Pioneering Change with Dr Rodger Spiller
Welcome to a special edition of the Money Matters blog with extracts from an Ethical Investment Week interview where Christine Gallagher, host and producer of the Wide Open Air Exchange program delved into Rodger’s early inspirations. After this conversation, Christine expressed her appreciation for Rodger's willingness to discuss his personal journey, acknowledging the vulnerability required. She remarked, "I don't take it for granted that someone is going to want to speak about their own personal self, which is a more vulnerable thing than just sharing expertise”.
The interview explores Rodger's early interests, particularly how they were shaped by his upbringing in a socially conscious household. Christine is intrigued by how Rodger's childhood environment, infused with his mother's spirit of seeking and activism, particularly against apartheid through methods like divestment, sparked his interest in making a difference through business.
This background set the stage for Rodger to pursue a path in ethical investments, guided by the principle that finance and business could be transformative forces for good. His journey illustrates a lifelong commitment to integrating investment and business with social and environmental responsibility. Read on to explore how early influences can shape a life dedicated to ethical leadership and making a difference. Then listen to the podcast for the full interview here.
Christine: One of the things that I think I read about you that really intrigued me was that it sounds like you've had an interest in what you do from a very young age. Were you a pre-teen or teen getting really interested in business and leadership?
Rodger: My primary interest was in making a difference and having an impact, and I was fortunate to grow up in a household where my mother, in particular, was quite a ‘seeker’. She would have lots of books around the house and interesting people she helped bring to New Zealand from overseas who were back in the 70s, encouraging people to think in terms of their environmental and social impact - their ability to make a difference through their lives, to challenge some of the big social issues.
At that stage apartheid was a major issue in South Africa in particular. We were protesting about that in our household, and New Zealand activists were thinking about how they could impact the situation in South Africa. One thing was the rugby tours. For South Africa, the ability to tour New Zealand and play the All Blacks was pretty important, and that was very controversial in New Zealand back then.
Another strategy that was considered, aside from protesting against those tours, was divestment from, or not investing in, companies that were doing business in South Africa. Back in the 70s, the first examples of this came to the fore when people were going along to shareholder meetings. In the case of a very large insurance company based in New Zealand, but investing there in South Africa, shareholders gathered together. There were a lot of university students who'd been enrolled in the project. A couple of middle-aged women who were shareholders led the charge and basically publicised for the first time in New Zealand this idea that it's not okay for this business to be making money out of this apartheid regime.
For Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement, that divestment was seen as pretty essential. When he came out of jail on Robben Island, one of the first things he did was go to university campuses, particularly in North America, and say thank you to the university students for their activism and divestment. So it was that kind of inspiration.
I had a social conscience and desire to make an impact. Then figured the best way for me to do that was through business because business is either a big part of the problem, a lot of the time, or potentially a part of the solution, and a key part of that. Whilst I was very politically aware, I felt that rather than going off down a political path, I thought the politics of finance, the ability to change the system from within, was going to be, for me, a more effective route.
That's so insightful. How did you know that? Where did that information come from? Or where did that insight come from at such a young age?
Going back to my mother, who was quite an inspiration for me, she would bring to New Zealand different speakers. One chap based up in Brisbane, Lionel Fifield, has a group in Brisbane called the Relaxation Center, which does all sorts of wonderful community education offerings up there. He was a Chartered Accountant who had taken on board these challenges of environmental and social change.
My mum helped organise his trip, and he stayed with us. I was so inspired by how he talked about economics and the science of comeback - what we put out comes back. Looking at the role that we all have as individuals, in the context of being consumers and investors as well as just general citizens. His visit challenged me to look at what was possible for myself as a young man, following in his footsteps. I had this inspirational leader who was a Chartered Accountant who was making a difference and looking at how to change the system.
But why was your mother doing that?
She's a concerned citizen - at the time, a woman who had children at home, who was looking at the wider environment of the social and environmental context and thinking about how she could make an impact. We were a little bit behind the eight ball in New Zealand. We had the 60s and the hippie revolution in San Francisco and other places. It sort of came to New Zealand in the mid-70s. I remember my mother being quite a hippy, if you like. She would read all these alternative books. There was a chap, Ram Dass, who a lot of your listeners might have come across with his book ‘Be Here Now’. That was my foundational reading and introduced me to psychological and spiritual concepts alongside economic and financial concepts.
