Like everyone else who’s been in business for decades and seen a lot, he always had a list of rules of thumb. Things like, “It’s easy to be right on the direction of something” and “It’s the timing that’s hard, so adjust your planning to that.”
I feel incredibly grateful for all the years of learning that I had from him. He was a very strategic thinker: If our capabilities are really good here, can we take those same capabilities and use them somewhere else? I’ve tried to do the same thing.
BM: He was not a big “talk to the outside world” kind of guy in his time. In the last year you’ve talked a little bit more at public forums. Anything spark it?
AJ: It’s expected as a leader of a company now. We want to get our message out. It’s time-consuming, so I think you have to be careful about how you allocate your time. Kathy’s been great, and other people as well have taken time to speak in outside forums and make themselves available. We want our customers to understand us.
BM: Have there been opportunities that Fidelity has missed by being a private company? BlackRock in 2009 was able to scoop up Barclays’ iShares because they were able to use their stock.
AJ: Well, you’re absolutely right. We’re not in a position to do an acquisition like that, and that’s part of the life of being a private company. Acquisitions that work out that well are, I would argue, more the exception than the rule. Kudos to those guys for making a great move and making it really work, because it seems like it’s been incredibly successful. And, oh, by the way, through our partnership with them we’ve actually benefited from it as well.
The only one we’ve done that wasn’t tiny was this company called EMoney, a desktop tool for independent advisers, for our intermediary business. This EMoney application is what a lot of advisers like to use in their interactions with their clients, their investors, so it’s been a great acquisition for us.
BM: Does that make you think about doing another like that?
AJ: It’s nice to know you can do it. I think there are a few of us here who thought, Let’s prove we can do something new. And we went and we did it. The company has grown tremendously since we bought it.
BM: I think Fidelity’s probably only been run by three people since the beginning, and they’ve all been named Johnson. Does that have to stay the case, or is that not critical?