Angela Ahrendts

[laughs] Really-

Angela Ahrendts.

[laughs] You gotta do the hand as well.

Mm.

And yes, then coming to, uh, I think a week on Friday, M&S will be for the first time doing a full, uh, runway fashion show at London Fashion, which exactly what Christopher Bailey did at Burberry all those years ago.

He took Burberry, and Angela Ahrendts was the CEO.

They took Burberry from a sort of pretty tired company to one of the world's big fashion icons.

Now, in terms of the PR folks, all you gotta do is just think about how often do you see M&S on the front of newspapers on the six o'clock, 10 o'clock news.

I mean, Apple, like, it gets all, all that attention, right? Like, there's a lot of people looking at what, what's their next move.

I talked extensively with Angela Ahrendts about this too, and, you know, she had transitioned out as, you know, the head of retail a few years ago and did a phenomenal job, right, launching like 500 stores and...

Um, but I guess to get to the heart of your question is how does this transition... how, how do we ensure that it works properly?

With the, uh, the insular nature of it and the promoting from within and the really nurturing over a decade plus, it, it has the feel of a family business, you know? Um, if it's you're like a family furniture store where the stakes are just, uh, for the family are very high, but the global stakes are a lot lower, it still has that same kind of like push-and-pull dynamic of with, with especially with Tim Cook s- you know, staying on and having a role and however involved he, he chooses to be or will be, uh, in the next phase.

Back in 2008, Musa was a social media manager at Burberry, where he convinced the brand to invest six figures on satellite bandwidth to live stream a Hyde Park fashion show, the first fashion show to be live streamed, by the way, setting expectations with senior management that they'd reach an audience of a million viewers.

Having to tell Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts that they delivered only six hundred and seventy-three, by the way, not six hundred and seventy-three thousand, just six hundred and seventy-three, wasn't the best day of Musa's career, as he'll tell it, but it was among its most important.

Because while it seemed like a failure, like value destroyed to almost everyone, Ahrendts saw it differently and as an early signal and necessary first step, and she wound up teaching Musa a succinct lesson in resisting short-termism that's defined how he thinks about value creation ever since and across roles at Nike, Ford, Apple, Airbnb, and GoFundMe.

Today, as co-founder of the consultancy Science and Story, he's trying to bridge one of the most expensive and dumbest divides in business, the one between brand and business strategy.

Uh, the brand was in flux.

It was all over the place.

There was no real focus and direction and- Um, the CEO before Angela Ahrendts had done a fantastic job of buying back-

Angela was CEO when you were there?