6 Nations Rugby Chairman: How curiosity can make you a CEO! - Ronan Dunne

0:00Working hard is not a scalable management style, working smart is. In 2007, O2 won the exclusive on the iPhone. We represented to Steve Jobs that we were in the experience business, not the technology business. Why O2 was so successful for a decade was... I can imagine the moment your boss is handed this device, he must have been thinking, this is going to change everything. If you were to write me a label to turn a product or a service into an experience, where would you start? I think the biggest failure that I see consistently in the corporate world is. Ronan Dunn is a corporate leader renowned for driving growth, transformation, and customer-focused culture in global organizations.

0:45As the former CEO of Verizon Consumer Group and previously CEO of O2 in the UK, he has led some of the world's most recognized brands through major periods of change. Today, he also serves as chair of Six Nations Rugby, helping guide the future of one of the world's most iconic sporting competitions. In periods of high uncertainty, you have a bigger opportunity to make a meaningful impact. Because without risk, there is no reward. You are just going to use the best competencies, skills, capabilities of you and the people around you to place the best bets. You are effectively saying that uncertainty can also be liberating with the right approach.

1:21How important do you think is the role of a mentor in someone's career? I only think there's one metric, one KPI that actually counts in the whole world. And that is, I'd like to explode the bullshit that most people are taught in business school and replace it with truth. Fantastic. I love that.

1:47Ronan, for those who haven't followed your career, could you give me an overview of your professional path? Sure. I think the first thing to say is that I have an eclectic sort of career. And it's really been driven by the fact that I'm a 15-year-old curious kid. And so most of my career, in a way, has been accidental. So if I share very briefly, the year I left school, the examiners went on strike. So places at college were delayed for several months. So I chose to take a training contract and become a chartered accountant or a CPA. I had intended to be a lawyer, but happenstance. When I then left my accountancy qualification, I moved to London because I was fascinated about how financial markets work.

2:39So I spent seven or eight years in financial services in banking and then in corporate finance. And through that, followed a former boss of mine who was just joining a nascent mobile telephony company. And so I happened upon the mobile phone industry and had the privilege of spending 20 years in senior executive roles in telecoms. So now spending my time on a portfolio looking, yes, at technology-led businesses, but primarily focused on enabling technology to deliver outstanding consumer experiences. Because customers don't buy tech. They buy the experience tech enables. So that's kind of what I've been up to.

3:22Fascinating. There's one thing you mentioned that grabbed profoundly my attention. You said you're a curious person, and I love people that are curious. And I think curiosity underpins the development of intelligence. Let's go back to your childhood, because I want to understand what type of stimuli affected your mind. It could have been your parents' education, or maybe something happened that shaped your mind to become curious. It's a great question. And let me tell you an anecdote that probably illustrates it. So my mom and dad were born in the late 20s. So they grew up and finished their education during the Second World War.

4:06So at that time, back in Ireland, economically a very disadvantaged time. So emigration was huge in the late 40s and early 50s. But both my parents decided to stay, although many of their family emigrated. And so the background was very much a make the most of limited opportunity. So my dad started as a kid in the post room in one of the big multinationals, Shell, the oil giant, and worked his way up. And so my insight to career was around circumstance and exploiting whatever circumstance was in front of you. And in exactly that vein, my dad ended up being sent to school at night to take a basic accounting qualification and occasionally brought the Financial Times home with him in his briefcase.

4:59And I was curious about these names, companies like Hammerson, a property company who had A and B shares and other things. And so I was just fascinated by what was happening. So I decided to write a portfolio, a selection of shares for companies I wasn't even sure what they did in the back of a copybook and price those shares every few months. And from that was the genesis of the idea that I wanted to go and learn how financial markets worked. And some 15 years later, I ended up working as an accountant and then as a banker in a large multinational bank in London. So that was my happenstance of the curiosity of, I wonder what that's all about.

5:45And just having a tiny window through my dad's career on the financial market. And I'm still curious about how things work. So you developed or you wanted to mimic a similar definition of success to your dad's career because dad is doing maybe this. No, in fact, not at all, because dad was just giving me the window. and there was never a census i've never competed with anybody in my life i've never actually seen necessarily role models i i'm one of those people who wants to put themselves in a position to be on the field and then see what happens rather than having a very specific view of i need to be here or i need to follow a particular path there's a great i'm a sports nut as we'll probably come but there's a great Gary Player, the South African golfer quote, and he says, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.

6:41I'm one of those people who just wants to be on the field, get a chance to be in the practice squad, and who knows what will happen. So it wasn't following my dad at all. It was, my honest thing is, if people were old enough, Meccano, which is a set that kids get given, which is little pieces where you can build, doing basic engineering, nuts and bolts, and you can build things. I'm always been fascinated by how things work, by understanding the inner workings and maybe like an engineer's mind. And that was what interested me. It wasn't that I was following a path. It was, I wanted to see, I wanted an invitation to be in the engine room.

7:24And financial services in the late 80s in London, where they had the deregulation of the financial markets, was stunningly fascinating. And London was a peer to New York in those days. So it was an amazing place to be. It was like having front row seats, you know, at the Met or, you know, at, you know, Super Bowl or something like that. Absolutely incredible. The reason why I'm saying this is because I believe that in families in which a parent is successful in a given field, let's say your father or your mother are a successful doctor or lawyer then if they are successful in their chosen field the definition of success within the family becomes that and then some kids could perceive that as their personal also definition of success or they end up pursuing a similar path towards that but in your case you're saying that you were just profoundly curious this is what you like.

8:24And I would say, and it's a great thing, and I'm blessed still to have my dad alive and very, very well at 96. So he wouldn't mind me saying, when it comes to moral compass and values, he's absolutely my role model from a professional point of view. He had a career that was, he took the opportunities that were available to him, But there was nothing in that, or my mum, who was a schoolteacher, that necessarily set a path. What they did do was instill curiosity and a sense of values-driven people always ultimately will get where they need to get to. And that was, I suppose, empowering and enabling and really made me feel there wasn't anything that I couldn't have access to or have an opportunity to try.

9:22And very specifically, they invested in education for their children in a disproportionate way. So the biggest single allocation of household income went to privately educating their children. So your parents instill you curiosity and curiosity takes you to financial markets. So what do you choose to study at university then? So this is the fascinating thing is I was about to start studying law at University College Dublin. But because the examiners didn't mark our what we call the leaving cert or A-levels to a British listener, my place and my offer was delayed for a month. So I went into a training contract for my chartered accountancy for my CPA qualification.

10:12So I don't have an underlying undergraduate degree. I just have my professional qualifications in treasury and in accounting. So again, quite unusual for somebody in the sort of roles that I've subsequently been in. But the point about that is, and I don't say this in any way defensively, is I discovered that the combination of experience and learning was massively relevant to me. And if you take an economy like Germany, where there's a complete parity of esteem between the academic route and the trade route, and you go to the highest levels in a Porsche or a BMW or any of the financial institutions, and you'll see people who've come both channels.

10:59Because that idea of work and relevant discipline learning and the academic route are both valued in the German model. Here, apprenticeship, FE colleges, further education aren't as valued among employers, perhaps, as a traditional undergraduate degree from a major university. But Germany is a great example of proving that the how you learn is secondary to what you learn. And that's certainly been my experience. I find your answer and your experience so valuable and refreshing for our audience, because this is a common question that I discuss with many friends of mine. They all want to understand if they can become very successful without a degree.

11:52And many of them, they're parents now, and they're also asking themselves, what should I advise my kids to do? And on top of that, I've asked many cross-sector entrepreneurs in this show if they believe attending university was a catalyst moment or a contributing factor, a directly contributing factor towards their success. And the simple answer for most of them is no, which we'll deep dive into your experience later. But you have been the CEO of some of the biggest organizations globally. And this is not just becoming an entrepreneur because we have seen entrepreneurs not going to university and then becoming successful.

12:35Ultimately, you don't need to face a job interview that somebody would look at your CV, perhaps potentially an investor or an investment panel. But to be able to work your way up and succeed at such a level in the corporate world without a degree, again, I repeat, is so refreshing and validating. I want to deep dive into the experience of your first job and how did that shape your mind into what is it that you wanted to do afterwards? Because I remember my first internship. It was in an industry that I am right now not working in. I believe that that was what I liked back then. But again, my definition of what I liked was a combination of what my friends were doing, what my parents told me that I should be doing, and my own perception of what would be cool or successful in life.

13:28But again, I was a very young person, so I knew nothing about life, little and about myself. What did you do in that very first job, and what did that teach you? Can I cheese and tell you two anecdotes? So my first real job was flipping hamburgers in McDonald's when I was 16. I keep loving your story more and more. It taught me two really, really big lessons. McDonald's is a remarkably proficient organization. It operates on a management by exception. There's a manual for everything. And the thing that it really embedded in my mind was the process liberates organizations to create personalized experience and outcome.