I had a blessing from other people. For example, my mother’s sister, my Aunty Martha, was a commerce teacher. She came up to spend time with us while she did some extra studies in Auckland. She'd come over and talk to me about my career choices at the ripe old age of 13, when I was sort of thinking, ‘Well, you know, I've got a few options at school. What do I do? What do I study?’ I asked that question of her, and she said, ‘Well, what do you want to do with your life, kiddo?’ I replied: ‘I want to help make the world a better place’. And she said, ‘Well, learn about money because money is what makes the world go round’. So I studied accounting, and as my other option, art. I kind of ticked both boxes, a bit of creativity and a bit of accounting, some creative accounting.
I love this because I wish somebody had had that conversation with me when I was younger. I wish someone had explained to me when I was really young - that money makes the world go round. That it's law and money… It affects everything we do. You had that kind of mentoring, or that advice really young. You listened to it, which is also something that not all young people do - listen to the advice that they get from their mentors. You took that and went and studied commerce and accounting. Then it was, there's something I do know, and I don't want to pretend not to, that it was a final subject of that course. It was in corporate social responsibility that that you won a prize for and you did really well in but by the sounds of it, Perhaps not unexpectedly.
It took a while to get to that final module, which was accounting for corporate social responsibility. Back in the day, people generally considered the language of business to be accounting. So one would go off and study to be a chartered accountant, and there are some pretty heavy-duty subjects one works through on that path. Not too much that related to social change or environmental responsibility, let alone psychology or spirituality and some of the other things I was interested in.
I had friends who were studying psychology and going off to become psychologists and therapists, and I would go to groups and hang out with them. But I'd go back to my accounting class and other friends. Both the people in the accounting class and my psychology friends would scratch their heads as to how I managed to coexist in those two different worlds.
Suffice to say that I hung in with the accounting. Yes, it was that final module where really, for the first time in New Zealand, there was the opportunity to think about, how do companies account for their environmental and social impact? I did an in-depth project, which won the senior prize, and saw that there was a glimmer of how I could pursue this in an academic context. It was quite new at the time. I went on to do my master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation in this space, but even the work I did there in the 80s and 90s was very much at the forefront of what was going on globally. There was very little, including in Australia, where I spent a lot of time studying, happening in this ethical investment space. It was very new to people. But having that grounding in accounting and understanding what was possible really set me up well for it.
I can imagine that 40 years ago, it was not known or understood or accepted in the mainstream. So you were really at the forefront of that, and not only in recognising the importance of it, in studying it, and then I suppose that would then require a kind of education of others. You're going to pursue that professionally, but also vocationally. Also in a kind of normative way, you want to see that change happen in the world, that you're actually having to educate others about why it matters and why it's possible. Does that then lead into the doctorate?
I was passionate about making an impact and doing an in-depth investigation about what was possible seemed really important. I didn't want to go be an academic full time - I've always described myself as a pracademic, so practitioner first and academic second. But to have credibility and insight from the robust world of academic research, where I studied philosophy and ethics, and then finance, and then leadership and business, and put all that together, and made it available in relatively digestible context.
For example, in Australia, I contributed several chapters to the first book about ethical investment as a publication from a group called Choice Books. Ross Knowles, who is a leader in this field in Australia, and was a founder of the Ethical Investment Advisers Co-op, edited the book and was really happy that I had the credibility and the data from my PhD research to make available at an investor consumer level. Whilst I wrote academic articles that are still being cited to this day and are seen as groundbreaking and continue to add value, I was also thinking about the business community and the investment community.
I spent a lot of time developing educational materials for investment advisers and financial planners, and a lot of that has been part of global initiatives, but also with businesspeople getting together and creating organisations. The first organisation I helped create and led in New Zealand was called Businesses for Social Responsibility. Then, I became part of a group called the World Business Council for Sustainable Development - that's a global group for which I was the NZ executive director. Funnily enough, that put me back to South Africa in 2002 for the World Summit United Nations, and Nelson Mandela, was literally on the stage, speaking to us and saying, business is key. As a leader, he certainly supported the work of the business community that was orientated around making a positive impact in terms of things like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and that's fundamental to most ethical investors. Even today, when I had a meeting with new clients, they are very inspired and excited by their ability to invest in a way that would impact and contribute to sustainable development as well as aim to do well financially…
… Thank you so much for your time and your generosity… It's been really wonderful chatting with you, and I've enjoyed meeting you.