URSABLOG: Joining The Dots

It is one of the many ironies of my life. There is a lesson in an introductory course for the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers (ICS) called Understanding Shipping , and is designed to reflect the local branch teaching it. The one for the Greek branch is called – no great surprise here – The Greek Shipping Miracle. I wrote the chapter in the supporting material and I teach the lesson, here in Athens. Of all the personnel available to the ICS here to choose from, this chapter is taught by an Englishman, born in the one city in UK which is furthest from the sea than any other.

That is not the end of it. I have no family background in business, let alone in shipping, and have no connections except the ones I have made myself, or have made with the help of others. By a series of happy (and some unhappy) accidents, and some risks taken, I have come to live here in Athens. What special expertise or inside knowledge could I possibly have to be able to write and teach such a lesson?

In my spare time I teach, not only at the ICS, but also on the Masters’ degree programmes at the University of Piraeus and the Athens University of Economics and Business. I am also heavily involved with the ICS globally in their educational programmes. I have no formal teaching or academic qualifications in shipping or business (or economics, or law for that matter) expect those provided by the ICS about thirty years ago. I have never been to sea. The ironies mount.

Nonetheless I regularly lead a BIMCO Masterclass on ship sale and purchase in various locations around Europe together with luminaries of maritime law. Usually it’s with Paul Herring of the UK Defence Club, a genuine one man legal powerhouse, ex chair of Ince & Co who has not only practiced maritime law over many decades, including in cases that have great significance for precedent under English Law, but has also co-written one of the law books for ship sale and purchase with his friend and one time colleague at Ince, Jon Elvey. I have also had the honour to lead the masterclass on occasions with Jon, who is now by the way, President of the London Maritime Arbitrator’s Association. On other occasions it was with Matt Hannaford, another incredibly experienced and in demand lawyer who co-authored the other important law book of sale and purchase. I am not bragging, I assure you, but I do wonder sometimes how I have ended up in such illustrious company.

In my spare spare time, as regular readers will know, I indulge in other passions, including – in no particular order – wine, music, history, literature, food (including the cooking of it), cycling, reading, film, theatre and travel. I also write this blog, mostly to download a lot of the stuff that I absorb in my daily life so my brain doesn’t explode, but also to share some of those things that may be of interest to you.

I will not admit for one second that I have a particular gift for anything, but this is how my life has turned out almost without me having any control over the happy – or otherwise – accidents that have led me to this particular point. My ability to be able to talk – or rather have a conversation about – Greek maritime history has its foundations in the work of the maritime historian Gelina Harlaftis, another person who I am in awe of, who was in turn introduced to me by good friends of mine in the Greek shipping industry. Talking about Greek shipping, and Greek history in general, and life in general, over tsipouro in the Peilion on a late summer afternoon was an unforgettable experience that could never have been planned as a career choice, or an ambition, one of those things that I had to do to further my career in shipping. But that introduction to her, to her work, has informed a great deal of my understanding of the shipping industry as a whole and those insights have not only brought me business, believe or not, but also have been helpful during the marketing of ships, and the negotiations in the sale of them.

This is true also of the BIMCO masterclass: one of the joys of it is not just to rub shoulders with the giants of maritime law, but also to learn from them – of incredible value to me in the negotiation and delivery of ships – and from the contributions of those attending the masterclass as well. I get so much more out of the courses than I put in.

But, if I think about it, this is true for of all of my life: the conversations I have with colleagues, owners, brokers, lawyers and other member of the shipping industry that I speak to in daily life, and not just about shipping, but about life too, are all of immense value to me. This is also true of the conversations I have with my students, and particularly those from the ICS who come from a far more diverse background – those fresh from university, those already working in shipping, those who have been to sea, those who have had careers outside of shipping and want to get in, those who are just interested in learning more about shipping – are important to me. I gain so much from them, and I hope I give something back to them too.

But I am not really in favour of those who just wish to study their way into shipping, and this is not just because of my own history. I am a great believer that you get the best education, professionally at least, on the job, by doing it.