14:16whereas many organizations believe the process is the enemy of personal experience and outcomes because they think it homogenizes everything. Far from it. Great process liberates you to add personal touch. And the experience of why O2 was so successful for a decade was because we believed we were in the experience business, not the technology business. And we used technology to liberate our people and our organization to deliver exceptional, high quality, replicable experience. So that was the first thing. Second real job I had was I came to London to work in Bank National de Paris, now BMP Paribas.

15:04And I got a job in the accounting department because I wanted to work in banking, but without any relevant experience, they said, start on the accounting where you're a qualified chartered accountant. And if you're good, we'll give you a chance to move. And two things there. The first is I had the temerity in my interview to say, although I'm here for this job, I really want to work somewhere else. And interestingly, the HR director wrote it in my interview notes. And four years later, the CEO picked it up, called me and offered me a job as a manager in the banking division because he said you expressed curiosity and an interest i'm going to give you a chance so that uh interesting but the real thing that i learned was and it's an immigrant uh behavior is you have to work harder than everybody else just to prove to yourself not the people around you that you're as good as everybody else because very often your hardest taskmaster is you, not the people around you.

16:08So I worked day and night in that first job. I got promoted three times in a period of 18 months. Wow. But what it also taught me was working hard is not a scalable management style. Working smart is. And what I realized was that I had to switch from being an output-based, you know, an individual contributor to a leader. And through those promotions, I realized that investing in the people around me and creating the conditions for them to be more efficient, more effective, and more successful was how I ultimately was going to continue to grow both personally and professionally. So those two lessons very early in my career, hard work is important, But smart work is even more important.

16:58There are so many things from what you've shared that I find so interesting. And I could talk about each of those in an individual episode. But I'll try to narrow down my thoughts. The first one, I find, again, I repeat myself, but so refreshing that a job like working at McDonald's has provided value in the form of appreciating process and process standardization and automation that led you to believe in that and become one of the most successful CEOs in the telecom industry. A lot of people that perhaps are right now working in McDonald's, they are dismissing the values and learnings that they can have at that particular job.

17:47So thank you so much for sharing that. And then the second thing that also I find profoundly interesting is that you're in a way stating that what enabled you to grow at scale within the corporation, as you said, it's not working hard, but it's working smart. and working smart for you means being able to delegate efficiently because if you were the one producing the work, the input and the output, the ceiling would be too low because your time would be consumed in very operational detail. So you can outsource that to your team. You delegate maybe based on skills, based on time that you can outsource to somebody else and that allows you to focus on other things.

18:30Correct? Absolutely. But also at the same time, investing in the development of the skills around you. Again, if I can use the sports analogy, and people will come to realize that I love sport of all kinds. But there's a reason why people wear different numbers on the backs of their shirts, because they're all playing different roles. And you can pick your favorite sport and you can say who your favorite player is, but nobody would expect that person to be successful if the goalkeeper didn't kick the ball out and move the ball up the field. if they didn't have a holding midfielder who created some space so that the forwards then have.

19:07And the early learning about how teams interact, my real experience was not a corporate or professional experience. It was I had played competitive sports since I was a kid. I had played football or soccer, as we would say back in Ireland, because real football in Ireland is Gaelic football, which is 2 ,000 years old, but also rugby football, which I'm now involved in again. So that idea of understanding the different roles of the team players, and it's that combination of, yes, delegation, which is critically important. It's about trust. But it's empowering. If you give people context, what you do is you give them the confidence to then exercise their judgment.

19:47And in a lot of organizations, what you get is you get a top-down management style where people are broadcast to, but they're not engaged in a way where the conversation is, if this is what we're trying to achieve, what is it that you can bring to this situation? And that's incredibly powerful. and I learned it really early because honestly, as a 23-year-old coming into the bank, people who'd been there for 20 years scratched their heads, they looked at me and their initial thought was, who are you to tell me what to do? And my point was, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm trying to help you to be even better at what you do and if that works for you, then it definitely works for me.

20:29So I built their trust by being a team player, not just simply the boss. I couldn't help myself. identifying some overlaps in your experience and what are the biggest lessons learned that you drew from those early years and also my early years. You've mentioned two words, process and experience. And those two words have meant a lot in my professional journey. So I started my professional career in the consulting industry. And when I was working in strategy consulting, the most common type of project that we were requested to do was packaging the products and services of a client, cross-sector could be any sector, from selling products and services into selling an experience.

21:22And I remember so vividly that for some industries like consumer goods, If you're working with Nike, that would be much easier. But we've, for example, worked with the telecom industry like Vodafone. And I remember that the overall consensus back then was to provide a homogeneous experience across every customer touchpoint. And the terminology across all of these different customer touchpoints, the color codes, should embed a feeling that you would pair with the brand. And with that in mind, as well as automating every single process within an organization to be very data-driven, automated, reduce cost, and also potentially by being data-driven increase the possibilities of incrementing revenues, that's one of the things that we were doing.

22:10I looked at the different industries that were behind in this journey. And I said that the hospitality industry was one of the industries, especially in the luxury sector, that was most behind in packaging experiences at scale. If you would look at the example of McDonald's, at the entry level of the hospitality industry, you could have 300, 400 McDonald's delivering exactly the same experience. It doesn't matter the city that you are in the world. But if you took that same example to a luxury hospitality brand, you wouldn't have when I started at least more than two or three or four globally.

22:49And I wanted to understand the reason for that. And the reason were two. The first one, it's an obvious one. The market is smaller. Obviously, the dressable market is smaller. But are you telling me that it is 1000 times smaller, for example? It isn't. So the complexity of the operations for a fine dining restaurant are higher than a McDonald's. So that would entail two things. that the caliber of the employees in a way, or the skills, better to say it in that way, the skills of the employees would need to be different. But also the manuals that you were mentioning earlier that automated absolutely every single process within the restaurant, or as I call them, it's not a restaurant, it's a business, would need to be even better than in McDonald's.

23:31What was the biggest challenge is that most restaurants are not operated by entrepreneurs, they're operated by chefs. which they are profoundly good and better than anybody else at cooking, but not necessarily at building a business. So we, when I say we, my brother and I developed a strategy, which was opening a number of different brands, by brands I mean different culinary experiences, on board corporate standards, in this case, these internal processes that we are mentioning to automate the business as we were doing for a giant telecom like Vodafone, but at a single unit restaurant, automate finance, operations, HR, marketing, being incredibly data-driven and then being able to focus on the strategic things of our industry by being able to delegate for these processes, going back to your experience, so we could focus on the growth of the business.

24:25So for me, it's just profoundly, again, validating that so many things that I have applied along my journey that I'd like to think in a way they turned out to be correct, are things that you've done in your journey. And there is a very strong parallel, and I'm not just making it for the sake of it, but if you take hospitality industry and you take those early years of the telecoms industry, and particularly the mobile or wireless telecoms industry, you know, brands, there's a distribution within branding between those that fulfill a function and those which embed aspiration. And what's really important to understand is, in the same way as you have different places where you can eat, and all of them add nutritional value and a calorie value, but some come with form and function and therefore speed, efficiency, reliability, et cetera, is the brand promise.

25:23But what we discovered in the telecoms industry, and which for me is the parallel with fine dining is, for me, a brand represents the manifestation of the aspiration that a company holds on behalf of its customers. And your brand should always exceed the reality of who you are as a business, but represent who you believe you can be and how you can bring your customers on that journey. That at the high end of food is exactly why people go to a high-end restaurant. Yes, the calorific values and the quality of the food, but it's about the experience. And the liberating thing for us at 02 and subsequently when I went to run Verizon Wireless was manifesting that aspiration of how great technology in the service of the individual can liberate the individual.

26:20And our belief was that we believed the possibility of technology should be open to everybody. And by making it simple, easy, and accessible, we allowed people to do more, but also to be more. And that was that manifestation of what sits above function, what sits above calorific value. And that is what I think is the parallel that you get in all of these is that if you do the first level, then you very often earn permission to aspire with your customers to achieve the second. If you were to write me a very simple playbook on how to turn a product or a service into an experience, where would you start?

27:05Would you say start with marketing, with branding, with product? Yeah, I've been quoted as saying at a time at 2002 that we were a brand that ran a business, not a business that operated a brand. And as well as sounding like a clever soundbite for a marketing podcast, The reason I say it and the reason I believe it is companies get very often confused internally between what they see as a brand promise on one hand and the culture and values of the business on the other hand. As soon as there's a gap between the two, you're already in trouble. Yeah. So what we tried to do was build a customer promise inside O2.

27:50And this wasn't for printing and putting on the wall or sticking on a decal and putting it into the window of a store. This was a set of principles which we would use to hold each other to account and would allow us to manifest the presence of the customer in every significant conversation we had inside the business. And so what we genuinely were attempting to be was be customer led. And because we understood the technology better than the average customer, we could imagine how the technology could lead to even greater experiences on behalf. So we understood how harnessing the best of the tech and creating a space that would allow customers to lean forward, to do more, and therefore to be more, would be the secret of our success.

