Of all the executives we interviewed to get a glimpse of how they organize their days, none are under the microscope as much as Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange Chairman Maged Shawky.
The youngest chairman of any of the World Federation of Exchanges' member organizations, Shawky is always in the spotlight with investors and financial institutions listening to his every word any one of which could trigger a shift in the market's direction.
We sat down with Shawky to understand how he handles the pressures of what might be the most stressful job around. Edited excerpts:
I usually start my day at 7am. Before heading into the office, I spend a little time with my eight-year-old daughter before she heads off to catch the school bus. I also spend come time checking my emails from home on my BlackBerry if the emails are easy to answer, I'll respond to them right then; if they require more attention, they wait until I get to the office.
I'm not sure how many emails I get a day, but I can tell you there's a lot of them. I receive emails from the United States, Europe, investment banks that issue reports on Egypt or other markets that I always follow up on, Asia and Japan, so you can imagine that because of the time difference I receive emails 24 hours a day.
As many as they are, I go through them all myself. Of course I prioritize them depending on the issues, but I open them all myself. Again, depending on the subject of the email, I will either pass it on for someone else to follow up on or respond myself. For example, if there is a group of investors requesting to come and see the stock exchange and see how the market's doing and what's happening in the market, I forward this to my secretary to set an appointment and of course to some of my senior staff so that they can attend the same meeting. Some of the emails are related to some issues that I can reply to myself if I'm the only one who can reply.
I'm in the office by 9am, and I start by reading all the local financial newspapers, because that's the news that will have an impact on the market and I need to gauge how the market will perform. So I start my day by reading all the financial newspapers and all the economic sections in the national newspapers to see what my expectations of the market will be this morning or how the investors will react to this news.
I organize my meetings according to what day of the week it is. I usually don't meet outsiders on Sundays and Thursdays and use these days to review any new projects or new regulation proposals. The rest of the week I have my normal set of meetings, which I prefer to do after trading hours so that we can be focused on the topic at hand.
Before starting the post-trading session meetings, I do some administrative work and handle market-related issues, investors' and members' problems, listed companies, disclosures, surveillance issues.
Wednesday has always been known as the 'committees day' at the stock exchange, where the listing, trading and membership committees meet to discuss the issues on their agendas.
On average, I leave the office at 6pm, but sometimes I'll have meetings -- especially with the Ministry of Investment or the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, with which we have several joint projects -- in the afternoon starting 4pm or 5pm.
I've managed to arrange my travel schedule so as to minimize the time I'm out of the country; I try to travel during weekends. If I'm going to Europe, I can leave Cairo on a Thursday, work Thursday evening and all of Friday and come back on Saturday or early Sunday morning. This is my plan for Europe and the US or the countries that have a Saturday-Sunday weekend.
For countries that take Friday-Saturday off, depending on my appointments, I leave Tuesday or Wednesday evening and work till Thursday and come back Thursday night. I try to minimize the time I travel, to the extent that I've been to New York and back in a day and to Sao Paulo and back in 36 hours.
I can rarely sleep on airplanes, so this planning helps me save time as long as I can arrange to be back here by the weekend so I can have time to rest. I prefer to travel as little as possible. I had made a decision not to travel for two to three months unless there was something very urgent: I delegate the trip to someone else and when I did travel, it was an official trip by the minister of investment to New York.
I stay connected to the office and keep track of what's happening in the market on my BlackBerry. Technology has generally made life much easier: I can access my email from anywhere, airports are now internet-enabled, so I'm in contact with my office, my home, anybody all the time because of technology. Even in the case of an emergency, there's a phone on the plane.
I make time for my family mostly on the weekends; during the week it depends on the momentum of my work. How I unplug from it all is a secret, but I do turn my BlackBerry off, though not frequently. When there's a long-weekend vacation and I know that most of the people are outside Cairo enjoying the summer, I turn my phone off for a day -- only one day and mostly it's Friday.
My job is stressful, but I think the most important thing is that you have to be a very good decision maker taking into consideration lots of variables and elements all at the same time to come to a sound decision. We're in live mode at the stock exchange all the time; a mistake is not acceptable at all. The decision momentum and the variables you take into consideration in decision-making are completely different.
Normally, senior management makes strategy decisions while the nitty-gritty things are attended to by the employees -- which is the case here, but then there are some decisions that by law, only the CASE chairman can make. Overall, I believe you're always powerful in your place when you have a great team. As long as you delegate and empower your team, you can be successful.
By Fatima El-Saadani
© Business Today Egypt 2007
