Michael Falk - Emotional Intelligence as Investment Alpha
Michael Falk, CFA, CRC is a partner at the Focus Consulting Group and specializes in helping investment/wealth management teams improve their investment decision-making, and their firms with strategic planning and succession. Previously, he was a chief strategist at global macro L.P., and a chief investment officer in charge of manager due diligence and asset allocation for a multi-billion-dollar advisory practice. Michael is a frequent speaker and presenter at industry events as well as quoted in the press. He is part of the CFA Institute’s Approved Speaker List. In the past, he has taught on behalf of the CFA Society of Chicago in their Investment Foundations Certificate program, been a contributing member in the Financial Management Association’s (FMA) practitioner demand driven academic research initiative (PDDARI) group and been adjunct faculty at DePaul University in their Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Certificate Program. Michael has authored 2.5 books: the 2016 CFA Institute Research Foundation Monograph “Let’s All Learn How To Fish… To Sustain Long-Term Economic Growth”, the 2019 Monograph follow-up “Get to Work… on OUR Future” and he co-authored the 2017 “Money, Meaning and Mindsets.”
Tune in to hear:
- What might the personality of an ideal hire for a leadership position in asset management look like?
- How can one measure things like emotional intelligence and curiosity that can seem kind of ethereal or hard to get your arms around?
- Has Michael come across any counterintuitive, or surprising, discoveries in his research as he’s tried to fill talent gaps in the financial services industry?
- How does a company best walk the line between having adequate conflict, to fully vet and consider all perspectives, but not such excessive conflict that it spills over into ugliness?
- What does the concept of “psychological safety” mean and how can one achieve this perspective throughout their organization?
- How do we get beyond just paying lip service to wanting productive conflict in an organization and actually get to a point where we can have these conversations?
- What are some common behavioral traps within decision making processes used by asset managers, and how does Michael council people to begin to overcome these?
- Is there really something magical about the human touch that is additive to the investment decision making process or can we simply automate these things away?
- How might we build out a more modular model that takes the best of quant, analysis and data and the best of human decision making and merges these aspects together?
- What has come into focus for Michael since receiving his ALS diagnosis?
Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Sustain-Long-Term-Economic-Growth/dp/1944960058
https://www.amazon.com/Get-Work-Future-Michael-Falk/dp/1704375827
ALS Charities:
https://iamals.org
https://lesturnerals.org
Recent Writing:
https://investmentsandwealth.org/getattachment/2166018f-6fbd-4389-ad61-8352e53d7537/IWM20NovDec-EverythingYouNeedToKnowAboutInvesting.pdf
https://www.cfainstitute.org/research/foundation/2021/capitalism-for-everyone
Compliance Code: 1740-BCI-5/27/2021