Speaker Biographies

Globalisation is here to stay.

The rippling effects of the US sub prime markets and resulting credit crunch have been felt the planet over as the business world becomes increasingly fast paced and unrelenting. Everybody is trading through turbulent times.

But whilst for some this potent reminder of globalisation can bring uncertainty, for others it offers an opportunity. It has become a business imperative to consider if you have the necessary attitudes in place to ensure your organisation continues to thrive.

Everybody thinks their leadership team is strong and decisive in times of success. But is it fit for purpose when the going gets tough?

René Carayol is one of the world's leading business gurus. He specialises in leadership and culture, drawing from his own unique experiences on the Boards of British and American organisations; from Pepsi (UK) to IPC Media and the Inland Revenue. He is the best selling author of the leadership and culture bible, "Corporate Voodoo" and a Visiting Professor at Cass Business School. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE for outstanding service to the business community.

René is a regular broadcaster for the BBC and has presented the influential "Pay Off Your Mortgage In 2 Years" series, BBC2's flagship business programme "The Money Programme" and the critically acclaimed "Mind Of A Millionaire" and "Man From The Met" documentaries. He is a broadsheet columnist, a frequent voice on Radio 5 Live and a regular expert commentator on Sky News and BBC Breakfast.

René is now CEO of the Inspired Leaders Network with operations in London, Belfast and Johannesburg and has provided leadership support to the likes of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, the Home Office and McKinsey and Co.

With this unrivalled business acumen, he chairs and addresses international conferences and has had the privilege of interviewing and working closely with some of the world's greatest leaders; from former US President Bill Clinton to the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and from former US Secretary of State Colin Powell to Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson.

Leading the UK's Most Loved Retailer:  How to Put Employees & Customers at The Heart of Everything You Do, And Profit From It

John Lewis was last year voted the UK's most loved retailer. All 69,000 partners in the John Lewis Partnership share in the benefits and profits of the business. Of the £380 million pre-tax profit reported by the company for 2007, over £320million went to the workforce in bonuses, pension contributions and other benefits. There is a growing consensus today that people are more engaged and perform to a higher level when they have a sense of ownership and responsibility. Charlie Mayfield, Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, will explain at Leaders in London how his company realised this over seventy-five years ago, and has been profiting from it ever since.

How To Lead When Everyone Is An Owner
James Heskett at Harvard Business School proposes that to maximise value creation, organizations need to act as if their employees and customers are owners, partly in recognition of the shift in power from suppliers to customers, partly in recognition of the need for an engaged, committed workforce to deliver levels of service that make customers loyal and thereby boost profits.

Adopting the partnership model is not right for every organisation, and Mayfield won't be at Leaders in London to evangelise. But, there are an increasing number of aspects and elements of the way the Partnership is structured and operates that appear transferable to PLCs and other more conventionally structured organisations. Not least, the Partnership's very uniqueness is a transferable learning point in itself. In crowded marketplaces, as the strategist Michael Porter puts it, you need to 'compete to be unique'.

Creating A Unique Organisation Through A Unique 'EVP'
Ten years ago the book The Service Profit Chain emerged from work at Harvard Business School, teaching us that to deliver a unique Customer Value Proposition (CVP) that lets you stand out from the crowd of your competitors, you need to create a unique Employee Value Proposition. Leaders across all sectors have become used to the acronym CVP. But, few have worked their way back up the value chain to re-engineer the EVP – creating a culture and reward system that delivers an employee experience which dictates the customer experience that those employees, in turn, deliver on your behalf.

John Lewis Partnership has embedded in its structure a unique Employee Value Proposition that goes beyond the traditional employer-employee contract and provides lessons in how to create engagement, commitment and a sense of job ownership in your employees.  

"Good retailing comes down to a few big decisions and thousands and thousands of small actions"

Ensuring Strategy Is Executed Through Thousands Of Small Actions
Last year, Mayfield announced plans to double the size of the Partnership within ten years to one generating £12 billion of annual sales. The thing he feels passionately about, he says, is that he wants a successful business but also, by being successful, to challenge the conventional wisdom about what creates corporate success.

