Andy Cosslett CBE chairman of ITV | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:11Hello, my name is John Reynolds. Welcome to Extraordinary Life Stories. On this episode, I'm talking with Andy Cosslett. For as long as I have known Andy, he's been a business leader, CEO of Cadbury's Intercontinental Hotel Group, Chairman of Fitness First, the RFU, Kingfisher PLC, and currently he's serving as the chairman of ITV. And he's a highly respected business leader with a wealth of experience across diverse industries. As a proven and successful businessman, who better to ask than what makes a great CEO and chairman? What does a chairman do? And explaining the difference between the role of a CEO and a chairman.

0:50I've wanted to have this conversation on Extraordinary Life Stories since it started. He's been a hard man to match diaries with, So I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. Let's get into it. Andy, thank you for joining me. Sure. Tell me, who is Andy Coslett? Well, he's this bloke from Manchester who tries to stay faithful to who he was growing up there. And it's a very specific sort of upbringing again, if you grew up in the middle of Manchester. and it's helped me a lot. So I've actually found that as I've gone through my life and through my career, being from that place and being from rugby and a few other things have been the foundation stones of any success and achievements that I've been able to get.

1:43So I think being a very proud Mancunian, even though I've not lived there for some time, I was back doing the Manchester University graduation recently and was talking about this in great detail. But, you know, very proud to come from there, very grateful to come from there. And I've travelled the world, I don't know how many times, millions and millions and millions of air miles. I feel lucky to have you sitting here. I've never forgotten where I came from. Yeah, I love that. And again, you know, we've known each other for a while now. I can't remember when we first met, but it was maybe 15 years ago.

2:18And travel was always a massive part of your life and even matching the diaries to be able to do this today. Again, I feel lucky, I feel privileged to be able to do that. What were the early kind of inspirations in the who and the what, if you like, that sort of led to your career making decisions? You know, I've been asked a few times about, you know, whether management gurus or people, very few. If there were any who influenced me, they were actually quite negative and I responded to the negativity. So, you know, I had headmasters who told me I would never ever come to anything at school. I found people who, you know, when you're young and you're growing and you, particularly if you're a little bit challenging, most people get somewhere in life or have an edge to them.

3:04But that edge is not what they want in school. They want little robots and conformist people who become prefects and things. Well, I was never a prefect because I was too busy asking why and are you sure? So I was a bit rebellious and it wasn't help from, I was on my own. My parents separated when I was 15 or something. So I grew up very early and very quickly. So I don't know that it was more than, you know, I had some people who helped me and some people who, but I wouldn't say I was heavily persuaded by particular people or I said I want to be like that person. I just followed my nose. I went to university, I went into business.

3:44I didn't think I was going to, and I did. And then I just went on from there. And then a few people took some risks on me earlier in my business career because they saw something that the teachers didn't see. And that's where it grew. And I think one of the lessons in life is the things that are actually not necessarily seen as good attributes when you're younger actually can become very powerful attributes when you're older because they're worth something different in that context. Yeah, there's a real theme of people there as well. You learnt from people you didn't like how they reacted to certain things.

4:18You learnt how not to do things. And actually taking that through your business journey, and I've always known you as chairman, chairman of Cadbury, chairman of Intercontinental, I think, when we first met. Apologies. It's always been very senior leadership to fast running right now, Kingfisher PLC until just a couple of months ago in ITV now. so to have a headmaster say you're never going to amount to anything there's got to be a little bit of a pride element that's kind of actually look what I've done now but there's no ego with you I've had really enjoyable conversations with you outside of today where I've almost been asking you from a mentoring point of view from an interest in business and you've always brought it back to people you've always brought it back to behavioral side of things has that been a common trait of how you've been successful in a business?

5:07I think so. And, you know, if I was writing a book, and I'm not big on writing management books and even reading them, but there's definitely, it's what I refer to, but coming from Manchester and spending my, because I was in rugby clubs from the age of three with my father, because he was there every weekend and most of the weekends as well. And he was a very good, very good player. And then I played from the age of 15, and from the age of 12 at school, or 15 for the local rugby club in Manchester. And you grow up fast and you aren't gonna be tolerated if you're trying to be someone you're not and too big for your boots.

