The Boardroom Path

[00:00:03] Ralph Grayson: Welcome to The Boardroom Path by Sainty Hird & Partners. I'm your host, Ralph Grayson, a partner in the board practice. In this series, we'll offer practical steps and useful perspectives for aspiring and newly appointed NEDs. Throughout its 30 year history, Sainty Hird has recruited senior board members across the City, Industry, the Public Sector and NGOs.

We're now also evaluating those boards, as well as coaching and mentoring those seeking to transition from an executive career into the boardroom. So we'll be speaking to some leading figures in the board advisory and NED world. Specifically, we'll seek their counsel about how and where to spend time and energy to make an effective transition into the boardroom. The goal is to equip recent and aspiring NEDs with tips, tactics and strategies to be most effective and build a successful career as a board director. In the process, we aim to help you to think more about who you are, how you operate and how you can make this work in the boardroom.

Robert Senior is a highly respected leader in the advertising, branding, and venture capital worlds. Best known for his influential tenure as worldwide CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi and his current role as a partner at Redrice Ventures.

Rob started his career in advertising at TBWA before co-founding Fallon London, where he played a pivotal role in building one of the world's most creatively awarded agencies.

His leadership skills and disruptive thinking led him to Saatchi and Saatchi initially as CEO of its London office, then as European CEO, and ultimately as worldwide CEO. At Saatchi, Rob was celebrated for his impactful leadership style, creative vision and ability to inspire both teams and clients. He championed a culture of "nothing is impossible", helping global brands shape their narratives and accelerate growth.

Rob is best known for Cadbury Dairy Milks gorilla, and now legendary advert featuring a gorilla playing drums to Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight, which was voted one of the greatest TV ads of all time. Also Sony Bravia Balls, which showed thousands of coloured balls bouncing through the streets of San Francisco to showcase colour TV. T-Mobile's Life's for Sharing series, which included the Liverpool Street Station flash mob, and the crowd singing, Hey Jude at Trafalgar Square, which sparked a trend of large scale flash mob style ads, which was viral long before social media virality was common. Toyota's "We Choose Hybrid" was a global brand campaign emphasising Toyota's green technology leadership and Visa's Go World campaign, a series of emotional globally televised Olympic sponsorship ads for Visa spotlighting everyday heroism and inclusivity.

After leaving Saatchi, Rob transitioned to a plural career. Devoting his energy to non-executive, pro bono and advisory roles. In 2019, Rob joined Redrice Ventures as a partner where he leverages his decades of experience in brand strategy, marketing and leadership development to support high growth, founder led, businesses in consumer brands and digital entrepreneurship.

At Redrice, he is renowned for his ability to spot potential, nurture talent, and drive transformation, while staying hands-on with entrepreneurs to help them craft strong business propositions and authentic personal brands. His unique perspective on personal branding, board dynamics, and authentic leadership makes him an authority on what it takes to drive success in rapidly changing industries.

When I asked Rob to be a guest, he replied "I am as far from NED central casting as it's possible to be" and so I'm particularly delighted to welcome Rob to today's Boardroom Path. Good morning, Rob.

[00:04:28] Robert Senior: Good morning and thank you very much for having me.

[00:04:31] Ralph Grayson: A pleasure.

Rob, can we just maybe put some colour on that background and experience and just talk us through your journey through corporate executive management and into the boardroom.

[00:04:44] Robert Senior: Thank you for a very flattering introduction there, Ralph. The only observation I would make or overlay I would place on that is that I have set up my own company. I have sold that company and in the intervening period made every mistake it's possible to make in running a company.

We sold to a holding company that was listed, a publicly quoted company, The Publicis Group. So my main stakeholder move from my client and ourselves, to the share price, the analyst community, and the impact on the share price. Of course,you satisfy the shareholders by building a business and you build a business by satisfying your clients. That is an immutable mathematical equation. But as we all know, an awful lot falls through the slats in between, and odd behaviors are abound.

If you like, I've set up company, sold a company, bought some companies, closed down some companies, so I know what a pretty miserable day in November can feel like. I suppose that's partly what helps add some colour and texture to the counsel advice and sort of input I may be making to other companies just because I've been through cycles.

