The small leadership team at Seven Group consider themselves doers over delegators. They need a lot of skin because they’re in a lot of games.  

Westrac is a Tonka truck wonderland of Caterpillar-branded dozers, excavators, loaders, skid-steerers and off-highway trucks.

The parts division, in isolation, is big enough to be a stand-alone ASX-listed company, distributing 75,000 product lines to customers in the mining, agriculture and construction industries.

Efficient distribution made Coates the country’s biggest equipment hire firm, sending a million pieces of kit out from 150 branches each year.

Allight provides lighting towers and mobile power stations to many of those same customers.

Beach Energy’s Otway and Lang Lang gas plants keep the lights on across the east coast, the Beharra Springs operation sends energy to Perth and the imminent Waitsia project will allow Beach to tap the lucrative international LNG market.

Seven’s 30 per cent interest in Beach, and the hydrocarbon fields housed in SGH Energy, means Stokes is occasionally thrust into the mud-wrestling spectacle that passes for the climate-change debate.

He doesn’t relish being in the public spotlight but arguing the merits of gas as a transition fuel is a walk in the park compared with the controversies thrown up by his 40 per cent interest in Seven West Media.

And then there’s Boral, the construction behemoth that Stokes acquired during a patient takeover bid described by some commentators as his coming-of-age moment.

Stokes chuckles at that description given he is almost 50 years old and has been chief executive of Seven Group for nine years.

The addition of the country’s biggest construction material company to the group means Stokes has a finger in almost every pie that makes up the Australian economy.

Boil it down all you want, the sheer size of Seven Group Holdings means there’s still a lot of stuff in the pot at any one moment.

The breadth of the portfolio demands a lot of good people in key roles but Stokes thinks the right hires are only part of the secret to success.

“Yes, you need the right people in the right executive roles, people who have a similar operator mindset and a constant pursuit of improvement,” he says.

“But you need a leader of those people who is in the detail enough to know what questions to ask. Trust but verify. Someone asking questions isn’t interference. Inquiring is not the same as managing.”

“The textbooks often promote this notion of a disconnected, inspirational speech-giver that’s there to inspire but not to interfere. I don’t believe that.

“The best leaders are like the captain, not the coach. They’re on the field, driving the team. Real success comes from having leadership on the field, being in the detail and reacting in the moment.

“Someone who is in the detail can be accused of micromanagement, and I am not a believer in that criticism. If your leaders aren't looking at the the detail, then who is? Expecting someone else to do it is a dereliction of duty.”

The daily prospect of having to answer detailed questions forces executives to thrust themselves further into the reeds, which is exactly where Stokes wants them to be.

He wants them to run it like they own it.

“History shows that more successful companies are those which have owners or insiders operating the business,” Stokes says.

“Give them responsibility but also accountability. This idea of giving people enough freedom to fail and then when they fail taking action isn’t necessarily doing them a service.

“That’s one of the reasons you see a lot of talk about how insider-led companies, those that are led by founders or people with material interests, do better.”

Call it an owner’s mindset, attention to detail or micromanagement — it works.

Competing management theories are tested every trading day and the tickertape reveals few listed companies have outgunned Seven Group in terms of total shareholder returns.   

Over the past 10 years investors have enjoyed an almost-sevenfold return on their money during a period in which the value of the ASX doubled.   

Seven Group is currently very much a share market darling, but it wasn’t always thus.   

“I took over as CEO in mid-2015,” Stokes recalls. “Early 2016 was a low point in our share price. We didn’t have investor confidence. Our strategy was not as coherent as it is now.”    

By mid-2017 the cycle had turned. Seven Group’s share price was dug out of the trench as investors were drawn to the company’s clockwork returns.   

Having seen the lows and received the brickbats, Stokes is reluctant to enjoy the highs or accept the bouquets. The forward-facing nature of stock markets means there is no time to look back on past performance.

“You need to have people around you that know that every day business can be better,” he says. “That every day there are opportunities to improve.”

The need to find new opportunities is particularly acute at Seven West Media.

Long the bedrock of the Stokes family’s wealth and power, the television and newspaper empire is having a come-to-Jesus moment.    

“The free-to-air market has grown for 50 years at CPI-plus,” Stokes says. “It’s never had a point where it’s turned and required people to make changes.   

“There are some structural headwinds and some cyclical factors playing through but you have a business that still generates a huge amount of interest and engagement.”

“It has a significant amount of revenue but has never had to have the same cost disciplines that other enterprises have. Most businesses would kill to have $1.4 billion of revenue. You just have to make sure your cost structures are orientated accordingly.”   

Stokes knows he can’t talk about “cost-out” programs without walking the walk.    

“The group’s head office has a small head count,” he says. “In total there are about 14 people that work in the SGH corporate office. In a direct context, we’re an overhead.   

“It’s pretty hard to hold our businesses to account if there is corporate largesse at the top. What we do has to be lean. That drives a leaner culture in each of the businesses.”   

It was Stokes’ attention to individual line items, more so than his appreciation of art, that saw him become chair of the National Gallery of Australia.   

“I grew up around art, of course,” he says, in a nod to his father Kerry’s famed collection.    

“I had been chair of the National Library coming to the end of my second term. They were looking for a new chair of the gallery who they thought would bring the right support and discipline for an incoming director.   

“I think it was more about my ability to manage the administrative parts of the operation and make sure it functioned effectively. To make sure there was cohesion between board and the executive.   

“The core tenets of good leadership remain the same, regardless of whether it’s in industrial businesses, creatives or not-for-profits.”   

Stokes’ work with the National Gallery sees him in Canberra regularly, rubbing shoulders with politicians who often fawn over his family.    

“The prism of time is generous,” he replies when asked which politicians he admires.   

It’s an observation that quietly damns the current crop.    

“Today it is seemingly more frenetic. There is the requirement for the perception of action rather than real action.”

“There is an expectation that government can solve every problem in society and in trying to do that there is regulation and legislation that doesn’t always drive the right outcome. It’s hard to know where it’s come from, but it certainly accelerated through COVID.”   

He points to current demands that the Federal Government cracks down on gambling advertising — something that troubles him as a director of Seven West Media.   

“There seems to be an attitude that the media is the messenger and so let’s shoot the messenger,” he says. “If the problem exists, taking the messenger out removes the noise but doesn’t actually solve the problem. It seems more challenging today for political leaders to stare down these issues. There is an expectation that government is increasingly in everyone’s lives.”   

The problem, he says, is once government is in your life, it’s difficult to get it out. The more laws you have, the harder it is to get rid of them — a bit like artworks at a gallery.   

“Once you craft legislation it’s really hard to take it back. We are experiencing this difficulty, in a way, at the National Gallery at the moment. It is the largest, most important collection of art in the country. The most valuable cultural item we have, worth $7 billion.”   

“We have 155,000 works. That’s too many. We are going through a process of reducing that number to increase quality but de-accession is more difficult than to acquire. Having the courage to lose something in order to improve the overall grade is tough.”

For most people, the unrelenting quest for improvement would be exhausting. For Stokes, it’s just life.