Brave Bold Brilliant: November Impact — Purpose & Profit Aligned

23:30Jeannette:Yeah. And that's exactly what I'm what I'm doing. And and, you know, if I think about it, if I take a moment to think about it, it's no different than my career. I pivoted so many different times in my career and I went and did so many different things that I had never done before. And in many ways, it was scary because I was taking on new responsibilities. I was taking on bigger responsibilities. I was taking on bigger groups of people. I was taking on functions that I never actually did. And I and I figured it out, you know, and I figured it out because I admitted vulnerability. I admitted I didn't know everything.

24:08Jeannette:I engaged people to help me. And I'm doing the same thing now. So to your point, I mean, that point you just made is so it really resonates with me. And I didn't think about it until this very moment, having this conversation with you, Jeanette, that yes, you know, we pivot so many times in our lives. And I have, you know, even in, you know, in my book, I talk about how many times I've pivoted in my career. And it was, it was a little I was a little afraid it took a lot of courage but it's the same thing now I'm just doing it in you know as I'm starting to leave the company but it's nothing I haven't done before let's hear from Lord John Bird so welcome to the Brave Bold Brilliant podcast I'm here today

24:50Lisa:with John the Lord Bird I've got the exactly right you put it so John I mean you're an absolute legend in terms of what you've achieved for homeless people and what you're doing now in the in the house of law so it's really great that you've come on thank you so much i appreciate it

25:07Jeannette:well you twisted my arm you offered me a kitkat didn't you did i no a kitkat i will give you a

25:16Lisa:kitkat anytime you want a kitkat i'm your girl so we're going to start with your journey if that's all right a little bit about your background some people will know you some people won't know you so well so I always like to start there so yeah do you want to kick us off with well I've started I've ended up in the House of Lords yeah well I was born to a

25:37Jeannette:London Irish family in Notting Hill which then was had the highest infant mortality rate than anywhere else in the British Isles it was a terrible slump It was a place where the houses were built, and they were brilliant houses, but they didn't sell in the 1870s. So they, you know, they filled them full of, they were declared bankrupt and sold by the courts, and then they were stuck full of poor people. So by the time I arrived in 1946, just after the Second World War, it was a slump. And the sagging roofs, rats, mice, you shared the toilet with eight other families. You know, there was no bathrooms, there was no kitchens, there was nothing.

26:32Jeannette:And, you know, rattling windows, everything was cold, freezing cold all the time, except in summer when it was boiling hot. So it was a real terrible place. And unlike a lot of slums that other people were living in, the slums of the North, for instance, were often very, very poorly designed cheap houses put up by a coal miner or a mill owner. But these houses were built for the bourgeoisie, for the posh. But they didn't arrive, and that led to a situation where, as I said, they got sold. So you'd be living in a house with a roof as high as, with a ceiling as high as that, with ceiling roses, you know, and architrave, and, you know, Corinthian orders, and all that stuff.

27:29Jeannette:So you kind of looked like, to me, I didn't realise it then, but later I realised it looked as though, you know, I was born in a kind of, you know, extinct civilisation. And actually when I was 22 or 23 I went to Pompeii in southern Italy and I went to Pompeii which had been destroyed by the volcano called Vesuvius and it looked like Notting Hill. And I thought, God, I didn't realise. So it was that kind of weird kind of thing. you know.

28:13Lisa:And so you were born there and did you have a big family like siblings?

28:20Jeannette:Yeah I mean my, well actually I have found out, this is, this is a, I have found out, you don't mind them, I have a couple of times.

28:28Lisa:No, we've got to have a group.

28:31Jeannette:I found out that when I was 69 and I'm now 76, I found out that my dad wasn't my dad. So I thought I was half English and half Irish and then I found out that my mum was playing away from home, politely to put it, in 1945. So I'm the result of an Irishman who my mother, who was Irish. I said, oh no, I started the biggest issue. Oh, you started the biggest issue! Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. and shook my hand and all that. And I said I wasn't actually coming down to sort him out because he's been a complete... He said, oh, that was last month. He said, in the last month, he's completely changed.

29:20Jeannette:He's supporting people, he's being kind, he's being, you know, he's really helpful, and all that. He has been transformed. And I thought, in a matter of... And what it was, it's a bit like you go to work and you don't really want to do any work. And it's a job that you don't want to do. And then someone takes a bit of interest in you and you kind of suddenly... And then they say, oh, you're quite good at that. And then you saw it, you change because you're in the marketplace, like as I was saying, all of us. And suddenly you think, hmm. And then your attitude... So this is what happened with homeless people.

