In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - CPP Investments CEO: The Canadian Model, Public vs Private and Investing for 22 Million Canadians

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Canada's pension funds have become a blueprint for institutional investing worldwide, and John Graham runs the largest of them. Nicolai Tangen sits down with the CEO of CPP Investments, manager of $800 billion on behalf of 22 million Canadians, for a conversation spanning strategy and leadership. They explore the celebrated "Canadian model" and what imitators get wrong, why Graham calls diversification "an act of humility," and how CPP weighs private markets, the US, and China. A scientist before he was an investor, Graham reflects on leading through COVID, AI's uncertain role in investment decisions, and his belief that investing is "quantitative art" rather than science. Tune in!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.  The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen and Jørgen Sviland. Background research was conducted by Isabelle Karlsson. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soverealth Fund. And today I'm joined by John Graham, the CEO of CPPIB, which is the Canadian Pension Fund, basically looking after the savings of 22 million Canadians. Now, CPPIB is one of the most respected pension funds in the world, and the Canadian model has become a blueprint globally. Now, what makes John stand out is that he is a scientist first who found his way into one of the world's great financial institutions. And I'm really curious to dig in what your scientific mindset brings to investing, John. So big thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having

me. A lot to cover. Absolutely. Now, first of all, could you help us understand just what the Canadian pension plan is? Just how is it different from a fund like ours? Sure. So CPP investments were the third-party asset manager for the Canada Pension Plan. The Canada Pension Plan is the mandatory program that all working Canadians contribute to. So it be somewhat similar to people in the U.S. to social security. So it's meant to provide a inflation protected, you know, defined benefit for working Canadians. How big is it? Today, the fund, the CPP, fund is around $800 billion, but it actually is a hybrid plan. So just one of the things and I think is important to appreciate because it really has a big influence on how we manage

the money is about 30 years ago, the Canadian government realized that the CPP at its current contributions and benefit rates was on a path to be exhausted. And this was because it was a pay-as-you-go program, money comes in, immediately goes out. And demographics were changing. You know, you had a aging population, you had people having fewer kids, people living longer. People living longer is obviously a good thing. But the plan was on a path to being exhausted. So they restructured the plan.

They increased the contribution rate, modified benefits, and they created CPP investments as the money manager to invest the funds, the surplus funds that aren't immediately needed to pay out benefits. And I think when we started out, that plan was about 15% funded. So really, it was still a pay-as-you-go plan. And over time, our very first check was $12 million. So we got a check for $12 million. About 27 years ago, today the plan sits about $800 billion. And the plan is partially funded.

And you are independent from the Canadian government. Yeah. So how hard is that to protect that independence? Yeah, we're created to be independent with respect to investment decision making, but we're still accountable. We still have accountabilities because we're accountable to all Canadians. And I think this is something that the Canadian governments recognize is important to have both independence with investment decision making. And that's enshrined in federal legislation. So when we were created, the CPPIB Act basically enshrined our mandate to maximize return without undue risk of laws.

and you ask the question, how do we differ from, let's say, a sovereign wealth fund? And I think the big difference is we're a pension plan, which means that we have liabilities. So when people try to replicate the Canadian model, what is it that they get wrong? What does they get wrong? Yeah. First, I think the first important thing is governance. And pretty much all the Canadian plans have some similar level of governance in that there is independence around investment decision-making, but obviously accountability to the key stakeholders.

And that independence around investment decision-making provides the flexibility or to build a investment organization that has a lot of levers to pull for driving returns, public versus private, active versus passive, domestic versus global. And I think having, I'm a big believer in optionality and having those various levers to pull over the long run drives value. And we will get back to some of them. But just in a meantime, you got eight pension funds in Canada, right? Sometimes called Maple 8.

So how did Canada develop this approach? Yeah, and there's definitely more than eight, but there is a term Maple 8 that really captures probably the eight biggest. There's now Maple 9, so there's another plan kind of coming in to Maple 9, and sometimes it's Maple 10. It's good to have so many pension funds. It's good. It's good. And I think they're very well run that they have had good governance, good performance.

