Month: November 2022

Episode 7 of The Executives Unpacked Podcast saw us sit down with Cees Honig, the CEO at Xite. Cees started his studies in economics at the University of Amsterdam, before moving into an MSc in business studies. In 2008, he joined Xite, where he worked his way up to becoming CEO. His happy place is having breakfast with his family, and Ricky Gervais is one of his idols. Read on to hear his biggest lessons and best advice from the boardroom. 

What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned during your career?

When you are leading a company or team, and you want to overcome adversity, you have to create different scenarios for solving the issue. A lot of people just run after one target. If you have multiple scenarios that you’re working on, you only need one to work. In the early days when we were starting up, trying to grow, get the music licencing in place and get deals done, especially in the States, we needed to be creative. We worked on different scenarios, changed our ideas, changed our business model and kept on changing it until it actually worked. That’s become an essential mindset for success. 

What do you wish you had been told earlier on in your career?

Ricky Gervais said something around the lines of ‘No one knows what the fuck they’re doing, so don’t worry’. I started in this company right out of college, and I was sitting across from a lot of people that felt like they really knew everything that was going on in the market, especially those big corporate cable operators and IPTV operators. Everything that’s going on was very interesting, but their products didn’t show a lot of innovation. That’s when I realised, these people know what’s going on, and know what they’re doing, but they’re not doing the stuff that they actually want to do. If I had known beforehand that nobody really knows how the hell to do what they are doing, that would have given me a lot more peace in the early days.

What is the best bit of advice that you’ve ever been given?

The best advice comes from scenarios when you face adversity, I think that’s a good one. But the advice I have been given by someone else is to relax, because no one knows what they’re doing. I think that’s a very grounding way of taking life and also your job, even though there’s a lot hanging on that. The key to life is not taking yourself and life too seriously, because if you do you’ll get overworked, burn out or you become an a**hole, basically. Just don’t get too caught up in it. 

Is there anything that has constantly kept you awake at night?

I seldom have bad nights from business. But when I do it’s a problem I can solve, like a business model problem or a curveball that some operator or major label throws at me. Sometimes I literally wake up in the middle of the night and think of a solution for it, write it down and then go back to sleep. The first moment I can I’ll speak to my colleagues and we start calculating and debunking it or stress testing the idea. That’s so much fun. I have that mechanism in myself that keeps me up when I need to solve difficult problems.

What one bit of advice do you always give other people?

Be open to learning and changing your opinion. Keep on asking questions, because questions are more important than the answers because by asking questions you’re telling people that you’re interested and they can infer your intelligence. That gets you the furthest in life. It’s also about putting aside your ego and admitting when you’re wrong. A lot of people really hang on to their opinion, but if you can put your ego aside and learn and ask a lot of questions, that’s the best advice that I can give you. 

To hear more of Cees’ advice and experience, tune into The Executives Unpacked Podcast here. 

On Episode 6 of The Executives Unpacked Podcast we were joined by Marco Tinnirello, the CEO at Eurovision Services. He has been in the broadcast industry for nearly 25 years, starting out with Globecast in an IT and data role before working his way to becoming the CEO at Eurovision services. He’s a man who believes that ambition matters more to success than talent does, and whose childhood aim was to be a highway patrol officer. 

Read on to tap into his insights into the content and media industry from an executive position. 

What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned during your career?

The road to doing the right thing isn’t always easy. You want everything you do to be a success and be great. The reality is, that’s impossible. The main lesson that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s okay to fail. It’s never great to fail, but you have to be comfortable with it, because you are going to fail. Embracing it and knowing that both outcomes are possible, is a really important lesson. If you don’t have that attitude, it will block you from trying stuff. I learned that the hard way. When I’ve messed up or when I made a mistake or when I failed, that’s when I’ve developed the most and gained the most. That’s a massive life lesson, it’s really helped me think differently about taking on opportunities when they present themselves.

What do you wish that you had been told earlier?

I’ve been pretty fortunate in my career, and I’ve always had great bosses and colleagues. good advice around me. It is very easy just to meander through your career without any objective, going from job to job just because it’s a job. One of the things I wish I discovered earlier was what I wanted to do with my career. You need to know what you want to do, and how you’re going to get there, because otherwise you’re just going to meander around. I wanted to be a leader. Realising that was a real light bulb moment. I just wish it had happened earlier.

What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been given?

One of my recent bosses said, ‘You’ve really got to back yourself’. It was a throwaway comment, but it wasn’t in this context. We had just gone through a certain change in the workplace where he had two choices; he either swallowed it and went, ‘I don’t agree with that, but I’ll stay’ or ‘No, that’s against my principles, so I’m leaving’. It takes a lot of courage to do the latter if you don’t know where you’re gonna go. You do that by having the confidence to say, ‘I backed myself, I know what I’m capable of, I know I’m going to be okay’. The guy who said it to me was a fantastic boss, and he told me that you’ve got to believe in yourself, and you got to back yourself, have the confidence to do the right thing, and you’ll be okay. It was just a throwaway statement that was said at an incredibly important time. 

What has constantly kept you awake at night?