28:41and ultimately that's why O2 ended up taking over a failed building in North Greenwich called the Millennium Dome which within six months became the world's most successful live entertainment venue. What was the connection with the mobile phone business? It was because that was a manifestation of the ultimate experience and that's what we wanted to represent as a brand. So I think being brand-led, and yes, marketing behind it, but not just marketing. And this, I referred to it earlier, this is when context is so important. If I'm in a retail store and I understand what our brand promise is, then not just my behavior, but how I engage the customer with the technology is different.

29:32And what it does is it gives me permission to be a retail expert. It allows the team in technology to say, we're in the vanguard of delivering great customer experience. Building network for the sake of network achieves nothing. It's a bit like saying, I've built the best railroad in the world, but I forgot to order rolling stock. It's what happens on the network, stupid, not the network. Do you know what color the mast is in your local community? Do you even know where it is? You shouldn't. You sure as hell know what the difference between great coverage is and no coverage. So it's that mindset of liberating the individual.

30:11And I take the same view when it comes to employees and colleagues. It's ultimately about making them the success they're capable of being and creating that space for everybody to have ambition.

30:30Hermes, the brand, one of the executives at Hermes, was confronted with the claim that Hermes is too expensive. And they said, sir, Hermes is too expensive. And he said, Hermes is costly. It's not expensive. And it goes back to what you were saying. Hermes delivers on its promise on quality design craftsmanship so it is not expensive it is costly it is costly because the world is driven by an economy of a b c and d so therefore based on the average economy of a person it is costly but it is not expensive because it delivers on that promise now another brand another competing brand and he didn't name any brand but another competing brand operating in the same luxury segment, aiming to address the same customers, would be perceived as expensive because they're not delivering on the promise.

31:26I want to understand that, for example, when I was thinking about this, Hermes has historically claimed this. So this is not something new, but giant corporations like O2 started this transformation from selling products and services into experiences no more than probably 15 years ago, 2010, 2008. What underpinned that necessity? Was it a revenue problem? Was it a change of consumer taste and preferences? Great question. There were two either enabling or enforcing elements at the time. The first was, we found ourselves, we came out of, O2 came out of British Telecom in November 2001. We were a publicly listed company for six years before being acquired by the Telefonica Group.

32:26We found ourselves in the early 2000s as having an inferior network and less access to capital than our competitors. And so we realized that if we were going to make this an engineering defined race, that we could never win. But building a top quality network that is engineering wise, seen as having the best metrics, isn't the same as making it the most accessible, the one that customers get the most use and enjoyment and utility out of. So we set our stall out and we said, we're going to divorce the industry and rewrite the rules of the game, partly because we didn't believe we could win by the rules that others have played.

33:20Critically, at exactly the same time, the world of smartphones was just dawning. And this was before so um steve jobs and apple launched in july of 2007 in the united states in november 2007 in the uk and o2 uh won the exclusive uh on the iphone and some might say lucky the reason we did is because we represented to steve jobs the fact that we believed we were in the experience business and that apple customers would get a better experience in the uk on o2 than they would on any other network. And critically, he believed us because we were right. And that condition of we're not going to win by playing by other people's rules.

34:06And secondly, we see a set of enabling technologies, i.e. smartphones, that are going to create the power in the hands of the individual user, as opposed to it all being defined by the network and the network settings. the combination of those two created the conditions for us to realize change was not just a nice to have but absolutely essential for our survival and the tools to empower that change to make a real difference were starting to become available and most people won't remember but o2 actually went out and developed with a company called htc in taiwan a forerunner to the smartphone a thing called the O2XDA.

34:49So actually, with a multicolored screen, with a stylus that you could use to do things on the screen. So way ahead of an iPhone, and actually looking not unlike the first iPhone, we actually invested ourselves in trying to accelerate the development curve in the space to bring more technology to bear that would be liberated in the hands of users. So those were the conditions that allowed us to be different and reset. So XDA became very popular at the time, and then very quickly, big manufacturers realizing that this was on, that actually the networks were able to deliver a data experience that was meaningful, allowed us very quickly.

35:34So that original phone ran Microsoft, and so you can actually run Microsoft services on a Note 2 XDA back in, I think I had my first one in 2003 or 2004, maybe. And so those became the forerunner of the modern smartphone. That with a Nokia communicator were probably the two devices that defined that early phase of smartphones. But what it also manifested to our customers were the fact that we were going to be in the vanguard of putting the power back in their hands. And our first ever advert was, oh, to a world that revolves around you. And respectfully, every other telco in the world was claiming it was a world that revolved around them.

36:20Yeah. Wow. Such a powerful story. So I'll give you an entrepreneurial analogy that we often discuss in this show. So a key trait of an entrepreneur is to be able to use the resources at their disposal to be able to develop their competitive advantage. A failing entrepreneur would claim that, oh, I didn't have enough resources or I didn't have the right skills, but the good entrepreneur would be able to make the most out of what they have available. And what you're saying is that this is also applicable at the level of a billionaire giant like O2, because you wanted to reshape your unique selling proposition, not based on an asset or an attribute that you're not the best at, in that case, the infrastructure or the technology.

37:12But you said, all right, our competitors are better at that than us, but we still need to be very good at something. So we're going to be very good at something that we can be good at, which are experiences. did you personally have the conversation with steve jobs to to no so my my boss uh at the time uh was got a phone call from the then chairman of uh of telephonic and said uh how would you like to go to cupertino um and matthew said why and he said we're going to get an hour's audience with Steve Jobs to talk about the possibility of taking the exclusive distribution rights for the iPhone. So my boss and his boss flew to California, flew home overnight and said, we have to have this.

38:10And to his credit, the chairman in Madrid, in Telefonica, Cesare Alietta, said, you guys run with this. Whatever you need, you have our support. And then very quickly, I got involved with the team. Three of the very senior people who were very early formative, Eddie Q and a few others in Apple, came and they sat in our meeting rooms for a whole weekend. and one of our competitors, who may be based in Newbury and wear red, had been negotiating for nine months. And it starts with V. Yes, and we wrote a contract on the weekend and finally roll on now. And one of the things I do is I'm on the board at Marks & Spencer's, but there's an M &S food hall down the street from us in Slough.

39:01So over Marks & Spencer's sandwiches, over the weekend, we negotiated and signed a deal to take. And the single most important thing for them was we laid out with our creative agency what the in-store experience was going to be like for an Apple and O2 customer. How they would shop, what the experience would be, visually what it would look like, how we would deal with them, how we would treat them. And then we brought them, which was absolutely genius. The timing was perfect because the O2 was about to launch and it had one of its opening test concerts on at that time. And we brought them down to the O2.

39:45And a little known fact about the O2, most people think it's just putting your name above the front door. The customer journey inside that building was defined in conjunction with the O2 marketing team. So I can tell you the color of the lights in the bathrooms, all sorts of things were designed in conjunction with us. And so what they saw was we weren't just talking good game. We had evidenced in a partnership already that we would go the extra mile to deliver an exceptional customer journey and customer experience. And so they were blown away by the experience at the O2, about our commitment to what would happen in the retail stores.

40:23And the final piece of the jigsaw was, 24 hours later, one of our marketing team flew to Cupertino to see Steve Jobs with three pieces of wood because he wanted to decide the finish on the desk that would be the desk that would have the iPhones displayed. And he personally wanted to choose between three different wood samples. That's the level of detail. But the point about this is it's not just about being anal or retentive about detail. It's about understanding it's about the customer stupid. Because it's not what you do. It's what you make happen. Our customers believed that we were empowering them to get the best out of what technology could offer.

41:13That's why, you know, Johnny Ive as the engineer, it was the industrial design. It was the ergonomics. It was all of those things. Because truthfully, customers don't buy tech. Most customers still don't know what 4G is versus 5G or what 6G will be when it ends. But if the device does what they want it to do, keeps them in touch with the people that are most dear to them in their lives, keeps them in touch with the sports and activities that are most important to them, then they will be loyal to the device and to the people who enable that experience on the device. When your former boss, the former CEO of O2, went to meet Steve Jobs and to understand what an iPhone would be, because there was not such a thing as an iPhone, and then he was profoundly compelled by it, how did he share this with the rest of his team?

42:09because you said that he immediately thought we need to have this. Yeah. So two things. They were famously as secretive then as they are now. So he wasn't allowed to take a sample of the device out of the building. So they literally played with it in the room with Steve for an hour and then had to hand the device back and leave. But because we had developed the O2 XDA with a gentleman called Peter Chu at HTC, somebody who I'm still in touch with, one of the absolute founding fathers of our industry. But Peter had had the same understanding and insight. So we had seen and worked with a manufacturer to build something that had many of the same characteristics as the original iPhone.