I've never been a huge fan of the Maple 8 concept because I think one thing it does miss is that we're all a little bit different in that we all have different liability streams. We're all pension plans. So we all have liability streams. Like at the end of the day, we're investing the money to meet the pension. promise. So in Canada, across 22 million Canadians, a promise has been made, right? So at every paycheck, you have a deduction that says CPP. And what you get in return for that deduction is a promise, a promise that when you retire, you're going to get a pension. And our job is to make sure that we meet that promise. So in order to meet that promise, you need to invest well, right? So here you are

800 billion. Just how do you decide where the money goes? How do you decide how to split the asset classes? So we are very linked to our mandate. Our mandate enshrined in federal legislation is to maximize return without undue risk of loss, accounting for the factors that impact the funding of the plan. That's our mandate. And said, you've got to invest the money, maximize return, try to grow the funding ratio of the plan and make sure that we can meet these obligations or these promises that have been made. And you don't have, like, we have a mandate which the ministry gives us, which tells us, you know, how much shares, how much bonds, you don't have that.

We don't have that. Literally our mandate is maximise return without undue risk of loss, taking into account the factors that impact the plan. So, you know, here you are, John Graham, $800 billion. go and see what you can do with it. Well, it started as 12 million, and now it's 800 billion. So, and of that 800 billion, 550 billion's investment income, it does show the power of compounding, right?

So 70% of the fund is investment income. And so we only, you know, quote unquote own the entirety of the investment process. So to be a little bit technical, we take that and think there's kind of three big decisions we make and we take a total portfolio approach and fundamentally we try to maximize the total return of the total portfolio. So the first big decision, what level of risk are we going to take? What level of risk will maximize return without an undue risk of loss? How do we thread that needle of taking our time horizon? So recognizing, and I think this is really important, we're a pension plan, we're not a wealth maximizing vehicle.

What's the difference between the two? That we will at times, and I would actually argue we may be in that time right now with the concentration risk in the markets. There will be times when we are not looking to fully participate in the market, in parts of the market where we feel there might be an undue risk of loss. So we are not always maximizing when we think about the upside and the downside. there are times when we may give up a little bit of upside to protect the downside because we think at this moment in time that's more important for thinking about the liability stream or the liabilities we have to meet. So what level of risk we're going to take?

That's number one. Two asset classes. How are we going to diversify? And you'll hear me say this probably a few times. Diversification is an act of humility. We don't know. And we do firmly believe in diversifying across asset classes and geographies as ultimately a risk management tool. The third decision is security selection, which companies, which assets do we want in the portfolio.

Now, you don't operate in asset silos, is there, right? Just how do you think about the various assets? Yeah. So in the total portfolio approach, we definitely try to do our best not to get totally siloed into thinking about asset classes and having fixed hard allocations into asset classes or into geographies. We think in factor space, we think about what's the real economic exposure we're bringing into the portfolio, whether it be duration, inflation, inflation sensitivity, whatever it may be,

knowing that asset class labels can be a little bit misleading. I mean, personally, I don't view public equity and private equity as different asset classes. I view them as different kind of ownership structures within equities and they have different ways of behaving through this cycle. So we try not to get hard allocations into asset classes, hard allocations into countries because that can lead to some strange behavior when you're trying to rebalance the portfolio. But think about what are the correlations between the different asset classes. That being said, we are organized by asset class. So we do have kind of soft allocations into asset classes. And we do ask people into the execution side to really understand their asset class,

whether that be real estate or infrastructure or credit, and to build portfolios in their asset class. What are the kind of things you don't do? We don't do. Well, we don't do. There's very little we don't do at $800 billion. And it's probably similar for you. But there's very little.

we don't do in that we also believe that we do not follow a path of blanket divestment. So take oil and gas. We have continued to invest in oil and gas. We have continued to support the oil and gas industry. We do not have a, we never take a path of blanket divestment. So there's no industry that that's offside for us. Now, there's some things we make a deliberate choice not to do. So take from a geography perspective, we're really, we probably have exposure to 50 countries around the world, but we're probably only really active in 12 because we just can't really be experts in every country around the world.

