Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mike, thank you very much for coming

Speaker 2 (00:02):
On The Unlock. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me, Oliver. I

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Appreciate it. Look, you've started off in magazines, you went into radio, you went into television, now you're an author. It all started in Fife and you wanted to be a PE teacher. How did it all come about?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
So I moved around a lot when I was a kid. I had a peripatetic upbringing. I lived in 26 different houses by the time I was 21.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Blimey.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
So my parents moved around a lot. I was an only child. I did my kind of senior education in Fife, but I'd lived all over Scotland and bits of England as well by then. Hence the reason I have a Scottish non-regional

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Accent. Well, I was born in Glasgow and I've got no Scottish accent.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Wow, you've done very well. You've done even better than I have. I

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Was at seven schools, not 21 different houses though.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Wow. Listen, this could turn into a proper session, couldn't it? And how did you find it? No friends, none. But because I moved around so many different regions of Scotland, I kind of decided when I was about nine years old that I wanted to stop changing my regional Scottish accent in every playground I went to. So now when I meet people from Scotland, they cannot tell which bit of it I'm from. So it's like a BBC Scotland voice, I like to think. So I did my schooling in Glenrothis in Fife, Glenrothis High School. I loved rugby. I loved every sport. I also loved contemporary dance.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
I

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Kind of just did everything and I decided that I enjoyed school and being at school for the social side of it and the sports side of it more than anything else so much that it would be a great idea to be a teacher and that being a PE teacher would be a great thing. So I applied for PE college and that was in Glasgow at the time and they took on 18 new students every year.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Because that was the number of vacancies on average that would come up in Scottish schools

(02:00):
For PE teachers every year. And I was 19th. So they basically said, look, you haven't quite made the grade, but if somebody drops out, you'll be the first there. I though, fair enough. I actually didn't much like the place when I went. I started work, I answered an ad in the local paper for journalists on our teenage magazines, Jackie Patches and Blue Jeans published by DC Thompson in Dundee. And I thought that sounds great. I had started a school magazine at school. We'd never had one there before, partly because I dropped a couple of subjects and needed something to do. And so I though, yeah, that sounds great. Went in, walked into this building in the middle of Dundee, just thought this is fantastic. You could kind of smell the industry and the earnestness and the words in the whole place. And they took me on a tour around.

(02:52):
I did all these interviews and then they offered me a job. I took the job and three days into the job, the PE college phoned up and said, great news, somebody's dropped out. And I was like, no, I know I'm really happy here.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
So

Speaker 2 (03:06):
I stayed in journalism and my first job was writing horoscopes.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Well, I was going to say for a women's magazine of all things.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
For a woman's magazine. A

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Man

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Writing for a woman magazine. I've worked on many women's magazines during my time. But 17. But yeah, so I was 17 years old, a school leaver. The magazine was called Secrets. It was a romantic fiction magazine and it was for elderly ladies.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Very good.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
And it was printed on hot metal presses.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Right, okay.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
One of the last magazines in Britain, I think, to be printed on hot metal presses. And so my core job was being the case room boy, which means you were to go up the stairs to where they were creating on these hot metal presses, really industrial. You can kind of imagine in your mind's eye this place is quite dark, there are kind of flashes going off. It's very hot because they are literally melting lead up there to turn it into fonts. And all the language that we now know in the digital world about fonts and cases and points and everything else, that all comes from that old printing technology. So I had to run up and down the stairs with the galleys, which were long columns of type. And then we'd have to subedit those, spot the mistakes and everything else and take them back up and down the stairs.

(04:23):
And yes, and write the horoscopes. So

Speaker 1 (04:25):
I had the fitness of being a sports teacher.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yes. I had all the stairs there. And I just loved it. And after three months, I was obviously so good at writing the horoscopes that after three months I was promoted to the role of beauty editor.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
There we go. I mean, look at you now.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Exactly. I was still 17 years old and I mean I knew nothing about cosmetics. I hardly could even recognise a bar of soap.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
But I mean the way that you got into industry is not what people can do now. You can't go into an industry quite like that.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Sadly.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
For people that are wanting to start out in something, what advice would you give them to opening said door and going and doing something from the bottom up?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
I think those sorts of opportunities, you even look at DC Thompson now for example, I'm still quite close to the company and then I take on graduates. They never took on graduates. They only ever took on school leaders and kind of trained them up from there. I think there are more opportunities now in terms of work experience and those sorts of opportunities than there ever were. I always advise anybody who is kind of young and ambitious to using whatever means they can get into workplaces. It doesn't really matter what you do because what you do isn't going to be what you end up doing.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Very

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Quickly you're going to find what you like doing and what you don't like doing

Speaker 1 (05:50):
As

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Soon as you start work. So just get into workplaces, take on responsibility, be really happy to do the things that other people don't want to do because they're a bit boring or a bit repetitive. And that's fine because it's all new for you. You can be really enthusiastic about just getting in and kind of getting on. And I think that whenever employers are looking at CVs and applications, that drive to that use of initiative to get yourself a role somewhere, to get working, I think always stands out in amongst other people who were maybe just a bit more academic and maybe spent more time doing those things. Do voluntary work. I mean there's a tonne of voluntary work out there you can do.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
But how do you think currently with the world of AI and the way that it is commoditizing industry and people's roles, people can cut through the noise and get into an industry that they've always wanted to be because things are moving at a race knots right now. You've written a book called The Next Gen CEO obviously. It's based on your history, but you're forecasting the future.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
What would you suggest to somebody that's wanting to start a business or get into a job and AI is changing the current climate?