30:04Jeannette:They started off being drunk and aggressive, there, you want a big issue. But they found out the more polite and kind and thoughtful, the more papers they sold. And they were there to sell papers. And I often, you know, people say, I love it the way the big issue vendor, they offer you the paper. And if you don't take it, they tell you to have a nice day. They don't tell you to go and get stuffed. And that is a part of what we all use you know if you're selling a company's products you've got to make the public think that you know you're doing it in a kind thoughtful way because that'll mean you sell more of the product so it's a very businesslike attitude yeah absolutely

30:47Lisa:and let's talk about the the perception of homelessness um and the sort of the image that maybe some people have around someone that's living on the streets because i guess some of that is probably justified, some of it is very unjustified. But what's the sort of the, I guess the profile, if you like, of your average homeless person? Or is every single person so unique that there aren't any kind of common reasons why someone ends up on the street?

31:16Jeannette:This is where I kind of fall out with most other people. Because I often hear anybody can be homeless. Well that's true if you have mental health problems, if you have drink, drug problems, great levelling, or if your relationship breaks down and you lose the plot, you could end up homelessness. If you have a mental health condition, you're more likely whatever position in life you have started off in, you could end up on the streets. But mainly it is a class issue because it's mainly people who come from, you know, the working classes, who come from the unskilled part of society or the semi-skilled part.

32:05Jeannette:This is my experience. There are people who, the one common denominator I've found amongst most people I've met in prisons as well as in homelessness is the fact they didn't do very well at school. And I'm typical or somebody who didn't do well at school. So you've got this situation where, you know, whatever you say, you could fall homeless if you had all of those conditions. But the people who move into homelessness are people who have started with a chaotic life. Poverty, long-term unemployment, social security, background. A lot of those people, not a lot of them, but a number of them will end up homeless.

32:53Jeannette:So to me the profile, this is what I would say 80 to 90 % of the people I've worked with who are in homelessness have these problems. And the other thing is the rootlessness, the fecklessness, the lostness, the not being able to kind of stick at things. We have helped many, many homeless people to kind of get somewhere. And they've done incredibly well and then they've fallen back and they go through this revolving door. And that's because of their restlessness and their pecklessness. They haven't got that thing that children should receive from their parents to move on. And an enormous amount of people I've known have come from the local authority care, because even though it costs£100 ,000 a year on average to keep a child in care, you would have thought they'd only spent five shillings on it, because most of them come out at the age of 16 with the average reading age of a 12 year old.

34:04Jeannette:And they have all sorts of problems, and they have this problem of applying themselves. I had enormous problems when I was growing up applying myself. Really, I just couldn't do anything. And it was only when I was banged up and I started to paint and draw and read and write, that I thought, wow, this is something. And, you know, not being any better than anybody else. and then concentrating and concentrating and drawing and painting and looking at stuff and reading, did I become a person who was good at it. But I found my passion. And then I found my passion through print. And unfortunately a lot of the people we work with don't find their passion.

34:51Jeannette:And if you don't find your passion, you often flake it through life. I'm not a psychologist so I'm probably using the wrong language but I do believe if people find a passion they tend to be able to weather all the storms that are thrown on them.

35:13Lisa:Do you think homelessness is becoming more of an issue or are we making progress in the right areas? There's always more to be done, of course, in any sort of area like this. But what's your opinion in terms of where things are today versus maybe where they were 10, 20 years ago in respect to homelessness?

35:29Jeannette:Well, if you go back to the launch of the big issue in 1991, there was probably, I think in the region of about 6 or 7 ,000 homeless people sleeping rough in the West End of London.

35:44Lisa:Just in the West End. Yeah, you don't have that now.

35:47Jeannette:No. London, Brighton, Bristol, Bath, these magnet towns. So you didn't get much street homelessness in Manchester or in Leeds. There is now, because homelessness is spread out. So actually it does look as though there is more of it because it's all over the place. But the problem really is that the government and unfortunately local authorities and charities have dealt with it as an emergency. So therefore they act in the emergency. They try and get them housed and all that. There's very, very little prevention going people, preventing people. Last year and the year before, the big issue did a very big campaign because we realised that we weren't the only ones that in Covid what was happening was that people

36:48Lisa:were losing their jobs and then facing eviction.