So we will prioritize and decide that we're going to really focus maybe on 12. With respect to asset classes, we've chosen the big ones. But, you know, one thing we've never done is crypto. We've never directly invested in crypto. And I don't know how it's been, that's been pretty good lately, not to be in that one. But one asset class where you are, where we are not, is private assets. So private equity, private credit. Now, you have one of the largest private market portfolios or anybody in the world.

So what is your view on that asset class just now? Yeah. So I think we'll take a long-term view. And private equity undoubtedly has had a more challenging couple years. We can get into that. But if I look over the past 10, 15 years, it's been one of the biggest drivers of return for the portfolio. I personally continue to be a believer in the private governance model.

I think for certain companies at certain times in their life cycle, private ownership makes a lot of sense, getting out of the scrutiny of the public markets, having the investors be very actively engaged from a governance perspective on the board of directors. I think there's at certain points in time, private ownership makes a lot of sense. So we continue to be constructive on private equity, recognizing though that right now, you know, the returns has been well documented over the past couple of years,

have not been, you know, at expectations. But if I look over 10, 15 years, it's been a big driver of value for CPP investments. And you measure your returns against kind of a benchmark portfolio, which consists of, is it bonds and equities? Yeah. So we have a benchmark portfolio that is, basically matches kind of the big asset classes that we invest in. So it's bonds and equities,

but there is also some sector-specific indices in there, whether it be real estate, credit, infrastructure, energy. And I think right now, looking at private equity, I mean, one of the challenges we have is the public markets, especially the broader markets, are just very concentrated and very concentrated into a a handful of US-based technology stocks. Yeah. Which is not what our portfolio looks like. No, no, no. This is a challenge for most active managers these days.

Now, you manage a lot of your private exposure internally. How do you make the choice between outsourcing that versus actually managing it yourself? Yeah, and the way I describe our approach is it's a partnership model. So for take private equity, we do invest in private equity managers around the world who we think are the best and the best investors in their space. And then we do co-investing and co-underwriting with them. Some other programs like infrastructure and energy historically, we may have been a little bit more direct, but we certainly do have some kind of external relationships. And here's a case for me, though, that these are choices.

These are choices the organization makes. And I come back to what we're solving for. We're solving to maximize the total return, the total portfolio. So we see value in having direct and fund relationships exactly how much we have of each. It's just going to be based on where we get the best returns. Who does better, your external managers or your internal guys? Well, you have to think about often while you're doing the internal. So the internal, you often have co-investing and co-underwriting at kind of advantageous economics.

So you're not paying the full fee and promote or carry the performance fee. So I think it's hard to say who does better because your internal teams are benefiting from the origination and the asset management of the external teams. So they're not totally separable, right? They don't compete with each other. The internal teams are actually building off of the external managers. So I actually think what's important is to mash them together and look at the blended returns of two, as opposed to think of them as two separate competing kind of investment strategies. Absolutely.

Now, John, Canada and Norway compete in ice hockey, but let's not talk about that. Oh, really? You do? Well, so together. But we also, but more importantly, we compete in transparency, right? Because there is just FYI for the listeners. There is a world championship in transparency. And you guys and us, we typically, you know, together are at the top of the league table here.

So why, in your mind, why is transparency important? Yeah. And I will concede, I think you've gotten the gold medal the last couple of years. Well, I think we're doing all. We both doing really well here. We're tough into it. So for us at CPP investments, transparency is something that we take very seriously. And part of it comes back to our purpose and who we are. We're a mandatory retirement program that all Canadians contribute to. We manage $800 billion of what is largely a public good here in Canada. So we have taken an approach to disclose at a level that isn't even beyond what is required under the CPPI Act.

With a view that Canadians should understand how the money is being, how the money is being invested and how the cost base that we have within CPP investments. So within our quarterly statements, we release pretty much every investment we make. so we have transparency there. And we provide a lot of information on how we run the fund, our various frameworks for running the fund. And we think it's important because of who we are. Let's spend a few moments on geopolitics. How much of your investments are in Canada?

