the future is building on our distinctive strengths in talent and in teaming by bringing in even more diversity. Diversity, as I said, of skills, perspectives, backgrounds, live experiences. And in today's world, therefore, sure includes a broad range of technical talent, software engineers, data engineers, product managers, data scientists, UX design, cyber experts, et cetera. And for us, that diversity is about delivering better business outcomes. It sparks more innovation. It brings more expertise. It encourages to look at our work with different lenses. And most importantly, it helps to drive better results with our clients. Yeah. And one of the things I've heard you talk about in different forums is this notion of hiring bilingual talent. And in my recruiting role, I went one place with it. Then I listened to the next sentence and I was like, oh, he's actually talking about something a little bit different. Can you describe that for people listening? Because I think it's a really neat way to think about the types of talent that we're going to need to be on top in the future like we are today. Yeah. You need great strategy thinkers. You need great product managers. You need great software engineers. All of us need to become more bilingual. If you're at a heart, a great strategist, you need to be able to have level one and two discussion on technology as well. You need to understand how technology impacts strategy. If you're a software engineer, you need to understand in what context you're working and how the clients tries to win through its strategy. Whatever part of the organization we come from, we all need to be able to be a bit more bilingual. Understanding strategy, understanding technology. You're one of the things that I really liked about my time when I was serving clients was the way we staff our teams. The operating principle is diverse teams one vain. But it's also one team. And it's not that I'm working over here. And when there's a tech question, I throw it over the wall to the tech team. They're on my team. And we are one team. And that's where you really learned how they think differently because you're at the whiteboard. You're in the team room with them side-by-side. It's one of the elements that struck me most through all of my client discussions. Even if we see internally that it's a diversity coming from different backgrounds, it struck me that our clients see it as one team. They couldn't say from what part we're coming from. And that's the true power. It's again coming back to the power of our operating principles. And the core one here is diverse teams one vain. Yeah, I really like it because I get a chance to branch out when I joined Bane as an engineer. It gave me a chance to talk business and just learn and learn on the job. And for people who had more of a business background, we do more technical work and they'd learn more of the technical side of the job. And as a team, we grow together. And that's been really exciting for me throughout my journey here. Christoph, as we start to wrap up, I know one of the things that you mentioned you've been doing is a listening tour and talking with some of our most important clients all around the world. But I also know that you've talked with Bane's current and future leaders around the world as well. What are you seeing the team energized by? And what excites you about the future of the firm? So is people listening today who might be thinking about joining Bane and company? What's the buzz? What's the excitement? What are they going to step into when they show up here on day one? First of all, we're working in an incredibly attractive industry. We're always working at the forefront of what's happening in the world with our clients. As you mentioned before, there's a lot of disruption now. Our clients need more help than ever before. And we see that also in how the industry has developed over time. It's an attractive industry, fast-growing industry. And we as Bane within that have been the fast-growing premium strategy consulting firm in our industry. That's exciting. It's an exciting industry. For the current talent, it's for sure an exciting industry for all of the future talent that is excited and interested to join Bane. And what I have personally found the most exciting, not just today, but over the last 25 years, is exactly that we're always working on the most innovative, the most exciting solutions, the newest trends with our clients at the forefront of disruption. It's a defined to innovative, disruptive industry. And that is what has excited me over the last 25 years. And there has been a few times, like today, where all of those disruptive trends get together. It's never been more exciting to be in this industry, to advise our clients. And that will give me a lot of excitement. And it's an excitement that I feel is shared by our teams. Well, Kristoff, we've had several senior leaders on the podcast over the years. And to a person, they always talk about servant leadership. And I want to thank you for coming on today. You answered the call last July and took on a very big role and still made time to come back and update your podcast as our first repeat guest. And I want to thank you for that. And I'm looking forward to the exciting times to come with your leadership and all of the opportunity for us to continue thriving as a firm in the context that you described. So thank you for your time today. Thanks kids. And I'm truly excited to continue to team up with you with all our teams and for sure with all of our clients. Looking forward to it.