The Evolved Leadership Podcast

#36 Get Things Done By Building Coalitions Of Leaders, with Paul Hodgson, Chair of The QLD Manufacturing Institute

• David McDermott

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My guest in this episode is Paul Hodgson. Paul is currently Chair of Queensland Manufacturing Institute Ltd, and the recent CEO of the Scaling Green Hydrogen Cooperative Research Centre, where he secured 97 partners and $163m of cash and in-kind contributions for a Round 24 funding submission. 

 

He is an Industry Commentator for the Ai Group Podcast “What on Earth”; and a Founding Member and Honorary Fellow of the Global Intrapreneurs Institute. 

 

Highlights of our conversation include discussing how good leadership grows leaders, not letting the process get in the way of the outcome, the strong manufacturing opportunities in Australia, building coalitions of leaders to get things done, and where hydrogen fits with the complex future that is coming.

 

Enjoy the conversation 

 

You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn at:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljhodgson  

 

To learn more about what it takes to be an evolved leader, and to check out our other podcast episodes, go to:  https://www.evolvedstrategy.com.au

So my guest today is Paul Hodgson. Paul is a CEO, a board chair, a mentor, and an advisor with a strong background in innovation and enterprise growth.  He has a significant career focus in helping organizations and entrepreneurs achieve sustainable impact.  Paul is currently the chair of Queensland Manufacturing Institute Limited.

He's also the CEO of the Scaling Green Hydrogen Cooperative Research Center, where he secured 97 partners and 163 million of cash and in kind contributions for around 24 funding submission.  He is an industry commentator for the AI group podcast, what on earth? And he's also a founding member and honorary fellow of the global intrapreneurs Institute. 

Paul, welcome to the show. 

  

Thank you very much, David, and an honor to be a guest on your podcast. 

  Tell us about your leadership journey so  far, Paul. 

Wow, how long have we got? No, it's been really interesting and it really is a journey in terms of leadership. So leadership's not a title, it's not a role, but if I go back probably as far as maybe 24 years where I really took on my first leadership role, it was Deputy Regional Director of AusIndustry  for Queensland, and I guess that's probably where I would see my leadership journey really starting.

Okay. Thank you. I then worked through large consulting, so I spent four or five years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I set up my own innovation and sustainability consulting business. I ran a a small and medium enterprise advisory service for the federal government. I worked for a couple of ministers, a federal minister and a state minister. 

I've been an economic development manager for a city council. I've been chief operating officer and, and general manager strategy for  A skills body, Construction Skills Queensland. I've been general manager for the East Coast for the National Energy Resource, Resources Australia Industry Growth Centre. 

And more recently I'm, I've been CEO of a Cooperative Research Centre bid. Through that time, I've also been chair on a number of committees for voluntary organizations. And even, you know, junior football coaches and managers and all sorts of things which require a lot of leadership skills and  experience. 

Well, that's a very rich and impressive leadership history. Before we get into what you do now, what have been some of the highlights and,  and lowlights of that journey so far, some of the greatest wins along the way, and also some of the biggest lows. 

  I think in terms of the wins, the wins are often about people and I'm a big promoter of the good leadership grows leaders. So seeing people that I've mentored, seeing people that I've coached, seeing people that I've worked with go on to do great things and become, have, have their own leadership impact is very satisfying to do that.

So it's often around the people that you work with and the people that you see go on from sometimes some opportunities you gave them or a role that you did or you some support and encouragement you provided them or some connections or introductions that you've made.  And seeing that,  you know, motivate them,  turbocharge them on to their own leadership journey is always a great a great thing. 

From low lights, I think sometimes it's, it's not having  people around you that you thought were ambitious, maybe courageous, that actually really did want to grow and develop.  and people who are quite happy with the status quo, or people who get, let the process get in the way of the outcome, which I find quite aggravating.

Because I think what you're always trying to do is have impact. And you're really trying to have positive impact and sustainable impact. And sometimes you end up working with people who really don't want to see any change happen at all. Or they are quite nitpicky around details and process where those, you could be a lot more flexible around how things are done. 