[00:05:54] Ralph Grayson: I'm fascinated by the blend of experience that you've had. As an ex CEO and now as a board member and as an investor, you've got huge perspective, good and bad of boards. I just wonder how you might talk a little bit about, how you viewed a board, its role, its purpose, what was good and bad whilst you were sitting as an executive member of a board and as a CEO, and how that perspective has changed in terms of the role and responsibilities and what makes good and bad. Now you are also a NED and also very active as an advisor on a variety of pro bono and academic boards.

[00:06:45] Robert Senior: I think your question is an awful lot more nuanced than people may appreciate. Let's start there. As a CEO, one is responsible and accountable and I distinguish between the two. Accountable is when something goes wrong, it's your fault. Responsible is if you said you're going to do something, you get it done. Your board members, the good ones, really understand where they sit on that spectrum and they largely, it's an accountability spectrum. They're being held accountable by the shareholders to ensure that everything is, let's call it, proper. The money is being spent, the time is being spent, the energy is being spent in the best interests of the company and its growth path. But as a CEO, your day is filled with voices and the good CEOs are really clear on which voices you listen to and when and what do you do about it?

So a board is just one of those stakeholder voices, and there are times, there were times, rightly or wrongly, but there were times when the board may be advising one thing, but for reasons way outside of the remit of the board discussion, I chose not to action whatever I'd been advised. There are other occasions when a board would bring to my attention a perspective that hadn't occurred to me and changed the course of my decision making and actions. So as a CEO,it's a graphic equalizer of opinion and input. A good CEO will be very carefully monitoring their talent base, the climate, the culture, the productivity,and be looking at next month's opportunities and problems while dealing with today's opportunities and problems. and therefore, surgical editing is really, really important.

Where that gets dangerous is when the CEO essentially doesn't listen at all to the board, and when it gets even more dangerous is if and when a CEO just does what they're told by the board. Both of those two things are very dangerous because they've abdicated responsibility for doing the right thing, in my opinion. So I feel for CEOs, I feel for the executive teams, I understand why sometimes they can come across as either myopic or selfish or, missing the bigger picture. And there will be times when actually it is the board members who are missing the bigger picture. It's the other way round and it's terribly difficult.

Which takes me to being a board member, not as an exec team. It is enormously nuanced. I think when done well,if you don't have the responsibility for the actions, but ultimately you will be held accountable for the outcomes, you are in the area of gentle persuasion or inspiration, the invisible hand almost. That comes down to relationships and the chemistry in the boardroom and the degree to which one is perceived as an irritating like the mosquito in the bedroom, or one is perceived as someone who really is doing right by the individuals and by the company and is worthy of listening to.

So just like a good adit's how you tell it and the nuance of what is it you're trying to communicate, to whom, when, and therefore how, and I think the role of a strong board member is incredibly important and actually very, very difficult.

[00:10:33] Ralph Grayson: Just before we leave your time as a CEO, could we maybe just get a bit of your wisdom on the crucial importance between the relationship of a CEO and his or her Chair and secondly, you touched on shareholders and implied shareholder primacy perhaps earlier in your career. Now we're in a much more complex and dynamic world of stakeholders. I'd just love to get your perspective on those two things, Chair, CEO, and then shareholders, stakeholder.

[00:11:05] Robert Senior: Well the Chair-CEO axis, in my opinion or the relationship is critical. If one feels the other is holding back the growth trajectory or the destiny of a company, then you really have a problem. First and foremost, it helps enormously if those two individuals like each other. We'll actually look forward to meeting and are capable and have a dynamic that goes beyond the agenda of the company. It sounds slightly facile. I think it's incredibly important and the reason it's important is if and when there are difficult conversations to be had, which is life. It happens. They're much easier to short circuit and avoid unintended consequences if there's a proper relationship in the first place because there's an understanding. So that's the first point.

The second point is, when it works really well is when there's a shared vision. There's a sense of we know what our North Star is. We understand at quite a profound level the purpose of this company and the purpose will then drive the business results. I think many senior executives and, for that matter, chairmen fail to distinguish between what is a strategy and what is an objective. And when someone says, our strategy is to grow the business by 20%, they are not very strategic. That is an objective. Clarity of purpose and precision of understanding in the first instance makes everything else that much more, shall we say, ergonomic.

[00:12:41] Ralph Grayson: And then the complexity of stakeholders.

