Ex John Lewis Boss: Why The Best Leaders Are Impossible to Read | Sharon White

0:00There is still the moment when you're standing at the gates and they ask for your security details and you think, oh my god, I'm about to walk into number 10. As a regulator, you've got to be a really reluctant regulator. My sweet spot is basically having 15 things to juggle and if I have 12 things to juggle, I suddenly become deeply, deeply unproductive. What topic in leadership do you think we don't spend enough time talking about? When we were in a very difficult period of closing stores, you know, I watch out and I want to die in a John Lewis store. You know, it's been, there's been such an emotional connection.

0:41And so it is much more, you know, the whole, you know, all 20 million customers are your stakeholders because they've... What did you do before? What led you to this? And he said, I was the president of South Africa. I sort of heart skipped a beat and then she went sorry noisy but where and he says hi I'm Hyatton and I'm Jimmy and welcome to what we don't know all about better leadership in a chaotic world so this is exciting I'm sitting next to you Jimmy for the first time first time on camera yeah that's an important qualification we do know each other very well um and are you excited about today's guest excited about doing this for me i am i'm doubly excited so i'm thrilled that we get to share a sort of not quite a sofa but metaphorical sofa um and i am really looking forward to talking to our guest today baroness sharon white who is pretty awesome she is one of the most I would say respected public figures in leadership in the UK and she's had this extraordinary career trajectory where she's not just worked at the highest levels of the civil service which is already an achievement but she's then gone on to lead a regulator in a very high profile role at Ofcom and then she's gone into the private sector and a very unusual organization kind of iconic organization in John Lewis.

2:13Completely. It is extraordinary the different things I think it's actually far more difficult than we give credit for to switch careers and switch sectors and industries and she's just done it multiple times I'm fascinated to learn more about how that's happened also the length of her career is major she started in the Treasury when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister which I think is pretty extraordinary yeah I think that's that's why she's had real longevity you really get the feeling she is not done yet completely she might see a few more Prime Minister's come and go. Yes, well, there's a lot we could talk about on that front, but we better not.

2:48That's a different show. But I think there'll be some really interesting leadership learnings talking to Sharon. But this is what we know about Sharon White, Baroness Sharon White. She's the former chair of the John Lewis Partnership, and she led this, as I said, iconic employee-owned business through a period of unprecedented change. She was the chief executive of Ofcom where she took some really bold bets around regulation and competition but earlier in her career she was the second permanent secretary at the treasury which is a sort of unique department in the context of government and she had to support the ministers there, chancellors there through the financial crisis which must have been quite the experience.

3:29I would say she is known for a very calm, analytical, quite measured style of leadership and so her sort of bold bets in her career sit in a very interesting way alongside that personal style and I'm looking forward to proving that. Yeah no I think she's had probably one of the most interesting careers in the United Kingdom and I can't wait to find out more about some of the thinking behind the decisions that she's made at various points. Brilliant let's go. How do you separate the signal from the noise when you're doing a job where everybody literally everybody has an opinion. Yeah and the points about being a reluctant regulator.

