 When AIG collapsed, it was like being at ground zero of the global financial crisis, so you'd had this macroeconomics colliding with micro policy from regulators colliding with I guess some competence and short termism at the parent company. And so you woke up in the morning and you have a situation where you didn't know whether the company was going to survive to the end of the day. You didn't know whether the US government was going to bail it out, and it did to the tune of 180 billion US dollars. And here we are, the major overseas subsidiary, AIA, and you're waking up in the morning and there's queues outside every branch going round 10 blocks, city blocks, you're on the front page of every newspaper in the region, and at that stage you realize you have an issue. Well, AIA is this huge Pan-Asian based insurance giant, it had around about 25 million customers. It was also incredibly linked into all the economies. At that stage I think we are owned about 43% of the long end of the Thai bond market. So if AIA had gone down, the repercussions were enormous. We had 300,000 staff and agents. We had many, many billions of dollars of debt with the governments. You had about, I think I'm not saying 24, 25 million customers. If the company had collapsed, all of that went down. So it focuses your mind about what to do. It focuses and you say to yourself, you're not there for yourself, you're not there for the company, you're there for all those people and those millions of customers and the impact on economies, and you say, our job is to fix it. So the stakes we were playing with, it was not a poker game. The stakes that you were playing with was people's lives and families and economies, and that's what we were trying to focus on fixing. When you come into a crisis situation like that, there's no academic book that's ever been written. So there's no book we could turn to and say, well here's the beginner's guide to fixing this global economic crisis and saving the company when your parent just went bankrupt. It's like all of a sudden we'd become a business orphan and we had to look at ourselves. So basically we got my best people together, we took them off their entire jobs and said to them, this is what you need to do. We basically drew up a list of key work streams and then we just got better at defining it day by day. We met three times a day with the crisis team. It was really a war room and my team didn't go home for weeks. In that case, I literally didn't go home for 14 days. I didn't have a day off for eight and a half months and neither did the team and we had this extraordinary bunch of people that worked together to get the outcome. Now history I think is a fairly good judge. What happened? It ended up being at that stage the biggest IPO in global corporate history and that IPO was the single biggest event that saved AIG. It was a remarkable event in that company's history and now it's running as this huge and highly successful independent organization. So what we did, we set up a number of work streams. There was about 12 and they covered all sorts of things. One of them was just a financial and capital position. If we couldn't secure that, then the company could have been a problem. The second biggest one was actually the regulators. How did we get the regulators and the governments around Asia on our side so that they would help us and protect us and support us? We needed rule changes. We needed them to ring fence the companies from outside influences. So that was really important. Communication was a big one. Communication with our policy holders, with our staff, with the media and getting the comms right and that sort of crisis. If you get the comms right, it can take all wrong. It can take all your time. So that was a pretty big problem. The people, what do you do with your people? Every competitor was circling like a bunch of sharks who could smell blood and were trying to take a lucky people. What do you do with the people? Remember, there's no books written on it and anything can blow you off course. There's a British politician, Prime Minister Harold McMillan. I think he's back in the 50s. And when someone asked him what could blow him off course, he said, events, dear boy, events. And this is the same thing. Events were happening so fast it could blow you off course. And so any plan that you'd done before the crisis, you could just throw it out the window. I mean, there's that other great intellectual and great global statesman by the name of Mike Tyson. He said once that... He said, everyone has a plan to beat me until I punch them in the mouth. And as a CEO in a crisis, you get punched in your metaphorical mouth continually. And the question is, how do you deal with it when there's no plans? Now, there's a few key rule of thumbs here, of course, that I was always consider. When you're in a real crisis situation, consensus and crisis are two words that just don't go together. And it doesn't matter what leadership style you have or what approach you have, you have to be absolutely decisive when everyone around you would otherwise panic. And in crisis, people want that clarity. So they want leaders or a leader that is absolutely certain and confident in their direction. Even if you get it wrong in a crisis, being certain and providing clarity and stability is actually more