[00:12:45] Robert Senior: Stakeholder management is one of those wonderful sort of de rigour soundbites in business at the moment. All it means is, anyone who has an interest needs managing. Whether it's an employee, whether it's a shareholder, a board member, anybody, the end customer is a stakeholder. The only thing we're here to do is to please the shareholders and of course, commercially, ultimately, it is to make sure that people want to invest in a company and get their due returns and of course on one level, on quite a binary level, that is absolutely true. But to run a company well, you have to look beyond. Sometimes you may take what short term, you may embrace some short-term pain in the best interest of mid to long-term gain. Which ultimately you'll be thankful by the shareholders. But sure as night follows day, in the moment, will ruffle some feathers.

That is about where you sit on the risk register, where you believe it is appropriate to apply an entrepreneurial mindset as part of a strategic decision making process and that's where stakeholder management and particularly shareholders can get very interesting.

[00:14:04] Ralph Grayson: It's rare I have somebody on this podcast who has worn so many different types of board hats. You've been on a PLC board, you've been on private boards, you've been in startup and scale up companies, you sit on Durham University's board. Do you have to consciously put one hat on, take one hat off, depending on which type of board you are sitting on, what the mission of that board might be and who their various stakeholders are?

[00:14:37] Robert Senior: That's a very, very good question actually, Ralph.The world we currently occupy and the notion of being a NED, just that acronym in itself, is simplistic. And being one board, one board to the next, it's all 10 to a dozen, I'm on a few NEDs and it's really good and as a soundbite in a drinks party itgenerally lands quite well. But it arguably utterly misses the point. To your point, one meeting could be vastly different, will be vastly different to the next, right down to the clothes you wear, the sort of vocabulary you use, your body language, the general gist of the conversation will be so, so different. And if your objective is to make a positive impact, by definition in that scenario,you morph. You try and present yourself in a way that's going to be most likely to be heard.

So in my case, I had a career of different clients, and you've mentioned a few in your introduction. A Cadbury client was very different to the T-Mobile client, they were German, they very different to Toyota, a Japanese who very different to Visa who are American, and so it goes on. I was used to a bionic zoom lens of going in and out of very different corporate cultures and was able to a degree at least,to fit in, shall we say, and be able to communicate and make an impact. It's the same with this, and I really advise people who are considering the next move, the next chapter in their career, moving into the NED area as they unhelpfully, the nomenclature it's given. That they stop and think of it because what it's like saying, I'm going to be a CEO. Well, of what? big company? little company? listed, independent, what? They're very, very different beasts and I think the key is to start with intellectual honesty.

Go, who am I? What is my superpower? When and where am I at my best? And actually when and where am I at my least effective? And what's in it for me? What do I need? Okay, this is a theory now, this is obviously not empirical. But I believe as sentient beings, if you go into a situation and you feel you've made a positive impact, you get something from that. You leave that meeting feeling that was time well spent. That was a good day. If you go into a meeting and go through the motions and take notes diligently and read the 150 pages and ask some sensible questions on behalf of shareholders, you'll walk away from that, and that's just a day in your life you will never get back. It's two very different experiences.

So I think asking yourself what's important to you and who are you is incredibly helpful, actually, in deciding whether or not to apply to a particular board position or not. They will give you very different experiences and you will give very different levels of input and impact.

[00:17:27] Ralph Grayson: I think it was just encapsulated how complex an individual's fit on a board can be and I certainly don't think people give enough time and attention to their fit and their personal brand in that respect. What am I solving for? What's the purpose of the board and then what's my role on that board?

Wearing your marketing hat, how would you advise people who may be thinking, this is where I want to go. Particularly if they're leaving the C-suite and all the things that made them successful as an executive, they don't correlate to being successful in a boardroom. What are the issues that, in your mind, you've been through that journey, you've seen lots of people doing it well, and no doubt, do it badly.