We have about 12% of the portfolio in Canada. And what about the US? It kind of ebbs and flows again. we don't have hard allocations, 45% plus or minus a few percent. It can get up to 50. You're probably similar in that. The U.S. has been an incredible market over the past 10 years.

Absolutely. And one of our biggest challenges is if we don't manage it, it'll just keep growing and growing, growing as part of the portfolios. We actually, it's one area we do try to manage it around that 45-50-ish-percent of range. Is there any kind of? kind of political, what should we say, not interference, but any political indications in terms of trying to get you to reduce your US exposure? No, no.

I mean, certainly I think people would like to see us invest more domestically in some areas, especially right now. And I will say from a Canadian perspective, Canada is looking more interesting than it has in years. And part of that is that? Yeah, and part of that is the ambition. You know, there's an ambition at the provincial level, at the federal level, to build things and to build big things. And pension funds like us, like infrastructure, we like big assets that are cash generative. So there's definitely a lot more kind of curiosity about investing in Canada than it has been in years. So people certainly would like to see us.

invest more in Canada and we're actively looking at investment opportunities, but we'll always do it with our mandated mind. The government is trying to attract foreign investors. Do you think you would always get kind of the goodies, the best bits? No, I don't. I actually don't. And I think this is, I think this, I look at the U.S. The U.S. is the most competitive market in the world. It's the most competitive up capital market in the world and it's been delivering the best returns. Competitive capital is a good thing. The ambition this country has in Canada for building things, it's going to require domestic and foreign capital. And we're a big advocate that we should see competition for capital. It'll drive the cost of capital down and it'll ultimately lead to better investment opportunities.

You'd ask about the U.S. I mean, people appreciate that it's a, it's from a market. market cap perspective, I think that was what, 70, 65, 70% of the global equity markets. So even at 45%, there's an argument that were actually underweight the U.S. What about China? Yeah, it's an interesting question. And China is a market where we've been active for quite a while. You know, my predecessors were incredibly knowledgeable and well connected into China. Our exposure to China has declined over the past few years.

part of that is because the rest of the portfolio has grown around it. You know, there hasn't been a, we haven't been selling assets per se, but the rest of the portfolio has been growing around it. We maintain a reasonable, I think, allocation into China. My personal view is, if you want to be a long-term investor, you have to have some level of investment in the world's second largest economy. You also have to have a certain amount of knowledge about the world's second largest economy because it has influence, real influence around the globe. So we've maintained our understanding, some of our relationships in the market.

I think for China it's always a case of how much of the portfolio and then how, what industries, what sectors do we want to invest in, knowing that there's some areas like obviously be very sensitive. to get into defense or to get into dual-use technology. So you have to think about how you want to invest. Talking about that, how does AI change the way that you run your organization? That's a good question. That's a good question. I mean, I think we're figuring it out like lots of people and probably go through lots of peaks and troughs

and thinking about the impact of AI. As an organization, we certainly have prioritized literacy and fluency, certainly prioritized trying to have a employee base that is very fluent in the tools and the technologies. So we have rolled out multiple LOMs to every single employee in the organization. And we have provided training. We've provided courses. And in fact, we have these kind of boot camps that employees can sign up for. So we've seen pretty good adoption, pretty good, I think actually very good adoption at the grassroots level from AI. More senior level, there's probably half a dozen processes we're thinking through on where can we really embed AI to do it more efficiently, more effectively. but a little bit more from the operations side.

Has AI made us a better investor? Have we made better investment decisions because of AI? At this point, TBD, at this point unclear, but we are dedicating a lot of time and effort to figuring that out. When you see 10 years out, how do you think it would change the way you work? Yeah, that's one thing too that as we think about AI, and I do believe the organization has really tried to adopt it. And we've given people a lot of license to try to use it in their daily life and encourage them to just be more efficient. And I don't know if this is AI or just good old-fashioned process optimization.

