“These boys will be someone, someday.”
My biggest claim to fame as a music reviewer was something I wrote over a decade ago, about a young opening act at the Enmore Theatre. I got to the gig early - a favour from a good mate who went to high school with the lead singer and drummer.
Back then, reviewing was the last vestige of a writing dream I’d almost let go of altogether. A dream that began in a 2UE newsroom when I was 16, doing work experience in journalism. Thank you, Mike Carlton.
A dream I gave up, because the security of finance was irresistible to a kid whose number of homes outstripped his years of life.
That band, by the way, did become someone. RÜFÜS. They added the DU SOL later.
Life has many currents, some you follow and then they stop before you imagined. Some flow back into your life later. Turns out, the skills you need to read a concert and read a room aren’t too different.
This edition’s guest spent 25 years proving that from backstage.
Find the Current with Craig Gilliver
(The University of Sydney Business School)
The full episode is available now on Spotify and Apple
A good career is supposed to look like a ladder. The most memorable ones look like a scrapbook.
Craig Gilliver’s scrapbook is a beauty. A kid from Bankstown - sheet-metal-working dad, mum in a factory, a Catholic school where most blokes left at sixteen for a trade. Becoming the man who looked after Elvis Costello and Lou Reed when they came to town. Who made talking newspapers on cassette for the blind. Eid at Belmore Mosque. The Boishakhi Mela with the Bangladeshi community. More Australia Days at Olympic Park than he can count.
Then, a redundancy at an age where the interviewers stop calling back, a pivot into academia during COVID, and now: teaching leadership at a business school with no business degree, holding a master’s in comedy writing and chipping away at a PhD by creative practice.
“The world’s oldest, youngest academic,” he calls himself chuckling.
On paper, it’s chaos. A random walk. But the reality is - it only looks random until you find the golden thread.
The days of wine and Whitlam
Craig wanted to be a journalist. He missed the marks for UTS - the hot ticket at the time - and did a literature degree at Macquarie, surrounded by North Shore kids he’d never rubbed shoulders with before. In Bankstown, university wasn’t the expectation. You were going to be on the tools.
“They were the days of wine and Whitlam - where a fella from the Western suburbs could go to university on merit and didn’t have to worry about how much money their parents had.”
His mum asked him once what he was actually doing out there.
A unit of Australian literature. A unit of sociology. A unit of Shakespearean and Elizabethan drama.
She looked at him quizzically. “Will that help you get a job?”
“Yeah, of course it will.”
“All right then.”
This is your place
Craig discovered a knack for planning events, and realised early that it was more storytelling than logistics.
“When you put on an event, you’re telling a story. This is the people’s place. Your taxes paid for this. You’re allowed. It’s permissible. And it’s fun.”
Eid at the mosque. The cultural fairs at the Olympic precinct. Same move every time. The event was the sentence and the crowd was the reader.
Which is why his leadership students don’t study org charts. They study leaders telling stories. He puts Jacinda Ardern next to Boris Johnson during COVID and asks his students one question:
“Who was making meaning for the people? Who was showing empathy? Why should I follow you? What’s the pitch you’re giving me? What’s the story you’re telling me?”
One leader said:
“If we all do this now and lock down, I know that we’ll miss our relatives and our friends - but the sooner we do it, we’ll be protecting the least of us.”
The other said:
“If you don’t do what you’re told, I’m gonna send the cops around.”
Same crisis. Two stories.
A year of applications
Craig’s hardest chapter started with a redundancy at the end of 2019 - at an age he’d rather not mention.
“They’d say, you got down to the last two but we’ve given it to the other person. And I’d say - was that other person younger than me? We couldn’t possibly tell you. Okay. I bet they were.”
Three months of that became nearly a year. Then a mate - another event manager, made redundant a little before him - said something over coffee that Craig didn’t take on at the time:
“Your next job is not going to come from a job application. Your next job is going to come from a contact.”
He was right. A contact at Sydney University who’d seen Craig work called with something COVID-shaped that had an event element to it.
“I closed the book I was reading, put it to one side, and said - yes, I think I’ve got time for that.”
The applications were Craig pushing against the current. The relationships were the current. His next chapter didn’t come from effort, it came from being findable to the people who’d already seen the thread.
You can’t look this answer up in the back of the book
My favourite thing Craig does comes on day one of his innovation class - a room full of quants who badly want the right answer. He hands out folded A3 paper and felt-tip pens and tells them to write a children’s book. Beginning, middle, end. Illustrated. The title is fixed: My Fantastic Invention.
They panic. “What’s the answer though, Craig? What should I make my invention?”
“No, no, no. You can’t look this answer up in the back of the book. The answer has to be what you want it to be.”
When I asked Craig what childhood belief he had to let go of to become who he is today, he went straight to the same place his students get stuck.
“You have that idea of your parents - they’re in charge. They were allowed to have children. They must know everything. Otherwise, why would they be in charge?”
Then you step over the threshold into the adult world and discover nobody hands you the manual.
“You figure, okay - you’re 21, and suddenly the heavens open and a ray of sunshine tells you everything you need to know. And it’s like - no, no, no, no.”
“It’s a longer winding road.”
Nobody’s in charge. There’s no answer in the back of the book. You’re the author. That’s the belief Craig dropped as a kid - and it’s the exact belief he now spends day one dismantling in his students, one felt-tip pen at a time.
His mum’s question got its answer, by the way. The literature degree that would never get him a job made him the world’s oldest, youngest academic.
Find the current
We tell reinventors to plan the path - line up the dots, build the ladder, make the next move make sense before you make it.
Craig’s life is proof of the opposite. Kierkegaard had it: life is lived forwards but understood backwards. The dots only join in the retelling.
That’s Find the Current. People don’t follow instructions - they follow the story that includes them. Leadership isn’t manufacturing meaning and issuing it from the front. It’s finding the current of what people already care about - this is your place, your taxes paid for it, you’re allowed to be here - and joining it, so that following you and being themselves become the same act. Ardern found the current. Craig found it at Belmore Mosque and Olympic Park. And when his own career capsized, the current - the people who’d seen him work - carried him to shore.
Over a decade ago, I stood in the Enmore Theatre and read the current in two schoolkids. It took me twenty years to read my own.
What current are you standing beside, telling yourself it isn’t yours?
The full episode is out now.
- AJ