This is not as simple as it sounds, particularly but not only at the sharp commercial end of the shipping industry, shipbroking. Success or failure depends on not only knowing stuff, but doing stuff, knowing that most things you try will not end in unalloyed success. You have to come out of your comfort zone and speak to people you may be afraid of, asking questions that may appear at best impertinent, and at worst offensive, by risking to try and do something that may sound stupid, and that you may be ridiculed for, but nonetheless just might work.

I imagine that this is just the same – although in slightly different ways – in the operations, technical and even HQSE departments of a shipmanagement company. And knowing what works, or what may work, or what will definitely not work, is part of the daily challenge of working in such a wonderfully competitive, frustrating and fast-moving industry, and can only be built up by experience.

This is not to say that shipping education is a waste of time, by no means. In fact without the ICS, and the success I achieved many years ago I would not have developed the self-confidence or absorbed the basic essential knowledge to grow within the industry, which is why I take my work with the ICS, BIMCO and the universities that I am invited to so seriously. But knowledge and understanding by itself is not enough. You have to do something with it.

There are many videos and posts floating around – particularly on LinkedIn I notice – about how various luminaries of the business world, but particularly in tech industries, achieved what they did in the hope, I suppose, of encouraging the rest of us to try their hands at start-ups or whatever. I find these videos irritating sometimes because the adulation showered on these pioneers suggests a way of thinking, a way of being that you have to have before you can be successful.

Success can be defined in different ways for different people, for different lives. We all start off in different places, and the limits of our success may be limited by the very place we started out: we can only get so far before we run out of road. But there is one story about Steve Jobs, the uber-tech king, which I did find useful.

He revealed that after dropping out of college in his youth – note that even he failed to complete what he set out to do – he stumbled into a class on Japanese calligraphy. As he said in a speech at a Stanford graduation ceremony “none of this had even a hope of any practical application” in the field of computer science. But when he created Apple, Jobs blended his art skills with computing to change the design of our digital world. The rest, as they say, is history.

“You can’t connect the dots [of skills] looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward,” he noted, urging students to create disconnected “dots” and then “trust [these] will somehow connect in your future.”

Despite all I have written above, my primary function in life, how I identify myself if you like, is as a ship sale and purchase broker. It informs how I view the world, I am constantly thinking about it, and I spend most of my time doing it. I may not share some of the brazen marketing skills of some of my brother and sister brokers, but that is because I not made in the same way. This does not make my any less a broker, but nonetheless I still measure my own success as a human being against the metric of competitive ship sale and purchase broking, which is doing deals, and delivering ships. And when I am not as successful as I would like to be, I think about ways of correcting what I am doing, how we as a team can do the things that we are doing better, or simply differently, even at this late stage in my career. I have no special insight, or magic formulae, however long I’ve been doing it. I just have to try new and different things to adapt to an ever-changing world. I try and allow myself to listen to as many people as possible, colleagues, students, clients, brokers, lawyers, even insurance brokers  – whether they are younger or older than me, less or more experienced – so that I can move on.

But all the multiple dots in my life, both in my past and in my present, do – when I give myself the chance to reflect on them – help me to shift my perspective, or come up with inspiration, because they show me the road down which I have travelled. And once I start joining those dots together, and colouring them in my experiences and accumulated knowledge and understanding I find I can create a new picture, a uniquely new and fresh picture that may, just may, move me forward.

I am able to teach that lesson on the Greek shipping miracle not only because I have read some stuff, but because I have also listened to the actors and actresses who all played a part, however big or small, in it, and am able to colour in the picture with my knowledge and understanding of Greek history (social as well as political), geography (human as well as physical) and, well, my own experiences of my life in Greece. And I teach it with passion and also with, I hope, an openness to learn more from my students.

I may not be Greek, and I may not have had the advantages – or disadvantages – of being born into the industry, or even connected to it. But if it’s an irony that I am able to teach others about the Greek shipping industry, with passion and with a feeling of belonging, it’s because – even if I didn’t know it at the time – I have lived it too, and it has been a life worth living. And no-one will ever be able to take that life already lived away from me.

Simon Ward