42:56So we'd already started to imagine and discover the power of a smartphone relative to what was a communicator, i.e. basically a device for making phone calls, whose only unique characteristic was that it didn't have a wire at the end of it. So you didn't have to wait until the phone in the hallway was free. You could make on your own. But bringing the power of the emerging internet and the worldwide web and putting it in your hands, bringing you closer to the people and things that mattered to you, creating immersive experiences, all of the things we understand now, you had a window, a showcase that was saying, just imagine what this could do.

43:43And because we'd been working for a year or more on developing that concept, when we saw it and said, wow, we've been thinking about this, we've been imagining this, and somebody's already as far as we are and further yeah we know exactly this is the right direction we have to be on the bus with this and so that was the the the level of enthusiasm that he brought back but because we understood from the context of an xda the leap of faith wasn't quite so great because we knew we were already trying to travel down that down that road but the fact that somebody was further ahead and the power of an organization like Apple and Steve Jobs just made it something that we had to have.

44:31Wow. I can imagine or I can try to imagine the moment in which your boss is handed this device and he plays with it. He must have been thinking, this is going to change everything. And even better, he'd already quietly told me that I would be his successor. So I knew. So when we were negotiating and then launching this, I knew that six weeks later I would be running the company. So I was able to lean into his authority in that situation to say, we're going to do this. We have to have it. And he provided me with the ultimate gift of, here, take this and run with it. Although we launched in November 2007, and some of your listeners may recall that the beginning of 2008 represented the largest kind of downturn in economic activity the world had ever seen.

45:29I want to take us back to your career. So in 2001, you leave the financial institutions industry and you become the deputy CFO for O2. So you've changed industries, and I can only imagine you being a curious and ambitious person working for the financial institutions industry. You've had your aspirations and your dreams, maybe to work at a huge bank one day and become a C-level. And you gave that away, and you follow your former boss into this new industry. How did you determine back then that that was the right move for you? there were probably two drivers the first thing is i always believed the great finance people are the ones that make it simple for everyone to understand and work out how to say yes so i was already on a journey of i want my finance my numeracy to be my superpower that liberates me to do all the other things because if you bring finance to the table as a reason to say no you can stop almost everything if you bring it to the table as an enabling power then it's amazing the conversations you get involved in it's amazing how early you get involved in the conversation so i had been working with david my boss for a few years and i understood through him that the role of great finance people was to understand the fundamentals of how the business made money and look at every opportunity, not in the context of yes or no, but how do I replicate the conditions that means we have a chance of making money?

47:14And actually business is an awful lot simpler than people make it out to be. Genuinely simple. You know, the telecoms industry and mobile telecoms is, it's your cost of acquisition, it's how long your customers stay, and tertiary to that is how much they spend every month, because actually that normalizes quite quickly. All the other stuff, guess what? You're using global industry standard technology. So you building your network will cost broadly exactly the same as the person who you're competing with to build because you're all buying industry standard technology and you're deploying it in an industry standard way.

47:53The bit that will make the difference is the way you empower and enable your people. It's the permission that you give them to embrace the experience, to make a difference. So what I found was that actually our job as finance people was to find a way to leave space for the magic. And so I thought, well, Bob, know nothing about it. But as it's early and it's nascent, and a very unusual thing, because I'm a bit of a geek. I try to hide it and pretend I'm a marketeer, but I am a bit of a geek. So O2 was created through what's called a demerger process. So you take a business, you split it in two, and each shareholder overnight went from being a shareholder of BT to holding two pieces of paper, one old BT and one new O2.

48:46That meant we created a FTSE 20 company overnight. That almost never happens. So the idea of being part of the process of giving birth to not just a baby elephant, but a fully grown elephant in financial terms, was a unique experience and something that I just thought this would be a fascinating journey. I know nothing about telecoms, but the transaction itself will be amazing. And it was, and I learned a ton. but it also allowed me to be in there at the gestation of a big company. I helped them to write every single policy. Now, some people might say, I'm yawning now policy. I set the rules. Nobody would yawn when they said, I wrote the coaching manual that helped England to win the World Cup in 2003.

49:33Nobody would yawn at that. But they might yawn when I say, I wrote the financial control manuals for a huge public company with a valuation at its peak of about 18 billion. Well, guess what? That's just as important as putting the ball in Johnny Wilkinson's hand in overtime for him to score the drop goal. It's exactly the same thing. You created the process and conditions around that enabled that to happen. And the thing for me is I've always wanted to be the person that says, now that we've put a framework in place, now go and have fun. And so I knew I'd have fun in a new nascent industry and that I might have a chance.

50:16I only think there's one metric, one KPI that actually counts in the whole world. And that is, was it different because you were there? If it was, you have a right to talk about it. if it wasn't if you were just a fellow passenger on a journey that a company or a team or something else happened i'm sorry you've no right to that story whatsoever you're just another observer so i always want to put myself in places where there's a chance that it'll be different because i was there to have genuinely left your dna behind and in 10 years from now somebody will say Well, the reason we do that is because running, that's the most powerful thing in the world.

51:01And that's what the opportunity of going into a relatively new industry, but one that was, the company was going to be so big that it was going to have a role to play, good or bad. O2 was going to be a huge elephant in the room in those early days of telecom, mobile telecoms. And guess what? We got it more right than wrong. So that was fun. Three things that underpinned your industry transition. Number one, a person of influence, your former boss, David. Number two, your innate curiosity. And number three, building a legacy. Let's talk about the first one. Sure. your former boss david clearly influential in your decision making back then how important do you think is the role of a mentor in someone's career more so in to become successful it's a great question and can i start by saying something that's kind of adjacent to it is a lot of people confuse coaching and mentoring they're fundamentally different things and I'm not saying that people don't need coaches, but mentoring is, in my view, is liberating the innate talent and capability that an individual has by affording them the access to your knowledge and most importantly, experience in a way that allows them to accelerate the application of their knowledge and expertise in a way that means that they can learn faster.

52:45That's what I consider mentoring to be, helping them to shape and frame their thinking, to address uncertainty, to deal with things. Coaching can be about specific needs that they have, to be a leader, to be a team leader, other things important. But I think people get confused between the two. So I think mentoring is hugely important and 40 % of my time now in my portfolio career is pro bono mentoring and predominantly of female founders and entrepreneurs, because they generally get a poorer shake on access, both to money, as you'll know, as a founder, only 2 % of the money that's raised in the early stage goes to female-only founders.

53:25A proportion, about 15%, goes to male and female. So my experience on mentoring was nobody necessarily put a mentor in place for me, but I had the temerity to ask people who I respected to help me. And so somebody like David might not identify himself as being a significant mentor to me, but he absolutely was because I used to go into his room and ask him to fill in some of the blanks for me, help me to frame some of the things that I was learning for the first time. And so he became very, very influential, but he also did it in a way that created space. And I think that's really important in mentoring.

54:10Mentoring is not answering questions on behalf of the mentee. It's framing the question in a way that the mentee has an opportunity to come to the conclusion themselves. And if I was to take one lesson from all of that coaching, mentoring, and experiences, work out what the question is before you try to answer it. Early in people's careers, they tend to misunderstand the question or misunderstand the complexity of the question and therefore answer it slightly in a vacuum. Whereas it's taking slightly longer to work out what the question is. So I wrote during the lockdown six lessons of leadership and I said one thing about business strategy is that ready, aim, fire is always a better approach than ready, fire, aim.

55:00But it's remarkable how many businesses feel the need to react and therefore very often fall into the trap of ready, fire, aim. because the market expects them to respond. Their customers expect them to respond, but they haven't worked out what it is they're actually responding to. And the bigger the company, the bigger the danger of that. So for me, to summarize, mentoring, hugely important, but mentoring shouldn't be, A, confused with coaching and should always afford the individual who's the mentee to make the decisions because what you've helped them to do is frame the context in which the question needs to be answered and make sure that they've worked out which question it is that needs answering.

55:46That's the key.

55:52What is your relationship with fear? Because people, and I guess it's only natural, when you're going to potentially change something in your life, fear is one of the common feelings that we can all endure. And fear is a very powerful feeling that will make us do something or not do something. When you went through this transition from one industry to the other, and you've transitioned into various different roles throughout your career, all of them successfully. Has fear played a role in that decision-making? Fear is a stranger to me. Again, I don't want to sound flippant, But if there's something that is a variable around you and you have a way of influencing it or impacting it, take the action.

56:47If it's an external factor that you are in no way able to control, it's an element of context. That's what it is. It helps to frame the context. But the idea that you should somehow or another be fearful of things that you can't shape just makes no sense whatsoever. in a bizarre sort of a way, in periods of high uncertainty, you have a bigger opportunity to make a decision that has a meaningful impact on the situation. I'm the quietest person in the eye of the storm. I'm calm because I see it as an opportunity to make a great decision that will make a big difference. So no, I'm not scared of anything, but I also don't sit around and ignore things that I can address, which I think a lot of people allow themselves to be fearful of things that actually they can control.