What keeps me awake is things that challenge your values and morals. As a leader you often have to make tough decisions. Sometimes you have to make restructuring decisions that impact people’s lives. Those keep me awake because I have to reflect carefully around them. The other thing that keeps me awake is the responsibility of leading an organisation.  It’s my job to make sure that we’re performing, which means I have to demand a lot from the team. I’ve always been super lucky to work with brilliant people who step up to that challenge. Question is, when do you push someone too far? I’ve got two responsibilities as a leader in this business, you know, deliver what the shareholders need in terms of performance and objectives; profitability keeping the workforce safe. One or the other doesn’t take precedence, you have to give both of them 100% attention. You’ve got to live by doing the right thing every single day. You’ll only sleep well if you never go against your morals.

Can you identify a single thread that has run through your career that has led to success?

My ambition. I’m very rarely the smartest person in the room, and I don’t have magical powers or talent that no one else has. I’m often surrounded by more talented and brighter people. As a leader, you need to do that. There’s some ingredients that I picked up from my parents, who were immigrants into the UK back in the late 50s, when the UK was looking for labourers. They came with two very simple ingredients, which is that you work hard, and you always do your best. They run a family business and as a kid I had to help out, and my job was to make up the flat-packed containers our cucumbers went into. If you ever ask ‘What’s the most boring and soul destroying job on the planet?’ I can tell you what it is because I’ve done it. It’s picking boxes. It takes stamina to carry on. I’ve carried that lesson through my life. I’m not talented in any particular way, but what I do have is incredible staying power and determination, which you need in business. Those two words, determination and stamina, have been the keys to my success. 

What one bit of advice do you always give to others?

I’m going to pass on two pieces of advice that were given to me. Number one is back yourself. Never go against your morals, never go against your values, always stand by who you are. The second is never let the risk of failure limit you. Failing is just part of the journey. You have to accept that. If you went back to being a kid and stopped walking and after falling over a few times, you wouldn’t have gotten very far. That’s how it is throughout that journey of life. I don’t know why we ever stopped realising it’s okay to stumble and fall over. Remind yourself it’s okay to do that. It’s part of the journey. So always back yourself and have the determination to keep going through failures. 

To hear more about Marco’s life and insights into the industry, listen to the full conversation on The Executives Unpacked Podcast here. 

For more behind-the-scenes insights into John Harris’s life, listen to the whole Executives Unpacked Podcast episode here. 

On Episode 3 of The Executives Unpacked Podcast neuco’s co-founder and director Laurie Scott sat down with John Harris, CEO of  LEUK Teleport & Data Centre, which was formerly known as Signalhorn. John brings a wealth of experience to the table, having worked as a CEO within the private equity business for several years. He’s got a proven track record of founding, leading and growing businesses. 

What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned during your career so far?

It’s all about people. People are essential in the businesses that you run. You can have great insights on data, it can tell you what direction to take your business in, but without the people in the business acting as agents for change to take it on that new journey, or invest the time and effort in making your business grow, that data is useless. So very much it’s about the people and the talent pool that you have in the business. Without the focus on that immediately in the business, it’s very difficult to make the business and its opportunities go in the direction you want them to go in.

What do you wish you’d been told earlier?

I think that’s a very difficult question, given how I came to do this role, and get involved in it. I think the thing that I wish I’d been told earlier was to develop my people skills. Develop them to the point that you can get under the skin of the people that you work with, to understand what motivates them and your senior leadership team. On an individual basis, you need to understand their likes, dislikes, how they spend their leisure time, what they do and what makes them tick. If you’re into that, and you can empathise with them on an individual basis, you can get much more out of them. Eventually that has to penetrate deeper into the organisation, and I wish I’d probably understood that more at 24 or 25. That depth of understanding and empathy with the people around you and that understanding of what motivates them or drives them at an individual level has to flow from you as the CFO to your senior leadership team. And from that senior leadership team down into the people that they manage and work with on a day to day basis.

What is the best bit of advice that you’ve been given throughout your career?

I think it’s probably a mixture of advice that I’ve been given and the environment I worked in.  Back in the 1980s, I worked for Salomon Brothers. Somebody there once said to me, ‘they don’t stab you in the back here, they come at you from the front with an axe’. That’s when I learned that you needed to be equally direct back and clear about where you were going, what you were doing. In that environment, Salomon Brothers was a very straightforward place to work. It was the making of me to be absolutely blunt about it. Having clarity of thought, clarity of purpose and clarity of communication with the people you work with was absolutely the making of me.

What type of things sort of constantly keep you awake at night?

I think in my role at LEUK T&C what keeps me awake is the question ‘are we managing to make the change rapidly enough to keep up with our customers demands?’ Even a year ago, some of our customers were interested in Leo, but some of them were difficult to get engagement with. A year on they all want to talk about it, they all want to be engaged with it. The speed at which we’ve got to adjust our conversations with customers is the thing that keeps me awake. Can we move as fast as some of our customers now want to move even though they didn’t want to do that a year ago?

Can you identify a single thread that’s run through your career that’s led to your success?