4:07Why does being a girly SWOT pay off even when you're a CEO. And how do you get media trained. What lessons of leadership can you learn from your own family focus group. And why gratitude is such an important leadership quality. And of course stay tuned for our animal story. Baroness Sharon White welcome we are so pleased to have you here thank you for joining us. It's great to be here thank you. We last met in number 10 when I was there as a sort of mid-ranking special advisor and you kind of came in because you'd worked on the private secretaries before particularly well and what's your reflection on when you're going into a session like that in number 10 like what what are you aiming to do um I mean I worked in number 10 in 1997 and uh I mean do you know I mean I've had this slightly bonkers career because I've done lots of very different things and when I go back there is still the moment when you're standing at the gates and they ask for your security details and you think oh my god I'm about to walk into number 10 so there's still there is still that moment in your you know even now you're sort of in front of the door and so it's a it takes me back to a time of my life I was I just got married I was in my early 30s I was a non-political advisor working for Tony Blair and it was a sort of an extraordinary important moment in my life and in my career so it takes you back to what it was like probably, I can't remember how old I was when I met, but probably in my late 40s so it sort of took me back but it's also, you know you know what the pressure's like in those boxes and it's partly the physical thing if anybody's been to number 10 people are always surprised that it's actually an office because it's really a sort of tumble down house and when I worked there I literally worked out of a old bedroom with an ensuite bathroom that people still used and and so you're trying to be helpful and you're trying to give a bit of context particularly when you're always balancing in those jobs the day-to-day pressures of the oh my god I thought I had all this time to work on this long-term strategic thing and actually what happens is oh my god there's war in Iran and suddenly yeah there's an oil shock and everybody's sort of monitoring long-term bond yields um and so I love it and it's always for the very you know it's it's young people it tends to be people quite early on in their career and I've definitely reached the stage where you know if there's a conversation I can have where it chimes uh I'd to do that but also i'm still you know i'm still learning the jobs have got much more difficult do you think do you think sort of government and number 10 has got i think massively so i mean when i as i say when i was when i was in number 10 in 97 so you had a bit of the sort of 24-hour news cycle and um my husband was a journalist for a long time and he started his journalism career at the days when, you know, he'd have breakfast at 10 and, you know, the newspapers revived and then he'd have lunch and basically there was this writing time for two hours in the afternoon.

7:21So in 97, you were just moving to the 24-hour news cycle and, you know, the news rebuttal unit and all of that kind of more professional sense in which politicians were dealing with the media that was always on. And then I look at, you know, I look at today and both the nature of the problems that politicians are tackling um there's no money uh you know the demographic pressures that we knew were going to hit in the in the 2020s but you know all the things we know birth rates falling expectations rising you know big questions around actually even the the legitimacy of you know liberal democracy our systems and it's also public and it's got you know it's not just incredibly public obviously for the politicians who've always known that but then there's the all the toxicity around social media it's also much more public for civil servants so we always used to joke that never have your photo taken and make sure that nobody ever knows your name as a civil servant um because you're there in the background and that's become, yeah, it's got much tougher I think.

8:34There is loads that we want to dig into there, I mean what a place to start. But before we get ahead of ourselves, I think we just want to spend a little bit of time getting to know you as a person, Sharon, if that's okay. And so I'd like to kind of take you back a bit, even further than the period we've been talking about. Can you give us an insight into how your home life has influenced the leader you've become? Give us a bit of a peek into what it was like. Home life, childhood home life. Let's go early, let's start there. I mean I always think when I look back, I'm the child of immigrants and I'm the child of the Windrush generation.

9:18So my mum, I mean, I can't believe it now with a 21-year-old. My mum came from Jamaica to the UK when she was 19. And basically never went back. She went back for her parents' funerals, and that was basically it. And my dad, they met here. My dad came when he was 26. And so I guess the things, when I look back, that more looking back than really at the time that was kind of super important, and definitely growing up a minority. So it means that I grew up in a very white, working class part of East London, and actually mostly very happy and certainly super happy at school, but home a bit more complicated.

10:04But I was so used to whether I went to church or whether I was at nursery school or primary school, I was either the only brown person or one of two or three. And it wasn't a, I never felt it as a burden. It was just a fact. And so I always think that whether that then transposes to working in the Treasury or going to Oxbridge, I'm very used to and very comfortable being in the minority. And indeed, I find it really quite discomproperating when, I mean, it doesn't happen very often, but a couple of times in my professional life, particularly in the States, when I've been in a room and it's been people who look like me, and I find it very, it's just not my sort of natural kind of experience.

10:56So there's definitely something around growing up in a culture that your parents didn't grow up in. And so, you know, if you're writing a letter to the GP, it's my brother or I are helping our parents to kind of navigate the system. I was quite a bookish, boring bookish, quite religious, quite nerdy, quite sporty girl growing up. And I was incredibly lucky we went to state all girls, comprehensive all girls schools that just were fantastically good. So I went to a junior high school between 11 and 14 and we were going to Oxbridge Open Days when I was 13. my senior high school, 14 to 18, you know, we were learning Latin, we could have learnt Greek, three of us went to Cambridge in my year, one is now Master of Jesus College, another is a, you know, very kind of distinguished medic, all of us from minority, that's my word, all of us films of non, you know, one from a Bajan background, Barbados, and one from an Indian background.