57:39If you can control it, deal with it. If not, why worry about it? It's just context. The only type of people that I met in my life that share a similar mentality in this regard to you are engineers. Engineers, they tend to have a very logic-driven approach to decision-making, but most of the ones that I met don't have something that you have which is quite to have a balance of both which is the ambition and the thrive and the curiosity to not only innovate but to create a legacy and to keep moving forward and to keep asking yourself what if and what that. But there's a dirty little secret out there that nobody tells you And that is that whether this is the entrepreneur setting up their own business or somebody who ends up becoming the boss, you don't have to know the answer today to the questions you didn't know the answer to yesterday.

58:41The role of the boss or the role of the entrepreneur is to decide how you choose to deal with uncertainty. because the reward for entrepreneurship is you embracing risk. Because without risk, there is no reward. So the idea that you address the things that can be addressed and then an entrepreneur or a leader, a senior executive, what they're actually doing is applying the risk capital that they have to those variables that are most likely to give them the best economic return. And so the dirty little secret is, it's not that the boss knows the answer to the question that the person who works for him doesn't know is.

59:34They realise that their job is to allocate risk on the residual uncertainty that's left after all the questions that can be answered have been answered. But just stating that is unbelievably liberating. on my first day as a ceo i thought oh shoot i now need to be much wiser than i was yesterday because i need to know the answer to all these things because i'm the boss and all the questions come to me and reasonably quickly i worked out no no you just need to choose how you allocate the risk capital and the risk appetite of the organization against the residual risk that's left in business. Because if there is no risk, there's no return.

1:00:18And you're just going to use the best competencies, skills, capabilities of you and the people around you to place the best bets. And that's actually a very different thing than the fear of, oh, I don't know what the right answer is. And I found it very liberating. The first couple of months as a CEO, I thought, I don't have the relevant experience and I was very tough on myself. And then I kind of reflected and had something of a spiritual moment. And I thought, you know what? Everything you've ever done has prepared you for today. You have a sense of understanding of risk. You have a sense of the risk capacity of the organization because you've worked in it for a decade.

1:01:00Why don't you just play those cards? And we did. We renegotiated our biggest single joint venture in the first couple of months. We decided to go and do a network joint venture because we didn't have enough capital to build the best network. But if I entered into a contractual agreement with another listed company, well, guess what? I would be able to invest enough money that we both had. So some of those things where I don't have the answer, but I now know what I'm going to do with that situation in a way that delivers us the best possible exposure to risk, i.e. the one that will deliver a reward to our shareholders and our employees and ultimately our customers.

1:01:41so that it's very liberating realizing you don't have to know the answer you just have to know what are you going to do in circumstances where there is no black and white answer there is no yes or no i really like this because you are effectively saying that uncertainty can also be liberating with the right approach completely it's also the same as vulnerability the risk of just making a a quick turn but um uncertainty and vulnerability are two of the same things it's just one you're talking about the introspective thing is honestly the most powerful trait of a great leader is vulnerability that instead of saying you know i'm the toughest i'm the bump bump the ability to recognize that you're vulnerable and express that vulnerability in a way that aligns others around you to common cause is massively massively powerful that's that's real leadership you know because you're bringing people together in common cause.

1:02:45You're expressing honestly your fear of failure, as the case may be. People want to work together to support each other. And I think vulnerability in that way matches into that idea of uncertainty inside a corporate and a risk environment. I think it's a very powerful combination. 2008 was at least on paper an important year for you because you're appointed O2's you're appointed the CEO of O2 this means that you become the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the United Kingdom how do you feel? how do you feel when you accomplish that? is it a sense of accomplishment, of success?

1:03:37And again, I think people who know me will respect me for saying this is, I never expected to be the boss. And it's not to say that I wasn't ambitious, that I am still ambitious. But I thought, and you alluded to it earlier in our conversation, I was a good finance guy. I was commercial. And my expectation was that I'd probably end up being the finance director of a bigger FTSE 100 company or whatever. And that would be my career path. And again, I was lucky that my boss, Matthew Key, and his boss, the chair, Peter Erskine, Both of them recognized in me something that I hadn't perhaps ascribed to myself, which was that I was a natural leader and that not just in my subject matter area, but that people respected me, took my opinion into consideration and that I had influence.

1:04:35And so they sat me down and said, we actually think that you have the potential to be the next CEO. So it hadn't occurred to me. and the time horizon was relatively short so this is maybe six months beforehand so honestly it was a bit like it's a an escapade an adventure it wasn't something that i had been planning and thinking and thinking and it came to me as a an opportunity and so i went home and i talked to my wife and said to her you know the guys at work think that maybe i could be the next ceo and of course she was ambitious on my behalf and said well of course if they offer it to you why wouldn't you why wouldn't you take it so I walked into it not in this sense of an accomplishment of something that I'd been building and planning for for a long time I sincerely saw it as a new adventure and again and I know it's easy to say sometimes when you've been successful or perceived to be successful.

1:05:36I ascribe no value to the label that what your job title is. You are who you are by virtue of the impact and influence you have, because it's not what you do, it's what you make happen around you that determines you as an individual and your worth. And that's as much in the community in which you live, in the family environment, as it is in the work environment. This BS about people being defined by their job titles just, it bores me, I just don't ascribe any value to that at all. So for me, this genuinely was an adventure. And yes, of course, my mom and dad were proud of the fact that I'd been appointed the CEO.

1:06:17But I went to work thinking, I now have more influence, going back to the point I made earlier of the opportunity to leave your DNA on the situation. I had strong views about how we could drive the business harder and further. and I was excited about the prospect of being at the table for those big conversations where when the music stopped, I could be the one to say, okay, having heard everyone, we're now going to go and turn left or turn right. And I wasn't scared by that. I've considered that a privilege. And so I had to learn how to be a boss, to be a CEO, and to be more open-minded to a whole wide range of things like your relationship with the regulator, things like your relationship in the UK with government, because you're building critical national infrastructure.

1:07:07Those are much bigger roles when you're the CEO and you're the face of the organization than perhaps, you know, getting the budget approved by the group or whatever the case may be. So I had to learn some of those new things. But as somebody who naturally sees themselves as a cheerleader and storyteller on behalf of the organization. I wanted to embrace that opportunity to tell our story because I thought we had a great story to tell. So yeah, for me, it was an adventure, not a career thing. It was an adventure. You mentioned your wife. Yes. What role did your wife play in your career? Fascinating.

1:07:45So my wife and I trained together as chartered accountants in Deloitte. So one of the big six firms as was. And so we followed similar paths. My wife actually started studying engineering at Trinity College Dublin and then moved to a business and accounting degree. And then we met at work. So we followed similar paths, a core accounting qualification, and then both had an appetite to move to London. My wife, of Irish parents, but had actually been born in London. And so she had been here when she was a very young child and gone to school in her early years and then had gone home when her mum and dad had moved back to Ireland.

1:08:27So she had some knowledge of London. And so we came again. It was an adventure. And we both worked in banks in the city. And like many immigrants, we thought we were here for five years and 38 years later, we're still uh we're still here and the most the most powerful thing of our relationship is the fact that we both were quite different but are very aligned from a values uh point of view and elaine is without a doubt um my greatest cheerleader and so in those circumstances where I might have come home and said, I'm not sure whether I could do that or should do that. She would always back me no matter what.

1:09:20And even things like, without changing the subject, but when we moved to the United States, one might say great career opportunity. Loads of people around us thought, you're crazy, you're successful in this market. why would you put it all at risk and try to start again by you know to be successful in a in a market that you don't know anything about but she said you can do this why wouldn't you let's do it and so she's been always that those critical decisions has always been the person that has said yes why not uh do it rather than know why and that's been massively important because i'm still a kid i'm 15, I'm curious.

1:10:05I still want to go on adventures. I still want to pack my knapsack and go out for the day and have fun. I genuinely do. And that definitely comes from my dad, who's 96 and still as bright as a button, goes out every single day and still has the same level of curiosity as he had when he was a kid. I'm very happy to hear that. I believe that the power of a healthy relationship can unlock the best future for yourself and we sometimes underestimate that we believe that the value of a relationship begins at home and finishes at home the moment you leave the door the value is or perhaps every decision you're making relies on you and I personally have a similar experience to you I've been with my now fiance for almost eight years and And I can categorically confirm that I am where I am at a professional level because of her, because she's been there for me, believing in me.

1:11:09And that's a type of support that I think it's incredibly important when you're building anything in life. In my case, I was building something from scratch and the amount of uncertainties were incredible. And yeah, she was there for me. So I'm also very happy that at a different scale and in a different industry and in a different generation, this is also applicable. And I think it's a very valuable lesson learned for anybody that is right now in a relationship or in the midst of finding a relationship. This person will not only become the parent or the co-parent of your kids potentially, but can help you in ways that you will only realize down the line.

