Our partners’morning Salon is like an orchestra tuning up before the performance. At the end of the meeting, the partners leave the room fully aligned for the day ahead.It sounds like a picture of harmony and concord. But it’s not so easy to reach decisions with eight independent minds around the table, and when the Senior Partner is, by tradition,primus inter pares.
That explains why the partners meet not once a week, or once a month — we can leave that for a board of directors with a CEO — but three times a week. Because each new proposal needs to be weighed, considered, tested, slept on, until a broad consensus is achieved. And even then, a strategy may be refined as it develops. It may seem like a recipe for indecision. Yet in business, too many decisions are taken in haste and regretted at leisure. A strategy that has been fully examined is much more likely to be — to use the former hedge fundmanager and philosopher Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s term — ‘antifragile’ than the capricious actions of a CEO at the mercy of a vote by distant or disengaged shareholders.
The Salon in 1970 with, from left to right, Guy Demole, Denis de Marignac, Claude de Saussure, Michel Pictet, Jean-Pierre Demole, Edouard Pictet, Jean-Jacques Gautier, Pierre Pictet.
This business model may seem to lead to a less pressurised working environment. That’s not exactly so; it’s just that when the average tenure of a partner is of over twenty-one years, the pressure is long term, rather than short term. And that kind of future-oriented thinking extends throughout Pictet. It explains the value we attach to long-term thinking both in our relationships with clients and in business strategy; it promotes our sense of responsibility towards clients, colleagues and communities; it safeguards our independence of mind and action; and it feeds our entrepreneurial spirit.