  So, let's just explore that one a little bit, given you've mentioned it, so,  I really like the way you phrased that, of not letting the process get in the way of the outcome and, and the frustration that comes when process does get in the way of the outcome. I guess two questions, one what, In your experience, like, is often behind process getting in the way of the outcome, and how have you solved it successfully so that,  it doesn't  become an obstacle? 

I think that there's a couple of ways of, of solving it. The reason that it comes about is often that people have very small jobs.  Not, not unimportant jobs, but in the grand scheme of things, they are tasked with something that's quite it's a component of what's required and they take that very diligently.

And they don't see the overall impact of what they're doing. And some people do get they do get jaded they get tired, they get beaten down.  And that's all they're doing is just looking at this thing that they've got to do. Maybe they're even incentivized just to look at that. But it, it doesn't join up and it doesn't enable other parts of the organization to have impact, and I think that can be, that can be really difficult to, to achieve,  to, to, to  achieve success in that basis. 

  Yeah, well, that makes total sense. And Yeah, sorry, it looks like you were about to go on and say more. 

  Well, I was just going to say about the overcoming.  I think it's trying to  enthuse people.  One of the things I think a successful leader does is excite people. They give people security. They work out what motivates them.  They respect what motivates them and they encourage that motivation. But they also protect them to give them courage. 

And you know, the buck stopping with a leader I think is a really important thing that I will cover. For you, I will not cover for you, but I will take accountability for this team, you know and allowing people to have some flexibility with the process, being really clear and visionary about the impact and the outcomes that we're trying to achieve.

People understand their role in that,  but they are not going to be pilloried if they don't achieve something. It's a case of, well, this didn't work. Or hasn't worked as a team. How do we do it better? How do we change our strategy to have more impact?  And I find you get a lot of people are often looking for inspiration and they don't get inspiration through their work.

So if you can show that it's, there's some excitement, there's some fun to be had and we can have a positive difference. I haven't really come up against anyone that says, no, that's not right. I have had a couple of people in my career say it's not professional to have fun at work. I found that curious because often when I start a new leadership role, I say, you know, wow, what a team we've got, what talent we've got.

What an opportunity we've got to do good and to make a positive impact, and let's have some fun. And I see people's eyes light up. They go, fun?  You know, I thought I'd come to work and I'd clock on and I'd do this, and then I'd go outside, work and have fun. And I've never found that having fun should be compartmentalized outside of a workplace.

 Silence. 

Really great point, because it so often is. And,  I totally resonate in my time as an employee for various organizations, starting out engineering consulting and  in business consulting with firms, , I even, even really cool firms, , there was still set some sectors of the, the group of people where there was that energy of just come and clock on and clock off. 

Sort of more evolved than others and some had more of a sense of we come here to play, but there's  There are at least currently in the world inevitably a fairly large number of people who are out there with jobs Who who do just see it as provision and clock on and clock off and and and not  Not having a sense of fun  So can you talk a bit more Paul about?

What helps to bring fun into  work 

What helps to bring fun? I think creativity.  fun. Getting people to,  you know, explore ways of doing things or  really what their contribution can be, making sure that the things that excite them are, they get maximum opportunity to use at work. I've had teams before where getting to know each of the members of the team and finding out what makes them tick, what motivates them and really looking for those opportunities within what we're doing to connect them with that.

It might not happen straight away. It might be a week. It might be a month. It might even be a year. But when they know that you see them and believe in them and understand them they really, really are motivated. I really do appreciate that when you go, Hey, look, there's this project coming up, or there's this connection coming up, or there's this, whatever it is that's coming up.

And I know that you could be really interested in that, would you like to do it? And their eyes light up.  It is good fun, but I think it's also the way we carry ourselves as a team. It's about being light. It's about being kind. It's about, you know, being unified and working together and taking, sharing the benefits, but also, you know, kind of sharing the pain of some of the disappointments as well.

One of my favorite quotes which I abide by is a Harry S. Truman quote, which is a leadership quote. Which is anything is possible so long as you don't care who takes the credit. And it's really interesting when I talked about some of those low points in my career, and I haven't had many low points, but maybe that's the way I look at things, but it can often be that someone wants to take. 

all of the credit for something potentially that they didn't actually contribute a lot to either. Sharing the credit is great. They say that success has many parents and failures are orphans. Well, I think you can really share the credit around around achievements. It does, it's not a zero sum game.

