Tough At The Top

Rachael Blackmore is a star of horse racing in Britain & Ireland and one of the world’s highest achieving sportswomen. But it wasn’t always like this - in her own words her amateur career barely got off the ground and she only turned pro at the age of 25 (much later than many other jockeys) in an attempt to kickstart her progress.  Even then, her first winner took a while to arrive and she had plenty of opportunities to doubt herself. Rachael's story is one of persistence and patience, both in persuading leading trainers to give her a chance on decent horses and retaining her belief that she had the ability to succeed.

She has since ridden well over 400 winners from more than 3,500 rides and starred in the last two Cheltenham festivals (the Olympics of jump racing), with an incredible 6 winners last year and three more, including both the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle, when the crowds returned post-COVID this year.

A trailblazer for women in her sport - albeit much too humble to speak of her achievements in those terms - in 2021 she became the first woman to win the Grand National in its 180 year history and followed that up this year as the first female winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. 

This episode is not just for horse racing fans but anyone with an interest in top-level sport and high performance. Rachael discusses her training methods, how she analyses a race in advance and then adapts as it unfolds in real-time, the toughness required to deal with falling off a horse (regularly) at 30mph and the pressures and expectations that come with success. We also explore what makes a great jockey, how she has improved during her career and the addictive nature of riding winners...

Sir Nigel Wilson has been the CEO of Legal & General since 2012, having joined the company three years earlier as Finance Director. Prior to that, he had a diverse career, spanning academia & technology at MIT, a spell at McKinsey, retail at the great management school that was Dixons in the 1980s, property at Stanhope and a long stint as the CFO of UBM, the events and exhibitions company. He has also sat on or led a wide variety of governmental and non-profit commissions & advisory groups, covering fields ranging from “Building Back Better” to Social Care, Life Sciences, Climate Risk and Executive Pay.

As an investor I got to know Nigel early on in his time at L&G, when the share price was down at 50p. Since then, he has presided over more than a decade of double-digit earnings growth, a dividend that has risen from 6p in 2011 to over 18p in the year recently finished, and a share price that has gone up more than fivefold since 2009.  

He is one of the most optimistic CEOs I have come across, a quality that is not as common among his peers as you might expect.  I also find it fascinating (and heartening) that he only truly discovered his professional purpose and mission in his mid-50s when he joined L&G. We talk about his mentors, his desire to be “on the pitch” doing rather than in the stands observing, and how his motivation has changed from when he first took on his current role, as well as why investors in the UK still seem to underestimate the company’s potential. 

You can detect the influence of his background in academia when he talks about how he thinks about complex challenges, working collaboratively with colleagues & stakeholders and engaging in what you might call “successful failures”, where progress is made even if the original target is not hit. A very talented athlete, he also discusses how he has learned to manage himself better through changes to sleep, nutrition and training, and how his working life has evolved post-pandemic

In this special episode, I focus on the most simple & effective strategies to improve your sleep, based on what I have learned during my training as a Sleep Coach, and also what I have found works in real life with my coaching clients – investors, CEOs, senior professionals, all of whom are living very busy lives and many of whom struggle with insufficient or low quality sleep.

I am firmly of the view that sleeping well is the single best way to improve your mood, your energy levels and your brain function, as well as being hugely positive for your long-term health. Just think of how you feel after a good night’s sleep, compared to how irritable & lethargic you are when your sleep is poor. In my view, it is the best legal performance enhancer there is…

Among the topics covered are:

- Prioritising sleep & giving yourself the right “sleep opportunity"

- Being consistent with your bedtimes

- Using modern technology to track your sleep & adapt your behaviour

- How alcohol & caffeine affect your sleep & how to mitigate this

- Food & supplements to promote sleep

- Winding down in the evening

- Making your bedroom environment as sleep-enhancing as possible

- What to do (and not do) if you wake up in the middle of the night

Steve Davies

Following on from a very successful career in the publishing industry, Jillian has been teaching meditation for almost 20 years and founded both the London and New York Meditation Centres back in 2008. She wrote an excellent book called “Why Meditate?” earlier this year and that is how I first came across her. Her whole approach is very practical and, I think, ideal for busy professional people who are curious about meditation but also a bit sceptical and confused about what the practice actually involves.

I have been intrigued about meditation for a while both individually and as a coach - I could see there was plenty of science backing up its benefits, I had friends who sang its praises, but I had flirted with apps like Calm & Headspace and not really got them to work for me. And I know I am not alone in that experience.  So a few weeks ago, I signed up for one of Jillian’s group courses and was really positively surprised about a) how easy it was to start meditating, and b) how quickly I saw positive effects.

We talk about the benefits and changes people see when they start meditating, from improved brain function and creativity to lower stress levels, greater happiness and enhanced sleep. From there, we move on to demystify how she teaches people to meditate, that it is not some strange, mystic practice full of chanting and strenuous yoga poses, but something effortless that can be done anywhere without anyone knowing you are doing it - on trains, in meeting rooms, even a church near your office. Jillian discusses the merits of meditation for children as well and tackles head on the common response that “I don’t have time to meditate”….