1:11:54Absolutely.

1:12:00Let's talk about the next change in your career because if there is one thing that I have learned by studying you profoundly and your career path is that you are curious by nature, by design, and you've proven that at every step of your journey. So eight years serving as a CEO of O2 were not enough to satisfy your ambition towards legacy or curiosity. In 2016, you decide to become, or you decide to move to Verizon, which is another telecom giant, as their CEO. Why do you move from a successful environment into an unknown environment? Well, we set a little bit of context around 2016. So Telefonica was our parent company at the time, and they had suffered quite a lot during the economic downturn from 2008 on.

1:13:05So they had an appetite to liquidate some of their portfolio. So they were exploring the possibility of entering into a joint venture and merging with one of our competitors in the UK, something that I was very supportive of. of. But the result of that would mean that we were going to bring two businesses together. And in a way, my job would have been done at that stage inside O2. And as a general point, I would challenge businesses that have had singular leadership for a decade or more as to whether or not the rate of change inside your organization is keeping up with the rate of change outside.

1:13:49And my definition of a healthy company is always having the rate of change internally greater than the rate of change externally. If you're doing that, you're keeping ahead of the game. So the framing of that 2016 was, we have a plan to do this transaction, and at the end of that, I will go and find myself a new job. So I was in the unusual, but perhaps luxury position of being in a job, but having permission to look for another job, because people knew this transaction was planning to happen, subject to EU clearance. And so at the same time, in the US market, which was dominated by two or three big players, but respectfully was less sophisticated from a marketing, from a customer experience point of view, and we're still in that it's about the technology stupid phase rather than about really establishing distinct, unique customer experiences enabled by the tech.

1:14:53And the board at Verizon had recognized that competition was increasing from one of their competitors, T-Mobile, in part because T-Mobile was substantially owned by Deutsche Telekom. And that the leadership of T-Mobile in the States were getting access to the experience and the insights of Deutsche Telekom in Germany and elsewhere. And so they were getting a window in and a seat at the table around what was happening in the marketplace in Europe. And I would still make the point, not just for telco, but a broad point is, because of the relative size of marketplaces in the European Union, it's a more sophisticated marketing environment than the united states is united states is one relatively large homogenous marketplace with 360 million people in it and you have three or four telcos in a population of 500 million in europe you know inside the eea you have 125 licensed mobile operators serving a 40 % bigger marketplace.

1:16:05So the need to differentiate, the need to market, the need to have very clear brand values, et cetera, much more significant. So pull those pieces together. I said, I want to do one of two things. I'm not going to go and work for one of my competitors in Europe. So I'm going to either switch industries and take the insights I've learned from a regulated, highly capital intensive, but ultimately B2C industry and bring them to somewhere else. And I thought about media. I thought about consumer banking. Those were the sort of areas that I saw. I also thought about transport, the BAs of this world, the easy jets, people like that.

1:16:50Or the alternative was go and lead a significant telco somewhere else in the world. And so that started my approach to the US market. And a conversation was initiated with Verizon at their request, because they were looking to recruit at the time and had this sense that maybe a European might be the right answer for them. And to cut a very long story short, I flew out every Thursday night for six weeks in a row, met people on a Friday, flew back on the red eye on a Friday night. And in the end, I said, you know what? You guys aren't going to learn anything more about me through this process. And not so much put up or shut up.

1:17:32I'm not that brave or arrogant. But I kind of said, look, I'm not coming again next week. I said, what you can do is come and visit me. And I told this story in the Financial Times about a year later that nobody knew at the time. My last interview was an open all-day interview where the president of Verizon basically shadowed me for the entire day. Went to every meeting I was at, went to a town hall I gave, walked the floor in the office with me, went and mystery shopped in the retail store and our competitor retail stores. and my case to him was what you're buying is somebody who is an up front out there leader who leads by example who is chief cheerleader and chief storyteller on behalf of the organization but my commitment is a people commitment which is to enable people to be the success they deserve to be so i said if any of that is true you'll be able to see it and if it isn't true you'll work out after a day shadowing me that my talk is a better game than my do.

1:18:39And so he stayed for the day and they offered me the job on Monday. That was it. So I did a full day, eight hour live interview in front of my whole team. And they didn't know I was interviewing, but the president of Verizon walking around with the president of O2 isn't an unusual thing because we all work in the industry together. So that was how I kind of turned a process into an experience, living on the belief that I've shared now multiple times, which is, it's not about the process, stupid. It's about the experience that that enables. And so I turned it on its head. And the rest is history.

1:19:20And honestly, I told the story afterwards in the FT, and even they were absolutely fascinated by the fact that I had decided to do essentially an open interview in front of my own colleagues. Wow. And you stayed at Verizon for six years. Yes. Can you remember for me the hardest challenge that you endured while at Verizon? And can you walk me through the steps of how you solved it? Sure. So despite having been in and out and despite being a clear and unequivocal choice by the executive and the board, When I arrived, and this is not about the individual, it's about the culture of leadership inside the US versus Europe.

1:20:07So I'm a naturally very open, empowering and enabling leader, where I surround myself with people who are better than I am at doing their job. And I try to give them the context and framework in which they can just get on and get it done. east coast u.s large corporates are unbelievably top-down militaristic in their management style here's the instruction now leave get it done and come back when you've got it done i don't expect you to ask i don't expect you to think i just expect you to execute so the characteristics of a lot of east coast companies is long tenured people who understand exactly how the machine works and who are essentially working in a quasi-military type organization with a small number of people at the very top making all the decisions.

1:21:01Doesn't that kill innovation? Yes, in my view. So I ended up arriving and a guy who I still have tons of respect for, and he's been very successful in his career, was the president of the whole group. And I was the president and CEO of Verizon Wireless. Now, this is a business with 100 million customers turning over$93 billion and making$45 billion of EBITDA. Wow. 140 ,000 employees. So, big company. But I had been running a big, successful company. Okay, it had 24 million customers, not 100 million. But guess what? Once you get to the millions, it's not a huge difference between the two. So I arrive thinking, and I don't think I was naive, saying I've got almost 10 years of being a fully-fledged standalone CEO, running the business soup to nuts.

1:21:59Yes, I had ultimately a shareholder in the same way as Verizon is a communications is a publicly listed entity, but I've earned my stripes so this is now my business to run and my boss's view was no no I'll call the shots you execute on my behalf oh and my view was that wasn't the deal I had with the board nor is it what the situation needs so our first 18 months was us like two people sitting in the two front seats of a car, both fighting over who has the control of the steering wheel, the gear stick, and the handbrake. And that was challenging. Now, we didn't fall out personally over it, but it was a fundamental different view about how.

1:22:49And so I had to earn the right to ask for forgiveness, not permission. And I had been through that process before with Cesare Alierta and José Mora Álvarez Palletti at Telefonica. And in both cases, I'd earned that right. And so I had complete freedom to operate. So I decided, look, I've been down this road before. The expectations were never as imbalanced as this before. But I've done this before. I've just got to prove that the decisions I make are of a consistency and quality that the chairman and the president and the board see me deliver. And that first quarter when I joined, Verizon had dropped revenues year over year in that fourth quarter by 7 % year over year.

1:23:39Now, 7 % is a big number anyway, but think about it. This is a business that turns over almost$100 billion. So you've lost$7 billion of revenue in a quarter. That's the size of the largest FTSE 100 company. so it's more than unfortunate you know that's serious so i decided that i needed to be accountable for the outcomes and then we could have a debate afterwards about the process by which i'd got there and within two quarters we were growing again and we grew for 23 of 24 quarters that i reported as the as the ceo so history records not about who's right and who's wrong but i did what I came to do, which was build a business back to growth, improve customer satisfaction scores, and grow the customer base and the profitability.

1:24:30So I took the experience of my previous roles and said, let's not have a debate about methodology. Let's focus on shared metrics of success. And if I deliver against those, I will earn the right to ask for forgiveness, not permission. And if you didn't? Well, the single biggest evidence of that was I arrived and one of our competitors, Sprint PCS, who was really struggling, had decided to introduce unlimited tariffs. And the viewpoint at Verizon publicly stated was this was utter stupidity that only a failing company would do it. And under no circumstances would Verizon ever do unlimited. So I arrived and started on the 7th of September.

1:25:16On the 7th of February of the following year, Verizon launched unlimited plans. And that ultimately was the vehicle by which I seized control. Because I demonstrated that as the business with the best network, the best engineers and the best technology, rather than protect the network by not doing unlimited that actually by opening up the network ours would perform better under load than anybody else's so it was a competitive advantage and the cfo had said over his dead body so the cfo left and was replaced and in february we launched unlimited and from then on the business grew satisfaction increased profitability increased and revenue increased from that day forward.