[00:18:14] Robert Senior: It's hard, isn't it? I get the feeling that there are some people,very successful in their own right, who view board positions as sort of tactical stepping stones for their cv, for their sense of legacy, for their sense of self. and it becomes a sort of making up the numbers. The impact of that, or the outcome of that, is you end up just making up the numbers. Because you're just there in order to be there and be to be able to tell people you've been there and your CV says you've been there, which may lead you to the next thing. And I suppose if you were rapaciously ambitious and have eyes on a FTSE 100 board or whatever it might be, maybe that's absolutely fine. I think it would be a shame though becauseit's a waste of human capital. It's a waste of a board seat. And so I always think, well, what's in it for them? At my best I can bring X? What is the nature of this company? What problem are they trying to solve? What challenges are they facing? And can I, with my experience and my personality and what I bring to a meeting at my best, is that going to be additive? So what's in it for them? And then what's in it for me? Will I enjoy it? Do I like the people? Do I believe in what they're trying to do? And therefore, as soon as you have that sense of a win-win a sense you get into flow and you get into a multiplier effect. When things start going well, and suddenly things feel effortless, it is an extraordinarily uplifting experience.You can see a board that's in flow and the board that is just sort of chewing its way through the agenda and everyone can't wait to get out, and that just seems some shame to me.

[00:19:56] Ralph Grayson: Well, I think it also comes back to, as you very correctly observed, the title NED is just wrong, and I know the CBI are actually looking at whether kind of Cadbury 2.0, which is a an exercise they're doing at the moment as to whether the label of NED is wrong. That that umbrella title of the difference between being a NED on a scale up board as opposed to a FTSE board is enormous and then there's a microcosm of that the role of the individual board member. I just wonder whether you've got any perspectives where you thought you are a great board member, you're just on the wrong board.

[00:20:31] Robert Senior: Definitely and I'mguilty of that. I should caveat that all my advice is based largely on mistakes I have made, rather than the glories I've enjoyed and the former outweigh the latter, I can tell you by some way. I can think of two or three boards with hindsight, I should never have joined. I was just poor casting. I didn't enjoy it. They didn't particularly enjoy it, and I don't believe I was really adding the value, you know, I was punching below my weight.If you've ever run a company, particularly when human capital is your main asset, every chair in your office is incredibly valuable. And when someone leaves and everyone says, oh, so and so resigned, isn't that terrible. Actually, as CEO, you should be thinking, well that is a shame, but how brilliant. We now get the opportunity to fill that chair with fresh talent, fresh perspective, fresh energy. That is an exciting moment and a board should be the same.

This is an exciting moment to bringgreater value, fresh energy, it's a positive thing. You're not going through due diligence. You are actually maximising the potential of the company's success, and that can only be positive.

[00:21:41] Ralph Grayson: I still find it extraordinary as governance has matured, and transparency has become so important that the vast majority of board seats are still filled by an almost amateur process. It is done through personal networks. It's done through personal connections. I just wonder when you think, in your experience, where it's gone wrong was that you not doing your own due diligence on that board, or was that the Noms committee not having the right process? What would you have done better, in retrospect?

[00:22:14] Robert Senior: Good question. Well, the golden rule of any business, I think particularly today, is that hope is not a strategy. And when people hope someone's going to do well or they hope this is going to work out, I hoped going into board I'd learn lots and it would be an interesting experience, it would make me a better operator or a better board member and it would fill my educational hopper,that was hope. Deep down, I knew, I didn't even speak the same language. I didn't really understand the business or have any particular affinity to it. It's not a good versus evil thing. It's just wasn't right. And for their part,there was a certain amount of shareholder dissent about the makeup of the board, and they wanted fresh impetus. My background had involved brands, and brands were part of the customer base of this business, and I think they were ticking a box. Oh, it's okay, well, we'll, placate the shareholders with this cv as opposed to will this individual genuinely make any difference, or are we interested in this individual making any difference? And I could argue that they were just managing the shareholders.

[00:23:23] Ralph Grayson: There's a lot to digest there. I mean, I think from a tactical perspective, I still find that strange that so few Noms committees actually think through what a future board skills matrix is going to look like.

So a board needs to be future proofed and the people you need on that need to be ready for what the world is going to look like. I mean, AI is a classic example of that at the moment.

Why should boards care about their brand?

[00:23:51] Robert Senior: Well, I obviously am a prejudiced on that, on the question of branding because I spent a career trying to build and nurture and sometimes launch brands. Everyone and everything has become a brand in today's world of iconography and smartphones and soundbites. Everyone, every politician, certainly every political party, everything has become a brand and all a brand is a product or a service that has greater value and meaning above and beyond its utility.

