Like the hard-nosed, crime-busting movie cop about to retire but unable to resist “one last case,” Bob McKinnon was contemplating a well-earned and leisurely retirement of playing golf and spending time with his family when the call came from a former colleague.

Gail Kelly, with whom McKinnon had worked at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, had just taken on the role of CEO at Westpac, the Sydney-headquartered financial services group. The banking industry star needed a turnaround executive to fix the company’s troubled IT operations and drive through a five-year A$2 billion ($2.1bn) transformation program ― and she knew exactly who to ask. McKinnon, having spent his working life taking on major change projects, was unable to resist the challenge.

That was in 2008 and a long way from where the young McKinnon, starting out as an accountant working on insolvency cases for Price Waterhouse in 1972, had envisaged his career would go. “My ambition had been to spend my whole life working for Price Waterhouse, progressing to become a partner in the firm,” he says.

But he soon broadened his horizons and, instead, headed for some of Australia’s biggest enterprises in the finance, construction and property management industries, where he has subsequently enjoyed an illustrious career holding all three of the top C-suite positions ― CEO, CFO and CIO.

Overhaul and integration

McKinnon is now group executive of technology at Westpac and three years into a major overhaul that has seen radical improvements in the reliability and efficiency of the bank’s IT, the integration of a major acquisition (the St. George banking group) and the development of Westpac’s technology offerings to support the next generation of banking.

“In some ways it’s as though everything I’ve been doing over the past 38 years has been preparing me for this one last role,” he says. “It’s been a lot of fun because of the great team we’ve built and the extraordinary progress we’ve been able to make in just three years.”

Some of those key skills were first honed in a formative 18-year stint at the then-young, innovative and fast-growing Australian property company Lend Lease, which he joined in 1979. During those years from his late 20s to his early 40s, McKinnon rose from being a head office accountant to group CFO and then chief general manager of the company’s financial services arm, MLC.

“I think a lot of my key learnings come from that time. From a career point of view it took me from being an accountant to being a leader and into a group executive-type role,” he explains. “It’s where I learned the importance of culture, the importance of having the right team around you, of having the ‘A’ team on the job. There are many things from those days that are career highlights.”

Two of the crucial things McKinnon learned from his time at Lend Lease, which have been themes ever since, are the value of people and the value of leadership. “When I started at Lend Lease in that CFO role, the succession planning in finance was in a bit of a mess. It needed a rethink and, over the course of a couple of years, I rebuilt the finance team with a whole lot of great individuals,” he says.

“Ten of the cadre of people I recruited went on to be CFOs of public companies and some of them still are. The quality of the people we were able to attract and the team we built was quite extraordinary.”

But McKinnon’s rapid rise through the executive ranks also presented him with a career dilemma. Having become CFO of a public company by the age of 35, he had achieved what was then his main career aim. After a spell as chief general manager of MLC, the question was, “What next?”

Mr Fix It

At Lend Lease he had spent a lot of time in turnarounds and had become known as “Mr Fix It.” So, with MLC at the point where Lend Lease could spin it off to focus on its property business, McKinnon took the opportunity to move on, taking on a new challenge as managing director at financial services group State Street Australia, where he was also CEO of Global Investor Services in the Pacific.

Although McKinnon had some exposure to the technology side of the business at Lend Lease and MLC, it was at State Street where he became immersed in it, largely due to the technology- and process-driven nature of the company. Its custodial banking and accounting business had grown too fast and needed to restructure, rebuild the management team and stabilize its financial performance.

“That was a turnaround and lasted a couple of years,” says McKinnon. “At the end of that time the business was a lot smaller than when I arrived. It had been losing money but now it was back to breaking even and was clearly headed in a new direction. Everyone was excited about where it was going.”

In 2000, having been CFO at Lend Lease and the top executive at State Street, McKinnon’s next role completed his C-suite hat trick when he segued into the CIO’s role at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. A former Lend Lease colleague was now head of the retail bank and in need of assistance with its IT department, which was having difficulties managing an A$1 billion per year IT outsourcing deal with its US service provider. The problem was the bank hadn’t built the internal capabilities to run and get the best value out of such a large contract.

“When I arrived, there was no IT strategy,” says McKinnon. “The IT was becoming increasingly unstable and all people could do was point to [the service provider] and say, ‘It’s your problem.’ My attitude was, it’s our business, our technology, and we’re accountable for it.”

The turnaround involved building teams and instilling project management discipline into the IT organization. McKinnon’s impact was such that he went from being the general manager of technology to joining the bank’s group executive and reporting directly to the CEO.

“It was an exercise, to some extent, in allowing Commonwealth Bank of Australia to reclaim accountability for the technology outcomes of the business and rebuild the capabilities across a number of different fronts,” he says. “And over the next five years we did that. We rebuilt a service management capability and a commercial capability. We rebuilt a sourcing strategy.”