It's not like the leader has to take a hundred percent. The leader does well when the team does well. 

  and like this topic, it can go to so many, into so many different  areas and unfortunately we don't have time today to probably do, how, how do you bring fun to work?  Really properly and thoroughly, but you've touched on some really interesting points and some other things that are coming to me and related.

I, I just reflect on the times when I was part of a team as an employee that I had the most fun and one stint, it was a group of maybe 10 to 12 people in the team. And we used to tease each other a lot in a light fun way, like not in a You know, going, going beyond to the point of it being cruel, but we, it was, it was an environment where there was a lot of teasing and it was really fun.

I used to wake up and I couldn't, I couldn't wait to get to work because it was such a a light fun, really. Like that was the number one. energy. It was a fun environment to be in, and it was sort of joking around for most of the day. And of course, getting work done. But,  we just supported each other and kept the energy up by, by teasing each other in a really fun way.

Another topic, which, which, we do get into a bit and have in previous episodes is getting into the flow state, as, as defined by Mahalia, where a state of consciousness so focused it amounts to complete absorption in the activity. So if you can find the right level of challenge and skill, the research shows and I, I think, yes, you can definitely use the word fun.

If you're totally absorbed, you're going to be having fun. And that's more about focused attention and really. being fully fully into what you're doing. And yeah, there'd be a range of other things we could look at there. But it's a topic which I sense is so vast, we could spend the rest of the conversation talking about it.

But I want to move to this, Paul, but so that we get a good amount of time.  I want to hear what what are you up to now as a leader? And I know that you have your fingers in a few pies from our discussion previously. So, what, what are some of the main things that take up most of your time day to day that, that are very much in the  territory of leadership. 

Quite quite busy. It's been a busy year this year. David just, just quickly, I just do want to touch on that fun bit, one, just really briefly, because I think it'd be remiss of me not to mention the work of Stephen Lundeen the fish, fish philosophy. So if anyone isn't aware of fun at work, then I think Stephen has still set the gold standard on that based on the work out of the Pike Place fish market in Seattle.

And I had the good fortune to work with Stephen. He came and was the MBA director at Griffith University for a couple of years. And actually presented to his MBA class. And so I, I developed a friendship with Stephen. I would recommend for your listeners to go and, and have a look at the work of Stephen Lundeen in leadership.

It's spot on. It's really very much around fun, but also about empowerment.  He's a, a, a master storyteller as well, which is great. But what I'm doing now. The key things are Chair of Queensland Manufacturing Institute, where I think the opportunities for manufacturing in Australia are as strong as they've been for maybe 30 years.

And so actually, how do we help governments and large project proponents and small and medium enterprises and others to really maximize the opportunity of manufacturing in Australia, particularly. in the large areas like clean energy and hydrogen, in medical technology and health, in construction infrastructure and defense and in food and agribusiness as key sectors for Australia.

How do we value add more here? How do we make that economic development sticky, so that we can have more investment, more revenue, and more local jobs beyond just construction, construction projects? is a key one. The other one has been the Scaling Green Hydrogen Cooperative Research Center, which  I've had the good fortune over the last two years to pull a bid together with 97 partners, and as you said, 163 million of cash in kind. 

Perhaps by the time this podcast goes to air we may have been announced as successful and we'll be able to operate for the next decade. And that really has been an exercise in leadership, not just from me, but from pulling lots of other leaders together. I don't think leaders operate in isolation.

Leaders need leaders. Leaders make leaders.  But coalitions of leaders is really how you get anything done.  And leaders aren't just about a title or a role, as I mentioned before. Leadership is a trait, and it can be worked on, it can be developed, I don't think leaders are just born, I think leaders and I think leaders can can occur in all sorts of different situations, people who may not consider themselves a leader, situationally become a leader, maybe through circumstance,  but but it's really important to work on those leadership traits, I And pulling together that kind of collaboration to build the green hydrogen sector of which it's nascent at the moment, it doesn't really exist.

