Ron Bundy, a pioneer of the ETF industry and the head of the index business at Morningstar, talks about disrupting a consolidated industry and the role of trust in accelerating change. “There’s a speed of trust that accelerates all the things we want to do in our business.”

Leadership has to adapt — to existential disruption like the COVID crisis, of course, but also to the routine but demanding challenges leaders face in a time of constant change. Like managing people through an acquisition by a competitor. Or navigating within an established business to harness resources for the high-potential business you’ve been brought in to lead.

Our guest for this episode of the Leaders Lounge provides first-hand insight into all these challenges. Ron Bundy built the Russell Indexes — still the leading US equity benchmark for institutional investors — and led the business through its 2015 acquisition by the London

Stock Exchange Group, a merger than dramatically realigned the index world. On

the eve of the pandemic last year, Ron was hired to transform Morningstar’s

index division — essentially a start-up within the big Chicago-based investment

ratings firm — into a disruptor in the industry.

Topics we discussed:

·  Being a leader – versus being a manager

·  Purpose and mission alone won’t make a firm successful. But having a north star makes

decision-making easier and creates a cohesion around big initiatives and big goals

·  Collaboration can slow you down. But “things move so much more quickly when you're not second-guessing somebody's motives.”

·  Giving trust “There’s a speed to trust and I find that giving it early accelerates all the things that we want to do in our business and helps us with our clients as well.”

·  Managing through a merger is about helping people cope with change. “It’s about bringing people into the tent to help solve problems but sometimes it just doesn't work.”

·  Diversity “is about getting people together who think differently than you do, who have different experiences and that try to solve problems in a different way.”

·  Getting resources within a larger organization “You can't just go out and demand resources. They need to want to help you.  We talk about ‘Unleashing the power of Morningstar.’ It goes it goes both ways.”