Tough At The Top

Sir Nigel Wilson, CEO of Legal & General

May 17, 2022 Steve Davies / Sir Nigel Wilson Episode 8
Tough At The Top
Sir Nigel Wilson, CEO of Legal & General
Show Notes

Sir Nigel Wilson has been the CEO of Legal & General since 2012, having joined the company three years earlier as Finance Director. Prior to that, he had a diverse career, spanning academia & technology at MIT, a spell at McKinsey, retail at the great management school that was Dixons in the 1980s, property at Stanhope and a long stint as the CFO of UBM, the events and exhibitions company. He has also sat on or led a wide variety of governmental and non-profit commissions & advisory groups, covering fields ranging from “Building Back Better” to Social Care, Life Sciences, Climate Risk and Executive Pay.

As an investor I got to know Nigel early on in his time at L&G, when the share price was down at 50p. Since then, he has presided over more than a decade of double-digit earnings growth, a dividend that has risen from 6p in 2011 to over 18p in the year recently finished, and a share price that has gone up more than fivefold since 2009.  

He is one of the most optimistic CEOs I have come across, a quality that is not as common among his peers as you might expect.  I also find it fascinating (and heartening) that he only truly discovered his professional purpose and mission in his mid-50s when he joined L&G. We talk about his mentors, his desire to be “on the pitch” doing rather than in the stands observing, and how his motivation has changed from when he first took on his current role, as well as why investors in the UK still seem to underestimate the company’s potential. 

You can detect the influence of his background in academia when he talks about how he thinks about complex challenges, working collaboratively with colleagues & stakeholders and engaging in what you might call “successful failures”, where progress is made even if the original target is not hit. A very talented athlete, he also discusses how he has learned to manage himself better through changes to sleep, nutrition and training, and how his working life has evolved post-pandemic