Speaker 2 (07:00):
So I think AI is an incredible tool. It's probably the most powerful single tool that has come into the world and into the workplace in my lifetime because it is absolutely transformational. And what it's doing is it's changing. The reason I wrote the book is it's changing the nature of leadership

(07:21):
And it's writing new rules just as quickly as it's getting rid of some of the old ways and the old rules of running things. But also it's eating those roles, those starter roles up really quickly. And I think that's the point really that you're making here, which is the opportunity to get into an organisation and to learn how the organisation works, how the marketplace works. It's a bit like sitting at the bottom of a tree. I always think those kind of starter roles. You might have a job that is very dull, very repetitive, but it allows you to sit at the bottom of the tree and see where all the branches are and start to make connections and networks and all of those supports that help you when you start to move on in your career. So what do you do now? I think in both cases you have to become more of yourself.

(08:10):
What AI does is it gathers together the best of, and it gives you the best of advice, but it doesn't. If you want to cut through, and I think that's at the

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Core of

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Your question here, you have to cut through with your instinct. You have to be brave enough to communicate in a way which is authentically you and to be unafraid of that. And if you're an experienced person, then that's using the weight of your experience. If you are relatively inexperienced because you're a young person looking for a role, well, the one thing that you have, the one amazing advantage that you have over everybody else is your age, your level of energy and enthusiasm is extraordinary at that age, and you don't appreciate it when you've got it. You just burn all of that there. But if you recognise that the people who are older than you are a bit jealous of you, they're very jealous of the fact that you have an insight into the way that the world works from the perspective of a 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 year old, that insight is just incredibly useful because what you know better than what they know is how to communicate with people like you.

(09:22):
In a world of AI and in a world of generational change, and that's one of the other major storms that's going on at the moment that's changing leadership, in a world of massive generational change, it's very difficult when you're of one generation to understand how to communicate with and appeal to

Speaker 1 (09:40):
People

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Who are of a younger generation. That's the core advantage that you've got. And so you take that energy, you take that insight and you push them into the application to be a part of a company.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
You mentioned a lot about leadership there, but everything essentially you know about leadership is genuinely about to expire. Yes.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
It

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Is, right? So just picture that then. Somebody that's reading your book, somebody that's understanding historically what has worked, frameworks, initiatives, ways of being, and then you say it's about to expire. What does a future leader look like?

Speaker 2 (10:18):
I'll answer that in two parts. The first part is to say I'm very conscious that what I didn't want to do was just to write a book that said, well, this worked for me and this didn't work for me because I'm very conscious in a world which is being changed by AI, by generational upheaval, and also by geopolitical changes that the old rules don't work anymore. That's not to say though that frameworks and approaches won't work in a new context. So in order to try and figure out what that new context is, I've spoken to lots of futurologists, lots of academics, lots of leaders who are more at the bleeding edge of what is happening at the moment in order to kind of verify, is this still valid? Is this still useful? Because I think what happens is as you become more experienced in a role, you take on lots of orthodoxies.

(11:15):
If

Speaker 1 (11:15):
You

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Imagine orthodoxies are the way we do things around here and it's a really useful exercise anyway when you do that to validate those orthodoxies is to test are those. If you go into an organisation and you say, "How do we do this?" And they say, "Well, we do it this way." And you say, why? And they go, because that's how we've always done it. You know that you're in the wrong place. You know that that's an orthodoxy you need to validate. And that essentially is what I've done. So I've basically brought an old playbook and I have cherry picked from that and I've tested all of those theories so that I know, for example,

(11:51):
Some of the problems that leaders had in the past will still endure in the future. For example, leaders often are people who are problem solvers. That's how they got to be leaders in the first place. So helping them with frameworks that mean that they don't just dash in and start to solve low value problems, that they remain solving high value issues and challenges, that's really important. And the framework that I'm suggesting to leaders now, it's called PISA, P-I-S-A, is one I've used personally for the last three or four decades. But when I've proposed it to new leaders, they were like, "God, that's brilliant. We didn't know that existed. That's perfect. That would really stop me from wasting my time." So I think there are definitely some old and tried and tested ways of dealing with things that will still work in this new world. So

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Let's just double click into that PISA framework then. Starts with pause. Just talk me through the process.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
So the P stands for pause. So if we assume that a leader often will be confronted with a problem, and for them, the easiest thing to do is just to solve that problem like that, but it will be a low value problem. And by solving the problem rather than delegating the problem to somebody else, they're not teaching anybody else to solve the problem the next time it comes up. So P is to pause. So you pause rather than diving straight in. It starts to give you a measure of objectivity. The I stands for it's not about me. So that reminds you the very valuable thing, which is when a problem comes up, don't take it personally. And often, especially with founders and entrepreneurs, they do. When there's a problem in the business, they regard that as a reflection of their own capabilities. And so reminding yourself not to take it personally again adds to that objectivity.