12:14And so there was something, there's definitely something about the immigrant experience growing up, and there was definitely something that I was very conscious of, particularly in regard to my mother, was that I got to go to school, and I got to stay in school until I was 18. My mother left school when she was 11. Didn't really go to primary school because every time her mother, she was the oldest of nine. And so every time her mother had a baby, my mum stayed home. So my mum could write a bit, she could read a bit. She wasn't really functionally numerate. And my dad stayed at school until he was 14 or 15.

12:57So I got to go to school. It's absolutely fascinating. if you give me tingles because there's lots of parallels in terms of my hinterland as well my my dad was the youngest of nine children not the eldest and he was the first one to finish secondary school so that basic appreciation for the fact that i go to school i go to a great school um gives you i guess i think it's like a bit of momentum it propels you forward you know not to waste the opportunity you have. And it's just an unended sense of gratitude and context for some of the bumps along the way. And amazing stories of social mobility there amongst your peers at your school in Leytonstone.

13:44But can you, within that fabric of experiences, draw out anything which gave you clues of the fact that you might have leadership potential in you? I mean it's a funny thing because I still think I mean what am I 59 almost I still think oh my goodness what am I going to do when I grow up I think um I think when I was I mean I talked about being you know I'm still quite religious I talked a bit about I was very religious when I was growing up and you know wanted to go off and become a nun or you know refugee worker type thing And so there was probably something about being quite comfortable with holding unconventional views.

14:32And I remember we had a Christian Union session, which for some reason I can't now remember. The entire girls' school and the entire boys' school went to. So it must have been a session of about 500 people that I was speaking at. And I can't now even remember the topic. It was probably none of the schools. it was probably so Christianity and Islam pros and cons and I remember sitting there and teachers saying to me Sharon we didn't know you had a voice because I was very as I said I was very bookish I was very quite nerdy quite introverted but I was on the I was unafraid when I had views or something that I felt was really important to debate to have a voice and that probably is something that has sort of taken me through my career.

15:21So I'm unafraid, not so much of conflict, but I'm unafraid of, I guess, being taken in a minority position. So whether that's some of the things we did when I was chief executive of Ofcom, when you're in a tussle with some very big, very companies with some very large balance sheets. I don't have a, I have a very strong gene, which is, you know, what's the right answer? What's the right thing to do? I don't mean in a fluffy, altruistic way, but what's the right thing? And how do you galvanise people around that? And I've got an economist's brain still, so what are the numbers? and who do we need in the room?

16:06So there's definitely something about driving at certain outcomes that matter to me. Do you think that sort of, there's groupthink in some of those kind of institutions, you know, like the Treasury or Ofcom that you've been at, where you're being able to take that outside view a little bit? I would say, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, yes and no, because um and and this is why i think the the whole point about social mobility i think is a really interesting point because you you've stepped in them in many ways i've stepped into the i've got a foot in my old world but i've also stepped into my into a new world which is um people who have been educated at similar higher education institutions etc but i definitely have a I definitely think there's a different view that you bring in having had a background where expectations are just very very different so I mean I spent a lot I mean to give an example I spent a long time when I was in government at the treasury working on social exclusion social mobility how do you get people closer to the labor market into jobs staining jobs earning more progressing faster and then a long time figuring out you know how does the government pay for the things it needs to pay for and some of the difficult decisions around that and in some ways i think like a very traditional treasury person you know you can't you can't spend more than you earn and there are lots of lots of things actually about partly my training my thinking which is very sort of in a way now very conventional.

17:54But you have a different perspective about who's winning and who's losing and how people are protected and how, you know, how you think about different groups. So even some of the work we did around, you know, different minority groups and their prospects at work, we always talk about ethnic minorities as though there's a homogeneous group which used to and still drives me completely bonkers um particularly in policy circles you know you look at you know bangladeshi women who've who've you know got a particular place in their communities their employment rates are basically tended towards zero you look at male um men who come from an and East Asian background who are performing better than, you know, their white counterparts.

