Braun is currently an investment director at the Luxembourg office of Capital Group, a fund firm with roughly $2.6trn in assets under management worldwide.

Aaron Grunwald: What experience you want to share today?

Christophe Braun: Similar to many others, the recent pandemic has had, in many ways, a very profound impact on my personal and professional life. It certainly challenged, first of all, my work-life balance. I think there has been a lot of challenges, but this was a challenge because suddenly you were forced to work from home. I’m someone that needs time away from work, [otherwise] I will work 24/7. That’s what my wife would say. I have to acknowledge [this], but I’ve been okay with that. But when I suddenly had to not just take work back home, but then also set up an office at home, it was very difficult. I had to challenge myself: when and where do you make a clear cut between private and professional life when so much is at risk, right? Where do you draw the line? What’s the right balance?

For me, personally, the last two years have been an emotional roller coaster because [firstly] I became a father. Our daughter was born in the first lockdown, at the end of April.

Your first child?

Yes.

So you took your paternity leave during the lockdown too?

Yes.... and during the pandemic my mother-in-law was diagnosed for the third time with breast cancer. Final stage cancer. Which puts another complexity to everything we went through. You have lockdown, you have the pandemic, she’s a person at risk, so what do you do? How many months has she got? We wanted her to have that time with her granddaughter.

So put another one on top. We had been renovating, because I was working in London and came back for my family. So I came back to Luxembourg with my wife and we had been renovating a house for two years. Not that we wanted to do the math, but the works were supposed to be done before [my daughter] would be born, in March. Now obviously, the pandemic caused a series of delays. And so basically, we had committed to rent out our apartment to another couple that were expecting a child and we didn’t want to let them live on the street. So we decided to move in with my mother-in-law and we created this bubble of taking care of her. She would be able to spend time with her granddaughter, with my wife. My brother-in-law also came back, he basically gave up his job in Indonesia as an engineer and came home to spend time with his mother. His father had passed away of cancer four years ago. And so I was working from home and just trying to help out at home, looking after my mother in law, and then dealing with a huge global crisis.

You know, the financial markets went down 30%-40%, a record correction, and you know, it’s kind of isolating working from home. That’s what it feels in your eyes, it’s just you against the pandemic, you against the world. But this is when you sort of zoom in. I think that’s what I’m trying to get to, the lesson learned: zooming in, zooming out.

So you feel very small, very fragile. And that’s the roller coaster ride, you should actually be happy, right, you became a father, you have this potential lying in front of you, smiling, and then again, life is so cruel and you have to start saying goodbye to people. And you have to stay focused, because you have a job, you have huge responsibilities. You are managing money, you have to speak to clients, and you want to tell them ‘keep calm, take a long term view’. But you have to remind yourself that and you have to continue believing in what you’re telling yourself and others.

We still haven’t overcome some of those events, but my daughter is 18-19 months now, she’s running around, she’s healthy....

I decided last year to take a series of parental leaves, to allow my wife to have a smooth transition back to her career last year, and spend more quality time with our daughter. And I can tell you that has been a great experience for me personally, but also for me professionally. And that’s where I want to say, I’ve realised that the interconnection between your professional and your private life is much more important than I personally ever had ever thought. So looking after yourself personally also means looking after yourself professionally.

How did you realise that?

[When] everything that happens on one side of the coin gets also taken on the other side of the coin, and vice versa.

I think the pandemic has shown me that you can get easily lost in the detail, become sort of overwhelmed by just focusing on the problems, just zooming in too much, and not zooming out enough. And that was something that was happening during the pandemic. A lot of people were just focusing too much on the pandemic and sort of lost sight of the bigger picture. And I think the pandemic has helped me to focus more on the big picture side of things and pay more attention to the long-term strategy or goals that I have as an investment professional.

So if you were to ask me, ‘what is the big perspective?’, I think, and I’m trying to go through with this, I want to reduce business travel. And this is not just because I’m a father, [though] it probably has an impact on it. It’s not just because of ESG and [Cop26] in Glasgow, but I think the pandemic has shown something that we all knew for a very long time, we have been traveling too much. We haven’t been selective enough. And I want to be more thoughtful about it. I think a lot of my colleagues, younger and older, experienced and less experienced, have seen this too. The pandemic forced us to acknowledge it. Not only acknowledge it, but the proof is in the pudding. And we’ve seen the pudding to some extent, right? I mean, it works. It works. [People have] acknowledged that long term relationships can be sustainable in a world where we have digital solutions. So that is one of the big revelations, I think, for all of us, for our industry.

You also said that your parental leave helped your professional life. How so?

Zooming out, taking a break and [taking] a bit of distance. Reflect. It sounds very cheesy.

I [plan to take four one-month] parental leaves.... I’ve taken two months off so far, December is going to be the third. It’s helped me to recharge my battery. Not that taking care of a child is not exhausting, but it’s different, right. I’ve continued to do my research but from a different angle. So I looked at the pandemic, and I looked at new investment opportunities, you know, as our society is changing, adapting their working habits, their consumer preferences and needs. So that has really helped me to zoom out and have less pressure to be available all the time, but still do my job.... and I think this has definitely helped me to improve the quality of my work.

If you had to sum up your advice, your lessons learned, what is it that you want people to know about about your experience?

Well, stick to your convictions. Focus on the long term, don’t panic, don’t lose sight of the ultimate positive things....

You know, I’ve just learned that when things are good and rosy, every company that you work for is good... but when the rainy season starts, and you start asking yourself questions, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, I think that’s where you want to work in an environment, not just work in an environment, live in an environment, personally, that has your back. You can see I’m still working from home. And that’s perfectly okay for everyone. That for me is the big takeaway, it doesn’t matter where you work, but it matters how you work. And that’s what we’ve tried to put a lot of emphasis on, the ‘triple C’. Communication, collaboration and culture has been reaffirmed for me during the pandemic, how important those those three letters, those three words are.

I said before, travelling less. We are fundamentally a stock picker. And so everything we do, all the research we do, is built on engaging with companies. Not just with our clients, but also with companies. And I think that engagement--not just internally, with me feeling comfortable knowing that someone is going to ask ‘are you okay?’ or telling me ‘I’m struggling’--but also talking to companies that we invest in. That was a great experience. You know, I wasn’t sitting in a plane, jetting to Japan, and then coming back with a jetlag, but suddenly, I was working from home and I was able to do much more company meetings. I wasn’t stuck on the plane anymore. And actually, if you go back the last two years, we did a third more company meetings than in a pre-pandemic world.

You mean saving on travel time to spend more time meeting with companies that you invest in?

Exactly.... because suddenly, all the analysts were working from home, and we were able to do an Asia investee company meeting in the morning, a Europe one in the afternoon and a series of Silicon Valley company meetings in the evening. And while I was doing much more meetings, the quality of our engagements, the quality of our research, hadn’t deteriorated. It had improved for the number of meetings that we were doing, and we were engaging more on different levels. And so that’s definitely something that we as an organisation want to do more and the lesson we have learned from the pandemic.