(13:41):
The S stands for separate out the issues. So often when somebody comes to you with a problem, they are coming to you with a problem which is wrapped in an agenda of some sort. It's from their perspective. So you work with them to separate out what exactly is the problem here, and you get them to enumerate that. And the A is stands for, am I the only person that can solve this? And 95% of the time, the answer is no, somebody else can solve this. So it allows you to look at problems in your organisation, to not jump into doing them yourself, and to put responsibility back into the hands of the people who will learn most from doing it. What you will find is two things. One is it will allow you the distance to do the things that only the founder or the CEO should do.

(14:27):
And that's really important because that's the really high value thing. There are jobs in a company, in an organisation that only the leader can do or should do. So it allows you to do those things. And secondly, it helps delegate to and coach the people below you. And what you'll find is those problems will come up far less often. But

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Could you filter that down to SLT, for instance? Could they use the PISA framework for managing their teams? And at what point should they use that without just fobbing everything off?

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Because it's not fobbing everybody. It's not fobbing everything off. That's the great thing. What it does is it places the appropriate accountability next to the task. And absolutely you would give that to SLT. I think this is a framework. PISA is a framework that works all the way down through the organisation to anybody who has anybody else reporting into them. It works for any leader at any level. And the more senior you become as a leader, the more powerful it becomes. But ultimately it's something that works for everyone.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
What I found interesting having read through the book is you mentioned acronyms are almost a code word for those at the top, for instance.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yet

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Here we are talking about PISA, talking about SLT, talking about all these different acronyms, which is somewhat contradictory to what you say. How do you build a culture where you aren't just crowbarring acronyms into conversation or phrases and you are starting to simplify the language so those at the bottom can understand what you're trying to do at the top?

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah. I think it's really important that you have a shared vocabulary in your organisation that it's shared inside and outside because so many problems happen as a result of people not quite understanding and being too shy to ask what does this mean exactly? There's a great example which I use in the book of Elon Musk and a memo that he wrote where he essentially banned acronyms from his organisation because it got in the way of people understanding things. And it also got in the way of people challenging bad process because as soon as something is easy enough to understand by three or four letters, then you're never going to challenge it. It feels so established

Speaker 1 (16:36):
At that

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Point. So super important not to do that. Super important to keep language really simple but common. And I always go through whenever I'm in a change mode in an organisation, which is quite often, most organisations are in a case of a state of constant change, the language that you use is really important and using language deliberately in order to reframe existing problems is also a really valuable thing to do. So if you are launching into an already competitive sector within your company, you're launching a new product or service, reframing that sector away from the way that it's described right now can also be really useful because it allows you to see the sector in you, see what its strengths and its weaknesses are. And so I think using vocabulary, being open to challenge, being really clear about what you mean, spending the time talking over those things internally and externally I think is really important.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
From a leadership perspective, naivety and vulnerability, you mentioned a fair bit in the book and you mentioned at one point you were walking around the floor, you had a lot of staff, multiple different floors in the office. And you knew there were things going on behind the scenes that you couldn't tell the team, but you still had to maintain some level of calm. How does a leader deal with knowing that something's hitting the fan behind the scenes, but they have to almost lie to their staff to make them feel like it's okay?

Speaker 2 (18:14):
I think whenever you're going through a change process, and I think what you're talking about there is when a leader has to hold onto something that they know which is going to have a massive impact on the organisation. I think there's a couple of things. One is, as much as possible, you need to try and make sure that that period of time is as short as it can be, that knowing something that everybody else doesn't know is very, very stressful. So I think you truncate that situation as much as you can. Often leaders can use the fact that they don't think they can tell other people as an excuse not to give bad news.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
And

Speaker 2 (18:59):
I think giving bad news is really important at a time when people can do something about it. I have been in situations myself where I've known I've had to close down a department, part

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Of

Speaker 2 (19:13):
A business. And early on in my career, I thought it was best not to tell anybody while I worked out what the plan was and then eventually I could give them certainty. The certainty was bad news, but at least I could be certain about this is the process, this is how long it'll take, this is how you'll be affected by redundancy, this is the payout, this is what that looks like. And I though that was good management. I've changed my mind about that over the years since because what that meant, often when you tell somebody that I'm afraid your job is finished now because this part of the organisation isn't performing, I now feel if you tell people earlier, you give them the opportunity to do something about that.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
So

Speaker 2 (19:56):
If there's a performance problem somewhere, telling those people early on that something is not in objective terms, that something is not meeting its targets allows them to do something about it or recognise nothing can be done about it. At which point, if you have to do the hardest thing and you have to make a group of people redundant,

Speaker 1 (20:16):
You

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Have to close something down, well, at least they understand why.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
And I was interested, one of the frameworks within the book is exactly that, having candid conversations with individuals and almost letting them down in a structured way and giving them the information upfront so they know what is coming. Yes. You also mentioned that HR said don't sit in all these redundancy meetings at one point, but yet you decided to very ethically and empathetically sit in these redundancy meetings. Yes. As a leader, you seem quite empathetic, you seem quite caring, but yet you also seem very ruthless on shows like The Apprentice. You're a nice guy. How do you balance the two?

Speaker 2 (20:51):
I guess what you see on The Apprentice is an absolutely authentic part of me. So I suppose I have an operating principle when it comes to that. I have a motivation. My motivation on The Apprentice is I want to make sure that Lord Sugar invests his 250,000 pounds in the right person with the right idea. And anybody who I feel isn't the right person or doesn't have the right idea, it's my job to stop them getting through to that level. And so I'm pretty clear when it comes to those things. I don't think I'm rude to candidates. I mean, I'm very direct with them.