5:44So if you spend a lot of time in that environment, you learn that the team is the thing and not you. And that if you try to step out and be the BIM, there's always someone who's gonna put you in your place. So that was one thing. And Manchester generally is like that. You know, it's a place where, you know, you're not going to flourish well socially if you try to be a bit, you know, the big man or whatever it is. And I've never forgotten that. And I've actually found, because you build on success, any success I got was forged on a real understanding of the importance of every person with their own merits and their own situation.

6:24And then genuinely caring about them or thinking about them. and the best, I didn't start as a chair, as chief executive, I was a junior oik down, way, way, way down here and it's huge. I joined Unilever and a massive global company and my first job was selling ice cream in Liverpool in the winter and it was hard and I had a Ford Escort and ran around with 300 cars that were my accounts and trying to get someone to buy an ice cream cake when there were people coming into the shops trying to buy single woodbinds, with no money. It was a tough sell. And the only way you could make a go of it was to be very, very good at understanding your customers, your shopkeepers, people with their cash flow issues, trying to position your brand and your products to give them something they wanted to sell and could sell.

7:15And it was tough. And I did that for the first nine months of my illustrious graduate entry into Unilever. I was going to be into London and advertising agency lunches and I did get there eventually, but the first period was tough. But that's teaching you resilience. That's also a story that probably earns you a lot of respect for the people that you work with and have worked with, where you've come through the ranks, you've learnt your stripes. Well, one of the things I said when I did this graduation speech, I said, well, what am I going to say about that? And I took out the card that I carried for For the first 25, 30 years of my business life, I carried my first business card, which said on it, Wall's Eye Screen, sales representative Andrew Cossack.

7:56That was my first card. And I did it because every time I sort of got promoted and went to a new job, I pulled the card out, remembered what it felt like to be on the front line when you've got these clowns in head office who don't know what it's like to be on the front line, dealing with very difficult shopkeepers, we've got no money to pay. And remembering how that felt, and the loneliness of the job and the hardness of that job, it was the hardest thing I ever did in business. I've done everything since with all these fancy titles and levels in different businesses all around the world. But the hardest job I ever did was that first year or so in Wall's Ice Cream, on the front line in Liverpool.

8:35And I've never forgotten it. And I could tell you today, the names of the people I used to call them, you know, back in 1979-80. And I kept that card for that reason, because it grounded me down the years to remembering what it takes, you know, and you make a sale one at a time to an individual who's not interested in what you have to sell unless the sun's out, but you still have to work with them on trying to improve their business. And figuring that out was a great challenge, one I never forgot. And I mentioned resilience, that's a clear part, even keeping the car almost like a memento, like a kind of a sort of reward from hard graft, but also empathy.

9:14Just the way you were talking then and like remembering how it felt. I imagine that makes you a really, really good leader, which is ultimately, sort of whether it's CEO or the chairman role, to reverse engineer that back into a team ultimately. You must be someone that a lot of people enjoy working with and you're looking in on their world with empathy and with a certain amount of respect for what they're doing and, dare I say, where they've come from. Tell me, what is the role of a chairman? Well, the role of a chair is you're still, you're captaining a team. It's slightly the same as a CEO.

9:50You're captaining a team, but in the context of a chairman, the team is smaller because you're captaining the board of directors, which will include usually a CEO. But you're trying to harness the talents of a group of people who have a job to do in a very specific role, specified role as a chair of a public company particularly. But I also was chair of the RFU, the Rugby Union, and half the people who were in that board were given to me. And they were dentists and tailors and dairy farmers. They weren't people from a business background. And you have to accommodate that differences as well. They're given to you by the game.

10:30So it doesn't matter where you are. You are basically assembling, or you have assembled in front of you, talented people, usually with a diverse and different background. And you've got to shape with these people the future direction of the business. And then the chief executive in the executive role is to go and execute that strategy and do what the board's set down. So you're trying to get the best out of people. It's a group usually between 10 and 14 strong around the board table. Most of them would be non-executive, so they're only in and out of the business occasionally. They're not like full-time paid executives.

11:06But you have to embrace them and they have to be up to speed with all the things that are going on. So you have to find the ways of doing that. You have to make sure that they are aligned to what's going on, because quite often they won't speak up if they've got a point of view. So you have to be able to read people very well, particularly around a board table. I need to know how you're feeling without you opening your mouth. So that's reading body language. And that's body language. And that's knowing you as well. Because if I know you socially, and if I know you, and we have a trusting relationship where we can speak to each other openly, which is the key to all relationships, isn't it?