Most leaders of organisations will say that a major issue for them is getting strategy executed by people at all levels of the organisation. This failure to execute is often due to a sense of detachment from the strategy by those charged with executing it.

Good retailing comes down to a few big decisions and thousands and thousands of small actions. It is in that execution that you succeed or fail. And those thousands of small actions – the Moments of Truth as Jan Carlzon, the turnaround CEO of SAS Airlines called them in his book of the same name – are what create your brand, your company, in the eyes of your customers. To build customer loyalty with those thousands of Moments of Truth demands a committed, engaged workforce.

"We plan for the long term. We don't do stop-start economics."

Organisations today have to deal with a climate in which customers, employees, and investors are pushing for more control. They want more fairness and transparency in how the organisation is run. One of the things uniting society, says Mayfield, is this sense of fairness, which is a principle the Partnership has at its core. Out of that comes trust. And trust is a commodity we need to see more of in business today.

Background
Charlie Mayfield became John Lewis Partnership's fifth Chairman in March 2007. He originally joined the Partnership in 2000 as Head of Business Development, responsible for business strategy and development for both John Lewis and Waitrose. He joined the Board as Development Director in 2001 and was responsible for developing the Partnership's online strategy including the purchase of Buy.com UK (now John Lewis Direct) and negotiating the Partnership's stake in Last Mile Solutions (now called Ocado). He became Managing Director of John Lewis in 2005 and then Deputy Chairman in February 2007 prior to taking up his appointment as Chairman.

He was educated at Radley College, then at Sandhurst and has an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. Mr. Mayfield began his career as a Captain in the Scots Guards. He joined SmithKline Beecham in 1992 and became Marketing Manager for the Lucozade brand, before moving to McKinsey & Co in 1996 as a management consultant, where he advised consumer and retail organisations. He is ranked Number 8. in the Retail Power list Top 100 most influential UK retailers.

Leading The Ultimate High Performance Organisation: Lessons from Britain's Most Successful Motor Racing Team

Ron Dennis, CBE, has been head of the world-beating McLaren Formula 1 team since 1980. The Observer calls him "Formula One's kingmaker" and rates him as "F1's supreme operator." Business leaders commonly complain that their markets are becoming ever more competitive, that the pace of competition has accelerated as never before. Ron Dennis will be sharing with us how to lead in the fastest, most competitive global marketplace of all.

How To Operate At Impossible Speeds, And Win
Formula 1 is a sport where the pace of the cars on the track is matched only by the pace with which the cars themselves are designed, built, tested and constantly improved. It takes a volume car-maker up to five years to conceive, develop, test and build a new car. It takes McLaren ten months. It takes Ford up to two years to design and develop a new suspension system. McLaren have done it in two weeks.    

To work at that pace, and to that quality, you need a team that works together seamlessly. McLaren has been called a frictionless machine, in which people from different departments finish each other's sentences, such is their mutual understanding. Dennis will be sharing at Leaders in London how you create a culture that brings together the top talent from your industry and unites them behind a common goal.  

"Formula One's kingmaker…a man rated as F1's supreme operator.'"  – The Observer

Vision, Conviction And Obsessive Attention To Detail
Dennis is known for combining an obsessive attention to detail with a powerful long-term vision. When small things can make a thousandth of a second difference in a lap time, and races are won or lost on that margin, then there are no small things. Yet, in Formula 1, you have to combine that attention to detail with clarity of long-term vision. Increasingly, as other markets pick up speed, all industries are having to learn how to think short-term and long-term at the same time. Bill Gates calls it 'thinking in double time' – competing in the now, while simultaneously planning for market changes in the future.

In motor racing, most people tend to think about next weekend, the next race or perhaps the next season. Dennis has a reputation for combining that with planning the next two, five, even 10 years. "Everything you see in the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes pit today, the whole infrastructure, was clearly positioned in his mind back in the early Seventies", said a colleague recently.

