Robert Gardner

In a time when your industry is under more ­scrutiny­ than ever, how do you defend investment ­consultants to your critics? 

If you go back 10 or 15 years, the role of a consultant was to pick fund managers—it was really just the outsourcing of a function. For me, the role of consultants now is to be able to anticipate the future, to help people to think more long term, and to shift their mindset from backward looking to forward looking. The clients that have spent more time thinking about the tradeoffs between time horizon, funding, investment strategy, and risk—those big-picture questions—they are the ones who have fared best over this period.