11:39If we have that together, I can tell how you're feeling at any one time. That's interesting. So much of what you do ultimately is not in a meeting room. No, I'm just watching people. So this whole like, Annie's out for dinner again, gone to watch the rugby again. And actually, that's a key part of seeing people in a social environment and seeing their behaviour. Yeah, when I interview people, the last interview is always in the pub or in a cafe, because I want to see how they're relating to the people who are serving them. How you treat the waiter and so on, yeah. Yeah. I used to do these interviews when I was developing the executive team, and quite a lot of the ambitious ones always wanted to be the CEO without really understanding what that takes.

12:16And in big companies, being a CEO, particularly international businesses, when he's strewn around the world is quite a big challenge. So, yeah, so I think, you know, one of the jobs that I've had down the years is to try to develop up-and-coming talent. It's one of the key jobs of a leader, whether you're a chairman or a CEO or just a senior manager. And I had a number of people come, would have a one-on-one as part of the appraisal and performance reviews you have all the time. They'd say, oh, well, I want to be the chief executive. And they've read a book, you know, so because they've read a book, people are very important, you know.

12:50So people are the greatest asset in any business, which is true, by the way, but they read it in a book. So I first question and say, right, so people are very important in their business, right? He said, yes, they're very important. I said, OK, so what's the name of the lady we've got in the front reception today? And blank, no idea. And the number of people who go into big corporate HQs or wherever there's a front desk, there's always someone who's there before you normally every day saying hello to the customers and the people who are visiting and the number of people who work in that office every day full-time who don't make it a make a point of finding out anything about these people that they pass who are the facing the face of the organization it's just astonishing so I used to ask them that question very few people knew they answer I said not only should you know the answer to that question, you should know a bit more about them.

13:45How far they have to drive to work. How do they do school runs? How do they manage that? I mean, these people are giving as much to this company as you are, and yet you can't be bothered to know anything about them. So when you can answer the question why you don't know that, come and tell me again you won't be a chief executive. Because if you don't get that, you can't be a chief executive. Because they think it's all about numbers and this and this, and it's nothing to do with numbers and it's nothing to do with strategy, it's nothing to do with any of that. And I've watched you do that. I've watched you do that even coming into the studio today, showing industry people what was your name.

14:16I can see it comes naturally to you, let alone that curiosity gives you knowledge to allow you to then, for me in business, those people then if I'm running late or I'm needing a favour, they're going to help me. And that's relationship building, that's the team strength, right? The other thing that you read in books, you sort of made me smile when you were saying I read it in a book and so on a huge attribution to being successful as a CEO as a founder an entrepreneur a chairman is having a morning routine getting up at four in the morning running a marathon reading a book meditating and without taking that to extreme do you prioritize your kind of mental and physical fitness and what works for you yeah I'm struggling at the moment because I've had a dodgy knee so oh rugby stuff so I'm having to fix this now because I've not been able to run.

15:09I bet that's been bothering you. When I first met you, you were on a running machine. Yeah. So when I was doing my global trip, for 27 years, I was doing long haul every week at least once, usually more. I was doing 120, 130 flights a year, year after year after year. So the only way you can do that and manage the jet lag and the time zones is to pay attention to your physical fitness and have a good enough engine to be able to deal with it. And I therefore, I've always, I've played rugby and I've played tennis and I've always tried to be reasonably familiar with the gym. So it's tough at the moment.

15:48I can't do that. Do you do something else? Have you managed to work out? Yeah, I do some weights and I do golf and stuff, but that's not really exercising. And is there a morning routine that works? Yeah, I used to get up But what I was doing, I had two basic routines because most of my last 25 years have been spent in airplanes and traveling places. So I used to have two rules. One was if I was at home, I was up at 5.30 working out three days a week. Not every day, but three days a week. And when I was traveling overseas on business, wherever I landed, I went straight to the gym. So whether it was midnight, three in the morning, we would find a gym that was open.

16:27I was running a big hotel company at the time, so usually the hotels I was staying at would have the gym open for me, which was very kind. And some of them actually had my running shoes, the ones I used to go to a lot, like in Shanghai and Sydney and Paris and places. So they'd just keep a pair of shoes for me. And that was critical. And as I got, you know, I've talked about this in another platform. IQ is your first 20-something years. You know, you build your IQ, and that stays with you for life. You then layer on the EQ, which is the thing that takes you. So it's like the IQ is like a booster rocket, gets you out of orbit, and then EQ takes you to the stars.