(21:30):
I expect answers. I expect them to have done the work before they come into the room and I get kind of a bit offended if they haven't done it. And that's often when my hackles rise, it's because genuinely I think to myself, why on earth have you turned up for a quarter of a million pounds worth of investment without having really done the work to justify it? That kind of offends me. I think this is an amazing opportunity and somebody else would have done the work to get here and you haven't. And I'm kind of offended by that a bit. I think probably five, six years ago, there was this whole trend across the workplace, which was to do with bringing your whole self to work,

(22:13):
That idea that you needed to be authentic in everything you do. Now I think leaders, I think everybody in work should be authentic, but when it comes to leadership, you also have to make some decisions about what you're going to miss out, what you're going to curate. People, when they look to you as a leader, are looking for consistency in behaviour and outlook. If you've had a bad day, if you've had a bad morning, you cannot bring that to work. You can't bring everything to work. I've had colleagues and never really bosses, but I've seen this in very senior people who've used that idea as an excuse to bring everything in. And all of a sudden meetings then become some kind of psychodrama

Speaker 1 (23:00):
With them

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Where they're pouring out their heart about things that have gone wrong and you think that is not an appropriate thing to do at work. So I'm very authentic in the moment. If something's going wrong, I will be very direct. I will be really constructive. At the same time, work takes up a lot of your time, a lot of anybody's time. So it has to be something that is enjoyable. Even if the work itself is difficult, if you have to be really diligent, even if the topics are really serious, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't enjoy it. And so I also think it's part of a leader's role to make sure that the working environment is one that people look forward to.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned obviously with regards to doing preparation, such like when you were coming to pitch for Quarter of Million Quiz. Now you went from magazine straight into radio with very little experience in the world of radio. None.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
None,

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Exactly. None apart from

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I'd listened to it a bit,

Speaker 1 (24:01):
As we all have. But you said nobody feels qualified. Most CEOs are just people that keep going. You've gone from one industry to another. Yes. You're ripping into people that maybe haven't done their research for a quarter of million quiz.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. How did

Speaker 1 (24:11):
You land such a big job in radio with no experience at all?

Speaker 2 (24:16):
By accident, which is the way that most of my career has come together. And when I speak to people about their careers, most of the people I know in truth didn't end up where they planned to end up. They may make it sound like that, but that's because these CVs are written in retrospect, aren't they?

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Very much.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Everything looks like a very smooth transition from one thing to another, "Oh, ballpark of a strategy. Here was my plan." No, I ended up there because I had done for the very first time in my life, I had done really, really well as an editor with a magazine called FHM, which had gone from 35,000 to over 500,000 in three years. It was the first thing I'd ever worked on in my life that was really successful. I was 30 years old. I was suddenly terrified that what was an amazing thing that kind of made my name and reputation would collapse as quickly as it had come up. And I didn't want to take that risk. So I had a kind of a career vertical.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
At

Speaker 2 (25:17):
The same time, I just happened to meet on a business trip, a guy who was moving on from being the managing director of Kiss FM, the trendy London dance radio station. And he said, "I'm moving on. I'm going to become the chairman of this. Would you be interested in throwing your hat into the ring for the MDs role?" And you

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Said yes. And I

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Said yes. And it turns out, I don't think there was anybody else who was never formally advertised. So I think I got the job because he wanted me to have the job. And there was

Speaker 1 (25:45):
A bit of learning through that process when you were MD of Kiss ML.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Massive learning. I'd never run a company before. I'd very successfully run creative teams, so I could parlay those parts of my experience across. I was conscious of the things that I didn't know, and I was honest about the things that I didn't know, and I sought help from people. So I didn't understand the way that P&Ls ran, so therefore I made sure I had a really experienced FD there and also other people I could ask about that. I didn't understand the way that programming ran. I made a bunch of really big tactical mistakes really.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
YouTube was one of them.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah, that was a little bit later on actually. The YouTube mistake was, that was a million pound mistake, that one.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Which could have been worth a lot more now.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Oh yeah, absolutely. That was when I had my own business and we had Shortlist and Stylist and Stylist was an incredible success, incredible brand. And YouTube were just going through a massive growth phase. And they offered us a million pounds, no strings attached, just to make video because they recognised that we were still at that point a scale up organisation. We didn't have the ability to invest in that ourselves. We'll give you a million pounds just to spend on equipment, studios, people and everything else. And I said no.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
And I said

Speaker 2 (27:11):
No. And I gave myself lots of reasons and other people around me, lots of reasons about why this was the worst strategic thing to do. The truth was Stylist was so successful that it was increasing the value of the company, just doing what it was doing so dramatically. And my own personal wealth was so tied up with what that company was worth that

Speaker 1 (27:32):
I just

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Didn't want to take the risk. That's the truth I see now. Which

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Makes sense, I guess if you've got that hindsight to back that up and to justify. And maybe just dial back a little bit to the KISS FM piece when you -

Speaker 2 (27:42):
So it allows you. I think the best leaders are those people who continue to take risks wherever they go. And I definitely took risks, all sorts of very creative risks when I was at CASE. One of them was recognising that the big market opportunity was to be London's young radio station. And what CASS was at that point was it was a dance music station. So most of its audience were young, but there were a whole lot of young people who weren't listening to it. It maybe got 20% of the audience that it could have done in terms of the youth audience. And so I made a decision that the quickest, most direct route to that was by banning us playing any records that were over two years old on air. We used to play loads of kind of dance classics during the day. So I banned them and I did a stunt where we had a bonfire, terrible idea, in the car park and we were going to throw live on air, throw old records onto it.