18:51So there are definitely aspects in the conversation where you're able to say, look, there are really important differences here in different perspectives. And at the same time, if I was in a group of other Treasury senior officials talking about today's economy and, you know, advising the Chancellor, I suspect we'd have, at a macro level, I suspect we'd have very similar kind of views. But when you look at the detail and different communities and how people are affected, and I think that's where the differences or the nuances, I think, come through. It strikes me, listening to you, that one of the features of being used to being an outside or an outlier depending on how you want to describe it is that you automatically kind of have that understanding that there is value in differentness and that not everyone starts from the same perspective even if there might seem to be lots of commonality in a group you know instinctively that you know you've come there by different routes by different experiences and so one of the striking things when you look at your career is you've been very courageous in lots of people's minds and you know straddling what seemed like very different worlds do you think that personal experience of different was just part of your normal um was influential in those decisions or am i missing something here um yeah i think particularly when i went to the to john lewis people were sort of i think just completely bamboozled i think um i think for me I guess when I think about the points of commonality, it really matters to me that the jobs I do, I can wake up in the morning and think, okay, there's a really clear purpose.

20:45And again, I don't mean that in a sort of blah, blah, sort of altruistic manner. And so for me, whether it's the John Lewis Partnership, which is trying to stay a competitive retailer while running itself as a democratic institution that has a constitution which forbids it from making profit. And indeed, the genesis of the business was all about kind of social mobility, all about jobs, good work. Actually, the first tranche of very senior people in the business were all civil servants and former army officers. Or whether it's Ofcom where you've got all the sort of hard power of a regulator, but actually if you use those powers, you know that you've already failed because you've not been able to have a conversation and negotiation with a company that generally is trying to do the right thing, which is provide better services and do it at a fair price and still make a profit, or whether that's government where, in a sense, the levers of public interest are much more transparent.

21:52So for me, there's a commonality in terms of my personal drivers. And then I'm also really, I get bored very easily, and I'm very drawn to complicated problems. As I say, how does an employee-owned business survive when there's debate and consultation? If you're an M &S, you're not debating your redundancy policy for 12 months with your elected council. You have a board decision on a board park and you take a decision. if you're a regulator how do you how do you go from really minimal broadband coverage in a basically a privatized um more or less competitive system um and how do you do that in a way in which you're not going to load so much money on people's bills that um the whole system comes under collapse how do you how do you get help a government get out of the mess of the financial crisis what without degrading services to such a degree that you then cause backlash i'm you know and i can't as you can tell i've been wholly successful um in each of those problems but I'm drawn to big problems and playing a, whether it's a major or minor or trivial part in fixing big problems, complex problems.

23:33You have that very clear narrative about why those moves made sense from your perspective. What did you find that the reception was from those who didn't know you said well when you came into a new sector or a new context? Yeah, it's interesting. When I moved from government to Ofcom, I sort of knew it was going to be a bit more public. because I'd made a mistake of reading all my predecessors' press cuttings the night before my final interview and thinking, oh my gosh, you know, the job will be fantastic, but actually the whole public commentary thing, I was always going to find, you know, a little bit difficult.

24:14And I think at that time, of course, because I'd been a civil servant for 26 years, and there was no public record of me. You know, I hadn't written anything, I hadn't given any speeches. Indeed, I think the only time I'd ever been in a newspaper, I was almost sacked because, you know, a comment was picked up that was sort of a bit, you know, opposed to sort of, or deemed to be opposed to some of the government policy at the time. So I was a very private citizen. And so I remember somebody who'd been in the media industry for a very long time came to see me. Great guy. And we got on very well.

24:53And he said, the thing is, people can't read you. and I said at that stage I thought I've been quite clear and I've given some speeches now and I was always struck by that comment as to whether I couldn't be read because actually I didn't fit a mould and maybe that's background, maybe that's just because I hadn't been in the sort of media or kind of telecoms industry for you know I didn't have sort of 20 years but in a way having very little, I wouldn't say background, not having had a clear public persona was really helpful, particularly in relation to regulating the media, because I hadn't been a special advisor.