But over the past three, four years, we at CPP investments, we have fewer employees than we did three years ago. Not by a lot. let's call it basically flat, but we have about 300 billion more of assets. So I think we're more efficient. And as AI contributed to that, probably AI has been contributed that a little bit, or at least it's kind of put a fire under people's feet to think about efficiency. Ten years from now, where my mind is, like, I'm not in the place of we should stop hiring juniors.

I think it's madness to stop hiring juniors because I think. I agree, I agree. Because 10 years for now, they're going to be the future leaders of the organization. And unless I've made terrible life choices, I won't be here 10, 15 years from now. So we're going to keep hiring juniors. What I think this allows us to do is just get operational leverage. I don't see the organization from a people perspective being a lot smaller. But what I do see is we can add hundreds of billions of assets without really adding a huge amount of cost or cost.

or people. And will it help us make better investment decisions? I think I'm still TBD on that. I don't know what your perspective is. I'm still TBD as to it'll help us make faster decisions, yes. Will it help us make better decisions? TBD. Yeah, no, I would disagree with you.

I would disagree with you. Let's spend a few minutes on you as a leader. How do you think your scientific background has formed you as a leader? Yeah, and probably formed as a, in a, from an investment perspective, there's not many things I know in life with certainty, but one of the things I know with certainty is I'm not a scientist anymore. Investing is not science. Even, even though I'll see these incredibly sophisticated models,

these incredibly quantitative approaches, investing, I believe, is not science. And the reason I... If it's not science, what is it? It's a little bit of art in science. It's a quantitative art. And what kind of art is it? It's an art that requires judgment.

It's an art that requires experience and an art that actually does require, I think. And that's a little bit of why with AI that I'm cautious on whether it will help us make better decisions. no, it may, is in science, and I was an experimental scientist, right? We could do an experiment in Toronto or in the States, and someone could replicate that in Japan, and they could replicate it in five years from now and ten years from now. Investing is this living ecosystem that's changing every day.

And our models for, which we're, CBB investments I'd describe as a very evidence-based, probably quite quantitative organization. And I believe it's the right approach and that it helps us think through it. But at the end of the day, they are just, they're our best guess at how the world is going to unfold. And until someone gives me data on the future, we are still trying to forecast out the future

with a certain amount of uncertainty. And to run a company in that environment, What are the most important leadership principles you have? Yes. One of the things I've learned and probably learned the hard way through my career. And I do believe this is every leader has a certain kind of call it a preferred habitat. Every leader has a style that is really reflective of who they are and how they want to approach a problem, whether you're a super empathetic leader, whether you're a pace set or,

a taskmaster, whatever it is. I have learned that at certain times, you need to be situationally aware. And whether it's what's going on at the time or whether it's sometimes the individual, and being able to flex the leadership style a little bit, not losing sight of the mandate, not losing sight of the mission and where you want to go. But being able to flex a little bit on how you're going to approach it, you know, I... Tell me about a time you really flexed it. I'd say COVID

when people were scared huge amount of uncertainty people were worried about their health worried about their jobs and I think we needed to lean into empathy at that time and I think we did lean into empathy

did that come naturally to you well I'm probably a little bit more of a pace I'm probably someone also is a little bit more like even coming back to COVID. I'm definitely someone who is more of an in-office person who believes that we need to be in the office. And I've had to modify my approach a little bit to make sure that we still get people agency. We still get people a feeling that they have, they're empowered to make decisions around their careers. Now, our listeners are when we kind of pull them and asked them,

how they want to, what do they want to have more of in the podcast? They say they want to hear more about failures, you know. You only talk about successes and everything is so great. And, you know, tell me about some of your biggest mistakes in life. So my big failures? Yeah. Okay. Well, I think as you know, in investing, you do have the opportunity to have failures.

