Episode Details

In this episode, we meet George Hunt, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Sydney Water.

George is a recognised technology leader within the global utility sector. He has a successful track record in implementing technology infrastructure to support increasing customer expectations, challenging regulatory outcomes and corporate business goals.

He has held roles as a Global Consulting Partner at Wipro Digital in the UK and CIO for Wessex Water.

George completed a four year technical apprenticeship in a major engineering company, and has a Bachelor of Engineering from Birmingham University, UK and a Master of Information Systems from Kingston University, London, UK.

Connecting with George

You can connect with George Hunt on LinkedIn.

On a story from his childhood that impacted his life

• My most influential teacher was my maths teacher. He encouraged two or three of us to take our maths O-Level a year early because he had faith in us. We all got A's, which was interesting. That was a defining moment.
• Around the age of 10, I joined the local rowing club and I can't begin to tell you how it changed my life. I suddenly found myself in a situation where I was surrounded by professional people, people who had achieved a lot. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, really professional people who were driven. I was mixing with kids who had very high aspirations and who were gearing themselves up to go to university and that couldn't have been further from where I was at that point in time.

On what has made him successful

• The first thing is a genuine interest in how applied technology can make a difference. The welding experience I had with the welding robots was a good example of technology aiding manufacturing.
• The second thing is that I learned quite quickly the power of learning how to advise and influence, as opposed to tell. People are the secret sauce and if you can get a team to work for you, with you, alongside you and they believe in where you're trying to go, then you can achieve huge things.
• I worked for this amazing guy called John Wolf who's sadly passed away now. He was one of two people in my life that has been truly inspiring to me and made me realise the power of working with people and getting things done with people, rather than a more traditional sort of management approach, where you tell people what to do. He taught me a huge amount about the power of goodwill, the power of investing in people so that they believe in what they're doing.

On getting a team to perform

• To win your people's hearts and minds, you have to have a compelling vision or proposition to offer them. If you sell the proposition to them, you can then sell the journey to them. And if you can sell the journey to them, you can grab their heart. I love a good analogy or story in order to help people understand what we're trying to ask them to do.
• How do you unlock discretionary effort? Why did you take on the challenges in your life that you took on? Not just because they're there. There must've been something that compelled you to do it.
• If you don't win the hearts and minds, it's really difficult to recover as you have no credibility, no goodwill credit that you can trade on when the going gets tough.

Some great analogies to help guide your teams

• Everything worth doing in business is like a marathon; all transformations take years. So you have to have the purpose within your blood and you've got to know what the outcome is going to look and feel like.
• The one analogy