25:38I didn't come with any political, baggage isn't that word, political affiliation. And certainly when we, you know, the discussion we took on regulation of the BBC when I was there that was super super important so you know people would you know I've read almost no personal media since my first year of com but you know you people would say well we don't know how she votes and I would take that as a you know we had breaks as well as a great you know and then then with the partnership it was a different order because of course I hadn't been a retailer wasn't a retailer and as I described the reasons for being chair and for going into the business was very much you know it's a very particular model of kind of corporatism in the UK.

26:30Do you think though that the comment around people can't read you there's a side of that which is valid as a chief executive rather than as a senior leader because I think there is something about being a CEO that's personal in a way that being part of that leadership team isn't necessarily does that resonate with you at all I think so I think I mean I think everybody has a period in their life and I think probably for me is when I first became a director which was about 2000 2003 when you you first have your big step from managing you know it's like I remember it was three or four people to, I think I was over there and went to lead a team that was about two or three hundred people when I was working in international development.

27:19And I think you learn very quickly the difference between being an open and accessible leader, but you're not people's friends. And about how you, it's an odd space this, but how there's the sort of appropriate and professional distance. And I learned that partly through mistakes. You know, I remember a particular case when we were going through a restructuring and I developed an incredibly close-knit team. We were all, you know, became very close friends with each other. We were, you know, all the rest of it. And I had to let somebody go. and I almost didn't take the decision because which would be for personal rather than professional reasons and then in all the places around the conversation I realized like it was you know I'd allow the relationship to become a friendship rather than a really really constructive and really really professional relationship at work so I think there is definitely a point of I I don't know whether it's not being able to read somebody, because you also don't want that degree of anxiety in your team with a sense of inconsistency or lack of predictability.

28:41But there's definitely a professional distance that allows you to be objective. And I think that comes back again to being the insider-outsider. And to never, I will never be an insider's insider. it's just yeah it's just it's almost an impossibility well i'm going to just ask one more question before passing over to jimmy um and that's what do you think other people who find themselves making transitions between worlds we'll say in a general sense can do to help build that trust and credibility in the environment yeah so i think a few things i think um some very obvious things like being super super super prepared so I you know I'm still the girly swat and every time I've made a transition either the very obvious ones the ones that look very obvious externally out of government into into business or actually some of the things I've done you know 26 years in government I did some very different things is spending a huge amount of time with the experts and the people who've been around that world for a very long time.

29:52I've spent a lot of time, again, the numbers and the data, understanding how things look differently internationally. So I think all of that's super important. I think it's really important for your team and the organisation to know why you've come. So if I think even with the partnership experience, which on the label looks the most different of the things I've done and obviously there was a lot of criticism during some of that period, is if you were in the business, you knew exactly why I'd come. I hadn't come. I'd come because I really fundamentally believed in the model and fundamentally believed that the partnership was, if not a better way of doing business, but a way of doing business that really needed to survive and thrive in the 21st century for all the broader reasons we've talked about in terms of kind of industrial democracy and so whether people thought you know it was a good thing or a bad thing that we were doing more or less online that we were closing shops or keeping shops open that we were trying to support the balance sheet through build through rent or whatever the specific decision was nobody doubted why i was chair nobody internally doubted why i was chair of the john lewis partnership i think that's really important and i think the last thing I would say is that particularly as I've got more senior in every job I've done, I've partly through all these conversations and the preparation, I've always been really focused on what is the one really key value added that you're bringing that is a bit of your, even if you don't necessarily communicate it externally as the real guiding light.