Is certainly probably one of the most, probably one of the biggest leadership challenges of my career and hopefully one of my biggest leadership success stories, but it's probably too early to too early to say, 

  there are two things there. So one is your role as the chair of the Queensland Manufacturing Institute and  also CEO of the Scaling Green Hydrogen Cooperative Research Centre, which is quite a mouthful.  So first question on the hydrogen business. I mean, is it a business? Is it a not for profit?  What's the entity? 

  well at the moment it is a bit within. A month or two. It should be, could be if we're funded, it will be a public company limited by guarantee. So it will be a nonprofit and the members of the organization will be our senior partners in the bid who are making the largest cash contribution to the decades work that we'll have ahead of us.  But it really requires leaders because these things will happen regardless of whether we do them or not in Australia. We could let the rest of the world  develop up a green hydrogen value chain globally, and then maybe come and pick and choose what they want to do out of Australia. But leadership is very much about being on the front foot.

And shaping an opportunity and being proactive and being courageous. And I think that's what myself and a large group of leaders are looking to do with the CRC. 

  with, with this 163 million,  and however much more comes in, if there are future rounds what, what will that money be spent on  primarily? Like what, what is the mission and provided it's.  It becomes a real, a real thing and what will it actually do? 

  Well, the mission is very clearly to build proactively build a green hydrogen value chain for Australia, right through from the production all the way through to utilization.  And then make the economic and social opportunities sticky for Australia. So more of the work happens here, more of the value added work, more of the long term work happens.

We're not just a place where people will build construction projects and export hydrogen that will actually have people manufacturing will be people having, doing services. And the like where most of that money will be spent will be in research and development projects, trialing and demonstration projects, early commercialization projects, collaborative projects, and also education and training.

The sector is going to require. Tens of thousands of skilled workers to be able to be successful. So we'll work with our industry, government, community, research and training partners to deliver up a comprehensive program of of education and training from effectively school leavers through to micro credentialing for professional people who are transitioning into the sector from another part of the economy. 

  And is there a particular industry that you're focusing on or is it all industries that, that effectively link into, you know hydro green energy and particularly hydrogen? 

  So there's, there's, there will be a hydrogen industry itself, which will be the production side and the distribution side. And that really runs from the electricity and the water sectors, because green hydrogen is formed through electrolysis.  The, the, the electricity pulls the hydrogen out of H2O water.

And creates the hydrogen where it'll need to be distributed and stored, it'll need to be transported. And then on the, the using end, we think in big industrial applications will be the users of hydrogen. So we're looking at the chemical markets things like ammonia and methanol, where hydrogen is a key part of already.

And we'll be looking at the major transport sectors such as aviation, shipping, long distance trucking and bussing and, and, and rail.  as the the opportunities to create, to take the electrification and turn it into a fuel that can be used for some of those heavy applications. It can 

  Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So that, yeah, the, the hydrogen sort of, and is it hydrogen fuelled cells or more than hydrogen fuelled cells? In terms of the research in the hydrogen space. 

  be more than hydrogen fuel cells. So hydrogen fuel cells is one way of applying hydrogen into both storage and also, I guess as a  storage and mobility for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle of some description. But there are other ways that hydrogen can be used. It can be put into a chemical such as fertilizer  and other chemicals that we use in the in the economy. 

For example, out of a barrel of oil at the moment, you know, there may be 50 different materials that come out of that battle of a barrel of oil, including plastics and polymers and other chemicals. They will need to be replaced and what green hydrogen provides is a base chemical from electrification, from electrolysis,  that can then be added to and mixed with other chemicals to create a green chemical.

So that's one thing. Hydrogen can also be done into direct combustion engines as well. So it can be used directly. It's inefficient at the moment, but there's a lot of work being done. But we just see that at the moment it's a very  sector. It's not really fully formed, therefore it's not competitive.

It hasn't been done at scale. And there's a great opportunity for Australia to play a very strong leadership role. And there's that word again, in the globe, if we are courageous, where we collaborate and we're focused and we invest. 

  Okay. And I, I want to also, cause I, I meant to ask this and I don't want to miss the you know, something that sounds fairly critical. It's, it sounds like there's a decision coming up as to whether you guys are going to be successful with the bid can I ask what happens if you're not successful to that 163 million, et cetera, will you just sort of go again next year?

Or, what, what's that scenario look like without wanting to be a negative Nancy? 