17:02But on top of that, you need FQ, which is your fitness quotient. And if you've got those three things, you're set. Because the fitness also gives you the confidence to do what you need to do, to make tough decisions, to face difficult situations. Because leadership, again, whether you're a chair or a CEO, the hardest thing to know about someone who wants to aspire to those levels is, do they have what it takes at the moment of truth? And Sam is on a rugby field. Everyone can talk a good game, but in the moment of truth, there's a moment where everybody knows if so-and-so's got it or not. And that's the same in life and in business.

17:42And you don't know. You take these big positions. You don't know what's coming at you down the railway track. There's a great big locomotive coming at you at high speed. And I've had quite a few of those. So you have to be very able to be confident that there's not much that you can't deal with. No. Which goes back to that resilience. And that comes from keeping yourself. Being the best version of yourself. And actually I found something really fascinating when we talked a few weeks ago and had lunch together. And you said that one of the roles as chairman is to instantly start looking for your replacement.

18:15You're serving a time. And just listen to all those attributes. All those leadership qualities that you've got. how do you go about finding someone that is going to tick enough of the boxes that are going to work for you and the corporate environment that you're in? Well you know the one of the you can see this can be said as a bad or a good thing but the way that corporate governance works now in big corporates public companies different private companies or sporting organizations but in public companies businesses the outgoing chair or the outgoing CEO cannot find his own replacement That's not your job.

18:51That's the job of someone else on the board to do that. So I just left Kingfisher after seven and a half years or so. And my replacement was found by the senior independent director, who is someone else on the board. I am excluded from the process, although I can be asked if there's anything I would like to share with the committee who's finding the replacement and with the headhunter who's doing the research. But you're looking for people. And organisations are in different times. it's like the RFU is the same, looking for coaches, you know, you're looking for particular animals at a certain time who can do a particular job.

19:26And sometimes it's best to have an internal succession. I've always benefited in my career by coming out from a different industry and dropping into a new industry because it was just at a pivot point of the industry where they were looking for something new. And that's a good thing. But if you've got a strategy and if what you're doing is working, you don't change it. So when it's time for the current incumbent to move on, then you're looking for someone who can continue the strategy forward and not turn up. Because the biggest risk is somebody new turns up and they go, right, here I am, thank God I've arrived, and we'll set the clock now again and we'll ditch all this other stuff.

20:04And off we go over here. And you've just spent five years building this strategy. And in very large companies, it takes years to actually see it through. So you run a risk if you go external of that being ditched prematurely. That could be an extra ego as well. But there are times, yeah. Trying to prove themselves, right? Exactly. And people who are chairs and people who are CEOs tend to be fairly big personalities who have enjoyed some success in their lives and they think they've got what it takes to make a difference. And they feel that they have to always make a difference. But the The biggest difference you can make is how people feel, not what brilliance you bring.

20:41So that's the biggest thing a leader can do is to make everybody they touch feel better and stronger and happier and hopeful for their own future. Because running large organizations, you're one person. At IHG, the hotel business I was running, the system, we had 6 ,500 hotels in 90 countries, 350 ,000 people. You can't talk to that many number of people, but you can set the standards, you can set a set of expectations, and you can touch 150 people, your senior team, personally. I reckon I can know 150 people well, if I'm there for a few years. And over that time, you can inculcate a system of beliefs about what matters and what doesn't in this company, and that percolates.

21:29And that's the biggest role of a leader, is how you touch a large number of people, not with the genius of your idea. That's good in startups and entrepreneurial businesses and tech. It's all leading up, but most businesses aren't like that. Most sporting organizations aren't like that. You're not looking for the big creative leap. You're looking for people who can make everybody who's turning up every day want to go a little bit harder, a little bit further, and feel free to come up with their own ideas. That's your job. as the leader of the organisation to free the existing talents there and bring us some new, but not to be the one that's creating the ideas yourself.

22:08No. That's not your job. And a lot of people think it is their job, and that's why they're talking from the day they arrive. You have to shut up and listen to what's going on first and learn where people are at. And, yeah, it's so important. And one of the – sorry, I'm talking again. No, this is invaluable. I don't have a lot of sayings from business. And I say I've not read a whole lot of books. But one that stuck with me was, if you're running a big organization, they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that one has stuck with me down the years. And it's absolutely correct in every way that.

