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The professionals:
Fast track chameleon

Johan de Wit is all in favour of ‘sending the blue-eyed potentials abroad to learn’. But, in an impressive global career with ING, the Dutch financial services conglomerate, he recognises the pitfalls. MICK JAMES profiles another member of the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board.

You have to be a bit of a chameleon,” admits Dutch banker Johan de Wit when asked about the qualities needed to succeed in a foreign posting. He should know. A career that’s spanned Asia, Latin America and Europe has taught him how to absorb a variety of local colours and cultures. “It broadens your perspective on life,” he says. “You grow much more rapidly. It enriches you personally.”
 
Perhaps he was lucky, more likely single-minded. Even 25 years ago, working abroad was very much part of business culture in the Netherlands. And, after National Military Service in the Navy he decided to work as a management trainee with Nationale-Nederlanden, one of the companies that later merged to become ING.

Expanding rapidly, both at home and overseas, ING’s philosophy was that “they’d hire 20 graduates and then, after 20 years, five of them would be in top management posts”. Aged 33, de Wit’s call came after eight years in ING’s corporate pensions business. “They said the time had come for me to leave,” he remembers.

He was “flexible”, but the decision was toughest for his future wife. “She was American, on an expat assignment from Oracle in San Francisco, and was due to go on to Switzerland. One year after we met, ING moved me to Mexico. We decided things were going really well, but it did mean she gave up her career and follow me to Mexico.”

More and more couples these days face similar choices, whether it’s the man or woman who makes the sacrifice, and de Wit doesn’t under-estimate the seriousness of the decision: “It does make it harder for a wife to pick up her career later. And if she’s unhappy, it’s harder to function. People always say they’re interested in an international career, but when you ask them, many reply: ‘I’d love to – but my wife doesn’t want to give up her career’.”

Mexico was de Wit’s first lesson in being a chameleon. As chief financial officer of a joint venture ING had set up with a Mexican bank, he was to be the lone ING representative among 16,000 Mexicans. So he was sent to Spain for a crash language course: “It was difficult at the beginning. By the time I arrived in Mexico, I could hold simple one-to-one conversations, but participating in board meetings was very hard. All the same, it is a really good HR strategy, to take guys who are young and eager and push them out of their comfort zone.”

Next stop was Chile as commercial director of an insurance company ING had recently acquired. “Many professionals work abroad for a couple of years and then come back. wBut I’d made it clear that I liked going international and wanted to continue my career abroad.”

But, after five years away from head office in Holland, he recognised another potential penalty for the global rover: “In Mexico and Chile, my contacts with Amsterdam were minor, so I lost a bit of traction in head office. It’s easy to lose your network. If head office grows and grows, a new generation of managers come in who have never heard of you.”

In the event, the rapid expansion of ING’s head office itself proved to be an opportunity. He was called back to trim the headcount of 700. In less than a year, he’d reduced numbers to 400 and, armed with the high-level experience of direct boardroom exposure, he won his next international role, as the first non-Japanese CEO of ING’s life insurance business in Tokyo.

It was a culture shock. The first revelation was the controversy of his relative youth: “I was 39, so the headlines in the Japanese newspapers were all about how I was replacing a Japanese veteran of 63. In Japan, the culture was that no-one could be a CEO before 50.”

And, this time, there was no question of a crash course in Japanese: “It would have taken two years, so learning the language wasn’t an option for me. You either do or you don’t – I opted to have a fulltime interpreter, which is quite common in Japan for foreign executives.”

And he remembers other challenges: “Japan is completely different from any other country in the world, even in Asia. Although I had very nice colleagues, they prefer not to mix business and family life. In six years, I had no more than five invitations to a Japanese home.”

The compensation was a rich expatriate life: “You build up a big group of international friends. The more remote the culture is, the stronger the expat community is.” And all the time he was learning the ‘hybrid skills’ of multinational management.

“You have to find the balance between really running a local business and knowing what the group wants you to do,” he says. “You have to explain the local market to head office, but not use it as an excuse. There’s a balance between managing up and managing down.”

Initially offered that post for three years, de Wit succeeded in extending his contract to six, his longest time ever in a role. Then, in 2008 he moved again, becoming CEO of ING Direct in the UK, with a remit to build on the bank’s successful launch and create a fuller service offering. Finally, six months ago, he moved to become Head of Retail for ING Bank Turkey, the country’s 10th largest bank and ING’s largest outpost in emerging markets.

“I am running the retail business and my role is to develop it,” he says. “I have developed myself as a change agent, I’m not a maintenance guy.” Indeed, if he’s learned anything in his peripatetic career, it’s that “you also have your own personal style, and I never change that”.

He’s not CEO, this time, but he likes his new position: “If you want to make a big change every couple of years, you have to be flexible about what type of business you run and what your position is,” he says. “This is a much bigger business, with almost 6,000 people, and a full offering of all products to all segments through all distribution channels including over 300 branches. So, for me, it’s another experience – a full-scale universal bank.”

De Wit has no idea where he’ll move next, but he is open to return to Asia as ING pursues growth in emerging markets. But there’s another thought: with three children under the age of 10, he confesses he’s beginning to look beyond his international career. “This is a topic that gets higher and higher on the family agenda,” he says. “I’m 48 now and, while the kids are still young enough to move around, I have to navigate a ‘soft career landing’.”

He wants his eight-year-old to have a settled home before she’s a “true teenager” – possibly in the UK is an option because, he says, it offers a good mix between Dutch and American culture.

“I have seen friends and colleagues with similar international careers keep doing it until their last day,” he says. “That’s a very hard landing, coming back to a country where they haven’t lived for 20 or 30 years. It’s hard to build a social network at that age. I want to manage that and pick the country where I’ll retire.”

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