(28:46):
And that offended so many people. I mean, I had death threats. If social media had existed then, I'm not sure I would have a career now. I created such a furory from doing that.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
I mean, it's not exactly the most sustainable thing to do in the world.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
No, and it's a bit akin to burning bugs, which

Speaker 1 (29:09):
You

Speaker 2 (29:09):
Know. We

Speaker 1 (29:09):
Don't do. We don't do

Speaker 2 (29:10):
That. We just

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Don't do.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
That's not the sign of a civilised society. I made a bunch of mistakes. I made them publicly and sometimes that's the best place to make them. There was one

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Mistake that you made when you were playing records. Maybe they were older, younger than two years, don't know. But it was at the point that Princess Diana passed away and you turned the radio on when all these other broadcasters were announcing she'd passed away and you had some house music that was pumping out.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah. I woke up that morning and the news was through and again, we were kind of pre-digital at that particular point. Yeah, I sat for maybe half an hour, an hour watching the news on television transfixed by the tragedy of the whole thing. And then I suddenly thought to myself, "I wonder what we're doing on the radio?" And yeah, I turned on and so every other station is Playing kind of funeral music and we're there playing banging house tunes. And so I'm on the phone trying to get ahold of the programme director or trying to get through to the studio to tell the idiots on air that we needed to maybe do something, a bit of - A bit more

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Sombre.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, maybe some soothing Ibiza vibes. Something like that. A

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Little bit of saxophone.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Rather than.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
People wanted you to leave at that point. They were thinking you were over.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah. What was interesting was when it came to running case, the team that were there were highly sceptical as they would be. Magazine editor comes in, bit of reputation from there. What's he going to do with this radio station? And then I go on and make some quick. I didn't understand the difference between tactical decisions and strategic

Speaker 1 (30:59):
Decisions.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
All I knew was good leaders make decisions quickly and in the absence of full data. So I made lots of decisions quickly. If I'd recognised and just done a simple list, which is something I talk about in the book, listing out what are strategic decisions, things like playlist, that's a strategic decision. Versus tactical decisions, what DJ's on at what time, I could have made lots of decisions that were tactical that would have got real momentum behind the station and given myself the time to make those strategic decisions.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
And

Speaker 2 (31:37):
I just didn't understand that framework at the time.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
And going into that tactical strategic piece, because I think it's transferable to anybody in business, top down, starting out, even if they're just employed right. Anyone can use this. Just talk about that framework because it is so simple, but it is also overlooked by so many.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
So it's an understanding of what is the difference between a strategic decision and a tactical decision. When you ask people to define it, there are lots of different definitions that people come up with. The one that I prefer is a strategic decision is one which once you have made it, it is either very difficult or impossible to change. A tactical decision is one that you can make, and if you have to change it, then you can. Might be a bit painful, might be a bit embarrassing, but you can change it. Whenever you are in a business, and let's use the example of somebody who just joins a business as a new leader within there, you should be able to write down the 10 to 15 big decisions that are coming up in the next couple of months and just write down your list and then separate that out into tactical.

(32:47):
So two doors. I can go through this door, I can go through the indoor, but if I need to come out the outdoor, I can, versus strategic. And what you will typically find is the long list is tactical and there's a very short list of strategic. It's important as a leader to be able to make decisions dynamically, so you need to get on with the tactical ones. Those tactical ones, you can make those without knowing everything, and that's absolutely fine.

(33:16):
So long as you make more of them the right decision than the wrong decision, you're okay and you will. You just definitely will. The fact that a decision needs to be made typically means that when you make the decision instinctively, you'll do the

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Right thing.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
The strategic decisions then you can use the cover and the momentum of the tactical decisions in order to give yourself the time to really think and study and look at different scenarios and just spend longer planning the implementation of those strategic decisions. It allows you to get real movement under the organisation, solve problems that may have been there before without risking doing something that is going to imperil the future of the organisation.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Do you put KPIs in place in terms of 60, 100, 120 day plans to be able to measure the success of all your strategic or tactical decisions?

Speaker 2 (34:11):
I put in place something that I. I like the phrase believable pathway. I think they're useful, those kind of 30, 60, 120 day. I think they're useful to capture things, but at the same time, sometimes making change can be much quicker than 30 days and much longer than 120 days. And trying therefore to capture it in that framework to begin with, I think can be a little bit misleading, but it's that whole thing. I think it kind of comes from politics and that idea of first 100 days in power and everything else.