Tristia Harrison is the CEO of TalkTalk, one of the UK’s leading broadband providers with over 4 million consumers and a significant B2B business alongside that.  She began her career in PR & marketing before joining Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse group in 2000, rising quickly through the ranks. When TalkTalk was demerged from Carphone in 2009, she was made Managing Director of its Consumer business.  She became CEO of TalkTalk Group in 2017 and is also a Non-Executive Director of Next, the clothing & homewares retailer, a Trustee of the Ambitious About Autism charity and the chair of Crisis.

Determined, inclusive, calm and increasingly confident about backing her own judgement  - these are some of the phrases that Tristia and those who know her well, use to describe her. She talks about compartmentalising her various professional interests to minimise the anxiety and responsibility of leadership, along with the benefits of a portfolio of roles rather than defining her self-worth purely on the basis of just one. She stresses the importance of context, accepting that you can only do your best and not taking business matters more seriously than they should be.

Tristia is also as well placed as anyone to talk about the differences between running a private company and a publicly quoted one, having led a take-private of TalkTalk earlier this year.  We discuss how she has redeployed the time freed up from no longer having to deal with the public markets and how her approach as a CEO has evolved to meet the demands of running a large organisation post-pandemic. More personally, she emphasises the importance of sleep, a new passion for fitness and running, and the value of her long-running book club circle.

Dame Jayne-Anne is the Founder and Executive Chair of Snoop. From 2007 to 2018 she was the CEO of Virgin Money.  She was one of the original founders of Virgin Direct in 1995 and, three years later, she set up the Virgin One account, which was then acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2001. She subsequently spent five years at RBS before returning to Virgin as CEO of Virgin Money until its acquisition by CYBG in 2018. As such, she is one of very few people to have been recruited by both Richard Branson and Fred Goodwin (!) and has experienced the full range of corporate life from entrepreneurial start-up to listed PLC. 

If I had to think of one word to describe Jayne-Anne, it would be “purposeful”. She has always believed that business should be a force for good (she calls her guiding philosophy “Everyone Better Off”) and has been happy to challenge established thinking and ask the apparently stupid questions that everyone else wants answered but was too scared to ask. This has led to some pigeon-holing her as “difficult”, but “brave” would be an equally valid description and it has been essential to her success.

She is very honest about some of the challenges she has faced along the way, from battling against engrained prejudices in the banking world, her struggle to have a baby and the purpose it gave her work when she eventually did, and some mistakes made since leaving Virgin Money three years ago. But she is also a wonderful story-teller and we also talk about her experiences in the banking crisis trying to buy Northern Rock from the government, how Virgin ended up sponsoring the London Marathon and indeed her own love of running and the role it plays in balancing her mental health.

Daphne Zohar is the Founder and CEO of Puretech Health plc. A serial entrepreneur, she has transformed an initial investment of $100,000 into a company now worth £1bn, with stock market listings in both London and New York. She created a unique model to develop and commercialise the scientific IP coming out of Boston's biotech cluster, turning conventional wisdom on its head by starting with unmet medical needs and then bringing the best brains together and letting their creativity run wild in order to construct new therapeutic solutions. This has led to successful innovations such as a video game to help children with ADHD, an orally taken capsule that swells up inside the stomach to reduce appetite and assist weight loss, a novel combination drug that could represent the first significant step forward in schizophrenia for 50 years and a potential treatment for long COVID. 

Daphne explains how she was able to persuade some of the most prominent figures in science to take a punt on a company with no track record and a CEO with no scientific background; the importance of persistence and how she tries to learn something from everyone she comes across; how she has changed her leadership style in the 15 years since the company was founded; and her excitement at the opportunities now available to female CEOs compared to a decade ago.

Andy Anson is Chief Executive of the British Olympic Association and took time out from the intense and complex preparations for the Summer Games in Tokyo to speak with me. He has worked for and led an amazing variety of organisations across sport, business and media, including Disney, Manchester United, Channel 4 and the ATP tennis tour, and he highlights what he has learned about leadership from the likes of Michael Eisner and Sir Alex Ferguson. 

We talk about some of the challenges he has faced in the run up to the Tokyo Olympics, his worst day at Manchester United and dealing with serious financial mis-statement at Goals Soccer Centres. Andy also discusses the power of sporting brands and their fanatical customers and offers some fascinating insights for anybody interested in the commercial side of sport. We delve into the importance of confidence and experience as a CEO, being comfortable surrounding yourself with people more talented than you are, and, as an added bonus, he tells me who he is most excited about seeing in action at Tokyo.

Pete Redfern is one of the longest-serving CEOs in the FTSE 100, having been the boss of housebuilder Taylor Wimpey since 2007.  He is one of the best long-term thinkers I came across in my time as an investor - we discuss where this comes from and how he combines a focus on financial success with a strong moral compass, trying to ensure that the company does the right thing even if this may be at the expense of short-term profitability. 

Pete talks about how he navigated the company away from the brink of financial collapse in 2008, how high his blood pressure got in that period and what he learned about looking after himself from that experience. We also explore the pros and cons of running a public company, how he has built the TW culture to minimise energy-sapping office politics and much else besides.