Looking Ahead to Lessons in Leadership

0:03Hey everyone, I'm really excited to say that in a couple of days we're bringing you a brand new series from High Performance in partnership with our good friends at Pw. We're going to bring you a new series on leadership, and we're going to be speaking to some really interesting, diverse, fascinating leaders who are making a difference in the world. We're really pleased once again to be working with PwC. Their purpose is to build trust and solve important problems, and their global strategy, The New Equation, is bringing this to life for their clients, their people, and society by combining technology with human ingenuity, passion, and experience.

0:38So let's give you a little insight into what's coming your way. We've got four leaders on the podcast. Here's a quick clip from Steve Hare, who's the CEO of Sage. If it's within my team environment, I don't embarrass people in front of their peers, although increasingly, I hope within my team environment that people call each other outside. So you start to get a kind of self-regulating behavior amongst the team. But what I do now is, you know, if it does happen, I speak one-on-one. And, you know, and then it's all about how the person reacts, right? If the person immediately goes, you're right.

1:18How do you put it to them? I describe the situation. I say, you know, that incident, how do you feel about that? Why did you speak to the person like that? What was the reason? if the person then becomes defensive and says well you know i was getting terrible service they deserved it i know that we've got a problem right if they go no you're right i'm sorry i'm tired yeah it's been a bad day i'll go and apologize to them you're absolutely right thanks pointing it out that's the right behavior right we're not none of us are perfect right we all under pressure when we're tired can do things that we wish we hadn't done but if someone's good enough to point that out to you then you need to be the sort of person who goes you know what you're you're right and it may not happen absolutely immediately if you're if you're in a if you're in a bit of an agitated state it may take till the next day for you to reflect and go no god he was so right i shouldn't have done that right um but if if there's no acknowledgement then you know you've got a problem and i remember um um actually i this isn't my um statement i think um i think i took this from the barcelona principles actually pep guardiola but when i when i first became ceo the first uh leadership meeting we had where we had the top 80 90 people in the room um i was talking about culture and i was talking about behaviors and I said every single person in this room is talented otherwise you wouldn't be here you're all capable really of doing what you've been brought here to do but whether you stay here will be determined not by your talent but by your attitude and if you don't live the values every day if I don't see you living and breathing and behaving in the way that we want you won't be here Steve was really interesting actually and we also spoke with Tessa Clark she's CEO of a company called oleo which is a food sharing app and she is passionate about us doing what we can to protect the environment and for people listening to this that you know aren't plugged in to the world in the way that you are and they maybe think well there's not really a problem with people needing to share food or share things they don't want i mean you would have done the research you would know the numbers yes how big is this problem that oleo is looking to solve so we are solving the problem of waste.

3:45We started off solving the problem of food waste and now we're solving the problem of waste more broadly. And it is no exaggeration to say it is one of the largest problems facing humanity today. And it's sort of hidden in plain sight. So if we just take food waste very quickly first, globally, a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away, which is worth over a trillion US dollars. Alongside that, we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night who could be fed on just one quarter of the food that we waste in the Western world. And here in a country such as the UK, we have almost 10 million people living in food poverty.

4:18In the US, we have about 50 million people living in food poverty. So we've got widespread waste, widespread hunger, and then the environmental impact of food waste is absolutely devastating. So if it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China. And that's because a landmass larger than china is used every single year to grow food that's never eaten you'll also get the thoughts in this series from tim amu a young guy who has sold his business for plenty of money and he shares his journey his story and the things he's learned along the way there's a video of me on my phone where it's just a six minute video and I'm just going, wow.

5:03Like I'm just sitting on the floor and there's a bottle of like Moet champagne next to me and I'm just like, wow, wow, wow. Like that's all I can say because at that point is elation. So the first point is, wow, this doesn't feel real. Second point is, wow, this is real. This is my new life. And then the next point is actually about two, three months afterwards, which is that at that point it still hadn't sunk in like it was like wow this is real this is my life but like the world still goes around you know the next day i went to the gym and i went to sainsbury's and i bought apples and then i went home and it didn't it like the world just kept going around someone described it as like if you have a parent pass away so like i kind of got the same feeling as when my dad passed away when i was like yeah pretty much at the beginning of fanbites and i remember thinking to myself i was going on the bus i was doing stuff and i said oh my god like my life has changed but the world hasn't changed and i think you know three months afterwards was then i was like oh okay the world hasn't changed because when the money drop i was convinced that like the world will change like the earth will open and like everyone will start singing and they'll be like yes you did it my son right but um that didn't happen so those were like the three kind of feelings one was very much like this can't be real the other one was like wow this is now my life and then the third one was like oh okay nothing really changed so there you go that's what's coming your way from our leadership series.

6:52We've also got a special live episode, more details on that very soon. So this starts on Friday. So no matter where you lead, I know that you will get great insight and understanding from the conversations that you're going to hear as part of this series. So make sure you check back in in a couple of days time for the first episode from the high performance PwC leadership series. See you then.

7:20Thank you.