So Nike shoes help protect your feet if you go for a run. Excellent. Nike's purpose is if you have a body, you're an athlete. So Nike's objective is to democratise sport and own it and monetise that. They're all connected and Nike's attitude is "Just Do It" because of that.

If you've got a body, you're an athlete, I don't care. I don't care what size you are, I don't care how many limbs you've got, you're an athlete. Go. Understanding the North Star, understanding the purpose, understanding what the company actually stands for, and then turning that as an instrument of business, not an ornament of business, this isn't an email sign off or a snappy line stencilled on the walls of the office. This is something that drives business decisions. In that case, and they are the minority, by the way, then the brand is everything.There's a distinction I draw, I used to draw, about revenue. I still draw, which is there's strategic revenue and there's tactical revenue. Strategic revenue builds on the foundations of what you are trying to build ultimately, your purpose. Tactical revenue is, pays the bills this week. I might knowingly take in some short-term revenue in order to get through next week, the week after, but don't kid yourself that you're building a business. Strategic revenue is about building a proper business. It's the stuff that's going to be recurring. The work you do for them will be stuff that will bring inmore business. It all takes you to the place you want to be. You have to be very, very clear what your brand is, I believe.

[00:25:54] Ralph Grayson: Just before we leave that, I've got to jump in. Cause you talked about a political party and you talked about revenues and brand alignment or indeed misalignment. Saatchi is famous for its "Labour Isn't Working" advert. Yet many years later, and we won't mention the name or indeed the colour or the political greed of the party. But you chose, I think, not to work for a political party, which was to give up revenue because you didn't feel that it aligned with your personal North Star. I presume also the company's How did you square that circle of brand versus revenue opportunity? And I wonder, did you share that with the board?

[00:26:40] Robert Senior: Well, first of all, I think the occasion you are referring to is because at Saatchi we worked with Gordon Brown's government and Peter Mandelson and Alistar Campbell and it was New Labour, new Saatchi because I'd taken over. That was very strategic on my part and great fun, frankly. The event you are talking about, I think is when we had an independent agency called Fallon. I believe there were probably 12 of us in total at the time. we got some early fame for relaunching the Skoda car, which at the time had websites devoted to Skoda jokes. How do you double the value of a Skoda? You fill it with petrol and all the rest. We we repositioned it from a marketing standpoint because it had been bought by VW, it was on the VW production platforms, and basically they became the smart choice. At the time, had quite a degree of notoriety, and we got a call from Ian Duncan Smith, I will be specific, from the Conservative party saying, well, we'd like to talk to about doing our advertising, and I politely declined. And he said, oh, well that's ridiculous. I mean, you do Skoda for God's sake. And I said, no, but Skoda are good cars. And then he hung up on me. Now, I was very confident in that exchange because we are 11 people, young people, all of whom had a particular view on the world, which was diametrically opposed to what was then the Conservative party.Everything we stood for was the opposite.

And it was clear to me actually that had I gone for the potential revenue of that, which by the way would've been, pitiful. Had we gone for that, we probably would've had three quarters of our staff leave. Because it was a cauldron of passionate young people who believed they were going to change the world. The creative soul, if well managed, can move mountains. If poorly managed, it's an absolute chaotic mess.

[00:28:35] Ralph Grayson: It's a great story, I love hearing that story. Let's turn it on its head. Where and when has your brand experience helped boards create value?

[00:28:46] Robert Senior: Gosh, difficult one. You hope you are adding value. You never really know. But from a brand standpoint,in the very, very early days of Redrice, one of our earliest investments was in Castore, the sports brand. And at that time it was set up by two Liverpudlian brothers. Both realising in their mid to late twenties that they were never going to play for England, essentially. They loved sport, they believed they knew a lot about sport and they were passionate about why is it that the great sports brands are American or German?They're full of spit and vinegar on this point and they set up this brand. I met them, we got on well, and I was invited to join the board right back in the day. Before the recent refinancing because they now valued at 950 million pounds.

But at that time they were turning over perhaps 200,000 pounds and I was very clear with them about if their start point was that indignation, the ferocious indignation, that there are no British thought leaders in this field of sport in terms of companies, That should always be their point of difference in the marketplace. And so we had a board, and it was a great board with some amazing well-known figures actually, across different industries, they're all investors in the business.