36:51Jeannette:So there was a quarter of a million people who potentially could fall into homelessness and that was frightening. And I was saying on the telly in the radio and in the papers, I said, look, you know, I work with 9 ,000 people a year. I don't want to work with 90. And that's not even, I don't want, I couldn't work with 90. What can I do with 90 ,000 people? So we built this thing called SMASH, which was saying no to mass homelessness. And eventually we got some money out of the government. we're still not sure, I think it was 360 million, to stop people falling into homelessness. The problem is people are still falling into homelessness, still being evicted, so it has not had the effect.

37:42Jeannette:But it raised the issue and now homeless prevention is of major interest and major concerns because of Covid. We still haven't got over the Covid thing, I mean even though you'd have thought we'd have been further down the line. But that's one thing. My opinion, it's all back to poverty. Poverty is the driving force behind social dislocation. So what you've got is you've got poverty. And poverty is poverty of spirit, poverty of opportunity, poverty of support and all these sorts of things. And if you don't have a way out of poverty, then you're going to be there for a long time. And virtually all of the money that the government spends is spent on emergency and coping.

38:40Jeannette:So it's like holding people's hands and very little on prevention and cure. And in fact, about 10 years ago, we developed this way of addressing this problem. And that is called the PEC method, which is prevention, emergency, coping and cure. So if you actually put this, like almost a piece of film, over any project and you ask the government, all right, where's this money coming from? Very rarely is it prevention, very rarely is it cure. It's all emergency and coping. So what happens is about 40 % of the money the government spends, of the 1.1 trillion money they get in from tax and then the money, some extra money they borrow, about 40 % of that is spent in and around poverty.

39:34Jeannette:So if you look at the prison system, we spend£3 billion a year, which which is not a lot really. We could spend more and spend it on rehabilitation rather than warehousing people. So we spend that. So we spend a small amount on our prisoners so that we don't get them out of it. We spend 15 billion on schools and yet we bail 35 % of our children at school who take up, who become the working poor who end up in prison or homelessness, long-term unemployment, depression, filling up the A &E department and living a poor life. So 35 % of children, 50 % of the money spent by the NHS is spent on trying to keep the poorest healthy, 50%, that's nearly£100 billion pounds a year you look at the social securities social support thing virtually all of that is

40:39Lisa:poverty let's hear from joe jamoska so welcome to the brave bold brilliant podcast i am joined here by joe jamoska and joe has been in travel industry a very long time she's a personality and a character that is larger than life in every single way and joe's going to tell us about her story but just a couple of highlights by way of introduction so joe joined royal carabine in 2005 so 15 years in that role well not in that role actually in the company but then in 2015 you were dedicated to celebrity and your current role is vice president and managing director of europe middle east and africa so quite a big a big title but um obviously prior to that you were at disney universal and you know I think the other thing that's fantastic is that you are incredibly well known in the whole LGBT arena as well and such a passionate you know advocate for diversity and inclusion so we're going to talk a lot about that so welcome to the podcast Jo.

41:43Lisa:Thank you Jeanette I'm delighted to have been asked. Very excited to have you here so it's been a couple of months before we could actually meet up and do this so it's great to be able to do that. Yeah I think a good place to start joe if you don't mind is just talk talk us through your journey where life started for you and kind of where you are now and then we'll go from there gosh okay well i'll try to keep it as uh brief as possible because circa what 35 years of the industry is a long time but um so i i guess it all came about through studying languages really so i i um studied german french and spanish um i used to be able to work in german eating french and drinking spanish but i can i can Now I can only drink in all of them.

42:26Lisa:That's where I've got to over the years. But, you know, languages were key to me. My mother was from Germany. My father was from Poland. So I was brought up with languages. And we might talk a bit about that later on. So therefore, I did a business studies degree in travel and tourism. And during that time frame, it was a four-year course, during which we did two six-month stints working in the travel industry. and for my first stint I was rep in Mallorca with Intersun Holidays as was with the infamous Harry Goodman and I just loved it. I loved it. It was an incredible experience. My Spanish was not great at the time and you know I was only just started learning Spanish when I was at when I was at college German and French were my stronger languages but I love the island, I absolutely love the experience but during that first six months I actually had to cope with a murder of a client four deaths, all of which apart from one were under the age of 25 through the balcony scenarios that we mostly had sadly in those days that still go on to this day and a birth, a baby was born in the hotel bathroom and the client thought that she had a hangover but she was actually pregnant So I do believe that it is possible to nearly go full term and not realise that you are pregnant.

