David SchwimmerOne of the things I love about my job is that every day is very different. So when I'm here in the office in London, meaning I'm not traveling somewhere, I tend to get up fairly early. I like to get some exercise and say hello to my kids, my family, and then I come into the office. And I may have meetings. I may have a presentation to give, oftentimes. There's a little bit of time during the day to catch up on something that I might have to prepare for or present later in the day. I’m probably giving on any given day a presentation or two, some kind of public speaking event. But every day is different. Sometimes I'm doing internal meetings. Sometimes I'm making decisions about people issues or strategic issues. A lot of times I'll have external meetings. Sometimes it's in the office, sometimes it's elsewhere. So every day is very, very different. And the topics, the range of topics can be very, very broad as well, which also is part of what makes it fascinating. It can be about regulatory issues or financial issues or people issues, technology issues, operational issues, customer issues. So lots of different kinds of issues. I think when you're in a role like this, you fairly quickly have to get to a point where the responsibilities have to feel normal. So I don't wake up each morning thinking, I have a huge amount of responsibilities. I wake up each morning excited for the day that I have ahead. And yes, it's a large company with 26,000 people around the world, and we are systemic market infrastructure. The world's markets rely on us, but I don't think about it that way. I think, this is what I get to work with every day, and these are the great people I get to work with every day, and let's see what we can do today. There are times when, in big, complex organizations, there are issues or problems or things go wrong, and that can certainly be frustrating or draining or challenging. But it's also part of the job. No one forced me to take this job. I took it voluntarily and I'm very happy in it. When you accept or even welcome those challenges as part of the job, and part of what makes the job interesting, it is what it is. I think pretty much every day, one of the things we talked about a few minutes ago. Pretty much every day is different, every day is interesting but every day also brings challenges. Sometimes are you reminded of the weight of the responsibility ? Sure, but I guess I would say that that comes with the territory. Trust is a huge part of both of my own values personally, but also what LSEG brings to our stakeholders, our customers, the markets, the regulators, the policymakers that we work with. I think about so much of what I do and so much of what we do depends on the quality of the relationships internally with our own people, but also externally with our customers, with our clients. We are here at LSEG, we provide systemic infrastructure, critical infrastructure here in the UK, but in France and other EU countries and around the world. Systemic infrastructure, that means in some cases the markets cannot operate or our customers cannot operate without us. That requires a huge amount of trust and for large businesses to be dependent on what we do. It creates a lot of responsibility and that means we have to be very careful when we make changes. We have to be very careful when we are introducing new opportunities for our clients and when we work with them, they have to trust us in a lot of these areas. It doesn't always go perfectly and sometimes we may make a mistake or something might not go exactly as we have decided. But that trust is the foundation or the underpinning where our customers know we're trying to do the right thing and we want to get to the right place as soon as possible. And it's mutual. It has to go both ways. We have enormous levels of trust with our customers as well. We have very big, broad relationships, very significant relationships with a lot of our customers, many of whom are the world's biggest financial institutions. Given how regulated we are and they are, given the demands on our business or on their business. There can be a lot of focus on getting things perfectly right and a lot of focus on delivery. These are relationships that have been built up over years, institutionally over decades. Trust is a really important part of that. I'm sure there's no one key event in my life that makes me who I am. I think it's got to be a combination of lots of things. I think it comes from maybe a background or a family background where I was encouraged to learn a lot and felt very comfortable learning a lot. That almost means being very comfortable not knowing the answer to things. I still feel like that's a situation that I'm in today, where I feel like I'm always learning a lot and I'm very comfortable not knowing the answer to things. I think in terms of getting to a role like this, you have to be willing to take some risks in your career. At various forks in the road in my career, I have gone off to do certain things that might have worked out well or might not have worked out so well. I think that's been important in terms of being willing to try new things. Being in a job like this, you have to have a range of interests and a range of capabilities because there's so much going on in lots of different areas and lots of different disciplines. There's an expression that luck is the residue of desire. Another way of putting that is, it's a little bit different, but sort of you make your own luck. But I like the first expression better. Luck is the residue of design, which means if you work hard and are prepared and try to think of all the different scenarios or outcomes and try to prepare for them, it doesn't mean that you'll get it, but it means you might be a little bit luckier than you might otherwise be. And so that's one thing. I think another lesson is just the importance of decency, like of being a decent, kind human being. And I think that's something that some people probably don't prioritize and just don't think it's that important. I think it's important. I think human interaction and decent human interaction is really important. I don't think there's any sort of rationale, like good reason to be a jerk or to be arrogant. And then, a third lesson I would say, and I often say this when young people ask me for career advice, I say don't set your own limits because people often choose not to do something because they think they might not succeed. That's an unfortunate characteristic because you don't know. And if you set your own limits, then you won't even try. So don't set your own limits. Give it a try.
