Above everything else, P-Solve has great people. We have, since the very beginning of our business, focused on building a really strong team from a wide variety of backgrounds.

We’ve done this by understanding some really important things.  Here, we describe the key themes that are embedded in our culture and make us what we are. 

The starting point is if you want great people, you can’t tell them what to think.  Ask yourself this – as a great person, do you like being told what to do?

However, great people can be persuaded.  This culture of persuasion and challenge runs throughout the business and is critical to get the most out of a great team.  Anybody can challenge anyone, and this flattens the structure.

Secondly, there is little real hierarchy and that provides transparency.  Great people like to know what’s going on and to have the opportunity to be involved, so we have an operating process that gives people the chance to be involved.

Finally, we have a strong focus on leadership within the business and a core set of principles and values.  They are not trite, meaningless words but represent the heart of who we are.  Our principles are our DNA: integrity, respect, authenticity and citizenship, resulting in our values: 

For more background on our principles and values, click here.

These principles and values are reinforced by strong leadership that runs throughout the business, we expect our leaders to exhibit some important criteria.  To see these, click here. You’ll find various types of great people at P-Solve but these principles and values are common throughout and, while as a business we will evolve with our clients, these principles and values will never change.

Building a great team brings with it the benefit of lots of innovation.  There are two key factors that lead to successful innovation, creativity and diversity.  We encourage people to be creative and to experiment with new ideas and, it’s important that, as an organisation, we reward this type of behaviour and try to avoid punishing failure.  Any processes including innovation will experience failure of some kind and this just needs to be confronted and addressed.  Punishing failure drives creativity away so we don’t do that.  Rather, we encourage people to be creative and work with others in developing ideas.

We have deliberately built a team from different backgrounds, and with different skill sets.  Right from the beginning, we understood that we needed the tension that comes from approaching problems from different perspectives.  Groups of diverse people make better decisions and come up with better ideas than any individual or group of similar individuals.  Diversity is a fact of P-Solve life and we will continue to re-inforce it as it’s been a key factor in our success.

So what innovations have we driven?  Well, every one of our businesses has a significant history of innovation.  For example, we were amongst the earliest in the market to bring hedge funds to our advisory clients.  We did some of the earliest derivatives work, both in terms of liability hedging and protecting against downside in equity markets.  We have been at the forefront of developing dynamic asset allocation strategies which adjust our clients’ asset allocations through time as market conditions change.  We were the first consultancy organisation to report to clients on our own performance, not just that of our managers, so they could see the results of our advice.  

There are many others and for more background on our innovations, click here.  These innovations are what drive our ability to help our clients improve performance. In the end, that’s what P-Solve is all about.  In simple terms, we believe that performance matters.  If performance matters and it needs to be improved, you’re going to need great people, with great ideas and innovation. That’s P-Solve in a nutshell.