43:55Lisa:Because I've actually experienced that myself. Not personally, but with this client. But a great learning curve for my industry. But I always knew that it was an experience and a stepping stone. I really learned about customer service during that time frame. Because it was the heyday of overbooking. It was the heyday of flights landing and not enough hotel rooms. And you really had to be on your game. and I have to say I was delighted when I returned when Lynn Wallington who's married to Nigel Wallington as was was head of overseas and still to this day I hold her in great admiration and she said you know you've clearly taken to this role like a ducks in water where do you want to go next so I then went off to Austria and lakes and mountains and I joined them for the time when when I finished my studies um so so I then worked within the tour operating business um Peter Long joined during that time from the construction world um I remember when he joined and I was very involved in the ski lakes and mountains program and it was new for in some because they'd always been Mediterranean yes and they they actually bought the business and we really developed it and that was great because it was already sort of an entrepreneurial business within a larger business and diana holland who was my boss at the time um who was a great linguist and real expert in lakes and mountains i'm still in touch with her today she works still with debbie marshall and does a lot of the um silver travel advisor trips and brilliant writer to this day um and we did it all we wrote the brochures we did the contracting and I learned an awful lot through through her um and um that was a great five years I tended to do five years since because I'd studied in I always knew this was going to be a career this wasn't just going to be a fleeting moment in the traveling I wanted to join as a career I wanted to use my languages um I genuinely loved working with customers and customer experience and learned a lot about that as I said in the the horrors of the the the early 80s in in the in the holiday world um and I then sort of progressed on to various other companies I was with Hertz Renter Car um Thomas Cook was my major client and then I joined Thomas Cook as a corporate sales manager and lived in Paris and managed IBM and General Electric um in the days when companies started to by their corporate travel across Europe or globally.

46:28Lisa:So that was very interesting, highly competitive roles. So I was living in Paris in the early 90s when they were building Euro Disney. Wow. Then it became Disneyland Paris. So I got to know a lot of the team there and then Disney asked me to join them on a European role, on a European marketing role, which I did. and that was an incredible brand to work for and had five years working with them on the going back into leisure so I did sort of corporate and then back into leisure and then had a stint with dreamticket.com the online travel world just at the time, late 90s when really the online tour operating world was just starting up and that was a fascinating period of really being involved with the fundraising.

47:24Lisa:We had our second round funding that we were getting. We had strategic partners in Ticket Travel Group, the Scandinavian business. And we were going for the second round funding when the sort of dot-com bubble burst. And our strap line was stop dreaming, start packing. And then it became stop packing, start dreaming. When sadly we didn't make it. But that was a great experience as well, working with Lawrence Hunt and the Rapid Travel Solution guys. but I actually then went back into the corporate world and went back to Disney for a stint and then I met Susan Hooper who was at Avis who had moved to Royal Caribbean and she said how are you interested in cruising I said to be honest no not really it's not really something that majorly interests me but the more I got into it and more I looked at it I just realized the excitement of the industry and how it's such a growth industry and that was 15 years ago my longest stint anywhere in a variety of roles as you said and um you know i think the i've been very lucky wherever i've been um i've had great overall had great learnings great experiences um but i do think the what's in the dna of the royal caribbean corporation from really putting the guests at the core of everything our crew and our staff overall is a culture that really suits me.