1:26:11So that earned me the right. All right. Let me unpack this to confirm if I understood it correctly. Biggest challenge is CEO of a big subsidiary of the group has challenging views on how to operate the business against the chairman and CEO at a group level. You initially were under the impression that you had more liberty to operate and you believe that you've earned that liberty and that right due to your previous experience as a seasoned CEO, then instead of crushing heads and go against each other, your strategy was to jointly agree on how success would be defined. So what are the metrics that we're looking at to define success?

1:26:59What are the most important key performance indicators? Your chairman and CEO at the group level agrees to this. And then within one or two quarters, all of those different metrics are achieved in a successful way. Now, that's amazing, right? That's inspiring. But what I'm very interested about that particular part of your journey, let's say if that took either one quarter, three months or two quarters, six months, how did you preserve your confidence? because you're basically saying to the chairman and the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, for that matter, not only the US, that leave me be.

1:27:40I will deliver A, B, C, and D, as long as we agree that A, B, C, and D is what needs to be delivered. And then we'll sit down again and assess the performance. Obviously, I would imagine that anybody would also be concerned of not being able to deliver. How did you keep your composure and your confidence to keep a very logic-driven decision-making mindset and not become emotional in those six months? Great question. And although the metric started to turn within two quarters, truthfully, it was probably 18 months before I had complete victory in inverted commas. So two important things, and it goes back to a question you asked me earlier about fear, uncertainty, risk, whatever.

1:28:25deal with the things that you can influence and don't worry about the things you can't. I knew that I had a modus operandi, a style and a management and leadership style, which for me was proven and I was confident could work. So I backed myself to work the way I work and that that would deliver the outcomes. What I was very clear was that if I veered from that course into a territory where I was neither being what I knew and understood as a successful leadership model, but wasn't exactly what they had previously done, that the danger was that you end up in no man's land. And big companies are like super tankers.

1:29:14they are relatively easy to steer when they're when you've set course direction and speed what they're almost impossible to do is to change course direction and speed that's the issue with a company of that size so what was clear to me was i needed to set course direction and speed and stick with it but do it in a way that was consistent with my management behaviors and what had worked for me previously. And I always, always believed that by liberating the people in the organization at senior level to be more influential around the outcome, by persuading the engineers that because they built the best network, they would be proven right by putting more traffic on the network, not protecting the network from traffic.

1:30:05And I bet those things. And what I was really saying to people is, you've earned the right as my team and my colleagues. It's not just about me arguing a discipline or a methodology with my president. I think you guys have earned the right to own the outcome because you're good. In fact, you're very good. And so what they saw was me mandating them, supporting them with good justification. And so the team won together. And it wasn't a theoretical debate about two management styles. It was about creating the conditions for the best management team in the industry. This is a business. This wireless unit was worth$400 billion.

1:30:56You know, you don't become that size by not being a good team. but they just needed to be persuaded to back themselves and realize that i was going to ultimately earn the right to run this business this way because they were scared a little bit that their sponsor was the president and if i was wrong and i got fired what would happen to them and i persuaded them that actually success for you is proving that it was about you all the time not simply about your sponsor. Great leadership. And you stayed at Verizon for six years. And then in 2022, again, your curiosity sparks and you decide to leave not only Verizon, but the telecom industry altogether and the United States and come back to Europe and become the chairman of Six Nations Rugby.

1:31:51And for those who don't follow rugby, that's the premier rugby tournament in Europe. Absolutely. What inspired you to transition from the telecom industry to a profoundly different industry, like the sports industry? So there's a few clues in our conversation so far. One is I'm a huge believer in team sport and fascinated. I watch, virtually the only thing I watch on television is sport. And I've had the privilege of going and attending at most of the major sporting events around the world. So the idea of teamship is something that I find very powerful. And the second thing is this allusion to the idea of experiences.

1:32:36And I believe that sport is an incredibly powerful tool where we can bring technology, we can bring many of the disciplines of business and still do it in a way that liberates sport to deliver even more immersive experience for the fans, for the players themselves. So the idea of being involved in evolving a sport like rugby that has incredible values and traditions, but bring it, perhaps drag it, kicking and screaming into a commercial reality, just felt like a huge opportunity and one that I would be very privileged to be involved with. And the second thing was that I had been exposed to CVC, the private equity house, over about 20 years prior to that and had built a relationship with a number of the partners over roles that I'd been approached about, but ultimately I'd never taken the CEO job of one of their portfolio companies.

1:33:41but I developed enough of a personal relationship that I liked how they worked and operated because there are some P firms I'll be honest with you where I wouldn't necessarily take a role in a portfolio company for certain firms but other firms I liked the fact that they either have patient capital or the way they engage with building the management team etc and so I felt confident that it was an environment in which I could marry up the needs of external capital, which I understood what those were, with a traditional sport who generally has had no access to external capital whatsoever. And so a kind of a slightly odd marriage was going to be created by private equity investing in sport, as has happened in a ton of sports.

1:34:31But I thought I would have enough experience from both sides to help to bridge. So it struck me as a really exciting opportunity and also signaled for me the moment when I wanted to go plural in that I wanted to take the learnings that I'd had from, at that stage, without sounding arrogant, a reasonably consistently successful 30 years in senior management roles and start to deploy that experience in a way that I was supporting other executives and other leaders to accelerate their development by giving them access to some of the experience that I'd had. And I enjoy, I never need to be the smartest person in the room, and I never need to be the one that gets tapped on the back.

1:35:22I'm very self-driven. I understand what's successful and what's not successful and i probably score myself a lot harder than people outside so the idea of having the job title or being seen to be the one doesn't really interest me at all um so helping other people around you to be successful in a space where it's important for the business to be better run better managed is a privilege i feel very privileged to be sitting in this chair and and be in a position to deep dive into the stories and journeys and minds of some of the most successful people in different industries like yourself. And when I was going through your research pack, one of the common denominators that grabbed my profound attention was your ability to pivot from one industry to another.

1:36:16And this was one of the things that I wanted to deep dive into in this conversation to understand what are the reasons that, not enabled you, but what are the reasons that made you choose from one, navigate one industry and then choose another one. And we established that it's a combination of curiosity, building a legacy or following the career, footsteps of a mentor. and when I went through this industry change throughout your professional path, so leaving the corporate telecom world behind and being a hands-on CEO to becoming a chairman of a very different industry, I couldn't really understand the reasoning.

1:37:04I thought maybe it's just a different phase of your life. You became a different version of yourself. But now, if you allow me to be analytical and express my analysis, nothing really changed. In fact, the reason why you chose this industry is because it's not only because of curiosity, as in previous decision-making that you made, but it's related to who you are. A common denominator across your over 13, 14, 16 years of being a CEO across two of the biggest companies in the world is that you are a team player. You like to enable teams to delegate, to empower them. And that is an intrinsic value that the sports industry, a collective, a group sports industry like rugby offers, which makes now much more logical and natural sense that you evolved into something that is very dear to your core values in your heart.

1:38:07what is the biggest lesson that you've learned in the sports industry that your previous roles in the telecom or banking industries didn't teach you yeah great question to build just thematically first um i would say that there's a common perspective that i apply almost everywhere which is a belief that says the world is not short of talent. The world's challenge is to match talent to opportunity. And therefore, I see myself as a convener, as an orchestrator, as an enabler of somebody who recognizes that I don't believe there's anything that we don't have the ability to solve. I just think we're not always as effective at applying the skills and talent that our community and society has.

1:39:04And that's why, for example, I get heavily involved in things like initiatives like Balance the Board to accelerate female talent in the boardroom. Balance in business, which does similar in the C-suite. because it's remarkable to me that any business would ever try to go to market in the same way as any sports team would try to go to the field without bringing its best players. And so this idea of being somebody who can help to bring those pieces together is the driver. And what I found in sport is a much clearer articulation of difference is what makes us stronger, not sameness. So you take, I'll use rugby, but you could use American football, given my time working with the NFL and Roger Goodell, the commissioner there in my time at Verizon.

1:40:00Everybody knows that American football team has a quarterback. and everybody probably knows that that quarterback's the best played person on the team. But there isn't an American football team in history who's ever played two quarterbacks at the one time. And why is that? Because there are different roles to be played on the pitch at any one time. And if quarterbacks are so good, well, why don't you buy two of them or three of them or four of them? Well, the answer is there's only a role for one quarterback at any one time. And what there is, is a role for a wide receiver. There is a role for the people in the line of scrimmage.

1:40:39Those are the big guys who kind of lean on each other like they do in rugby and the scrum. And what sport tells you is, don't get confused about, oh yeah, just recruit more people like us. Actually, more people like us is the last thing we need. Genuine diversity. And I'm not just talking about it in DE &I sense. I'm talking about people who think differently, people who act differently, people who are motivated differently, people who have different lived experience. The richness of diverse, not just talent, but experience is what strengthens the squad and strengthens the team. And particularly, and American football is probably the best example of it, they have this concept of special teams.