31:41So you know, when I was at the Treasury working on the austerity program actually a lot of what I did was how do you make the choices and trade-offs really super transparent and actually I spent most of my time with ministers with officials and other government departments so that when they rocked up they had an understanding of the why when I went to Ofcom it was it was all about how do you provide a service that was a luxury good to majority and that drove every pretty much everything we did with some very common big big big consequences and with the partnership you know went even with covid it was how how does the how do you give the model the best chance of surviving you know even with as i say some conversations around equity partners which you know again was you know was quite controversial externally but was really important in terms of thinking about how does this you know how does how's this the model you know you still feel the passion can't you how does it survive how did you prepare for taking those more public facing roles you talk about yourself being a sort of early swat etc how do you go about preparing because it strikes me as something that almost every person that becomes a chief executive has to go through they're normally an expert in a sort of single domain and then they have to take on this huge range of extra stuff including quite often a kind of like public personas so how did you prepare for that so i guess a few things to say so i had made the shift to bigger and more complex complicated things when i was in government so quite a lot of that had already sort of happened behind the scenes so when i went to ofcom i was i was basically in charge of the public finances for um the government I was sort of the lead person for half the Treasury, even though you've got this slightly weird shared accountability of ministers.

33:40So some of that I had definitely learned probably over the 10 to 15 years before I went to OPCOM. So the really big change for me, of course you're learning new subject matter, but the really big change was becoming, was going into a role that was more public. and I don't know whether anybody is ever prepared for this. So as I say, my husband was a journalist, which helped. I mean, I did, you know, I did media training and all, you know, all the rest of it. And I had a great director of comms who then came with me to the partnership. But I mean, I basically didn't, I literally did not, I read a profile that was done of me before I started Ofcom I was announced but I hadn't started and a friend from school rang and said Oh Sharon, like literally from my primary school I rang and said, Oh Sharon I just want to let you know some journalists have been in touch and I said well why on earth will anybody be in touch with you and they said oh they're doing this piece on Saturday and I was so discombobulated I can't tell you because nobody had called me and I rushed to the, you still had paper newspapers, I rushed to the newspaper stand or whatever on the Saturday and read this thing and it was perfectly fine and it lived in my head for at least, you know, you can tell even now however many years, it lived in my head and I basically took a vow that I would basically try to keep myself informed of the sort of industry and how our decisions were being relayed but as far as I could I would never read any more personal press and I've always had a kind of, as I say, a number two kind of director of communications.

35:30I mean that's not a great answer to the how do you prepare. I mean it's a very personal response which is I prepare, I do my training, I work really, really hard to, particularly when you know you're being criticised or your decisions are being criticized about how you show up in the organization and all those things. But at the same time, you know, unless you're a very particular and very peculiar character, we take these jobs despite the public noise. You don't take the job because, you know, you're fond of, you know, because you've got a desire to be a public persona. I happen to be very interested in areas of the world where there's basically a public or consumer interest.

36:28So it comes with the territory and I see the positives around accountability, etc. From a personal level, it is the least... It's my least... The least rewarding aspect. Yeah, the least rewarding aspect. What are the frameworks that you try and bring in place? You say you're really drawn to complicated problems. And one of the things that I think about is interesting when you compare business and government. Is business generally has three primary stakeholders. Customers, employees, investors, shareholders, etc. You manage to have one of the few jobs in the country where you get both of those together.

37:05Employees and investors. But also I'd be fascinated just how you compare that to being a regulator. where you've also got the media and all that side of things as well. There's so many, one of the challenging things about government is there's so many different sort of stakeholders. Yeah, yeah. I don't know where to start. I think inevitably you, well, maybe just take being a regulator. I think for me the starting point was always you've got to be, as a regulator, you've got to be a really reluctant regulator.

37:41you know effectively you are you're a group of public servants when i was there 900 public services facing into a multi multi-billion pound sector of the economy that people really care about i'm not the chief executive of bt i'm not the dg for the bbc and so part of the part of thinking about the stakeholders but a lot of doing the job is can you get to a place where you've got a shared outcome and shared view with the companies that you're that you're regulating and overseeing and as you know from my time at ofcom that was true in some quarters but it was very not true um we had a very um we had a quite a long debate with bt over the future of its network arm It was a very difficult planned merger decision by the Commission, but which we were part of in the end meant that Hutchinson 3 and O2 Telefonica didn't merge.

