Craig Drummond
on dealing with crisis The Medibank CEO joined the private health insurer after three decades in the financial sector, including stints at NAB and Goldman Sachs JBWere. He is a Male Champion of Change and director of the Geelong Cats.
The baptism of fire
“The company had been moving over from Medicare’s system on a 40-year-old mainframe. On my second day in the role, a young chap walked up to me and said, ‘I’m from technology and we have a problem.’ I went into the room thinking, ‘This is not good.’ He said, ‘We have a legal obligation to send out tax statements each year – if you don’t have that statement, you can’t lodge your tax return. And right now we have no way of providing that to our 3.7 million customers this year.’ We went immediately to the regulators – the ATO, APRA, ASIC – and to our board and worked through the strategy. I did literally dozens of media interviews in my first week-and-a-half in the role. We had to produce ASX releases, I had to talk to investors. And I knew very little about the company so it was confronting.”
Using a crisis to set your leadership sail
“Three months later we issued the statements. You know the saying ‘Don’t waste a great crisis’? Well, I certainly saw how leaders performed under stress; you learn a lot about people. And it enabled us to galvanise the organisation on some of the things we had been doing that weren’t good enough and gave us real motivation to do significantly better for our customers. I’m not a yeller or screamer. What’s done is done. It’s all about how you work out the way forward quickly and sensibly. I had technology people saying, ‘We’ll meet the deadline. It’s going to be okay.’ But you say, ‘What if we don’t meet that deadline?’ Those consequences would have been far worse than having the right conversations with the right people externally and internally, early on, which is what we did. The thing I feel most proud about, though it’s a work in progress, is helping to reorientate the company towards putting customer outcomes at the top of the list.”