48:48Lisa:Yeah, well, 15 years. As you say, normally you've done your five-year stints and then moved on. Absolutely. 15 years sort of says it all, really, doesn't it? Yeah. And I think what's interesting is you were just talking then. You said you had that stint in the entrepreneurial world, really, where you were raising funding and doing all of that sort of stuff, and then you jumped back into corporate. But actually, your early career, when you were repping and having to deal with all of the stuff that that brings with it, you have to be very responsive and think on your feet don't you and um you know i think sometimes people tend to think of corporate as being very stiff structured without innovation and things like that and entrepreneur will be the total opposite and i think the reality is that you actually get a bit of both even in the corporate world absolutely you know i don't know what your experience has been thinking about that that sort of thing within your roles that you've had you're absolutely right i mean if i if i i often say when people say what part of what's really influenced you in your career those early days really influenced me one is the importance of customer service can you imagine now flights landing and there's no rooms for for guests when they land and having and how you handle that because we were we were frontline then we were facing the the the customer um obviously from a from a customer customer power and the customer rights then we're very different yeah frequently communicating um frequently even if the messaging is even if the answer is we still don't know which the world around us at the moment we still don't know um really looking at understanding people's mental health and mental situation you know i think it's been really tough when we've we've seen light we do now see light at the end of the tunnel but i think as we go into winter now and i think we're going into potentially a second situation that we're in it's tough for people because we were starting to go back to the office yes we were starting to see one another face to face and it was making such a difference and i do hope that we'll get back to that again um versus spending your life on zoom although i think there's been lots of pluses on that which i which i can talk about but so it's first of all i think is the key heatedness and the tip of the team and i think whilst it's so tough at the moment but from a leadership point of view you know having gone through as we've done your 9-11 ash cloud cost to concordia financial collapse gulf war very early on for us um this there's nothing like this and as as as i talked to the team we speak every morning at uh at 10 30 as a team and we started off on march the 19th when we start our first day on lockdown saying let's put a morning catch up here and we'll do that for two or three weeks before we're back in the office and still now we're doing it pretty much every day whether we're all there or not yeah we're still doing that and because the world's changing so much but keep because and it keeps the communication going it keeps us seeing one another in fact we've got to know each other better because we've met puppies um claire stewart my sales reps has just got the most gorgeous puppy that i'm just so jealous of because i'm still determined that we'll get a puppy um we we're meeting the children more we're meeting the partners more when they're coming in you know lynn's got an electric car which is causing havoc so most days i've got a message saying i don't know what to do with the car so they're hearing all about that and and so we've got to know each other better as well so i think seriously i'm not i'm not being i think that is the thing through this if you haven't got a good team if you haven't got a cohesive team and we've done a lot of work on that with a fabulous coach from a lady called charo garzan from business called paradox and she's been amazing in helping us we didn't start this with covid we've been doing this for a long time and but therefore the way in which we work together as a team now i think has really paid off especially in the world of zoom yeah and the world of virtual um so that's been a key side of it listen it's it's the travel industry as we know is going through it more than anybody the cruise industry literally was in the eye of the storm very early on yeah and has been singled out in a way that a lot of the other sectors of the industry haven't one of the things i'm also very proud of is how we work together as clear the cruise line international association andy harman the team have done an incredible job and whilst we fight like cat and dog once they're in the funnel and commercially yeah overall uh tony roberts from princess is currently the chair and we work again we meet this morning that was the call that i had before we spoke 9 30 every thursday we meet yeah um with all the heads of the cruise lines and and a lot of great work has been happening with the government and working with them to try and get more support we don't believe in yes there's frustrations but we believe the best approach is to take them with us on the journey not to just keep knocking them yeah and robert coots um just you know has stated that he's working with us as an industry to hopefully reverse the advice of to not cruise at the moment you can't cruise anyway from the uk um but you know bookings for 21 are not a disaster they're they're not brilliant but they're not a disaster people are booking but we just need that advice to change so that there's greater confidence but but the healthy sale panel recommendations are coming to the fore the center of disease control in the states are listening to the healthy sale panel because the u.s obviously for the three major cruise lines yeah is the core and we can see light at the end of the tunnel but we just don't know with this pandemic and this is the difference from any event that we've had when it's happened it's happened 9-11 happened it was behind it was awful yeah but it was behind us and then we made changes to go forward yes you know liquids absolutely not going to the cockpit and we learned to live with that the problem with this is it's still around us yeah and none of us quite know where it's going to pop up yeah so we need to we responsible we need to care for one another and look at one's own own health but I'm afraid I also believe we can't shut down we've got to keep the economy going everything we're stemming up is going to be a lot worse and that's a real concern that I've got and to see so many people in our industry we've had to make changes we made them very early on and you know who knows what's going to happen it's a really tough time and to see so many people great people so what would you say has been the worst piece of advice you've ever been given in your life or career whichever context i think probably if you can't beat them join them okay i think probably going back to what i said about perpetuating some of the inequalities and the behaviors etc that potentially in the 80s weren't great um so i think probably that is not if you can't beat enjoy them it's actually if you can do things differently then do them differently yeah do them in your own way yeah yeah so I think probably that is is is one of them yeah um and then the the best one I think um I think probably two so my mother's one of take people for who they are not what they are yeah and I think my father's one in from a business point of view is you know fail fail to prepare prepare to fail um and um failure is something again i think is a lot a lot of people i think a lot of women have it even more oh my god i can't fail but actually it's it's okay to make a mistake and to get things wrong and to bounce back up but i think if you fail to prepare you are preparing yourself to fail and and preparation to me and that's something again as a team I'm very proud of because we do our best to prepare the best that we can for our guests, for the teams, for our crew and for our trade clubs.

56:32Lisa:I've always found that when I surround myself with the right people, those that are at least a few steps ahead of me, it really makes me be a better version of myself. It always helps me grow the business, it always helps me develop the team and that's why we're here. So please share this with someone who's maybe thinking about starting their own business. You know, remember, all starts with courage, clarity and action. So be brave, be bold and always be brilliant. And I will see you next time.