October 15, 2015

White-collar crime expert wins Alumni Award

Campaigner for more female participation in MBAs and expert in financial market security, Professor Alex Frino, has been awarded the 2015 UOW Alumni Award for Research and Innovation.

Professor Alex Frino, originally from Warrawong, didn’t take the decision about which university to attend back in the late 1980s lightly. 

“I remember doing quite a lot of research to decide which university to apply to when I was doing my HSC – this included talking to the big eight accounting firms. I got an aggregate that would have got me into any Australian university but I chose Wollongong for its well-recognised teaching quality and because it had one of the best-regarded accounting schools in the country. Both of these proved correct.” 

Professor Frino, who says he wanted to be an academic from the outset, has a seemingly notable ability to know what he wants and how to realise his ambitions. He is currently Dean and Professor of Finance at Macquarie University and is an authority on security market supervision and integrity. He is one of the most prolific finance academics in Australia and internationally. 

“The reason I decided to become an academic was because I wanted to teach and help others. I was once told by my mentor that even my name Alex means ‘helper of man’,” he says. 

Quick bio

After graduating from UOW with a Bachelor of Commerce in 1988 and a Master of Commerce (Honours) in 1989, a young Mr Frino won a scholarship to study at Cambridge in the UK. He later completed a Master of Philosophy in Finance, followed by a PhD in Accounting at the University of Sydney. He has lectured at UOW, earned a professorship at the University of Sydney and is currently a Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.

“Ironically, as you become more and more successful as an academic, you spend less and less time in the classroom and working with talented young people to help them achieve their ambitions.” 

Professor Frino, who is UOW’s 2015 recipient of the Alumni Award for Research and Innovation, has found a meaningful role away from the front line of teaching as a contributor to long term, big picture initiatives. 

“I have come to realise I can still make a teaching contribution so to speak by taking knowledge generated by my research teams and colleagues and translating them so that they can be easily understood by the broader community.” 

Mainstream media plays a significant role in Professor Frino’s enthusiasm for knowledge transfer and he is often called on by media outlets and business reporters in Australia and abroad to explain what’s happening in the world of finance. 

“The media is also very powerful in driving change around important social issues, particularly when credible academic research can be used.” 

Professor Frino is also an advocate for women in business. He is one of the main drivers of the Women in MBA (WiMBA) program, which helps women overcome common barriers to completing their MBA study – time and money. 

Before joining the Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM), Professor Frino conducted a review of the MBA sector and found that only one in three MBA students are female. This statistic, he says, was confronting. 

“Perhaps even sadder than this was that women tended to opt for cheaper MBAs. This lack of diversity in MBA programmes and ultimately in leadership positions in companies is a social inequity issue, but also means that the potential stock of leadership capital in Australia is sub-optimum. 

“If you start with the simple reality that there are as many talented women out there as men, then the best possible stock of leadership capacity is yet to be realised in this country –  there are less than 20 per cent of women on boards and even less in executive positions in Australian companies. 

“Ultimately, this realisation drove my decision to take on the role at MGSM and I feel like my team is beginning to make a real difference – we have already created more than 50 new opportunities for women at MGSM in the last six months.

UOW joined the WiMBA initiative, which is now led by Kristina Kenneally, Director of Gender Diversity at MGSM, in 2015. 

“It was a pretty proud moment for me when the University of Wollongong became a founding partner of the Australian WiMBA network together with five other Universities – as always, UOW leads from the front.” 

Interestingly, Professor Frino, with his team at MGSM, has also studied narcissism as a predictor of company performance, which was widely reported in Australia, including in the Australian Financial Review, BRW and SMART Company. 

“A little bit of narcissism can be a good thing for a leader. My wife tells me that I have a healthy sprinkling of it in my own personality. It becomes a problem if you cannot control it, or if the weaknesses of the personality trait take-over – you need more Hyde and less Jekyll.  

“One of the things that leading management schools do effectively is work with the individual to help them understand their leadership DNA – the good and bad. With emotional IQ, you can control the bad and become a more effective leader. While probably not the best listener in the world – a narcissism trait apparently – I understand this, and when someone talks to me at work I consciously try to listen to them and give their view a fair run.” 

Maintaining connections

Despite having firm connections with various universities around the world, UOW remains an important part of the Professor’s career. 

“I am very proud of my Warrawong roots and my UOW education. I am honoured and humbled by the fact that the University that gave me a start in my career would recognise me as a worthy recipient.” 

The character and collectiveness of UOW’s alumni particularly invokes a sense of sentiment in Professor Frino. 

“I am a graduate of three universities now, but Wollongong alumni are different. They are warmer, less aloof and protective and proud of their own,” he said. 

“I would come across them again and again in life and they have ‘lent me a hand’ many, many times throughout my career – even folks that I didn’t know during my student years. You see, there is a very deep and rich but informal ‘UOW connection’. People look out for each other in the Sydney business community – without fail the words ‘I was a student at Wollongong University too’ would open doors and seal deals.”