(34:53):
All it is, it's an artificial set of parameters. So I like to put in place a believable path where you say, "What is it that we need to do and what are the steps that we need to take in order to achieve our objective? How do we know when we've achieved our objective or you set clear KPIs for that? What percentage of our revenue is going to come from here or there?" And then you set measurable milestones along that believable pathway. And then of course you can capture them and say, "Well, this will do in the next month, this will do in the next quarter, this will do over a two quarter period," whatever it happens to be.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
How do you feel about Elon Musk's kind of unreasonable timelines where he sets something that is probably going to take a year and says, "Get it done in six months." And he knows they won't get it done in six months, but at least they'll be a bit closer potentially to the end than they would be if they had the whole year to play with.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, I quite like it. In Next Gen CEO, I write about the power of reasonable leaders acting unreasonably. So if you were to draw a very simple kind of four box graph and you have reasonable leader, unreasonable leader, acting reasonably, acting unreasonably, almost all leaders would put themselves above the line. So they would say, "I'm mostly a reasonable leader." Elon Musk, maybe not so much. There are definitely people, very high profile leaders who are tyrants and bullies and sometimes they're enormously successful and they can turn out to be, I don't know, the president of the United States. Most people who aren't psychopaths though would mark themselves above the line. And in most of what they do, they will be in the top left hand corner, which is a reasonable leader acting reasonably. But it's useful to tactically shift across that line and be a reasonable leader acting unreasonably because all the time you're sitting in the top left hand corner, you are building up goodwill because people recognise that you are not asking them to do something you wouldn't do yourself, that you're giving them the appropriate time and the resources to do things.

(37:14):
Sometimes though, you need to act unreasonably. I think that Elon Musk example, if you had to take the positives from it, are asking people to do something which is unreasonable. I think that's okay because sometimes that allows you to break through the

(37:33):
Orthodoxies that have built up over time.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
To push the boundaries. I think your exact term in the book is being completely reasonable is sometimes an indulgence no leader can actually afford is exactly what you say there. Now, just going back to change, your life changed. Please

Speaker 2 (37:46):
I wrote that sounds good.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
It does, doesn't it? It's almost like you know what you're doing. Going back to 2006, your life turned upside down. You had a Caesar salad or a Caesar wrap. You were on route to Portugal for a long weekend with your wife. You were moaning a bit about feeling ill. Yo wife though you were always a bit ill when you go on holiday. I appreciate that. I know what you mean. But you nearly died.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
I mean, I felt like I'd nearly died. It was never properly diagnosed, but certainly I ended up in hospital. So I started off with something that they imagine was salmonella, but I'd eaten the evidence and got rid of everything by the time they were able to test

Speaker 1 (38:28):
Anything

Speaker 2 (38:29):
So they could never quite tell. Yeah, I got very ill within about 24 hours of being there and trying to pretend that I wasn't feeling ill. A moment where I was super, super ill and fell over and smashed my face against a very hard stone floor and got back to London after this kind of short, hellish break and then tried to go back to work and then got really, really ill, was rushed to hospital. And then there was a moment as I'm lying there in bed and Bev, my wife is there. I think I say I feel really ill at this point and suddenly all the sensors and all the

Speaker 1 (39:11):
Machines

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Start to go beep beep beep beep beep like you see in a medical drama. A triage team runs in, somebody takes Bev away and all of a sudden they're wheeling me into something else and it all goes a little bit blurry at that time. But what happened was whatever bacteria was in me had started to attack parts of organs that would rather not be attacked. So lots of my gut just kind of gave up the ghost. They were concerned about what it was going to do to my liver, my kidneys and so on and so forth. I had many weeks in hospital as a result of eating what was in retrospect I realised now it's kind of warm, it's quite a tangy chicken wrap as it turns out. Maybe one that had been sitting on the side for a couple of days.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
However many days. You thank later on in the book that the person that served you that very chicken wrap. At the beginning you were a little angry. At the end you're very thankful because it changed your life. It changed the course of your life. What did you change when you were lying on that bed after when you were recovering, then when you went back to work? How did that change your

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Life? I started to reflect that if I had indeed, if that had been the end of me, what would I have been sitting up in heaven? Probably in hell, I don't know. What would I have regretted? And I figured that by that time I'd had quite a track record of success in creating products and businesses that had made other people a lot of money and I'd been really well rewarded for that. I wasn't bitter about that, but I did think to myself, "Well, I've never done this for myself. I've never had the bottle to take the risk myself." So I was determined that when I was well enough and when the right idea came about or opportunity came about that I would take it, that I wouldn't hesitate. I also started to think who would I work with? Who would my team be? Who are the people?

(41:09):
Because I knew it would be in media in some way, shape or form. There was a guy who. I had a conversation very early on with a guy called Tim, Tim Ewington, who became my business partner, who at the time he comes from a very strategic and research background. He and I are very different as people and we get on tremendously well, still do to this day, but our skill base is very complimentary to each other. He has a brain the size of Bulgaria.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yours is pretty big as well.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
No, no, no. I'm just a little more street savvy. I know surface level about lots of different things, so I can bluff my way through loads of things. Tim is a very deep thinker, a great reader. Again, won scholarships to everything that he ever did in his life. Comes from Yorkshire, so he has that very gritty way of thinking about things. To the point. Everything he's got, he kind of created himself. I was determined that if I left the company that Tim would be my business partner. We started from that point to think about things we might do together and it was kind of really exciting just playing around with that. I always knew that to be an entrepreneur and to leave, I would have to do it with somebody else.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Really? A lot of founders don't often think like that. They want the whole pie. They want to do it themselves. It's very lonely that way. Others have a business partner or a co-founder