38:50And for each of those decisions, you think very carefully and in a very structured way about your stakeholder groups. obviously from the company side key investors certainly many of these decisions which in other countries would be taken by government so you've got to think about as an independent regulator yes they're your calls but actually you're operating in a political context you've got to make sure that you're not going to be blindsided and so there's a lot of there's a lot of conversation there's a lot of engagement to make sure that you really do have the space to operate and sometimes space that you think you have doesn't then doesn't transpire because you got the change of ministers and Europe so on the telecom side you know you you it was incredibly important so Margarita Vastai who was the competition Commission Commission at all who's one of the most fantastic sort of leaders internationally was a very stakeholder very important counterparts it is a very you approach it and I would say in a very non-naive way and you know just because your legislation says that you've got the following powers and ideally you're not regular you know you're not using those powers and that's what you're trying to do as much of this through discussion if you are in the territory then you've got to be really very very structured and very very plan that you've got the space to take the decisions and then the partnership is all of the above because it's also a democracy yeah and it's a very unusual sort of decision-making structure there's an elected council so the country's divided into constituencies like the like for the House of Commons people elected on the three yearly cycle they hold the most public ownership as well people think about the partnership right it's almost like it is it's like I mean I always think it's much more like running the BBC or it is it was you know one of the lovely things so do you know I'd be out with my kids on probably child number one rather than child number two couldn't be seen with me for ages but child number one on the you know the weekend and nine times out of ten somebody would come up to us and say oh shan i've just been in the brancross store just bought a carpet i just wanted to let you know that i spoke to madeline and she was she was completely fantastic or i'd be on the tube and somebody was there oh i was i was you know i was trying to park um at the waitrose in north you know one of the waitresses in north london and there was a real issue and i'm can I write to you?

41:48And of course, and here's your... And I, you know, I almost, as I say, in a mostly lovely way, I could, I almost could not leave the house while I was chair without somebody almost always, almost always positive, not always positive, but almost always positive saying, we love the stalls and this is why, and thank goodness you've managed to get through COVID. And, you know, I used to have letters saying, you know, particularly when we were in a very difficult period of closing stalls you know i watch out i want to die in the john lewis store you know it's been there's been such an emotional connection and so it is much more you know the whole you know all 20 million customers are your stakeholders because they feel in a very positive way that they they own the business and they have a stake in the business and And it's an emotional connection that very few, certainly very few retail brands, I would say even M &S, which is obviously, I mean, I'm a great fan of Arches.

42:53I think they're doing a great job being Steve Moach. It is a different relationship. What do you think we can learn from that quite extraordinary picture you just painted of the emotional investment that people have in a business? when we think about what better leadership might look like across the private sector perhaps the public sector too what can what can we learn from that experience yes I mean my own very strong view is that the the way in which the partnership is modeled is is and obviously you know my many brilliant predecessors is a huge part of that because if you walk into a waitress store if you walk into a John Lewis store, maybe you don't quite understand why we're a bit different, but it feels different.

43:42And it is people aren't on commission. And, you know, I used to visit stores every Friday. I'd just rock up some part of the country. And, you know, sometimes people used to talk to me about a product, but normally it would be, you know, Mrs. Jones is 88 years old, and we had not seen her for six weeks. And she came in on Friday because it's Fish Friday. And she brought her Tupperware container in and she bought 200 grams of hake. And we were so pleased to see her because we were really worried about what happened. and thank goodness we're now able to give away some free flowers to and the whole the way in which partners that we call colleagues partners feel that sense of ownership I think comes because the they're they're all shareholders in the business and it means that when people across they get very cross because it's our business, their business now.

44:49But there's a sense of pride which I think is, my own view, I think is really difficult to replicate in a classic public company, a classic PE company. I mean, it's also, it's not an easy model, it's not an easy version of employee ownership. I mean, I now chair something called Frontier Economics, which is also employee owned, but it's got less of the structured democracy of the partnership. But it means people really care. A lot of responsibility for you then as a leader. Yeah, and also... I mean, you are famed for being able to see the positive. What is it that in you enables you to have that sort of buoyant, resilient response?