On this podcast, we speak with people from all walks of life to understand how they make decisions in uncertain circumstances. This week, we’ve taken this prompt a bit closer to our day-to-day jobs by speaking with Tom Slater, Head of US Equities and a decision maker for the Long Term Global Growth Strategy at Baillie Gifford. Tom works in similar circumstances as the Value Team but takes a very different approach to decision making. His team focuses on high growth companies both in listed equity markets and in private companies. Nick Kirrage and Vera German hosted this episode which explores the fundamental differences between the growth and value styles, but also some surprising overlaps between the two teams’ approaches.

Minutes:

1:46 Intro from Tom Slater

2:58 The basics: Value v Growth

3:44 Why are humans bad at imagining different outcomes? How does Growth approach this?

6:49 What happens when everything goes right?

8:12 How does Tom identify Growth opportunities?

11:49 Do you focus on a ‘hit rate’ to validate your process?

13:47 Long-termism is and being benchmark agnostic

17:21 How does a fund manager behave when they are greatly out- or under-performing the benchmark?

21:20 Making decisions in a team environment and how to foster a environment for decision making

27:19 How do you handle disagreements?

30:20 Using pre-mortems

33:02 How do make the decision to sell a stock?

36:53 What do you set out to learn from management meetings?

41:35 Book recommendations: How Nature Works by Per Bak

45:38 Tell us about a time when a bad decision that came about from bad process and not bad luck

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