A former New Zealand Army Captain’s career came full circle recently, when as the head of AMP Capital Investor’s Alternative Assets area, he returned as the landlord to the opening of the new NZDF Headquarters in Wellington.

It was an ironic return to a military situation for Murray Gribben who began his career in uniform to find himself 25-years-later (with more than $12 billion under management) with a $2.9 billion property portfolio that included his old work. He is now Managing Director of AMP Capital.

As a student, the Wellingtonian considered joining the Territorials straight from high school, hearing from a friend he could be in the TF over the summer holidays before moving on to study chemistry at Otago University.

“I couldn’t get a job for over summer. So I went along to the Army because a mate told me I could join the Territorials for three months over the holidays and then go to varsity. So we signed up and about a month later some Colonel rang up and told my father that I couldn’t enter the Territorials because school exams clashed with the week of the intake."

However, Gribben’s military aspirations weren’t cut short prematurely. An insightful army recruiter rang back three weeks later, noticing he was interested in the Territorials and asked if he would be keen to go to Duntroon College in Australia.

“I said ‘where’s that?’ And to cut a long story short I got my Bursary and went to Duntroon.”

Taking advantage of fiscally advantageous positions was obviously a skill the Tawa College student displayed early on, despite this position coming somewhat by chance.

As part of a group of 10 to head to Canberra, Gribben quickly found that the Australian students were about a year ahead of the NZ schooling system in chemistry, so early in his course he switched to economics, as he had always held “an interest in stocks, the share market and things.”

The-then 18-year-old’s shift to economics turned out to be a second piece of serendipity, setting him on a path to investment banking and corporate finance.

In 1982 he graduated in economics and then the Army sent him back to do another honours year at Canberra. Upon completion of his post-graduate year, Gribben served in the 2nd/1st at Burnham in 1985, and later that year went to Singapore with the mortar platoon from 1RNZIR.

In Singapore, he met his wife and whilst his colleagues were continuing the adventure and heading off to places like Afghanistan and the Golan Heights, the newly married Captain decided the Army wasn’t the place to have a family.

Moving back to NZ and on the back of a cold call to an investment bank, that also turned out to understand the military (the MD’s uncle was a Brigadier); Gribben began his fledgling economics career.

The keen multi-sports athlete says many of the skills he picked up in the Army can be applied in the cut-and-thrust world of corporate investment.

“You learn to deal with a wide spectrum of society. The Army gives you the ability to converse with a Private and then five minutes later converse with a General.

Because the military runs on a lot of SOPs there’s a lot of good governance and process around what you do. But people also have a reasonable amount of autonomy at the varying unit levels and the procedures teach you to have a lot of trust in people. At certain times you can be quite collegial and ask for opinions and advice and use that to make your decision, but also when you don’t have that time you can just make the decision and trust that people are going to run with it.”

The 47-year-old says that if you extrapolate that into a business environment where 110 people can be trading all manner of things, working in IT or the back office; you can’t possibly be across all of it

. “You need to establish a strategy, which is what you need to do in any military situation, and then you establish a structure to achieve that strategy and resource people to let them get on with it.”

With a passion for the outdoors, Gribben says that he didn’t really appreciate those “execution skills” until he left the Army.

“The structures and procedures give you a competitive advantage in execution skills. If you need to get a task done and you know how to get from A to B, you know how to execute it. It’s not a skill that a lot of people have – which sounds silly, not knowing how to get from A to B – but you are given skills to ask, “what’s the coordination and what are the logistics at the end?”

Should one of his own show an interest in joining the Service, the father-of-two says he would have no qualms about recommending the military.

“I’d say go for it. You get to study and you get paid and it’s just a fantastic opportunity. I think Duntroon is one of the best scholarships in NZ, I appreciate what it did for me so I’ll always be very supportive and my peers and colleagues have all done well as a result also.”

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