Alison Rowe is the CEO of the Moreland Energy Foundation and the inaugural Chairwoman of the Future Business Council, among other Executive and Non-Executive Board Directorships. Having started her working life in the Navy and finding herself driving warships at the age of 22, Alison brings a strategic approach to the organisations she is involved with.

From an early age, Alison learned the benefits of failing fast, failing early, and most important, trying again. It takes time to build courage and resilience, but these are vital characteristics of an effective CEO and Director. You need to be willing to try innovative things and be willing to failing in order to achieve something great.

We get into a wide range of topics, including...

• Techniques for building and developing resilience and accepting failure
• Unintentionally becoming a non-conformist
• Having trusted advisors outside of the boardroom that you can reflect with and get any feedback you need
• Having courage and making decisions when you don’t have all of the information
• Being comfortable with the fact that you will never have 99.9% of the inputs, and how you can harness your skills and experience to still achieve the desired outcomes
• Developing a ‘Risk Appetite Statement’ to allow you to walk the tightrope between managing risk appropriately but maintaining innovation and entrepreneurialism
• Having multiple pathways and a complex web of stakeholders through which you can influence outcomes, so that you don’t have any single point of failure
• Having an appropriate Decision Making approach so boards members feel empowered
• The different size boards required for different stages of growth in startups
• And much more!

Links

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonrowe1/

Moreland Energy Foundation - https://www.mefl.com.au

The Future Business Council - http://www.futurebusinesscouncil.com

Climate Alliance - https://www.climatealliance.org.au

Episode four of Boardroom Hustle is a powerful one. My guest today is an old friend, Claire Maloney. Founder and director of The Bravery, chairperson of the charity One Girl, proud feminist and advocate for total diversity, Claire is relentless in standing up for the things she’s passionate about. In today’s episode, we discuss those passions, and how they’ve driven her to succeed.

In the show, Claire and Paul Smith have an insightfully philosophical conversation about a variety of things such as the journey that led Claire to where she is today, the importance of knowing when to shut up and listen, what makes her tick and what she considers the most valuable thing in the world – and how you can make the most of yours.

We also get into the following:

• Fear, courage, sustainability and social causes
• What Claire is feeling most vulnerable about right now
• How the boardroom can act as a conduit for social change and positive impact
• Confidence, privilege and coping without a safety net
• Where Claire’s business, The Bravery, is planning to go in the near future
• The high emotions that come from being face-to-face with confronting issues, and how to handle them
• Avoiding business burn-out and keeping a strong sense of purpose
• How to de-stress quickly and effectively
• Refining your passions down into a successful career path
• Claire’s love of crisis management and how that’s been beneficial in her board career
• Being real, honest and (in Claire’s words) owning your shit

Links:

The Bravery Website

Claire Maloney's Twitter  

Claire Maloney's LinkedIn

One Girl Website

One Girl Twitter

This episode of Boardroom Hustle covers a wide variety of different topics. My guest, Alan Jones, and I get into things like EQ, IP and everything in-between. Alan is an entrepreneur, investor, board director and startup mentor, and he sheds some light on the life-changing moments he’s experienced throughout his journey: the relationships between startup founders, investors and the boardroom. He also talks about the big changes he’s trying to encourage and bring about in the world.

Throughout Alan’s career, he’s been lucky to realise the importance of stopping and smelling the roses. Today, we discuss how he came to that realisation, as well as:

• Why serenity is such an important part of Alan’s day
• The Darwinian approach that many industries take towards business, and how this can be of detriment to those industries
• How Alan came to value taking time out from the daily grind and learned to relax
• The various flaws within his industry, and who is the most likely to come up against discrimination
• How Alan came to be known as the Chief Hindsight Officer
• Why EQ is such a vital aspect of business, especially in the boardroom
• How to get that ‘spark’ back into your boardroom
• Why we tend to have shallow interactions rather than deep and meaningful ones, and how to start digging deeper with your directors
• The best way to take minutes for your meetings to ensure you get the most out of your time
• The one common theme that can be found in every single boardroom
• Negative outcomes that come from living a hard, fast lifestyle, and how you can avoid falling prey to them
• What it means to be a whole person, and how you can aim to become one
• Can a younger director find that balance between work and life, or is that something that comes with time?

Links:

Alan Jones LinkedIn

Alan Jones Twitter

The New Agency

Startmate

Blue Chilli

For anyone who has ever been told, ‘You’re too young to do that…’ then you need to listen to this latest episode of Boardroom Hustle. My guest this week is Parrys Raines, whose resume reads like someone decades older than her 22 years. Parrys has led a remarkable life thus far, taking on various roles such as law student, international speaker, writer, blogger, business owner and board director, and she has never let her age hold her back.

Parrys is passionate about sustainability and pushing for a better future. She’s a prime example of success at an early age, and is a wonderful reminder that you’re never too young to start changing the world.

In this episode, we get into loads of fascinating topics, such as...

• Why imperfection is sometimes better than perfection
• Parrys’ advice to those who haven’t yet been able to connect to their passions and purpose
• What Parrys considers to be changes that should be (but aren’t) occurring in the boardroom, and how younger people are intertwined with that
• How the career ladder has transformed into the career lattice, and what this means for everyone across all generations
• The benefits of an intergenerational mentoring relationship
• The drive behind Parrys’ decision to start her first website business at the age of fourteen
• Board roles, building a company and how to remain optimistic towards the unknown
• The roadblocks and difficulties Parrys has come up against in starting up her second company, and how she has overcome them
• How you can find and create opportunities to do what you really love in a job you only just like
• Parrys’ devotion to sustainability, and how she managed to combine that with her paralegal position

Links:

LinkedIn

Instagram

Twitter

Centre for Sustainability Leadership

The Future Business Council