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Suzanne Heywood

Chief Operating Officer, Exor N.V.

Search every verified Suzanne Heywood interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Suzanne Heywood, Chief Operating Officer at Exor NV, has been speaking publicly about her memoir "Wavewalker: Breaking Free," which recounts her childhood spent sailing around the world for a decade with her family. In interviews, Heywood described the experience as one where she was "trapped on a boat" with limited access to education, friends, and medical care, and said she eventually escaped through education. She stated that her parents believed it was "entirely their right" to make that decision, and she expressed a desire to spark debate about the balance between parents' rights and children's rights. Heywood also discussed how her upbringing taught her resilience, which she said has been helpful in her career, including during her time as CEO of CNH Industrial during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her professional capacity, Heywood has commented on the future of the UK Civil Service, calling it an "incredibly exciting moment" due to technological and geopolitical changes, while also expressing concern about morale and the need for talented people. She has advocated for Europe to become faster and less bureaucratic to remain competitive with the US and China, and has emphasized the importance of innovation and technology in business. Heywood has also spoken about the power of education, noting that AI could enable wider access to learning. Her memoir has been optioned for a television miniseries.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“We have to become more productive. We have to invest in things like technology otherwise China and the US are going to run away before we can have a chance of catching up with them. So the we have to get faster and that means that we need to start breaking down some of these bureaucratic barriers which slow us down.”

“Europe needs to first of all come closer together this is a world where we need friends everybody needs friends it's very hard I think to be in this world and not have friends... I think the other thing Europe needs to do is it needs to get faster at doing things. So Europe moves very slowly. It's relatively bureaucratic. Things take a long time.”

“I mean in my childhood I struggled to think of a moment where my parents ever put my needs first. You know when when they ever kind of made a a kind of sac a meaningful sacrifice of anything because of something that I needed. Um my needs were always subsidiary to the things that they wanted to do uh at every point.”

“There is no longer that distinction. There used to be a distinction between foreign policy and, you know, home civil service policy and that doesn't exist anymore. The two are completely intermingled because what's happening in terms of foreign policy is massively impacting domestic policy. When we put sanctions on countries that is impacting domestic policy, you know, all of the talk about tariffs is impacting indus”

“I think he would be worried about the state of the Civil Service. I think he definitely would be worried about that. The kind of morale in the civil service is not where we as a country want should want it to be because we need incredibly talented people to go and do those jobs and they're not hugely highly paid jobs. They are now jobs where people sadly have fear that they may end up on the front page of the newspap”

“I think a lot of it was that he wanted to be seen as a hero you know this was him creating a kind of purpose in his life and the Captain Cook narrative although it was the the kind of narrative that I grew up with as we'll see as the kind of voyage went on it became more and more apparent that that really wasn't something that he was sticking to.”

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