Let's start with the person.

Listen, the person in my life, the rock, and I know that's a cliche, is my wife, Bev.

I met Bev when I was 22 years old.

And, you know, having had a childhood which was full of moving multiple times, I lived 26 different houses by the time I was 21.

There was a lot of change and upheaval.

I wasn't unhappy, but there was a lot of change.

And Bev has given me continuity and a sustainability that I could have only dreamt of.

A piece of advice that's stuck with you or that you live by?

So I wonder, do you agree with that? Do you think that leadership is something that you're sort of born with or do you learn? Which way do you think it goes?

I think everybody is born with a set of qualities and it is up to that individual and probably the environment around them how those qualities are grown and turn ultimately into characteristics.

And if that doesn't sound like too strange a definition, qualities are innate.

There's something that you have within yourself that sometimes aren't obvious from the outside, whereas characteristics are things that you are known for.

And there are characteristics of successful leaders that you can hone, you can evolve, you can work on.

You can build like you would build a muscle, like you would build anything else.

And I think, you know, when I think back to the various different figures and the sources and what we know about them, you know that some of the really powerful people that we talked about were people who had a military background.

But I wonder whether you took anything from the conversation you had with Chris Holliday about Walt Disney for those aspects.

What would you suggest to somebody that's wanting to start a business or get into a job and AI is changing? So I think

AI is an incredible tool.

It's probably the most powerful single tool that has come into the world and into the workplace in my lifetime because it is absolutely transformational.

And what it's doing is it's changing – the reason I wrote the book is it's changing the nature of leadership.

Mm-hmm.

And it's writing new rules just as quickly as it's getting rid of some of the old ways and the old rules of running things.

But also it's eating those rules, those starter rules up really quickly.

How do you balance the

FHM was next.

It was an absolute leviathan, and when you look at where it started.

So when we acquired it, it had just recently changed from being For Him magazine to FHM.

It had been published by a small independent publisher.

Emap, the company I was working for, had acquired it for a million pounds.

And just to put that into context, uh, it was making a million pounds of EBITDA per month by the time I left it three years later.

So it was a hugely profitable beast by that point.

... given everything you've just, you know, you've explained.

Sure

... into roles.

Typically, those roles that they were always in to begin with.

You know, if I-- if you think about where you guys started off, I'm quite sure it was the same as me, something quite menial, something quite repetitive.

But it was brilliant, like sitting at the bottom of a tree and looking up at the branches above you.

You could see the way your company worked, the industry worked.

You could kind of see a route forward.

Mm

Sure

... into roles.

Typically, those roles that they were always in to begin with, you know, if I, if you think about where you guys started off, I'm quite sure it was the same as me, something quite menial, something quite repetitive, but it was brilliant.

Like sitting at the bottom of a tree and looking up at the branches above you, you could see the way your company worked, the industry worked.

You could kind of see a route forward.

If we don't have those starter roles in our industries because AI are eating those jobs, then what do we do? How do we intervene? Um, secondly, there is, uh, an enormous amount of geopolitical change and upheaval.

You know, if I spoke to CEOs five years ago and talked to them about their supply chains, basically the, uh, the procurement director was on it, by, by which they meant the procurement director was busy not really reviewing the fundamentals of the supply chain, but more just honing the efficiencies of them.

Yeah.

So I just wonder how much can we learn? Because I guess as a CEO, you'd get cancelled pretty quickly, wouldn't you, if you carried on like Genghis Khan?

Listen, it's a good point.

Beheading people isn't in many of the more modern playbooks for leaders, after all.

But I think it's a bit like asking if Pele would have been top scorer in the latest World Cup, you know.

And the answer is, well, no, not if he was suddenly dropped in there wearing the boots that he wore, you know, when he did when he was 17 years old in whatever, the 1950s.

with the training regime and with the diet that he had then.

But if you were to give him the modern advantages that technology would have given him and time to acclimatise, then would Pele have been one of the greatest footballers playing today? I suspect he probably would have been.

How can you deal with that?

What's the book about? What inspired you to write it, and how do you hope people will use it?

Well, look, just to reassure all listeners, there are no recipes that I've made up in my book.

Uh, the analogy was merely when I left home when I was 17 to start work for the first time, I took a few belongings in a small suitcase, and one of them was, uh, Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course book, which my mum gave me, 'cause she kind of figured I was gonna need to f- you know, be able to cook for myself.

And it's a book that I have kept all those years, and I've always gone back to it.

It's kind of like, it's the, it's the, the, the foundation stone for...

I mean, I love cooking now.

It's the foundation stone for everything I cook, so every time I find, like, a new recipe in a magazine or online, I will almost always go back to Delia's and go, "How did she make," I don't know, "mayonnaise then?" And also, over the years, this is a book that has become, uh, open by the hob, it's become spattered with grease.

What is the difference between strategy and tactics?

So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, of course.

Um, so during the, the process of writing the book, it's 60 chapters.

Some of them are ...

Well, they're all, they're all pretty short and punchy.

The longest one I think is nine pages.

The shortest one is two pages.

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And you saw a business maybe that was slow to change, did you?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And what's interesting is these things tend to happen in, they happen slowly, slowly, slowly, and then really quickly.

So a new form of technology comes along.

So in my case, you know, working in print magazines, The internet came along.

Everybody immediately thinks this is going to change everything.

Then it doesn't change everything overnight.

Yeah.

And you saw a business maybe that was slow to change,

did you? Yeah, that's exactly right.

And what's interesting is these things tend to happen in, they happen slowly, slowly, slowly, and then really quickly.

So a new form of technology comes along.

So in my case, you know, working in print magazines.

The internet came along.

Everybody immediately thinks this is going to change everything.

Yeah.

Hmm

... and those questions are much easier, and it's absolutely fine, as your interviewee example showed.

It's, A, fine to look at your notes.

It's, B, also fine to pause, right? You win no prizes, you get no jobs based on whether it was three seconds or a millisecond between the interviewer finishing their question and you starting to answer it.

If you need to take three seconds, five seconds, that's fine.

In a funny way, it's quite flattering for the interviewer because it's like, "Oh, I've asked them a question that's really got them thinking." It's fine to show you're working out tangibly, and it's also fine to show that you're thinking when you're, when you're in receipt of a good question.

Yeah.

And then finally, it's thought leadership.