Voice at the table

Throughout his C-level career McKinnon has always had a place 
at the top table and he’s clear that CIOs must have influence in the boardroom if they are to succeed ― although this doesn’t necessarily mean a formal seat on the board.

“One way or another CIOs need to have a voice at the table. You can sit on the executive board and still not have a voice because you have two things missing: one is you’re not a good influencer and the second is you’re not respected by the other leaders of the organization,” he says. “Being a good influencer, being aligned with the business and being respected by the leadership team are ultimately more important than the structure you have.”

There will also always be a debate about whether it is better to have a CIO who comes from a technology background or not. With his finance and general management career path, McKinnon says this actually helped him fix the problems at Commonwealth Bank, where a lot of the work was around people and strategy rather than day-to-day IT.

“One of the things I do best is build teams and put the right people around me. Coming into a place where there was so much learning to do, so much capability to rebuild, it was a great opportunity to get the very best people I could find and start to build a team,” he explains. “And I’ve never been shy to employ people who I thought were smarter than me. Frankly, I think that’s something a lot of people are afraid of doing.”

That kind of reputation for building crack troubleshooting teams brought McKinnon a new and high-profile challenge. Around the summer of 2006, construction of the high-profile 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium in England was attracting headlines for all the wrong reasons. Delays to the project were costing Australian constructor Multiplex huge amounts of money as it fought to save the contract and bring it back on track.

At the time, Multiplex was still 25% family-owned, with the son of the original founder in charge, and struggling to make the transition to a public company. With his job at Commonwealth Bank now coming to a natural end, McKinnon was asked to step in as CFO of Multiplex, returning to his roots in construction and finance. His remit from the board was to work with the CEO to drive the company’s turnaround and fix the Wembley Stadium problems.

“From a personal achievement point of view it was a fantastic two years. Multiplex was full of great people who, despite the bad press and the struggle to get Wembley finished, got that job done,” he says. “Multiplex lost half a billion dollars on the Wembley contract, yet the board was determined that we would finish the project.”

As Multiplex emerged stronger from that troubled period, its share price recovered and the firm became a takeover target for asset management company Brookfield. The family stepped down from the management of the company, so McKinnon and the COO took over as joint managing directors for the next year to oversee the sale to Brookfield, staying on for six months afterwards to help smooth over the transition.

One last job…

By now 55, McKinnon had his sights set on retirement and less intensive work as a non-executive director when the call came from Gail Kelly, newly appointed CEO at Westpac, asking for help to turn around the bank’s well-documented IT problems.

“Stability was a major problem,” he explains. “The management team was in disarray. Their IT strategy wasn’t an IT strategy and the board had lost confidence. The business had lost faith in technology.” The first step was to develop an IT strategy that eventually led to a A$2 billion transformation program, which is still underway today.

The most pressing challenges lay in improving the reliability and stability of the bank’s IT offerings and regaining the confidence of the business, particularlythe frontline. “We’ve made a 90% improvement in the stability of the platforms but we still have a little way to go. We’re striving to get to a state where the highest severity incidents are the exception. So that has brought a lot of confidence to the organization.”

The strategy is also about improving sustainability and infrastructure capability ― vital when such a large part of the banking operation is technology-driven. This includes rebuilding relationships with the bank’s key IT service providers and, as a crucial part of that, Fujitsu will build and operate a new data center, which will serve to improve both efficiency and capabilities for the future.

As with most organizations, cloud computing is becoming a critical feature of Westpac’s IT strategy. In one early initiative, the bank plans to use a combination of Fujitsu and IBM expertise to offer a cloud-based version of Microsoft’s Collaboration Suite to all of Westpac’s 38,000 employees ― a unique and innovative combination, he says.

“For us it’s more around private rather than public clouds. I don’t see many places offering a software-as-a-service solution to core banking,” McKinnon predicts. “For us the opportunity is in infrastructure and in our ability to quickly stand up, test and develop the environment, and in our ability to virtualize production environments in an efficient way.”

There is still work to do on Westpac’s IT turnaround, but McKinnon is clearly enjoying the challenge of what he says will definitely be “the culmination of my executive career.” Until that next “last job” comes calling? “I’ve been getting counseling on how to say no,” he jokes.

Bob McKinnon: The résumé

1972-1979
Insolvency accountant
Price Waterhouse
(Accounting services)

1979-1991
A variety of roles, rising to CFO
Lend Lease Corporation Group
(Property solutions)

1991-1995
General manager, finance
MLC
(Lend Lease’s financial services arm)

1995-1998
Chief general manager
MLC

1998-1999
Managing director & CEO, Global Investor Services in the Pacific
State Street Australia
(Global investment services)

1999-2000
Non-executive director & consultant
State Street Australia
(Global investment services)

2000-2005
Group executive & CIO
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
(Financial services)

2006-2008
CFO, then joint managing director
Multiplex Group
(Property & construction)

2008-present
Group executive, technology
Westpac
(Global financial services)