22:51Most of what you say, people don't listen to anyway. You know, if you're on a platform, you've done that. We've all sat in the audience. Just watched these presented. 90 % of it could be speaking a different language. They're watching you instead. They're watching the way you move. They're watching the way you deliver. They're watching. It's all body language and confident. Do I like it? Politicians have that same issue. They're trying to. But it's fake. And you know it's fake because most of them haven't done much in their life. And that's why it's fake. And everyone can see it's fake because they've not stood in the fire.

23:21They haven't been on the front line. They haven't sold ice creams or liver puddings in the middle of the year. So it's all dressed up. So when they try to come out as men and women of the people, it kind of falters. But I think when I took over at IHG, the first thing I was just after the tsunami in 2004. And the first day in my new job as CEO, I'd never been in a hotel business, so I was made CEO of the world's biggest hotel company. And day one, my office was in Windsor. the biggest operating unit of the business was in America and the head of America had applied for the job that I then got with his fan club in America they wanted him to be the new CEO worldwide which I got so I didn't have a bunch of fans there but I didn't go to America which is where the obvious pressure point was so I went to Phuket because in Phuket they'd had the tsunami and four of our hotels had been smashed to bits we'd lost people, we'd lost guests guests had lost children, children had lost mothers and fathers and I went there for my first two days I spent there just to be on the ground and showing them and it was deliberate in a way I wanted it naturally because there was a huge pain going through the world and the organisation and I went there and it was like a war zone, it was incredible and I said I'll come back and I actually went back the last day of my time in IHG I went back and they'd opened an orphanage and the same team was still there but that idea of caring and showing that you cared on the first day of a new job in a new industry about which you knew nothing was something which and then for the next seven years people talked to me about that people I'd never met in the organisation I'd fly into Puerto Rico or China and somebody would say oh yeah and we know you went because it just went around the organization that that's the kind of place we are and I said well that's who we are isn't it we look after people every day in a hotel that's what we do so if I can't show you that I think that's important then I've failed leading by example so you lead by example now I didn't know that at the time but that's actually what came out of it there's a there's a whole mental health conversation around that from you personally going to Buket and seeing things firsthand but being there in a work capacity but being there also as Andy, but I can imagine you were really hands-on helping people that have seen awful things, experiencing awful things.

25:50We're filming in the Jack studio, JAAQ, just ask a question. And you will have seen a huge transition in mental health from, dare I say, things that are pretty archaic and man up and just get on with it, to actually now huge HR departments with a number of different people all doing different things to try and help people in what is a crisis where do you sit with that not just as chairman from an ITV point of view but as as Andy who's someone that really understands this well you know I think it's and rightly so I think there are certain things which have been for way too long and and I look at it for two lenses one is there's a human and I try to approach everything I've done in in my life as a human so there's a human angle to this where it's just great to see finally that people can speak and not everywhere and not all the time, but we're getting much more grown up about being able to talk about things that affect you.

26:52And that's great. From a business point of view, I also see it through that lens. And it's the best possible thing you can do because so many people would be carrying pain. You know, physical pain is one, but the mental pain we also know is very, very prevalent. Again, it comes back to what leadership is. Leadership is about trying to make sure that the people of your business, the resources you've got at your disposal are working in a way that's most productive for the company and for themselves so they can participate in the journey and the happiness of results and performance and share the benefits of all that.

27:29So to get people feeling really positive about how they're spending their days, you want them to feel job satisfaction, yes, but you want them to feel well. You want them to feel that they and if part of that is a big obstacle to being able to speak up About something that they see or something they feel that's a problem So I think the more enlightened now leaders recognize that and see this as a very very positive thing From a business point of view and a commercial point of view quite apart from the human point of view Which is actually the most important thing that we're doing the right thing for more and more people so but I see it as a absolutely a win-win and it's the same and there's other conversations taking place about managing the environment and there's a lot of deluge of reporting and legislation and regulation that we now have to do in big businesses to demonstrate that we're doing the right thing for the environment but it's the right thing to do and it helps you connect with your people and in the old days it wasn't a big topic of conversation though but now we go into these We have these large forums where we have representatives from different parts of the company.

28:38And they come together a couple of times a year and talk to me as the chair or the board, the CEO. And they talk about what's on their mind. And the environmental management, I'm thinking back to Kingfisher where I was recently chair. And the conversation used to just be about paying conditions. Now it's moved on. Most of the time we would spend on those forums would be about how can we do more about, you know, we sell a lot of products that help people save energy in the home. save water in the home noise is expensive these things but they want to make a difference how do we do more of it? Can we do more of it?