important. Because if you get it wrong, you'll find out soon enough. Second, it's about separation. Separate the run-the-business stuff away from the crisis and have your best people focused 100% on the crisis and break them up and take them out of their day jobs. Thirdly, put things in boxes. Give yourself deadlines that you must meet at that time. Fourthly, and always be prepared before the crisis. You'll never be able to predict what crisis is going to happen, but build the relationships before. Build the relationships with the government and the regulators and your key people long before. Because if you already have the relationship, then they will help you when you really need it. For example, regulators in Malaysia, a woman I have great respect for, one called Governor Zeti, who was the head of the bank Nagara, I've built a relationship with her over years and she's a woman with a formidable intellect and really a great leader in Malaysia's history. I wrangle up the day after the crisis started and I said, I needed some money out of that business. And she was always very formal and she said, Mr. Wilson, I'm going to do this for one reason. And I said, what reasons that Governor Zeti? She said, only because I trust you. When you're in a crisis situation, and it doesn't matter whether this is a business or a sports body or a governance scenario, the only rules that you judge it by, the value set you've got. And we used to talk regularly in our business and with our people in this crisis and would say, how will history judge us? What were the decisions the shareholders, the staff, the regulators, what will they say in one year or two years and five years about how we handled this? At one stage, we were three weeks away from IPO. Remember, this is this massive IPO of this Pan-Asian giant. We're three weeks away from that. And the AIG board decided they were going to sell it to Prudential, which is another large UK organization. And the Chinese said it was like the snake trying to swallow the elephant. And it was a deal that financing just could not work. There's no way it would have worked. And I think they would have just collapsed under the debt load. So what do you do in that sort of situation? Do you take the personal financial benefits that would have come with that transaction? Or do you make the decision you think is going to last long-term? And my management team and I chose that second option. And we would have all been paying an extraordinary amount of money to complete that deal. But it was the wrong deal and it was the wrong outcome. And it's those sort of decisions and those key moments that you build teams or break teams and get your judge dithers being successful in a turnaround or not. Because at the end of the day, it comes back to your value sense. It's the same with Aviva. Aviva's a 320-year-old organization. It's this iconic British organization that did some stupid things financially and strategically. But when you have a look through and as you do a turnaround there and as I do a turnaround there with my team, it all comes back to the value sense. I'm not talking about basic values, like honesty and integrity. You've got to have those anyway. It comes down to how you want to run the business. Do you want to run it short-term or long-term? And one of the most important values we have is actually something I stole from the All Blacks. And that is a value that we call create legacy. We want to be good ancestors. We want to think long-term. I know I'm only a temporary guardian in a 320-year-old organization. That organization was built by people long before me. And you just want to leave in a better place. You want those decisions to be those sort of long-term decisions. And you've just got to do it in a way without chubris and arrogance. And unfortunately, there's way too much of that in the global corporate world at the moment. How do you prepare yourself for a crisis? In fact, there are a number of things you can do. You can never write a plan that's good enough for a crisis. It doesn't exist. It's going to be thrown out. But what you can do is get the depth of people that are used to working under pressure. You can get a value set that you use as the foundation for decisions. So, at Aviva, our value set is create legacy, which just means be a good ancestor. Care more, which basically means just do the right thing. Kill complexity. So, you always want to simplify the organization down. And the last one we call is never rest, which means never be happy with the status quo. Some people think it means you don't get any sleep, and there is a bit of that too. But it's never be happy with the status quo. Always think your very best isn't quite good enough for the customer. And if you put those values in place in strong culture, if you have a strong project management or change management methodology, then you'll cope with crisis much better because you can use that infrastructure you have in place, understanding, of course, that the decisions you'll make will never have been done before. When you're going through a crisis, you're always thinking to yourself, am I making the right decision? Am I good enough? Everyone's following me on this decision. Is it the right one? And every leader in a crisis will doubt themself. But if you show that during the crisis, then you're in trouble.