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Paul Swan, General Manager of Research and Wool Production

Paul Swan, general manager of research and wool production at Australian Wool Innovation, says "strive to find employers with strong business ethics that align with your own."
Paul Swan | Source: Courtesy
By
  • Rebecca May Johnson

There are few sectors of the economy that offer as wide and interesting a range of career opportunities as fashion. Role Call highlights some of the industry’s most interesting jobs and the talented people who do them. For more production jobs like this, visit BoF Careers.

SYDNEY, Australia — Paul Swan, general manager of research for Australian Wool Innovation Limited (of which Woolmark company is a subsidiary), is well qualified for the in-depth researching his role requires, having obtained a PhD in wool science and a BA in wool and pastoral science from the University of New South Wales. Swan's position demands both a keen scientific mind that can stay on top of evolutions in the wool industry and forge new paths through original research, as well as a high level of business intelligence, with which to manage large research and commercial projects.

BoF: Please describe your current role. 

I work for Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), an Australian-based not-for-profit research and development and marketing company, which, among other things, owns and operates the Woolmark trademark in 14 countries around the globe. My role is general manager of research, which involves leading a small team of specialist investment managers and support staff operating across a diverse range of disciplines, from the health and wellbeing of the sheep, to the operation of the farm system itself, and through the pipeline to the consumer of wool products. Our mission is to invest strategically in innovation and practice change to make wool growing more profitable and sustainable, and to contribute to growing demand for our wool.

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I also wear some ‘international’ hats, chairing, on behalf of the International Wool Textile Organisation (the body for the global wool industry, based in Brussels), some international working group processes in the areas of sustainable wool fibre and textile production, and wool product wellness impacts.

While my team is mostly based in our Sydney office, a number are based in regional Australia, and I also work closely with a number of people based internationally — especially in Europe. This tends to ensure frequent travel, videoconferencing, and the joy of juggling time zones!

BoF: What attracted you to the role?

This type of role has always pressed a lot of buttons for me, and this is not the first time I have been in a role like this. It brings together a number of passions of mine, including science and learning (I always was a bit of a science geek!), change leadership, and working with very smart people across a range of fields. However, the fundamentally custodial role AWI plays — to invest on the behalf of mostly small, family businesses to create a better future — has always resonated with me.

In short, I work in a role I am deeply passionate about.

A real challenge for long-term investment managers is to not make orphans of their failures, since this pretty much guarantees repeated underperformance. Hence the wisdom in the old saying: success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.

BoF: What is the most exciting project or initiative you have worked on?

Two in particular come to mind, representing a strategic innovation for the farmer, and another for the consumer — both potentially life changing for the user.

Back in 2002, we initiated a major strategic investment programme seeking to map out the practical impacts of malnutrition on pregnant sheep and their lambs. In Australia’s drought-prone climate, this is a real-life challenge for farmers. The learnings from the ‘Lifetime Wool’ programme, which at the time was the biggest I’d been involved in initiating, have been far-reaching. Today, around 2,500 Australian growers have been through our Lifetime Ewe Management program (AWI covers around two-thirds of grower costs), and our data shows it is having a dramatic positive impact on farm businesses (e.g. 10 percent more lambs), and the health and wellbeing of the sheep. We have a two-year waiting list for new participants, and lots of very enthusiastic advocates.

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A more recent example is focussed at the end of the pipeline — on consumers. In 2010, we initiated a clinical trial to explore the application of wool’s unique moisture and thermal management properties in assisting sufferers of atopic dermatitis, and painful and debilitating lifetime condition now affecting around 1 in 10 babies born in the western world. Sufferers of atopic dermatitis have difficulty retaining normal water levels in their skin, and the resultant skin dryness leads to inflammation, redness and desire to itch, and discomfort — which traditionally are treated using pharmaceuticals such as steroidal creams, avoiding sunlight, and heat. Our trials, now being replicated with infants, suggest that fine Merino knitwear creates a healthy, non-irritant micro-climate for the skin (a "second skin"), which is why subjects in the trials to-date exhibit greatly reduced symptoms, and improved quality of life. So positive are the impacts, using something so simple and inherently natural as fine Merino wool, that we have experienced difficulty in getting patients to return to their original modes of dress at the end of the wool treatment phase, as dictated by the experimental protocol.

BoF: How is your role changing? What are the forces driving this change?

These sorts of roles evolve with the needs of the business, and also the evolution of the industry it serves. For the Australian wool industry, some of the greatest challenges lie in dealing with rapidly rising demand for meat protein (reducing the size of our flock), an ageing grower population, and pro-actively dealing with rapidly evolving consumers and their changing modes of dress (especially casualisation).

For me, the biggest challenges over the past 12 months have been to renew our investment focus — narrowing and deepening focus on the "must-dos", not the "nice-to-haves", while lowering our overhead costs — and time and staff management. In my experience, the intensity of this business has steadily increased over the past decade, and along with that, the physical and personal challenges for all of us involved.

BoF: Tell us about a time you failed and how you learned from it.

Long-term science investment is an inherently risky proposition and failures or underperformance are common. Partly for this reason, a real challenge for long-term investment managers is to not make orphans of their failures, since this pretty much guarantees repeated underperformance. Hence the wisdom in the old saying: "success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan."

My greatest failure? Over a decade ago, I had reservations about the commercial viability of genomic technology in our industry, yet allowed myself to be persuaded of its merits and strongly argued for what has become a $30 million decade-long investment in genomic technology by AWI. Now, my assessment is that there is a very substantial risk that the main beneficiaries will have been the geneticists and their champions, not the average Australian wool grower.

The key learnings? The commercial planning and evaluation process was never given strong enough emphasis, and a clear exit strategy was never developed. Loud special interest groups were able to dictate the agenda.

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BoF: What advice do you have for people who are interested in doing what you do?

I’m not one of those people who has always known exactly what I wanted to do — like many, I've meandered. However, there are a couple of pieces of advice I would offer to those who aspire to a career in strategic science investment management:

  1. It is important to be passionate about what you do, and strive to find employers with strong business ethics that align with your own.
  2. Following on from the first, work hard and bite off more than you can easily chew. Standing out from the crowd in a positive way is never the easiest option — especially in science (it is easier to be a sheep).
  3. Acknowledge that, realistically, you are only likely to be a custodian of your current role for a relatively short time — so work hard to leave it in better shape than you found it for whoever comes along after you, and deal with the fact that you are always replaceable.
  4. Cultivate mentors, and ask for advice — in retrospect, I have been very fortunate in my career to encounter some wonderful mentors, often in an informal sense. I was also very fortunate to have a CEO at one point who actively supported me with a particular mentor, at a time when my career took an abrupt turn (as they do!).

This interview has been edited and condensed.

For more production jobs like this, visit BoF Careers.

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