And at the time I was on the advisory board of the ATP, the men's tennis board, and I had met and got to know a little bit about Andy Murray, and at the time we knew that his relationship with his current sponsors Under Armour was tad fractious. And we also knew he was in the autumn of his career. But the other thing we knew was that he was a proper thought leader in sport. If you listen to him, he's a thoughtful individual, highly articulate, around topics such as grassroots funding in the UK such as equal pay, gender pay in sporting events. He's quite a progressive thinker in the field of sport, and he's thoughtful, and he's very well known. We brokered a deal with him for him to be sponsored by Castor, not by paying him King's ransom that he was being paid on a annual basis just to wear the clothes, but more as a business partner. He took a share of the company, advisory role, and we had a range, an Andy Murray range, of which he was a shareholder as well. It's worked out very well for him. It's worked out very well for Castore. But in the board meeting where myself and the one of the Castore founders were reporting to the board that we'd met him at Heathrow Airport at five in the morning on his way to the Australian Open. There was dissent in the board. Understandably actually, if you think about it. They said, we're a progressive brand, we're young, we're scrappy, we're maverick. Surely we should be investing in, up and coming sports personalities, sports people, to represent that spirit. Well, I was saying to 'em, yes, but what we need is proper thought leadership and establish that. We need to establish a degree of awareness and fame and be very, very clear what we stand for. So we think this could be a terrific opportunity. And then someone said, yeah, but in the contract it says that if he wins a Grand Slam he gets a 5 million, or I can't remember the number, but let's call it 5 million pound payout. If that were to happen and he's still on the circuit playing, that would take us out of business at a stroke. Which again was a perfectly fair point.

However, back to my,belief in and appetite for risk and entrepreneurialism, the response was, well, well, let's have a look now online. What odds we could get for Andy Murray winning a Grand Slam and it was in the order of between 1575:1. To which the suggestion was then made, well, why don't we make a 10,000 pound bet? So the cost of doing this, the risk is 10,000 pounds, and if by the way, he does win a Grand Slam it would be profitable for us. It's a silly story. It happens to be a true story. It's a silly story, but it's one of, if in the right context, IE it's a startup. It's hugely entrepreneurial, hugely maverick, hugely scrappy. It was the appropriate advice to give, I believe. If I had made that suggestion in a board meeting of a listed company, I could so understandably be asked to leave the board for fiduciary negligence, so horses for courses.

[00:33:12] Ralph Grayson: I love the idea of the chair of a risk committee heading off down to William Hill as part of a rigorous, corporate governance driven risk assessment. But,we'll leave that there for the moment. I'd love to just go on to whether you've spotted any patterns where board members have really added value or really, created value.

Are there things they think about? Are there processes they have, are the methodologies, are the things that people could pick up from listening to you about how do I add value?

[00:33:51] Robert Senior: It is always good to be on a board where at least one or two of the board members you really, really respect and you look to and think, gosh, I'm going to learn a lot from those people. I've been lucky enough on a couple of occasions or a few occasions to be in that situation where there'd be someone who terribly well known and right at the top of their game. Two characteristics of that type in that I've witnessed.

One is, dogged persistence. There's one example of someone who speaks incredibly quietly, very softly spoken, very gentle with the vocabulary, very understated generally. But if there's a point they're making, and the answer from the Exec team, it's plausible enough but not quite answering the question. Said individual will wait, few minutes, let the conversation drift on, and then very gently just go. "I'd just like to come back to the point I made earlier." And that person is capable of doing that six or seven times until he gets a satisfactory answer. I thought that was terrific because you know, we've all been in situations where we think we've made a blistering point in a meeting, but somehow the meeting doesn't really pick up on it and it just falls off the edge of the table. You sit there, maybe thinking, well, at least I said my piece, or you're thinking, gosh, how frustrating. I wish they'd listen. Or you're thinking, God, I clearly didn't make my point very well, and, must try harder. But either way, you stop, and this particular individual, to remain nameless, absolutely does not let go. But never, ever demonstrates any frustration or agitation. Just keeps going. So that's the first one.