I think it’s a combination of things. Firstly, the experience of working at Salomon Brothers where they made me focus on people is very clear. What made them very good was actually that the talent pool was very deep. Understanding that people are critical I think makes one successful. How would you be a great leader? The answer is to just employ really great people around you. Equally, I think I was lucky enough to get into an engineering degree. So I was mathematically literate, which is quite useful in looking at numbers and analysing data. I think you have to have some interests outside work so that your profession isn’t a 24 hours a day task. It’s necessary to be able to have some time doing other things that give you moments to be reflective, I think that makes you better professionally.

What’s one bit of advice that you always give to others, or for somebody coming into the industry?

I think as a technologist, fundamentally, I’d have to say embrace change and the future as fast as you can. 

For more behind-the-scenes insights into John Harris’s life, listen to the whole Executives Unpacked Podcast episode here. 

On Episode 2 of The Executives Unpacked Podcast we sat down with Simon Farnsworth. Since starting his career, Simon has spent most of his working life in the broadcast industry. He moved to Australia and worked at Globecast, where he played a major role in them being acquired by Telstra. Moving back to the UK in 2016, he joined Discovery to head their Olympic technical distribution team, laterally progressing into the role of CTO for broadcast technology and operations, having been responsible for Discovery’s delivery of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, and most recently, the 2022 Winter Games. Simon recently left Discovery and has taken up his new role as CTO of News UK since September, and at neuco we’re also incredibly lucky to have him as our non-executive director. We asked him all of our burning questions. 

What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned during your career?

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is to listen. It’s not just listening, it’s also interpreting what you’re hearing, because a lot of people can spend a lot of time listening, but if you don’t relay that to the person, environment or situation that you’ve been in, it’s really hard to translate that into action. It’s asking often really simple questions to unpack problems or solutions or growth mechanisms that you’re working on. But I would say that’s the biggest thing. Another important lesson I’ve learned is is to show judgement. And not many people talk about judgement from a leadership perspective, because a lot of leaders go through a lot of executive training and coaching, and things like that. No one talks about judgement in terms of doing the right thing at the right time with all the environmental factors, people factors and business factors that you’re faced with. It’s about that moment in time where you make the call, and it’s about making those calls for all the right reasons.

What do you wish that you’d perhaps been told earlier in your career?

I think that when you’re young, and you’re trying to grow your career and climb the ladder, you believe that you can do everything, and you want to be liked by everyone. Well, guess what, you can’t do everything, and not everyone will like you. That’s a really hard thing to accept. You’ve got to have pretty thick-skinned. You’ve got to be respected by your team, but not everyone’s going to like you, and not everyone will like the decisions that you make. My philosophy has always been to kind of set the context around that to say, ‘I’ll listen to everybody, but I’m paid to make a decision. Not everyone will like that decision, and therefore you probably won’t like me, but I will make those decisions in the best interests of the company, or the business at the time.’ I think it’s really important that you accept that, and that you’re comfortable with that. That’s not easy.

What is the best bit of advice that you’ve been given? 

Get the right people around you. If you don’t have the right team, act quickly to get the right team. You’re nothing in senior leadership positions without the team because you can’t do everything yourself. It’s about creating an honest, open environment where people actually enjoy work and want to come to work. And again, that’s easier said than done but if you do those things right, you will be successful, regardless of what industry you’re in.

What types of things have constantly kept you awake at night?

I think for me, it’s about ensuring that I get that balance, between the work environment and the family environment. I think there’s a lot of pressure on executives to deliver, and that often comes with sacrifices at home. Because if you don’t have that balance right, you won’t be your best on either side of the equation. I’ve been privileged enough over the last six years to work with some outstanding leaders at Discovery, and they’re very balanced individuals. Yes, they work really hard, but they also really value their home lives, because if you don’t have stability in one, you can’t really focus well on the other and vice versa. If you don’t have a good job, it makes your home life difficult because it puts pressure on finances or stability. For me, it’s all about getting that right. I probably haven’t always had that right. In the past, I probably worked too much and focused too much on that, which affected that side of things because you don’t have great judgement, great vision, and all those things you need to be a great leader. And also, the clue here is often in the question that you’ve asked, it’s about getting good sleep. Don’t try and stay awake too much. Without sleep, you can’t do anything.

Can you identify a single thread that has run through your career that has led to success?

Yeah, I think it’s two things. For me, integrity is really important. I think if you get that right, people will respect you and want to work for you or with you. Secondly, stay humble. Keep your feet on the ground and just be an ordinary human being. If you’re a normal person everybody can relate to you, whether it’s the guy in the post room or the CEO or whoever else. I think those two qualities are really important. If you get that combination right; working hard, being humble and having strong integrity, you’ve got a very good solid axis to bounce from, and I think they’ve been really important in my journey so far.

What one bit of advice do you always give to other people? 

Something I always say particularly to young people is find something you enjoy. If you enjoy it, you’ll try hard and you’ll be passionate about it. If you don’t enjoy it, you end up becoming very negative in life. Find something you enjoy and that you’re really passionate about and you’ll succeed because you care about your work. It’s really as simple as that really.

To hear more insights from our executives, listen to our Executives Unpacked podcast, with new episodes available weekly.