1:41:23so on the field at any one time it doesn't players approximately but there's a squad of 50 and on match day there's 30 something and the reason is they have a kicker and they only come on that punter only comes on to kick the ball might only come on twice in the whole game depending on the way the game plays out but they're a specialist and that's just what they do they don't do anything else there if there's a field goal often the same person as the punter but not always will come out and kick the field goals. So they have their attack team and they have their defending team, depending on whether they have possession of the ball or not.

1:42:02So sport has recognised is there are different roles to play at different times. And what we should have is teams who are capable of being the best at all of those elements. Sometimes I think in the corporate world, we've lost the awareness, not only that we need more diversity of talent and competencies, but we've also lost the context in which we make, we set those teams up for success. And so what I bring is I'm a generalist. I've been lucky to work in banking. I've worked in telecoms, but I would reject completely that I'm a telecoms guy. I'm a general manager who knows how to get shit done in telecoms.

1:42:46But guess what? I also know how to get it done in other places because I have that mind of an engineer which says, I see the blueprint. If that's the strategy you want to execute, I can build you an organizational model and a team that is capable of executing that strategy. I may not be the person to write that strategy in every situation. but if you write up even a half-decent attempt at it, I can see exactly how I would build an organization and an operating model and the talent that would be required in that model to execute against that strategy. And if I may be so bold, I think the biggest failure that I see consistently in the corporate world is people talk about transformation and they articulate how they're now going to shift their weight of emphasis from one place to another.

1:43:38and then I look at their operating model and their organisation and I think, but your people are getting up every single day and they're still mapped to the strategy you articulated to the market two years ago. How on earth are they going to move to this new space unless you give them the context in which they can then operate aligned to this new strategy, this new operating model and this new set of priorities. So that's the thing I do is I'm the person who brings team to life in a way that brings out the characteristics of diversity in a way that amplifies the ability to execute the strategy.

1:44:20I think this is such a valuable lesson that is applicable in every aspect of life. And it comes down to, in my opinion, to diversity. Everyone has a different role to play and every single role adds value to the overall picture, whether it's in a professional aspect or in a personal aspect. But unfortunately, right now, we live in a world in which we are heavily told by either social media or some bigger media outlets in the form of TV shows or movies to dress in the same way, to say the same things, to follow a particular norm. And that kills personalization. And people believe that if they're sometimes different in one way or another, and right now I'm speaking in a personal lens, not professional capacity, they won't fit in the world and there's not a place for them.

1:45:13And I think it's the opposite. I think that can only add value to who we are as a human collective community. But then at a professional lens, I remember my grandmother, as you can imagine, grandmothers are very proud of their grandkids, regardless of whatever they do. But in my case, she's, I can tell you, she's probably overly proud. And she calls me and she keeps telling me, Alberto, I am so proud of you. You're a young entrepreneur. I wish everyone would be like you. And I would be like, grandma, I think if everyone would be like me, the human race would extinct, right? I mean, it wouldn't work in any way, shape or form.

1:45:53So one of the things that I try to do when I work with different teams within my company, and it's a smaller company, but I still lead teams. I try to apply the same approach, especially because one of the functions that I enjoy the most overseeing is recruitment. And I try to recruit with as much diversity as possible because everyone plays a different role. diversity in skills, diversity in culture, diversity in approaches and mindset. And we have seen now and again in so many different examples during the growth of my company that that has been probably the best decision that we've made that underpinned the next level of growth.

1:46:34Because if everyone would be exactly the same, nothing would function whatsoever. I want to talk about purpose because we discussed purpose in your career and what was the purpose and the reason for you to change one career path to another. But there's one factor that I believe is important and some people may be interested in that factor and I've revealed the factor now and some other people may not be interested in that factor but that factor is interested in you whether you want it or not. And that is money. how important do you think should be how important money should be in our heads when it comes to deciding what to do with our careers again sometimes I think when people who have been on the face of it successful respond to questions like this people think that the answers lack credibility

1:47:38sincerely Actually, knowing your worth is hugely important. But that's fundamentally different from accumulating money. And I think what happens is people get confused between the things. So let me try and give you an example. If a corporate or financial institution asks me whether or not I would speak at an event and asks me whether I have a speaker's fee, the answer is yes, I do. not because i need the money and i donate and usually directly all my speakers fees to a particular charity one in ireland one in the one in the uk but the point is there's a value there and i understand what my worth is as a public speaker yeah so i will charge the fee but that's different from just to accumulate money and i think what's happened a lot in our society there's a fundamental separation between worth in a value sense and money in an accumulation sense.

1:48:44Money in its own right has no value whatsoever. Money applied has value. And so if I take the same philosophy that says I'm trying to apply myself to places and things where I believe I can make a difference and deliver a positive outcome, I take exactly the same view to money, that my worth and the value should be measured because it's one of the metrics that validates whether or not you're really making a difference or not. But the accumulation of money for the sake of it should never ever be a driver. And I'm lucky enough that I've earned enough money that I don't have to worry about money.

1:49:23But now I feel as much an obligation about what I do with that money that I don't need as if I hadn't earned it in the first place. So I invest in early stage entrepreneurs. And part of the reason I do that is because I want to give something back. Do I take an objective economic lens when I'm doing that? Of course I do. But I have the privilege now of supporting smart entrepreneurs who mightn't otherwise get enough money in early rounds to be able to, what we talked about, run their business for long enough to work out whether it's going to be a success or not. So I think with earnings, with money, what we've lost sight of is the obligation that comes with it to use it.

1:50:07It's the Old Testament parable of the talents. For those that much is given, much is expected. And I take exactly the same view. And whether those talents are human talents or whether they're financial talents, I take the same view. Ronan, I'm going to take us to an imaginary world for a second. I need you to follow me on this journey. Let's entertain the idea of a world in which money is not a trading concept. It's not a trading currency. You can acquire anything you want and desire. Let it be the house, the car, the dinner, the lunch, for free. but still the jobs and businesses that you understand of today's world still exist purely to offer purpose because we still need to be purposeful to have to put a meaning to life right what would you do if you were not paid i'd be a visiting lecturer at business school because i'd like to explode the bullshit that most people are taught in business school and replace it with truth.

1:51:18Fantastic. I love that.

1:51:24If I were to strip away all your titles and all your achievements, you're not a CEO, you're not a chairman, you don't have 30 very successful years of experience in some of the biggest corporations in the world. Who are you and how would you define yourself? So, good question. I'm very clear that who I am is a 15-year-old curious kid. I'm fascinated by everything. I love being involved. I'm the small child who put their hand up at the side of the field or the yard in school and said, pick me, pick, pick, pick me. I want to be on the team. So I've always been that. Honestly, the thing I'm most proud of without a shadow of a doubt is the privilege to be a dad.

1:52:14And I wrote, so again, I have, because of the roles I've played, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn. But I published about eight years ago, maybe now, a letter to my daughter on LinkedIn, which ultimately was read by about five or six hundred thousand people. And what I tried to encapsulate in that was the transition from being the teacher to being the pupil and the nature of the way relationship changes between a father and their child and how when you first look after a small child, it's there about nurture and safety and protection. But actually the real privilege is when the roles are changed and you start to learn from your own child or children.

1:53:08And certainly for me, that's been an incredible journey and definitely the most rewarding thing. I've been lucky to be married to the same person for 38 years, and we together have one daughter who is an amazing young lady. But family is hugely, hugely important. So if somebody was to write one word at the end of the day when I pop off is I would say grateful father that's what I'd say how would you define success in life

1:53:48how would I define success

1:53:55I think success I would define like leadership is having brought people to places they wouldn't otherwise have gone and that's just as important as a kid in the playground who decided to try a sport for the first time ever because what have they got to lose as it is somebody in a boardroom where you persuaded them actually maybe they could go and go to that next level but taking people to places they would otherwise not have gone I think is the ultimate privilege and it's the ultimate evidence that it was different because you were there. Would you say you're successful according to that definition?

1:54:35I would say I should continue to try every single day. Ronan, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. I admire you at a personal level, your work ethic, your passion for innovation, growth, and your unique ability to pivot into new challenges, environments, sectors. I say with hand in heart that I've learned a great deal from our conversation. And I know that a big part of our audience right now are making very big professional decisions and I also know that by learning from your experience they've gained a lot of clarity into how they need to decide how to confront decision making fear failure and challenges because everyone in this day and age seems to have the recipe on how to be successful and they speak about success like there is no tomorrow but no one speaks about the hard moments and the hardships and that's a big part of anyone's success in my opinion so thank you for sharing your unfiltered journey it's been it's been magical thank you so much thank you for the privilege of being here and sharing some some thoughts and ultimately hopefully it was different because i was here Thank you.