How tall. And you have the opportunity to be humbled. And any investor who says they haven't been humbled, is probably not either taking a lot of risk or is not being overly truthful. So certainly some of the investments I've been actively engaged on have not turned out as planned. So what have I learned from that? One of the things I try to tell are our younger colleagues too, which I do believe, is you can't diligence a bad investment into a good investment.

spending another week is not going to turn a fundamentally bad investment into a good investment. And in fact, you may just convince yourself that it is. And sometimes you have to know when to quit. And you have to know when to back away from an investment. If I think about where mistakes I made and failures I had, just this belief that if you just did more work if you just structured it or you could take a bad investment if you could just structure it a little bit more you could turn it into a good investment what's the worst one you had my word i'm not going to make the name of it what about what about on the personal level what about like a personal mistake the biggest failure on the personal level yeah i think the one thing

we all learned to in uh in in in in in leadership roles that getting the right team around you is the most important, is one of the most important things. Having a senior team that is aligned to where you want to go that is, as bought into the vision and the mandate of the organization, and will truly act as team one. We'll be there to support each other and be there to support the organization. And I think you also have to realize that when it comes to hiring people, when it comes to the teams, you never get it perfectly right. And so I think one of the most important things is to make sure that you get your right team in place. And were you too slow in doing that? I think like most people, you end up being too

slow. If I ask leaders what are some of their biggest regrets is that they waited too long to get their team in place. And guidance I give new CEOs is this is one of the first things you should do is when that one year anniversary hits, you should be able to look around your senior team and say, this is exactly who I want with me at this point. Because one thing we've also found is I've been in this role for over five years. It has gone by in a blink of an eye. Absolutely. Same here.

I've been close to six. It's just like bang, as if it started yesterday. Now, tell me about the culture. How would you describe the culture? I would describe the culture at CPP investment. as very purpose-driven. So who we are, right? It's not lost on anybody

the important work we do for Canadians. And every time we do, which I'm sure you do employee engagement surveys in various kind of employee suggestion kind of surveys,

the one thing that always comes back that is pretty much always our highest score is that people believe in and are really motivated by the purpose of the organization. And I think the culture has largely formed around that, the kind of the purpose-driven nature of the organization. How do you set the expectations right?

And what I'm thinking about is, you know, the expectations beyond which you perform well above expectations and the proportion of who you think needs to improve, just where you set it. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is one of the challenges for organizations such as ours. We are ultimately investing as a talent-based organization, as a talent-based business. And so I think we have to be very rigorous on talent. One of the things that I will tell the senior leadership in the organization is at the end of the

week, you should be able to look at yourself in the mirror and answer two questions. One, that you help drive performance and two, that you help develop the next generation of leaders. So every single leader, performance and people are two of the expectations to be a leader at CPP investments. So I think we take talent development very seriously, ensuring that we really do have the best people working here. I think one of the needles we have to threat is we're this enduring institution similar to you in that we have to be here 50 years from now.

We have to be here 75 years from now. We are almost by definition the exact opposite of a founder organization. We're almost the exact opposite of a founder-led culture. So we have to actually in some ways institutionalize. the culture, institutionalize the investment process. And it can never be about the individual because that's not how you build a durable, sustaining organization. It has to be about the purpose.

It has to be at the mission. It has to be about the mandate. But investing is a lot about individuals, right? And investing is a lot about these great investors. So what we can have at CPP investments is a star culture. We can't build investment programs around individuals. We have to build investment programs around organizational strengths and advantages. What are the part of the culture you're trying to improve?

Trying to improve. I would say a little bit on just what I mentioned. And it's ensuring that everybody really understands why we're here. We have one fund. We have really kind of one mandate to maximize return without undue risk of loss. So how do we really embed that owner's mindset into the organization? How do we really embed that one fund mindset into the organization to ensure that everybody is thinking long term? And everybody is thinking about how do we maximize the long term?

returns of the of the of the portfolio and investing is an interesting you know it's a fascinating business to to be in a lot of organizations is very much about the individual they're selling almost an individual it's kind of jeunise qua with investing and here at cpb investment saying how do we get people to really buy into that one fund mentality and to really think about how do we compound the value of the platform? How do we make this organization a more valuable platform five years from now than it is today? Do you think the culture is a reflection of your own personality? I actually don't.