Creating The Ultimate Working Environment
This focus also moved him to plot and save for years so that he could build his dream McLaren complex, the McLaren Technology Centre, which Dennis has described as 'an industrial Utopia for (his) workers'.  Designed by Lord Foster, it cost an estimated £300m and was opened by the Queen in 2004. It employs around 1,000 people who produce Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren – supercars that sell at £313,000 apiece, are produced at the rate of three a day, and for which there's a waiting list of two-and-a-half years - as well as planning the assault on next year's F1 season.

"Our race, if you like, is with ourselves. The team exists to win. Every victory, in our terms, equates to a successful day at the office". – Ron Dennis

Leadership Is About Attracting And Unleashing Talent
Under Dennis, McLaren has consistently attracted the greatest drivers, providing seats for F1 heroes like Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Mika Hakkinen. Dennis famously nurtured the career of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes' star driver, Lewis Hamilton, from when Hamilton was literally a 'boy racer' on the karting circuit. Inspired by this success, Dennis has now launched a new foundation - Dream Chasing - to help support youngsters who are having difficulties fulfilling their ambitions.

Everybody Wins: And That Means All Stakeholders
Everybody in the team, both under the spotlight in the pit lane, and away from the race action, both in the factory and during testing, unstintingly give their maximum effort to enable us to win, Dennis has said. A sense of sharing in a winning culture is crucial to engaging and motivating people. And it's a principle Dennis extends to all McLaren's stakeholders: "Our relationships are two-way streets, with great benefits accrued on both sides. That is the way we do business at McLaren, be it with our drivers, partners, suppliers or personnel."

Background
At just 21, Ron Dennis headed up engineering and mechanics for Australia's triple world Formula 1 champion Jack Brabham. Having recovered from a late night crash in his E-Type Jaguar, when an exhausted Dennis was on his way to get parts for driver Graham Hill's car, he moved on to management. He never looked back, becoming the supremo of a multi-million pound motorsport business.

He created the McLaren International team in 1980 when he merged his own company, Project Four, with Team McLaren Limited. The outfit dominated Formula One in the 1980s and at either end of the 1990s, with four consecutive constructors' titles.

McLaren has competed in Formula One since 1966, but it was under Dennis that it achieved dominance in the 1990s, becoming the most successful Formula One team in history at that time, with 148 Grands Prix wins. The team has also claimed eleven Formula One Drivers' World Championships and eight Formula One World Constructors' Championships to date.

Through the performance of the McLaren Formula One team, under his direction since the 1980s, Dennis has established a world class company that continues to push forward the frontiers of technical design and application in many fields of advanced engineering, from aerodynamics to carbon composite technology.

He has been lauded as one of Britain's most successful managers. In 2000 he was honoured with a CBE for services to motor sport. In 2001 he was presented with a BRDC Gold Medal for his contribution to motor sport. He was also awarded an Hon DTech from De Montfort University in 1996, an Hon DSc from City University (London) in 1997 and, in 2000, an Hon DSc from the University of Surrey. 

Leading And Growing Global Brands: How A Passionate Workforce Creates Powerful Brands 

IHG, owners of brands including InterContinental & Holiday Inn, was the largest hotel group in the world by number of rooms for the fourth consecutive year in 2007. The company, with its origins in the brewer Bass, has been led on an unprecedented worldwide expansion programme by Andy Cosslett, brought in as CEO to grow the brands in 2005.  Cosslett will be sharing at Leaders in London how to drive brand evolution and growth through your people, rather than just leaving branding to the marketing department.

Branding Is Too Important To Be Left To Marketing
Brand creation takes place in the thousands of interactions between your people and your customers every day. So, how do you get your people to deliver a consistent and distinct (branded) customer experience? You won't get engagement and passion by parachuting a set of values in from on high. They have to emerge from the people in the organization as something innate to them, not imposed.