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Or

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Call out.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Instinctively, I always wanted a business partner

(42:42):
And it was brilliant doing it. I would strongly recommend it to absolutely everybody, which is find somebody you want to work with because it is really lonely, isn't it? It is. You start a company and then you have that thing you talked about earlier on where you're walking around and you've got fears or you know things are coming down the line. They're not going to be good. You don't have an answer yet. If you've got somebody else to sit down and speak to who has exactly the same skin in the game, and we were absolutely fifty fifty.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Everything

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Tim and I have ever done, absolutely split down the middle and that's been brilliant. We don't agree all the time, which is fantastic. So you get this brilliant sense of. We always, in our business, our business was known for its levels of very high levels of constructive dissent. Everybody could challenge everything.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
That's impressive.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Which is a really powerful engine to have in any organisation. And then it's really clear who the decision maker is. But what you have is a culture where people are debating things, debating things, then a decision is made. At that point, everybody snaps in behind the decision and pushes forward because they know they've been listened to. It's incredibly powerful fuel. But that was the dynamic that Tim and I had. We'd debate things furiously, then agree them, and then we would push on. The only way we agreed those things ultimately was I was the CEO. We were co-founders and I was the CEO. So we were happy that I would make the final decision on everything.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
I was just about to ask that because I've had fifty fiftys with no shareholder agreement, no clarity, and then you're at loggerheads because no one makes that final decision.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
So somebody has to be nominated at the very start, and that was fine. Tim was really happy to delegate that responsibility to me. He was happy for me to be the final decision maker. I was really happy for him to lobby and persuade and it got the best out of both of us. I never wanted to make decisions that would make him unhappy,

(44:41):
But I would often make decisions that he wouldn't have made. It wasn't the one that he wanted to make. There was just a genuine respect that sat in that. Then a point came where I recognised that the structure and strategy of the organisation I was in, IPC Media was changing, that my role, which was essentially inventing and launching new magazines and websites and other things, that was going to change, that actually developing new ideas and redeveloping old products was something that was quite a rare skill. I knew that anyway. Actually, even at very elite levels of leadership, you get people who are brilliant at implementation, but not very good at thinking of new ideas and developing new stuff in a way which is both kind of instinctive but also objective. And that's something I've always been, that's my course. I'm a developer at the end of the day.

(45:42):
Tim comes from that background as well. So together, we decided that we would set up an agency. We had a five person agency, but it gave us the opportunity to hire some really brilliant people who became the core of Shortlist Media when we pivoted out of being an agency and into a media owner ourselves.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Because one of the things that you did was distribute free magazines essentially outside train stations and the industry were like, "Well, it doesn't matter. It's a free magazine. How do you know who's reading it? Because people are just basically being given a magazine." You pivoted the terminology into the word freemium, which is a term that many people know now, right?

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
What was the reason behind a freemium magazine that then you ended up selling tonnes of advertising in and actually becoming the most popular magazine of its sort?

Speaker 2 (46:28):
So we recognised that underneath it all, when you look at the traditional business model, the way of getting magazines, consumer magazines to their readers was incredibly inefficient. For example, I was the publisher of monthly magazines where you would have 40% of the copies that you distributed were returned. The reason for that is because retailers don't want ever to be sold out of a copy of a magazine. And as the publisher, you don't either because you'll lose your pocket. So therefore there's an endemic oversupply of copy in there and that costs tonnes of money. If 40% of your copies remain undistributed, that's a huge drag on your bottom line. The marketing costs of persuading people to remind them to go into a news agent or a supermarket and to go and pick up that magazine was enormous. You have to stick it in a plastic bag with a gift on the cover.

(47:29):
You have to spend money on television advertising, which is hugely expensive. You have to market considerably. If you take all of that out of the equation and you say, "Now what we're going to do is we're going to give readers a properly targeted group of urban professionals, because that's where we're distributing,

(47:51):
Who are on their way to work because that's when we distribute it or coming home from work, a product which is absolutely designed for them. We are going to thrust it into their hands so they don't need to remember to go elsewhere. So our marketing costs will be zero within this. Our distribution costs will be a fraction of those. Our wastage costs will be 1%, not 40%. What we recognised was the editorial cost base, which was the thing that made traditional publishers assume that this wasn't possible. You can't do anything that's really quality because how could you afford to spend on it? The editorial cost base is not that different because it's such a small percentage of what you're spending anyway. So you do it on a piece of paper, you go," Well, it's crazy not to do it this way, surely. "So we recognised that the issues were how do you build a distinctive brand?

(48:41):
How do you build trust from advertisers that actually this is being given to the right people? And how do you create an 11 city distribution network? The distribution network was incredibly difficult. If we'd known how difficult it was, I don't think we'd ever started. It took months and months of being in, I don't know, Liverpool in the back of a van on a rainy Thursday morning, almost crying because this was so tough.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
And were you out there as well?

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Oh

Speaker 1 (49:11):
Yeah.oots on the ground?

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
How important is it for a leader to be out there with its team?

