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Ahmed Fahour was one of the recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007.

Ahmed was appointed Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Australia Post in February 2010. Previously he held the position of Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Australia, National Australia Bank.

Most Australians first heard of Ahmed Fahour in September 2004 when the Melbourne-raised financial innovator was recruited from Citigroup, the world’s largest financial services company, to restructure the National Australia Bank (NAB) after a series of calamitous reverses that had cost it its Number One ranking.

The finance world had watched the young man’s impressive overseas career in consultancy and investing, and noted his return from New York in 2004 as head of Citigroup’s Australian operations.

But not until his recruitment to NAB—with the widely reported inducement of up to $A34M over four years—did he become a community name.

Working to a broad target of restoring the bank’s reputation and financial strength by its 150th anniversary in 2008, the man who “loves solving problems” set about creating teams to transform the bank culture and restructure its operations. He promised customers, and wary investors, to “hack off the hubris which saw our gaze turn inward and lose sight of the customer that the organisation was formed to serve”.

Three years on, he borrowed Churchillian wartime rhetoric to claim “the end of the beginning” of the bank’s turnaround. NAB was named 2006 Bank of the Year by Money magazine, and received the Australian Marketing Institute’s National Award for Brand Revitalisation. Its 2006 results showed revenue up, expenditure down, a significant rise in customer satisfaction and major investments in people and infrastructure.

It’s all about fundamentals, he insists: “Never stop questioning conventional wisdom, seek the core truths, and be prepared to upset the status quo to make the changes your research has identified.”

That life-changing philosophy first emerged soon after his final Economics exams at La Trobe in 1986. “I thought I had done well in absorbing and replaying conventional economics (he won the Donald Whitehead Prize)…but (expletive deleted) I suddenly realised I might have wasted three years— a light went off,” he says. “Our academic model taught us to think the same, to memorise, and learn frameworks, but not to think of challenging key assumptions.

“So in my Honours year, with the guidance of fantastic people like economic historian Eric Jones and macroeconomist Glenn Withers (now Professor of Public Policy in the Crawford School, ANU), I learned how to review the basics of any situation, to see why things are as they are.

“Eric and Glenn, less than conventional, taught me that you differentiated yourself by being original, questioning the models, and pushing the boundaries.

“For my Honours thesis in econometrics, I tested which variables had driven inflation and unemployment in 19th and 20th Century Australia, creating my own theories and models. It was groundbreaking at the time—and the light went back on.”

His mentors weighed his ambition and newfound intellectual curiosity and arranged a meeting with Boston Consulting Group (he didn’t realise it was a de facto recruitment interview) which launched his fast-track career as a consultant.

He worked on post-merger integration, corporate vision and strategy and merger acquisition and was appointed a Director in 1997. He was then appointed Managing Director of iformation Group, a private equity joint venture with Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic Partners and Boston Consulting Group. In 2000 he joined Citigroup in New York, became a member of the global management committee at the age of 34 and also was Head of Corporate Development with a particular role in improving its cross-selling performance. Later he became CEO of Citigroup Alternative Investments and was responsible for managing $A112 billion of investments globally.

The young Australian focussed on teasing out the financial core truths rather than parroting the latest management jargon and philosophies. “I grew up in the real world, on real streets…there was no silver spoon and background of the most privileged American colleges.” Boats were rocked, fools not suffered gladly, sacred cows prodded.

While a student, Ahmed played football for the Carlton Under 19 team in the Australian Football League competition. Framed football jumpers and other links to the bank’s many football sponsorships decorate the wall by his workstation in a large open-plan office. The multicoloured contemporary bank headquarters in Melbourne’s new Docklands precinct is intended to reflect the NAB’s ‘cultural change’ and openness.

Ahmed likes using sporting analogies to connect to appropriate audiences---just as the bank reaches millions of TV football viewers with a catchy multicultural ad for its support of the AUSKICK junior national competition.

In another football analogy, you could say he ‘barracks for the underdog’. His father and mother migrated from troubled Lebanon in 1969. Ahmed was three.

The Fahours worked hard to raise eight children, especially when his father’s modest wages were interrupted by a car accident. His jobs included cleaning some National Bank branches.

Such memories no doubt helped shape some of the bank’s recent initiatives, notably in microfinance. People down on their luck have difficulty borrowing from mainstream financial organisations, Ahmed says. “We’ve put a lot of senior executive time into supporting the Good Shepherd Youth and Family Service group, which for 25 years has offered no-interest loans, typically modest emergency loans under $1000. We’re also now trialling not-for-profit unsecured personal loans up to $3000 at about half the normal interest. Furthermore we’re looking at placing $30M over three years in a microfinance loans area the bank would previously not have considered.”