  No, no, that's okay. I mean, it's we've often talked about a plan B, so. And it's the case with a lot of grants that you go for. Not everyone can be successful and there are five other shortlisted bidders.  And the government  generally will fund three or four of those. So we've got a three or four in six chance.  It will really be down to our partners and to our establishment board and our executive team to go, what do we do? What do we do with this, this consortium that we've built, this program we've built, these resources that we've, we've attracted do people want to walk away? Or do people want to do something else?

Is there another way of enacting this? And that 163 million where we're seeking 50 million from the Australian government but potentially the 163 million and potentially with some other grants or other funds or other investments could be sufficient to get this up. and running next year anyway.

Scaling Green Hydrogen is quite an urgent priority for Australia because the rest of the world are doing this, we're in a competitive situation and if we don't, if we don't accelerate we may lose the opportunity altogether and so we would want to get on in doing it. You can go back for a further round but I'm not sure if we'd want to wait another year.

But that would be a, it'd be a question for the wider leadership team about what we want to do in the, in the case where we didn't get funded.

 Yep.  And for those listeners who aren't familiar with the world of hydrogen energy, I mean, of course,  everyone's heard of the term climate change and,  various degrees of, I guess, understanding and or interest around, what the concerns are and potential scenarios. Is it is the development of hydrogen and the prioritization of that globally and in Australia effectively to meet the challenges of, this term climate change that can be, interpreted in so many ways, or does it go  beyond that? 

It's really aimed at decarbonization. So hydrogen  is already produced at some scale. So it's produced about a hundred, 80 to a hundred million tons per annum. That goes into ammonia for things like fertilizers. It goes into petrochemical refining, but it all comes, well generally all comes from methane.

So it's got a high carbon footprint. So there's an opportunity to. use green hydrogen, which which is effectively a zero emission alternative into those chemical markets. And then there is, as you say, the opportunity to use zero emission hydrogen as a fuel in the energy space. So hydrogen really hasn't been used for energy.

There's no reason to use hydrogen for energy if you weren't decarbonizing. At the moment, coal and gas and oil from just about every application would be the cheapest form. We've spent decades, potentially a hundred years or more, in some of those areas developing those supply chains. We've got very efficient.

The challenge with all of them is they actually have a carbon footprint. And so, things like Green Hydrogen will be a decarbonization tool in a toolkit.  And we want to make sure it's as robust as possible. possible tool so that it can be an option in a number of those applications. But it won't be a panacea, it won't be, it won't be used in a lot of things that electrification can do directly or batteries can do directly.

It will work collaboratively with those in complementary to to achieve decarbonization.

 Yeah. And I know there'll be all sorts of  you know, different ways to look at the, depending on context, where hydrogen is, is a good alternative, but how do you define good? Is it primarily, minimal environmental impact? It sounds like on average, the economic case won't stack up at least at the moment against, using fossil fuel resources, et cetera.

Would that be fair to say? 

  In most applications, that is fair to say, but it's a very complex scenario. And the reason is, is that in the past if we look at energy, then there's been almost a cozy duopoly and I don't mean that in a negative way, but stationary energy through electricity. has been predominantly coal. Thermal coal. 

In some parts of the world it's nuclear. Gas has played a role in that. But predominantly it's been coal. And Australia's national electricity market has been predominantly coal based. So it sits there. But no one really used coal for mobility applications. So cars and trucks and planes and boats.  And and rail.

So people have used oil. So through diesel through petrol through other other things out of a barrel of oil. But if you look at those  that they've sort of sat alongside oil for mobility, coal for for for stationary power, https: otter. ai  options. There will be lots of things that people will do. They may use electric for passenger electric vehicles. In, in some countries and in other countries they might have fuel cell electric vehicles with hydrogen. It will all come down to the strengths of their infrastructure. the business models that will come down to consumer behavior and consumer preference.

It will come down to seasonal factors. It'll come down to other uses. So if you're in an area where there's lots of electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure, you've got high renewable generation, you've got storage. Then it's probably likely that hydrogen is not going to be able to beat battery electric vehicles.