Speaker 2 (49:15):
I mean, I think it's a trade off between low value and high value. I think if you're out there every single week, that is you doing low value work and you can't do that. I think if you are out there in order, A, to genuinely understand what the problems are at the cold face so that you have a real appreciation of that. And secondly, in order to show everybody in the organisation, we go the extra mile, and I am going the extra mile. I'm not asking you to do anything. I mean, we used to do a thing with our editorial teams every year. Our editorial teams used to get dressed up in the merchandiser outfits and go and merchandise magazines. They'd spend a couple of hours out

Speaker 1 (49:57):
There

Speaker 2 (49:58):
On a cold February morning. It's not great work. Understanding what it's like, being in front of their readers, understanding that even though they've got this really great thing in their hands, sometimes people don't have the time, right? They just want to walk past. Being utterly ignored on the street is - Demoralising. Well, it's a tremendous leveller, if nothing else. If you spend the rest of your career being fated by PRs from beauty companies, being ignored by a commuter, that levels you. And then obviously we'd go for a nice breakfast afterwards and talk about what that was. So for sure I was doing that, but then so was everybody else in the organisation. They all had a feel for what that was like. The key was our conviction that we could do this without spending 10 million pounds on marketing. And advertisers took a few weeks to really wake up to it, and that was a nervy moment, but the reality of it was in front of them.

(50:59):
They were commuting themselves. They'd get on a tube in the morning and they would see tens of hundreds of copies of shortlist being read, being consumed. They were themselves the target audiences

(51:11):
For both shortlist and stylists. The advertising, when it came, came at scale and quickly, and then that was the thing that the traditional publishers, the

Speaker 1 (51:25):
Incumbents

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Just never believed would happen.

Speaker 1 (51:26):
Because they saw it in the world. They saw it being used 100%. Yeah. Now as we wrap up this podcast, I want to take you back to the beginning of the book, the first few pages where you mentioned that you once presented a cookbook to Delia Smith. You gave her this cookbook. It was thumbedthrough. It had scribbles on it, had pages torn out, all that good stuff. You opened the book by saying that you want this book to be treated like that, to be on someone's desk, then looking through it, then working through those frameworks. Why is that? What is the purpose of this book for an individual if they haven't read it yet, and what will it give them from an insights perspective that could help them out?

Speaker 2 (52:01):
So it's a book that I very deliberately wrote in a clear structure, and the structure is my philosophy of leadership, which is if you imagine a target, it starts with self-leadership on the inside, and then it emanates out from there, from self-leadership to people leadership, to organisational leadership, to market leadership, and then ultimately to thought

Speaker 1 (52:22):
Leadership.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
Because I think those are the foundations that you build it on. You can't be an outstanding leader unless you yourself are disciplined about the way that you do things. So understanding yourself, empathising with yourself in the first instance, being honest with yourself

Speaker 1 (52:43):
In the

Speaker 2 (52:43):
First instance, if you can't do those things, if you don't recognise that you need some absolutely non-negotiable core characteristics, then moving out to the outer rings from there, it's never going to work. You won't have the solid foundations. The chapters themselves are really short, that's partly because I have a limited attention span. So the longest chapter I think is nine pages. The shortest chapter is two. I wrote it because that's my attention span like that. But also I recognise that the people who are reading this, and really this is for two main audiences. This is for people who are leaders at the moment, but recognise that the world is changing around them and that they require a new edge. And also for people who are emerging leaders, people who are maybe in their first leadership role or they anticipate that happening. It doesn't need to say CEO on your business card, by the way, to read this book.

(53:41):
It's a much broader career piece than that. Those are both people who are really time pressed, and so

(53:52):
I wanted to write something which was really accessible. I also wanted to write something that was honest, and so I talk a lot about the mistakes that I made, and we've talked about some of those in the podcast today. I want to be really open and candid about those things because nobody really wants to hear me go on about. And then I had another great success and everything else. You learn a lot from your mistakes, and if you can learn from other people's mistakes and my mistakes, that's great. And I wanted it to be useful. So I wanted it to have actionable frameworks. I wanted people to go, "That's interesting. That's inspired a thought in me. How might I now take that on and make that practical?" So it is also full of short lists of action points you might take or ways in which you might capture this on a little graph or a little pyramid.

(54:46):
And deliberately in the book as well, they're hand drawn. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I drew them and then somebody who's really good at art redrew them.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Redesigned

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Them. I'm not sure they're much better than they were when I drew them in the first place, but there we go. And that is really the idea, which is this is something that I really hope, much like Delia Smith's cookbook was when I got it when my mom gave it to me when I was 17 and ended up full of post-it notes and kind of spattered with grease from the hob and

(55:20):
With pages turned down, which I'm delighted, thank you Oliver, to see here with notes in the margins, with things highlighted and everything else. I want this to be a book that doesn't sit politely on the bookshelf. I want this to be a book that when leaders or leaders in waiting are sitting thinking, "How do I tackle this problem or how do I make the most of this opportunity?" They kind of go back like I do. Whenever I'm cooking something new, I've seen it in a magazine or I've seen it on television, I go, "And how would Delia do this?" And I always go back

Speaker 1 (55:52):
There

Speaker 2 (55:52):
To that core. I would love it if this was for some people a book that they were able to go back to and refer to and then go and then do their own thing on top of it. That would be the most flattering thing that could possibly happen with Next Gen City.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Well, I've given it to my team. They've got a few questions I'll talk to you about off air. Alan Sugar says you're the real deal. I think you are. Thank you ever so much for coming on. It's a great book. Appreciate it. Thank

Speaker 2 (56:19):
You.