Fearless
i’d like to start today by saying a huge
thank you
for inviting me to participate in this
very special tedx event
alongside such amazing speakers such as
sarah adder
and wendy it’s a true honour
and delighted to be part of such a great
team of inspiring
and fearless women and you know it’s a
shame it’s not live
but i will certainly be following the
whole conversation afterwards even
though
this is recorded from here in stockholm
sweden
so my talk today is all about how
failure can make you fearless
and uh you know it’s not obvious
that failure helps one be fearless but
bear with me
because i as i reflected on my own life
story
i’ve realized a lot of it’s actually
through the failures that i’ve probably
learned the most
and learnt to be the fearless version of
myself that i now am
so first of all i should probably start
with helping you understand who i
am and and my background as you can hear
probably i’m from glasgow uh i was
um you know a clever kid that went to
what would nowadays be called an inner
city school
i was bullied for being clever and i was
bullied
because i didn’t live in social housing
my parents who were both factory workers
had you know stretched themselves to
their financial limits to buy a house
but that was unacceptable at the school
that i was at so
i was bullied my parents um
were very hard working but factory
workers as i said
they had a tough life uh my grandparents
lives were even tougher and both
both grandfathers were alcoholics and in
that context
um you know i i escaped a lot through
reading books
i escaped a lot through working really
hard at school but
by keeping my head down and the books
and uh and the the you know the the
aspiration
i i had from from some role models in
other parts of my family
made me want to move beyond that tough
experience and so i had aspirations to
go to university
to get a profession to get a
qualification but but sadly
my father was diagnosed with terminal
cancer in the summer before i was due to
go to university
we decided not to tell him that he was
going to die
so it wasn’t the right time for me to go
to university whilst we were trying to
pretend
that everything was okay so um
so all of those experiences whilst tough
uh
really made me who i am today
um you know first of all the bullying
helped me become tough but they all
also taught me to have empathy
the fact that we had limited financial
resources
taught me to have my own financial
independence
as quickly as i possibly could i
actually started working at 12 and had
two jobs by the age of 14.
the fact that i didn’t go to university
um taught me that i had to learn a
number of
other skills beyond just straight
academic skills
to be able uh to move on
and achieve in life and be able to to
move up the ladder and achieve so much
more than my parents ever could
and finally losing a parent at a young
age makes you realize that life can be
very short
and if life is too short you should
never stick anything too long
if it makes you unhappy as a result of
that
my motto in life is have a dream and
bravely make it happen
and uh and certainly uh there have been
uh many experiences in my life that
probably
this this starting point in my life has
made me
have the confidence or be brave enough
to take them on and so just let me take
you through
some of those most monumental uh
experiences
in my life as i said at the age of 12 i
was selling fresh cream around the doors
of glasgow
kept very many old men that lived in
their own happy on a saturday morning as
i was
delivering fresh curtains of cream to
them that was the equivalent of
a caddo uh or online amazon in these
days actually i was ahead of my time
clearly at 14 i was an avon lady
and after knocking on doors i finally
realized that actually
all my family members could sell so much
more for me
if if i outsourced it to them because
they worked in factories
i guess that was amazon again reselling
um at the age of 17 after
not going to university i joined the
scottish whiskey industry
and became their west of scotland
trainee accountant
of the year and spent five years with
them one day a week going to college but
learning to be in finance
in 1990 i then joined procter gamble and
that was the star of 20 years
um a great 20 years where there were
many
experiences but some of my bravest
movements um
was probably going to romania in the mid
90s
uh it was just after the fall of
ceausescu
we were trying to open up markets like
bulgaria and serbia
i had to fire the bulgarian distributor
for paying off the mafia
i had to find serbian distributors to
sell detergents and that was between the
bosnian and kosovan wars so the people
who were
meeting kind of dressed like warlords
after that probably one of the the more
braver moves was after 16 years very
successful in approaching gamble finance
i made a move into general management to
run protruding gamble’s newly acquired
well a hairdressing business
and so i got to know all of the
hairdressers and there’s lots of
celebrity hairdressers
across the uk and ireland so having been
an accountant
i was then in the hairdressing industry
which was
totally different but a great grounding
for becoming the ceo that i am today
after 20 years i then moved into to the
tmt sector so i was brave enough to
leave procter gamble after 20 years
and you know first virgin media ending
up here now in scandinavia
um during that time though um i started
to realize that you can
always pick your own bosses uh and i had
a couple of failures uh during that time
as well
one of them was because i just couldn’t
cope with an undermining boss
another one was when i didn’t get the
job that i really wanted which was to
become the cfo of manchester united
football team
and then another time was when you know
i had to walk away from my when i
realized i didn’t have the backing of my
major shareholder
but these were all life-forming
experiences for me
and as i look back if i hadn’t walked
away from the undermining boss
if i hadn’t failed to get the manchester
uh united role then i probably wouldn’t
be here in sweden today
having spent now almost seven years in a
variety
of some of the biggest telecoms
companies in the world
and in fact you know you know a lot of
people said
why are you going to sweden when you can
get a great role in the uk
but having thought about weekly
commuting between
windsor and manchester uh you know
stockholm became an even
easier uh and and more delightful weekly
commute
uh especially during covert times
because stockholm has actually been a
great place to be
so what are the insights and lessons we
can take away from my fearlessness but
also my failures
i think you know looking at
the concept of levelling up the need for
social mobility
the need to reduce the divides and the
inequality that now exists in society
we absolutely need to be role models to
the kids at the pure ends of society
we absolutely need to invest in
education
and teachers that not just give them
academic but actually teach them life
skills
give them hope give them aspiration and
we absolutely need to get the service
and hospitality sector back
up and running again because a lot of
those kids that’s the only place
that will learn financial independence
but they’ll also learn life skills
beyond school
and then finally from from a career
point of view
um what are the what are the insights
and lessons well i think first
you know pick your boss pick the
companies you choose if you can
so that you’re in an environment where
you can grow and develop and be
challenged and
and get some brave moves along the way
also make sure that you don’t put all of
your eggs in one basket
you know after 20 years at procter
gamble i
also started to put myself on on boards
i first of all started on a charity
board
then i ended up on the board of greg’s
the bakers
and now i’m on the board of british
telecom i’ve also taken up mad sport
things over the years like running the
london marathon or
or or doing some crazy bike rides
through vietnam and cambodia
they were all great distractions away
from when things were tough and when
i had moments of failure because then i
could focus on achieving something else
and then finally pick your partner
i have a great husband and we have a
great home environment that i go home to
every weekend and and i focus on during
weekends and holidays very much
um so finally i just want to say what’s
the lessons to be learned from all of
this
and what do i give to you um don’t view
failure
as failure view failure as an
opportunity for you to learn
and make yourself a more confident
braver version
of yourself and finally don’t always
pick the obvious candidates
because if if companies like procter
gamble and the scottish whiskey industry
had picked the most obvious candidates
they wouldn’t have chosen me
and maybe they would have missed out on
a lot so
be fearless and learn from failure