It's not going to be able to beat electrification for heating and for cooking inside buildings. But in other places where maybe they have to import their renewables to get to net zero, if they're importing hydrogen, maybe it makes no sense for them to convert that back to electricity. They will put in hydrogen networks and maybe it'll make sense for their passenger vehicles and other mobility to run off of hydrogen because every time you change an energy source from one one thing to another, you're actually going to have less losses.

You're going to have costs in that process. And so you want to try and minimize the amount of those within your, your value chain.

 Yes. Yeah. And I know,  as well, this particular topic could be many podcast conversations, you know, just around hydrogen and energy. But just to close this particular line of inquiry with with one final question around if you were going to pick one, and let's just say Australia, but also feel free to comment globally, if it if it's  Relevant.

Within Australia, where do you see hydrogen being used the most in, say, the next  10 years? 

In the next 10 years, I think the major domestic applications will come in you know, looking, looking at the best case scenario, I think one will be hydrogen used in brocading of iron ore to create a green iron  for export. So if you, at the moment we produce iron ore and we export iron ore. One of the ways to get to a green iron and a green steel is to actually bring green hydrogen into that process.

It makes a lot of sense to do some of that value adding in Australia and then export a green iron that can become a green steel offshore just with electrification  overseas. So I think that's one avenue. Another one is into green hydrogen, into green ammonia for fertilizer. So we're a big agricultural producer.

A lot of our chemicals and a lot of our fuels we don't have sovereign capability of. So we import about 80 percent of our mobility fuels. everything from jet fuel through to diesel and to petrol. So a lot of that gets imported. We import I think a hundred percent of our urea, which goes into the ammonia, which goes into things like AdBlue for diesel trucks.

And it also goes into things like fertilizers. So having sovereign capability and sovereign security of our fuels. Chemicals, I think is a really key one for Australia. And that is gonna complement electrification and battery electric. It's not really gonna compete with battery, electric and electrification.

This is, this is the, the, the, the Batten holder or the batten relay runner with electrification. There is a, a, a sort of a hierarchy where. You're trying to eliminate the amount of energy that you're using, which eliminates emissions, that's energy efficiency. Then you would look at direct electrification and batteries.

If that doesn't work, then you're going to need a fuel or a liquid, then you'll look at green hydrogen and derivatives. And then there's other applications that you might look on down that scale.  But but we'll the next decade is gonna be really interesting for hydrogen. I think it's really gonna be the 2030s and beyond where we're gonna start seeing hydrogen used in Australia in significant quantities.

But our CRC will run for a decade. We we're hoping that by the early 2030s we're having a significant impact in pulling the value chain together and making it competitive Safe. And delivering economic and social prosperity.

 Yeah.  Well, that was really, really fascinating to hear. And for those listeners, you know, who want to understand more, I'm sure just Googling green iron, green steel will help you to understand a bit more about what Paul means by those terms. And and you can go deeper on that if, if. If that's something you want to do, so Paul, I want to move us on to also just spend a little bit of time to finish around your role as chair of the the Queensland Manufacturing Institute, which I know you've said previously, there are links with the, the involvement you have in the hydrogen space.

Can you just, finish with a sharing a bit about one of the main priorities there and, and and the links with the hydrogen work. 

  Yeah, sure. So Queensland Manufacturing Institute was started 30 years ago as a centre of excellence in manufacturing. Manufacturing itself has had a pretty choppy three decades. It was probably pushed aside a little bit by the resources boom from the late nineties. But what we've seen since the pandemic has been a real  change of rebalancing global supply chains.

Having precarious single point of failure supply chains for manufacturing is a real challenge. Australia's got a lot of the ingredients for manufacturing, whether it be talent, robotics and automation whether it be large demand for things such as clean energy, defense.  infrastructure, but also their critical minerals.

I've heard the federal industry minister say that Australia's got 50 percent of the world's critical minerals and we mine 1 percent of them. So we've got huge opportunities to  make Australia much more of a manufacturing powerhouse than it's been. Having said that, manufacturing has grown in Australia.

It's morphed as well. Manufacturing has become. different. It's not necessarily just a big volume game anymore. There will be a lot of companies out there that won't call themselves manufacturers, but they make things. They design things, they engineer solutions. Sometimes it's more bespoken custom than it is a very large production run that we see.