And where is it different from you? Well, I don't know if it's different because I don't think you can lead this organization. Because I think the culture is said it's very purpose-driven. Yeah, but you are. So are you. Yeah, exactly. So I think people who aren't purpose driven will either self-select out or be selected out. You know, I think when people exit this organization, it's often because they're, they just aren't aligned to the purpose of the organization and want to do something else. And we have a lot of amazing ex-ex colleagues. So I think from a culture perspective, I think the, you know, it's terrible to say, but I think you've got to conform to what the CPPIB culture is if you want to be a leader here.

And one of the things I find amazing, and I do find this amazing, we have seven offices outside of Toronto. And we all get it. We're the Canada pension plan. It's in the name, right? Like we are managing the retirement savings of 22 million Canadians. But we have colleagues in London and South Paulo in New York and Hong Kong in Mumbai. And the culture there is remarkably similar. Remarkably similar. Like they are motivated by the purpose. They get it.

We spend a lot of time talking about it. And I bring people to our offices around the world. and one of the common things they say is like, wow, like we're in Mumbai or we're in Hong Kong, but you would have thought we were in Toronto the way they were talking about the purpose of the organization. How do you make sure it doesn't become bureaucratic? Well, that's a very good question. And I would say that is a constant and requires constant effort because most bureaucracy is put in place. for very good reasons and made sense at the time.

And then it just kind of takes on a life of its own, like a little Frankenstein that grows over time and gets fed and becomes unmanageable at some point. I am sure if you ask some of our colleagues, they would give you very different views on how bureaucratic we are. I think it's something that we try to thread that needle, sometimes well, sometimes not as well as, how do we empower people to and delegate to people so they can make decisions?

I am a big believer that decisions should be made by the people who are closest to the information. So how do we delegate to people, let's say on the investment side, into the various geographies and asset classes so they can make decisions? But ensuring that they are aligned, you know, delegation without alignment leads to chaos. So how do we make sure they're aligned and they understand what we're solving for? And then I have to periodically, you know, I found in this job, like once every so many years, kind of hit a pause button and do a decluttering of the bureaucracy because I've also learned that it only goes one way.

Absolutely. You will not naturally, you know, de bureaucratize. It'll just always add, always add. And then every once in a while, you've got to slam that pause button and just start. purging some of it out and then let it to start accumulate again. How do you switch off outside work? Yeah, probably not well. Probably not well. But I think we learn things about ourselves.

We learn what we charge us our batteries. It probably speaks to whether we're introverts or extroverts at heart. How do you charge? How do I charge it? I actually charge. I have learned this and you can ask my friends and my family. I have three dogs. I will put in my earbuds,

take the dogs for like a 45-minute walk at night, listen to podcasts, listen to audio books, and just in some ways kind of disconnect a little bit. It's not the best way when you have to recharge by basically being alone for 45 minutes at the end of the day, but I have found in this role that it's probably what charges the battery the fastest. What do you listen to? What do I listen to?

So I don't listen to fiction. I don't read fiction. I like to listen to podcasts on history, a lot of podcasts on history. I came across one recently that was an older one called The History of Rome. I think I had 170 episodes that I listened to. I loved it. It's a lot on history and a lot on business, whether it be the Financial Times or Bloomberg,

the various business or investing podcasts. Now, we got a lot of young listeners. What would be your advice to them? So, you know, I have two children. They're 23 and 20. So I always give the advice that I give them. So it's the same advice that I give my own children who are really just starting their professional career. And the advice I give them both of them is keep learning.

just always keep learning keep learning about your job never stagnate this is one thing I've seen in my career with people go into cruise control and they become complacent and jobs evolve and jobs will evolve away from them so keep learning

keep learning about your job keep learning about other jobs that people are doing in your organization don't be don't be complacent and you are going to have to take some ownership of your career. And think about what you want to do and make sure that your value

to the company is only increasing. Well, John, that seems like really sound advice. It's been really great talking to you. Please keep up all the good work on behalf of 22 million Canadians. Great. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to share the story. Thank you so much.

Take care. Thank you.