Beyond banking, he’s found time to explore some critical community issues. “Climate change, the aging of the population, East-West tensions and indigenous problems are very important to me,” he says. The migrant boy who coped with the usual ethnic slurs of the schoolyard is particularly concerned with the plight of many Aboriginal communities.

It’s easy, at one level, to celebrate the skills and often flamboyant play of Aboriginals who have earned a disproportionate representation in senior football, by including young Aboriginal kids in the AUSKICK ads. Not so easy, to join other prominent community figures (including Essendon legend Michael Long) in repeat visits to remote Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. “For instance, I’ve been three times to one very remote community of 300 people (Robinson River in the Northern Territory), a positive place, no alcohol, most members with jobs, and the women with a strong leadership role. I’ve also seen places where despair dominates. Forty years after a landmark referendum, how can we have failed again so badly?”

In the long term, he hopes that some of the positive ‘social inclusion’ activities which can underpin cultural diversity (the central roles of business, sport and education) might, with health improvements, offer hope for strengthening Aboriginal communities.

As a Muslim, he has been drawn into another unsettling community debate which is challenging Australian claims of tolerance and belief in a ‘fair go’.

References to “9/11” sometimes trigger a disturbing flash of recall. He was working in New York as a senior vice-president for Citigroup when many certainties fell with the twin towers. “I recall the madness and the terror like it was yesterday… work colleagues died there. It was another turning point in my life.”

He spoke with passion at a recent Fulbright Symposium in Perth on Muslim Citizens in the West: Promoting Social Inclusion: “The divide between the Muslim world, or at least substantial parts of it, and the West is an affront to good order; it is an affront to our shared humanity….

“In a world increasingly racked by religious and racial conflict, fundamentalism of different descriptions as well as the debilitating effects of poverty and civil unrest, the social inclusion that we know in Australia can serve as a powerful inoculating agent, protecting us from these disturbances…

“Business, community organisations, government and educational institutions cannot take social inclusion and social harmony for granted. Where they exist, they need to be supported; where they don’t, we must strive to build and nurture them.”

Another hobbyhorse is education and language: “If I could wave a magic wand, I would like every Australian to learn a second language, to appreciate other cultures.”

A more personal restructuring looms now he has reached 40. “After 20 years in the high-intensity financial world, I would like to think I can ease away from the hands-on emphasis. I’m excited by the responsibility to ‘lead the leaders’, to focus on team building and mentoring. John Stewart (NAB Group Chief Executive) told me from the start to go for A-grade talent and don’t compromise; A-grade talent attracts other A-graders who are sufficiently confident in their own ability and will look for people more clever than they are. On the other hand, B-grade talent may fear competition and therefore recruit less-talented people.

“Life bestows on people many beauties. From my La Trobe days, when mentors changed my approach to life and urged me to push the boundaries, through to generous support from superiors in finance, I’ve always had more mentoring than I feel I deserved at my level. People taught me to grow with a challenge, to be more than I am. I’ve tried to repay this by encouraging and guiding my own people.”

Elements of self-motivation and business judgment showed early in young Ahmed. At 12, he begged a local chemist into giving him his first job, suggesting that he might deliver prescriptions to the elderly by bike. Deliveries soared, and he recruited a younger brother and sister: “I figured out something called leverage …they each got a quarter of the takings, while as prime contractor I earned a half.”

At 17, the Preston boy pedalled (or took the bus) to nearby La Trobe University. “It was a great four years. It was a simpler layout then, and a real melting pot of nationalities, ideologies and opinions. I had wonderful teachers and no problem in being accepted; just another working class migrant kid with a strong work ethic. What it lacked in tradition it made up in diversity.”

While he shies from offering any secret formula for success, Ahmed is grateful for some things he didn’t do, as much as for things he did: “There were times when I might have looked silly, if I had not stuck to reviewing the fundamentals. For instance, I had a welter of opportunities to partake of the dot.com boom, but my research made me uneasy and I kept clear. Decision-making is as powerful in the negative as it is in the positive.”

A message for the coming generation? “I encourage young people to keep the flame of their risk-taking and passion, balancing this with the wisdom of those who’ve been there. Push the envelope, get on with innovation. It’s easier to seek forgiveness than permission, even if it occasionally got me into trouble!”

He recounted some of his beliefs and experiences as a lifetime problem-solver as guest speaker at La Trobe’s Law and Management graduation ceremony in late 2007.

Ahmed and his wife Dionnie have four children. He hits the gym, joins with brothers and sisters in games of squash and volleyball, and when possible watches the currently lowly-ranked Carlton football club.

There has been footy gossip that perhaps a long-retired half back flanker turned institutional makeover expert might have a contribution to make to bringing his beloved team out of the wilderness.