So it's a really interesting one, but manufacturing also delivers high value jobs highly skilled jobs. It also creates full time employment and it also delivers other supply chain benefits because you often have other suppliers feeding into the manufacturing sector. So what we do is we're part of the industry capability network, which is a national organization.

We help working with governments and project proponents, looking at how to. to fill out the local supply chain, how to get more local suppliers involved. And we also work on the capability area. We have a gateway industry skills program for advanced manufacturing that we, we run for the Queensland government that works with about 50 schools across Queensland.

Exciting. school leavers and, and people at school about the sector, connecting them with manufacturers, educating them about the manufacturing sector and giving them experiences as well of what it would be like to work in the manufacturing sectors. Cause obviously having a skilled labor force is absolutely critical as well.

So we do a lot of those types of things. We've been doing it for a long time. And we hope to be able to do it for a lot longer. There's a lot more focus on manufacturing now than there was even five or 10 years ago. So the challenge for all of us is how do we capitalize on this opportunity? Because it won't last forever. 

  And unfortunately, we're. We're almost at time and it has been truly fascinating to hear your perspective on the topics we've talked about, Paul, and  particularly hydrogen and now  how the manufacturing side of things links with that and your two roles in both those spaces. But if we finish with Just shifting to the topic of leadership, because you've had and continue to have significant leadership roles,  if we think of the term evolved leadership, which is,  this podcast is the evolved leadership podcast, whatever the term evolved  What, what's something that you haven't mentioned yet that to you is a quality of an  evolved leader? 

A lot of people still see leadership as quite hierarchical and potentially what I'd call hero leadership.  And I would see evolved leadership as much more distributed. Much more not quite silent, but it's working with it's people aren't working for you. It's not necessarily leaders and followers.

It's actually leaders and aspiring leaders and, and, and giving people the ownership over their aspects of the work, coaching them, mentoring them, supporting them, encouraging them, developing them, and. And really pulling and inspiring a group of people together to achieve great things much more of a network effect rather than a a hierarchy.

And I think that's a really important part, the leadership as a team sport.  Leadership is kind, it's empathic it's supportive, it's encouraging  and the, you know, the idea is to create more leaders. We often see leaders and managers as the same thing. I see them very differently. Leadership is a, is really a culture. 

It's not about tasks. It's not about transactions and just leave you with, I guess, talking about my leadership journey, it'd be remiss of me to say that probably the really key, first key part of my leadership journey was being on the PricewaterhouseCoopers young leadership team back in 2022 sorry 2003, 2004. 

And we did a very intensive amount of work looking at leadership. And I still come back to COVID's, COVID's seven habits of highly effective leaders, right. As, as a really early inspirational book for me and leadership. And I often think about synergy. I often think about, you know sharpening the saw.

I think about productive capacity I think about beyond win win lose and beyond win win even and a whole range of those habits because I think they are still relevant today and perhaps even more relevant today than they were when that book was written probably 25 years ago.

 Yes. And it is a, it is a cracking read. And for those who haven't read it, Paul's referring to Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people. And yeah, they're kind of some principles that are going to stand the test of time, you know, no matter what the century is or the, or the decade.  So Paul, we'll, we'll pop , the, your, the LinkedIn details and, and company or organizational websites for the Queensland Manufacturing Institute and the  it's the, the other with a very long name, scaling Green Hydrogen, CRC.

So for people who are interested, they can go that, go to the show notes and check those out. Are there, is there anything else that you'd wanna direct listeners to in terms of articles, links, anything at all? Just to, to close off. 

  No, apart from that, I'm always happy to talk to people and help people. I think leadership is also about providing value. It's about thinking about value in every interaction. You know, how can I make someone's life better, their job better, how can I help them? And sometimes that's impact, most cases, that's just encouraging people, giving them confidence.

Most people have got the skills and the capabilities, they just don't have the confidence to fill it. And so a lot of my mentoring work is actually instilling confidence. In people, but look, I'm happy to just connect with people. And if people have got any questions  or, or feedback or would like some introductions or links I'm only too happy to help.

And LinkedIn is probably the best place to go to connect with me.

 Cool. Well, Paul, thank you very much once again for your time. It's been truly fascinating. 

  Fantastic. Thank you very much for the opportunity, David.

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