The second one is if there is a point that's been made in board meeting one that has peaked the interest or concern insaid individual. They may well wait till board meeting two. During which time they've done a little bit of desk research of their own to then come into the meeting armed with some data points that is utterly binary and that intervention changes the course of the meeting quite dramatically. To go into a meeting and not have any impact at all can happen and that's fine, but maybe once or twice. If you've got a point, make sure it's heard.

[00:36:26] Ralph Grayson: And I can't resist not following up with the question, what's the boardroom behavior that irritates you the most?

[00:36:34] Robert Senior: Going through the motions, asking factious questions, the bleeding obvious, and then factious answers, and everyone feels that they're doing their due diligence and they're proper governance and we're all, this is all good and the boxes are all being ticked. But absolutely nothing is going to happen as a consequence. Nothing will change, so might as well not have had the board meeting.

[00:36:58] Ralph Grayson: Your views on the current landscape out there, what are the things that worry you the most as a board member?

[00:37:07] Robert Senior: I think,we clearly live in tumultous times and as Winston Churchill defined history as just one thing after another, after each tumultuous event, we all find ourselves saying, well, oh, thank goodness that's over. Back to normal then. And then another COVID arrives, or another war erupt, or tariffs are landed on every country unexpectedly.

You have to expect the unexpected in life and in business. It's quite easy to hide behind a crisis and curl up into the fetal position and do nothing and hope it all goes away.

I have to say, one of my, it's like pavlovian shudders is every time anyone mentions AI. As though we all have to have an AI strategy. I mean, it's beyond ridiculous. I mean, understand the possibilities of AI and then look at your business and ask yourself the question, in what way could we improve our efficiency or pivot into this or that or the other? By all means, but please, let's not all get intoxicated and feel like we've had a jolly good meeting because we've really nutted out this big imponderable concept. Before AI, it was big data, before big data, it was social media and so it goes on. It's beyond tedious. Running a business is not determined by a single variable of technology availability. It is assisted by it. In fact, artificial intelligence is a bit like NED. the nomenclatures wrong. It's not artificial. It's assisted. We have the intelligence, we get assistance from it to improve that intelligence, improve our knowledge, improve our speed, and then build a better business. It is not replacing and so I do find the impulse to sort of, fall into a paralysis of doing nothing but just talking about it. I find that a bit irritating.

[00:38:50] Ralph Grayson: You're about to trigger me with ESG. If ever there was an erroneous debate around simplistic optics with unqualified people pontificating. Anyway, let's pull this together then. Risk and return for an aspiring non-executive director, be that on a pro bono board on a PLC board, on a private board.

How do people balance the risk and return and the association of their own brand with that board?

[00:39:19] Robert Senior: Try and keep your assessments simple. Don't overthink it. If you're on a board that no one's ever heard of it doesn't demean you in the seating plan of dinner party. It doesn't carry the social cache or the professional cache that a lot of people think it does. If you think it's interesting, it probably is interesting. If you think you can help, you probably can help. And if you like the people, you will probably get on, then I would do it. And if you don't think it's interesting and you don't think you can help, if you really asked the question and you don't particularly understand or have an affinity to the business, probably best avoid it

[00:39:52] Ralph Grayson: I think that's great advice. Rupert Jones who was a previous guest who was talking about how to maximise leadership on a board and he talked about Christmas lights looking pretty on a tree but actually not adding anything other than colourful. There's nothing wrong with being colourful, but is that all you wanna be?

Rob, there's a wealth of perspective and thought you've put into that. Thank you so much. If anybody wants to follow you, connect with you, talk to you. Are you a LinkedIn poster? I suspect not. But is there any way that that they can follow up with you?

[00:40:25] Robert Senior: Yes, of course, and funnily enough, I have been known to post the odd LinkedIn. Although I'm appalling at it, as in, I don't do it very often. But I do follow it and I'm a voracious reader of other people's opinions. So by all means, get in touch if you'd like to. But thank you so much for this opportunity. I've enjoyed it enormously.

[00:40:42] Ralph Grayson: It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Rob.

[00:40:44] Robert Senior: Thanks.

[00:40:45] Ralph Grayson: I hope that you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and have found it helpful when thinking about how to approach your own path to the boardroom. If you would like to push this a little bit further, Sainty Hird runs a bespoke one to one Programmeme designed specifically to this end. For more information, please visit our website, saintyhird.com, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the Boardroom Path to receive new episodes. Thank you for listening.