State Street CEO Ron O’Hanley reflects on the career opportunity he initially turned down before changing his mind, and why it taught him that you can engineer opportunities but seldom their timing. He also discusses curiosity, leadership, mistakes and the decisions that shaped his career.
After more than a decade at McKinsey, O’Hanley was preparing for the next stage of his consulting career when Mellon Bank offered him the opportunity to leave and run a business. His first answer was no. Three months later, he reconsidered.
It became, he says, “the best thing I ever did.”
The experience taught him a lesson that has stayed with him:
“There’s a lot of ways you can engineer your opportunities. You can seldom engineer the timing.”
In this episode of Executive Decisions, O’Hanley tells Steve Sedgwick why the timing of an opportunity shouldn’t necessarily determine whether you take it, and how curiosity and a desire to keep learning have shaped his career.
He reflects on leading through the global financial crisis, when his team came close to shutting money-market funds in order to protect clients, and the lesson it taught him about how people respond under extreme pressure.
O’Hanley also discusses leaving Fidelity without another job lined up, why he questioned joining a 230-year-old State Street before eventually becoming its CEO, and the work involved in turning a Boston-centric institution into a more globally run organization.
He also reflects candidly on a serious mistake he made as a young man, why he still thinks about it decades later and how it has influenced the way he thinks about leadership and accountability.
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