The Speech That Wasn't About Us

Last Thursday night, Stuart and I were inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, at a black tie dinner at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Six new inductees, individuals and businesses, walked across that stage, joining a list of Queensland leaders the Hall of Fame has been building since QUT and the State Library of Queensland founded it in 2009.

We spent the week before writing our three minutes of acceptance speech, and it turned into something we didn't expect. We sat down to write about the business, and every draft kept turning into a list of other people.

We started in 1998 with a handful of pharmacies servicing aged care homes in Queensland. Neither of us set out to build what Epic Pharmacy and Icon Group became, we just kept solving the next problem in front of us, and one decision led to the next, until nearly three decades later that string of decisions had businesses impacting on millions of lives and healthcare journeys each year.

That's the part of the story that fits neatly into an awards bio. It's not the part we kept coming back to while we reflected on what to write.

We kept coming back to Dad, who I wrote about a few weeks ago, and the work ethic he handed me without either of us noticing it happen. We kept coming back to Tom Ryan, the man who took us to dinner when we beat him to a hospital contract he had expected to win, and who spent a decade teaching us so many business lessons. We kept coming back to my brother Andrew Reid, who moved to Brisbane to take on a 6 month maternity leave contract more than 20 years ago and has been a key part of everything we’ve done since, and Belinda Bennett who has also played a myriad of key but vital roles for us over the past 20 years. The list could have gone on and on, as there are so many whose contributions have been so vital to what we were being recognised for last week.

None of those names were going to fit on the plaque. But they were the actual answer to the question the night was really asking, which wasn't "what did you build" so much as "how did you get here."

I wrote a few weeks ago about inherited code, the patterns you're running that you never chose and rarely notice. Standing up to accept an award is a strange way to find out how true that is. You'd think a moment like that is about you. It mostly isn't. It's a room full of the people who wove threads into your story long before you had a story worth telling, and you're just the ones holding the microphone.

If you had three minutes to explain how you got wherever you are, whose names would you include in that speech?

We talk a lot in Ready to Rise about the leadership patterns you inherit and the ones worth keeping. If you're not in the community yet, the link's here.

I've also linked  the Hall of Fame site with the videos that were made about each of the inductees, which now reside in the archives of the State Library of Queensland. 

Each and every one is a great story, and there are learnings galore in all of them.