Jo Taylor
The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
Jo Taylor exhibits the Navigator archetype throughout this interview, demonstrating a rare capacity to steer a 240 billion dollar institutional vessel through volatile terrain with deliberate, conviction-led course corrections. Taylor recounts shifting 60 billion dollars out of fixed income in a single year and rotating aggressively into inflation-sensitive assets ahead of the 2022 downturn, moves that required both analytical precision and institutional nerve. His framing of leadership is explicitly directional: he set a 200-to-300 billion target as a rallying point for the entire organization. Taylor also navigates complexity across geographies, asset classes, and stakeholder demands simultaneously, balancing fiduciary duty with a structured impact agenda. His venture capital background informs his risk calibration, and his emphasis on agility as a differentiator reflects a leader who reads shifting conditions and repositions before the tide turns.
“From a base of 200 billion of assets, my target in five years will get us to 300. And that's been a pretty good rallying cry for everybody to say, how do we make that happen?”
“We have a huge amount of flexibility and we use it. When I took over in 2012, we had about 45% of our balance sheet in bonds. By the end of the year, we'd taken it down to 15%.”
“We want to actually help those fossil fuel businesses to be better in terms of their climate emission footprint. We are more able to do that being an investor rather than passing the problem to somebody else.”
Money Maze Podcast: “Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan - With Jo Taylor, OTPP CEO”
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