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Equities

When macro is noisy, culture is the compass

March 03, 2026 - 5 min

What makes WCM different from other active managers?

We have three core values in the firm: fun, gratitude, and serve others. And when you think about it, those are very, very different core values than any other firm I've ever heard of. You know, most people have core values around integrity, discipline, process. Those are permission to play values. In our world, we wanted to come up with values that really described who we were as people. And it's pretty simple. If you love what you do, if you have fun every day, and as Buffet says, if you skip to work every day, you're going get a lot more out of everybody in the organisation.

And gratitude is just an acknowledgement that we're pretty fortunate to be able to do what we do in this day and age. Allocating capital is really one of the most exciting jobs in the world, and we get to do that. So hopefully with a sense of gratitude, there comes some humility. And that humility is around, you know what? We compete against very smart people every day. Everybody works hard in this business. What can we do differently so that we can answer the investment equation successfully? And to me, what we can do differently is care more about our people. Sounds a little corny, I know to people, but I will tell you, if you care about your people, not just on the professional side, but also on the personal side, you build a very, very cohesive team that has a chemistry that allows you to excel. And the single greatest reason that we have succeeded over the last few years is because of that.

And then serving others. I've had people ask me that, come into the firm, how can I be successful at WCM? And I tell every single one of them, if you make everyone on the team around you better you serve them, you make them better. I'm the CEO of the company. And you know what my job is? My job is to make everybody else's job better. It's about me making people in our organisation better at what they do, by giving them the tools, caring about them, and serving them.

 

How would you describe WCM’s investment philosophy?

The core tenets of our philosophy and process at WCM Investment Management is to buy high quality businesses with big competitive advantages, selling at a discount to intrinsic value. No, I'm actually kidding on that because the reality is, if that's all you're doing in the business buying high quality businesses with wide competitive advantages, selling cheaply, then you have no advantage over competition because that's what everybody in our industry does. And we realised that about 20 years ago.

The reason most active managers don't outperform the benchmarks is because they're all doing the same thing, expecting to get different results. So we learned around competitive advantages that it's much more important to identify a business whose competitive advantage is likely to grow over the next decade or two, versus one that has an absolutely large or wide competitive advantage. That's huge. Because you completely reframe the question around, is this a big dominant company with high returns on invested capital to, well, this may have a really strong economic moat right now but we actually through a lot of pattern recognition and work that we do have identified in this business that it's likely to grow that competitive advantage over the next couple of decades.

And the other one is culture. I mean, we've learned this from our own firm. Again, wall Street loves to quantify everything. Most people think there's magic in the DCF modeling or massive spreadsheets. And, and look, there's no competitive advantage there. Everybody has the same information now everybody can build a spreadsheet. What people can't do, because it's difficult and you can't quantify it, is get into the people side of the equation and organisations. And it's the people that drive the competitive advantage to grow. It's all about the people and it's all about the core values. We do a lot of work there, we’re light years ahead. We have four analysts that just focus on business cultures. They don't try to assess the moat, they don't do any valuation work. They just try to assess the people side of the equation in every company that we invest in. And where we find strong alignment between culture and strategy we've got a long term winner that's going do really well.

 

What do you look for in a company’s culture?

I think, you know, when you look at corporate cultures in 2022, that, you know, you really began to see where the really good scrappy, adaptable cultures started to shine. You know, when the markets are going straight up, oftentimes it's difficult to tell what's really going on culturally in terms of the values in an organization. But 2022 really revealed a couple of big ideas. And one of them is adaptability. And we look for several things in culture. We look for alignment of the culture between its values and what it's trying to do on the strategy side, we want see a lot of strength in the culture throughout the organization. And really almost more importantly, we look for adaptability.

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