Martha Lane Fox

On a lighter note, she's enabled us all to raise our voices as the co-founder of Lucky Voice karaoke bars.

Welcome, Baroness Martha Lane Fox of Soho.

That has got to be the coolest title in the Lords.

[laughs] I'll tell you what.

So thank you.

[laughs]

That's all for this episode, but if you want more, we continue our conversation with Baroness Martha Lane Fox about courageous leadership, leading through uncertainty, and why she thinks it matters now more than ever.

There's no magic to it.

And I think I applied to 12 different places [laughs] and got 11 different offers, and there just seemed to be so much going on in that startup world, and it seemed so exciting.

You were seeing, um, relatively young people, um, set up companies from scratch and, and do really well for themselves, you know, Martha Lane Fox and, um, Lastminute.com. That was a- all around that, that kind of time period.

And I had been sponsored through university by Nuclear Electric, and at the time, they were closing down all of the nuclear power stations, so there was this big contrast between going in- into, into an industry that is, um, at an end, and e- everything's being closed down versus going into an industry where everything is starting out, and it's all new, and nobody really knows what they're doing, and you, you can, um, make something that didn't exist before.

And of course, these days they, they are building new nuclear power stations, and I still occasionally get recruitment consultants coming to me and saying, "You've got, you've got some nuclear engineering experience [laughs] for this from 25 years ago," so not really any good to anyone.

Andy's path has taken him from the Bank of England, where he served as chief economist, to chairing the Leveling Up Advisory Council and back to the University of Sheffield, where he graduated in the late 80s and now returns as its ninth chancellor.

More recently, he became president of the British Chambers of Commerce, succeeding a former guest of this podcast, Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

But it's Andy's work outside the mainstream of economic policymaking that brings him here today.

Back in 2009, he co-founded Pro Bono Economics.