Economic Growth, Governance, and Capital Allocation – Dambisa Moyo

**Dambisa Moyo** (0:00)
The best piece of advice I got when I joined my first board about 15 years ago now was, you have to internalize that anything can happen. My own board career has been bookended by pandemic, financial crisis. Also, a lot of unique things that have happened to the companies. I had a CEO die in office at SAP Miller. We've had companies that when I joined, were trading at $60 a share go down to $7.
Was this company gonna go away?
I was on the board of a company, the second largest in the sectors was SAP Miller. Everyone told us, there's no way you're gonna get bought by Anheuser-Busch. It's impossible. They have to take out the biggest bond ever in history to do this. All the conflicts of interest, a laundry list of why it wasn't gonna be possible. And guess what happened? We got bought. They did do the biggest bond. Anything can happen. Something that people breeze over is that joining as a board member, you're coming in in the middle of a movie. Your job is to quickly figure out who's the protagonist, who's the martyr, what's the plot.

**Ted Seides** (1:06)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.
My guest on today's show is Baroness Dambisa Moyo, global economist, author, board member, and investor who sits at the intersection of public policy, corporate governance, and capital allocation. Dambisa serves in the UK. House of Lords, sits on the boards of Chevron, Starbucks, Condé Nast, and Oxford University's Investment Committee. She is chair of the Economic Club of New York and oversees Altered Trajectory alongside her husband, Jared Smith, the family office formed after his sale of Qualtrics in 2018 Our conversation traces Dambisa's journey from growing up in Zambia to becoming a leading voice on global economic development and governance. We discussed how her experiences across more than 80 countries and on the boards of four global companies shaped her judgment on economic growth, governance and decision making. We then turned to the application of those lessons at Altered Trajectory, including the evolution away from an endowment style portfolio, balancing Dambisa's macro convictions with Jared's moonshot investing style, and positioning for long-term themes. Along the way, we discussed the challenge of investing through structural change while avoiding ideological thinking.
Before we get going, long-time listeners might remember my discussion of the lived experience of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, created by Michael Murvosh and described in Episode 402, two years ago. Well, after an eight-year sabbatical, I'll soon return to the mountains of West Virginia for my next journey. I'll take leave of my familiar surroundings and electronic devices to go on a week-long adventure, meeting allies, facing ordeals, and encountering the so-called belly of the beast. After which, I'll return transformed by the experience. Like my past journeys, I have no idea what I'll find or learn once I arrive, and that is the essence and beauty of the experience. If you also feel the call to adventure, there's still time to engage and sign up. Hop on heroesjourneyfoundation.org to learn more about the upcoming journey. Hope to see you on the mount. And thanks for spreading the word about the Heroes Journey and Capital Allocators. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing transcript or a specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content. Over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is.
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That's alphasense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Admired Leadership. Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Studman, the executive coach behind Admired Leadership, who's advised more than 500 CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on 40 years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent.