In Deepest Gratitude

This morning I heard the sad news of the passing into eternal life of Michael Andrew.

I met Michael on my first day of my career in December 1988 – he was a freshly minted Tax Partner at KPMG Melbourne; I at the lowest rung on the ladder of this meandering thing called a career.

Michael had a profoundly positive impact on me and many hundreds of other people fortunate to have met and worked with him.

**

Close on twenty years ago I had the opportunity to meet with an esteemed Australian businessman and he told me that his mentor was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

I must have scoffed at the loftiness of his contact for me to be – rightly – corrected that this person’s mentor was but a Manager at the law firm when the businessman started as an Articled Clerk.

This person said that I should seek out those who have known you your whole career if you wanted to receive the purest of career advice.

He then asked me who it was that I had been thinking about – for he said that I was most surely thinking of someone – as he told me his story.

A couple of weeks later I found myself in the office of Michael Andrew – the person that I had been thinking of – explaining this very scene.

I asked Michael what was his remembrance of my time at KPMG – this being now seven or so years on since I left KPMG during which time our exchanges had focused on Michael’s poor choice of football teams.

Michael did not care for niceties when he said that I was not a particularly good tax consultant (how right he was!).

But – in his eyes – he said that I was a networker of the kind that he had not seen before at KPMG.

I had often heard the first observation about my legislative interpretation abilities but I had never been exposed to such a window into my being as was the second observation.

I had no appreciation that I was viewed that way.

That someone that I rated so highly would be so honest with me about my strength and weakness gave me a lifelong confidence to be similarly transparent with myself.

That coffee rates as the most important thirty minutes of my career.

That moment fundamentally changed the course of my life.

(Many years later when Michael was the Global Chairman of KPMG and based in Hong Kong we had a virtual coffee – he in Hong Kong and me in Melbourne – and he recited word for word the discourse of that memorable day).

**

Just a couple of months ago, after an ego indulging LinkedIn documentation of the lessons from my first 30 years of my career I saw an alert show up on my phone – that omnipresent measure of (self) importance that someone had opined upon my thoughts.

As I eagerly opened the notification I saw that it was Michael that had commented:

“Your one of a kind Tom,honesty and openness are greatly admired qualities,thank you for sharing”.

I will treasure those sentiments; those words for as long as I have the capacities to remember.

**

With Michael’s passing there is the emotions of sadness and thankfulness.

Sadness that he was taken too soon.

Thankfulness that I had the opportunity all those years ago to have met him.

Married with this is a unique emotion that today – more than 11,000 days on from the day that Michael and I first met – is finally the dusk of my youth, the end of my first day at work.

Tomorrow will be the first day I will awake to a world knowing that the three people that were there on my first day of my career and who in their own ways cared for me as a person not a colleague – Michael, Peter Lockwood and Judy Balding – are all in the loving hands of their Maker.

A kind, decent, thoughtful, intelligent, loved soul has left the building.

May Michael rest in eternal peace.