Above everything else, P-Solve has great people. We have, since the very beginning of the business, focused on building a really strong team from a wide variety of backgrounds.

We’ve done this by understanding some really important things.  We describe here those key themes that are embedded in our culture, and make us what we are. 

The starting point is that, if you want great people, you can’t tell them what to think.  Ask yourself this – as a great person, do you like being told what to do?

But great people can be persuaded.  This culture of persuasion and challenge runs throughout the business, and is critical to get the most out of a great team.  Anybody can challenge anyone, and this flattens the structure.

Secondly, there is little real hierarchy and that gives us lots of transparency.  Great people like to know what’s going on and to have the opportunity to be involved.  So we have an operating process as a business that gives them this chance to know and be involved.

Finally, we have strong focus on leadership within the business and a core set of principles and values.  They are not trite, meaningless words, but represent the heart of who we are.  Our principles are our DNA – integrity, respect, authenticity, citizenship. We have the following values:

For more background on our principles and values, click here.

These principles and values are reinforced by strong leadership that runs throughout the business – we expect our leaders to exhibit some important criteria – to see these, click here. You’ll find lots of different types of great people at P-Solve, but these principles and values are common throughout.  And while as a business we will evolve with our clients, these principles and values will never change.

Building a great team brings with it the benefit of lots of innovation.  There are two key factors that lead to successful innovation.  The first is creativity – we encourage people to be creative and to experiment with new ideas. 

It’s important that, as an organisation, we reward this type of behaviour – what we’re trying to avoid is punishing failure.  Any process that innovates will experience failure of some kind – it just needs to be confronted and addressed.  Punishing failure just drives creativity away – so we don’t do that.  Rather we encourage people to be creative and work with others in developing ideas.

The second key factor is diversity.  We have deliberately built a team from different backgrounds, and with different skill sets.  Right from the beginning, we understood that we needed the tension that comes from approaching problems from different perspectives.  Groups of diverse people make better decisions and come up with better ideas than any individual of group of similar individuals.  Diversity is a fact of P-Solve life and we will continue to re-inforce it – it’s been a key factor in our success.

So what innovations have we driven?  Well, every one of our businesses has a significant history of innovation.  We were amongst the earliest in the market to bring hedge funds to our advisory clients.  We did some of the earliest derivatives work, both in terms of liability hedging and protecting against downside in equity markets.  We have been at the forefront of developing dynamic asset allocation strategies, which adjust our clients’ asset allocations through time as market conditions change.  We were the first consultancy organisation to report to clients on our own performance, not just that of our managers, so they could identify the effects of our advice.  

There are many others – for more background on our innovations, click here.  These innovations are what drive our ability to help our clients improve performance. And in the end, that’s what we’re all about.  In simple terms, we believe that performance matters.  And if performance matters, and it needs to be improved, you’re going to need great people, with great ideas and innovation. That’s P-Solve in nutshell.