The 10 best ASX management teams right now

Blake Henricks: I'd say heavy. Business isn't easy, but at the moment, the CEOs we're talking to are telling us, "It's harder than ever." I mean, it's just really tough out there, to be honest. We're hearing companies reducing hiring intentions, we're not seeing slashing and burning yet, but they're just getting sick of trying to innovate while going back to their customers and pushing through prices. And so no one's feeling that good, everyone's a little bit nervous. Not yet a disaster, but that's how we feel. It's just a bit heavy, a bit down.

Matthew Kidman: Sketchy? 

Blake Henricks: It's like flying a plane with three levers. So you've got the pricing one first, you needed to make sure that you were passing on inflation effectively. Not too much, but not too little either. You had to have good control of your costs because if unchecked, some of these cost bases are going to be rising high single digits. And then finally, as James talked about, I think you needed to keep innovating. And what we heard from company management was, "We keep going back to our clients once every two months asking for a price rise." And then, "Oh, and have you tried our new product?" And they're saying, "No one wants to hear about it." So the people who got those three levers right were the ones who succeeded

Top energy/utilities management teams 

James Gerrish: I liked what Chris Ashton did at Worley. I mean, it's a complex business that they're operating at the moment - 50,000 employees globally. There are a lot of challenges surrounding that. And it's a business that operates on low margins. So you're juggling all of these different things, plus you've got this big thematic that's coming in the coming few years, which is all around decarbonisation and taking the opportunity set that's coming ahead of it. So, I think they did a really good job balancing the different ebbs and flows of the business, while still setting up wealth for the future. So, Worley was a good one for me.

James Gerrish: You do and that love affair has probably come off a little bit in the last couple of months, but I think the guys at Sandfire have done pretty well over a reasonable amount of time. So, Karl Simich was the long-standing CEO there. There's a new CEO coming in very shortly, Brendan Harris. But that's been an operational turnaround story, they had a really short mine life - they've addressed that. They've had operational challenges, which when you put it up to how OZ Minerals has delivered over a long period of time, we thought that it was uninvestable. Now, it is to me. So I thought they did a good job, and they've set the business up really well for what comes next, and bullish on copper and I'm bullish on how they've improved operationally.

Matthew Kidman: They've run pretty hard. Okay, let's switch sectors. Something that we all used to love and now we stay away from - tech. Who did well there? Which management team got that situation right? Because it's been a tough 12 months.

Seek (ASX: SEK) - Ian Narev

Blake Henricks: It's been a tough 12 months. And I'll pick a company that's a bit counterintuitive, because it's both tech and cyclical, and that would be Seek. So, it's had everything going against it thematically over the past six months. But what we like there is, through COVID, the company didn't harvest all the cash flows, they actually doubled down in investing, particularly in Asia, where they almost doubled the cost base in the space of two years. What that's going to mean is, inevitably as job volumes roll off, they've actually got a lot of fat in the base to be able to react to different market circumstances and hold those earnings much better than they would have if they had milked it for all it was worth.

Blake Henricks: I think CSL and Paul Perreault's last result. What we love as investors, is counter-cyclical investing. Typically, if you can get in just after the cycle finishes, you get a much stronger business. I think that's where CSL is going to be. They've added 30% to their collection centre footprint in the US. And as things return, we think it's going to be really well set up. One really interesting thing, I think in the market, is that Grifols, one of their key competitors, is actually really struggling at the moment. They're having to shed staff and try and make their collection centres work, whereas CSL is humming and has invested counter-cyclically. So, that's the one I'd call out.