Andy Cosslett will share the steps IHG has taken to involve its people in creating and defining their own brand values, a set of expected behaviours based on those values, and a compact with its staff.

There is also a hunger among customers for organizations to 'be real' – to allow their people to be themselves in serving the customers' needs, not slip into 'have a nice day' automatism. Cosslett will be sharing at Leaders in London how his organisation is pioneering the creation of a new employee experience, as it is the employee experience that determines the customer experience.

Think Differently To Create Distinctive Brands 
At the end of 2007, IHG launched a $1 billion re-brand of Holiday Inn. It includes a complete overhaul of the brand and, for the first time, signature sounds and scents so that the Holiday Inn experience is identified with a particular scent and particular sound. No hotel group has done this before. A small example, but when you are in the business of creating memorable stays, a significant one, as smell is one of the most powerful senses in triggering memory.

IHG uses innovative customer research to inform its re-branding, and the lessons from Holiday Inn will be fed into the other brands in IHG's stable. This is all part of an ambitious growth target set in 2005 of adding 50-60,000 new rooms globally by the end of 2008.

Too many leaders, says Cosslett, think traditional means of asking customers what they want will give them a path to growth. But it is not just about received wisdoms – it about looking at the facts and using insight to establish what needs to be done next.

Outside-In Leadership For Innovation
Sometimes it takes an outsider to spark the re-examination of your industry practices that can act as a catalyst for leading change. Cosslett's background was outside of the hotel industry and as a marketer. The dominant question that outsider mindset brings into an industry is 'Why' - specifically 'Why do we do it that way?'  The first job of a leader in leading for growth is to encourage and instil that pattern of thinking, to make it clear that re-invention drives growth. 

You have to deconsolidate, strip down all the things you do and go and ask why. 'Why do we play the Girl from Ipanema when no one in the bar is over the age of 40? Why do we grab the bag off that frequent business traveller, then they get to the room first and wait ages for their bag when they are exhausted and need it now?' says Cosslett.

"There is a hunger among customers today for organizations to 'be real' – to allow their people to be themselves, not slip into 'have a nice day' automatism" – Andy Cosslett

Seizing The Global Opportunity: Ride The Demographics
Make sure demographics and global trends are on your side. Here are the demographics IHG's growth strategy rides on top of: In the West, baby boomer retirees will be heading for the airport, not the rocking chair. In the developing world, more than a billion people have been freed to travel. Chinese tourists alone will make 100 million trips annually over the next decade.

But, don't wait for the world to come to you, says Cosslett. Being first into China has enabled IHG's current growth rate in that country of one hotel a week. When China starts to travel, within the country as well as abroad, the opportunity is enormous. So, much of the company's investment for growth is there, including opening the sixth Chinese IHG Academy recently to train Chinese staff (up to degree level): If you are moving fast into new territory and the skills do not exist within the country, then create them.

Background
Andy Cosslett started his career as marketing manager at Unilever. In 1990 he joined Cadbury Schweppes as Marketing Director for Schweppes GB. Subsequent roles included Chairman, Cadbury Schweppes Australia; Chief Executive, Asia Pacific Confectionery Business and Managing Director, Great Britain and Ireland. In 2003 he was appointed President of Cadbury Schweppes Europe, Middle East and Africa. In 2005 he was brought in by the IHG Board as Chief Executive of the InterContinental Hotels Group. Cosslett is an example of what Rene Carayol, Leaders in London Chairman, says is the authenticity and personality we need in a world of 'clone' business leaders, if your leadership is to stand out and have an impact; for example, at last year's Americas' convention of IHG leaders, Cosslett walked out on stage playing an electric guitar. Andy Cosslett holds a BA in economics and MA in European Studies from the University of Manchester.

Leading And Growing Global Brands: How A Passionate Workforce Creates Powerful Brands 

Steve Tappin, Author, The Secrets of CEOs and a Managing Partner in the Global CEO & Board practice, Heidrick & Struggles